PDX Protest, Day 82 — Breaking Stories

You leave for ONE weekend…

I’m not sure quite how to catch up on every twist and turn of what happened while I was in the woods without reception, escaping the heat by, I dunno, four degrees or something, so I’m limited to the punctuated, articlized highlights amplified over the course of, well, yesterday.

And I gotta say, the weather ain’t the only thing getting hot, y’all. Shit’s bubbling, and the two words that most come to mind are “tick” and “tock.”

I did follow Friday, however. The march started at Peninsula Park, with the intent of reaching PPA, but it didn’t even make it to Interstate before the police intercepted it with a riot line and declared an unlawful assembly, citing “paint bombs,” whatever the hell those are. From there it was a bunch of advances and half-kettles as the protest attempted to be like water and find a way past the blockade down side streets. They found no success, but instead a game of cat and mouse as more and more riot lines appeared out of nowhere to halt their advance.

It looked to me like perhaps PPB had set up a sort of defensive screen of riot cop clusters so that they could quickly respond to wherever the march headed for. The sheer number of cops that night, and their propensity to materialize from thin air, support this thought. It’d be a clever way to adapt to the uncertainty surrounding the last-minute nature of recent protest decisions (often to the point of on-the-spot voting). It’d be incredibly expensive in manpower, though, and it’s questionable how long PPB could afford to keep it up.

It was also an exhausting night for the protesters, as they marched around and around and around as they tried to avoid riot lines and standoffs. I started to wonder what the end goal of the evening was — if they still had fantasies of reaching PPA or, i think more likely, just looking to defy the dispersal order for as long as possible.

At any rate, reporters started tapping out just from sheer exhaustion from all the marching and sprinting to keep up with and/or away from bull rushes, and it’s questionable how many protesters have the stamina to keep up with very many nights of that.

The most fascinating moment for me was a video of a cop looking for a “leader” of the protest to enter “negotiations” with. He ends up taking down contact information for one Black man, and I can’t tell whether the Black man is trolling the shit out of the cop, the cop is trolling the guy, it’s a honeypot, or what exactly. It was weird. I had not seen “negotiation” as part of PPB messaging before, and handing over contact info to cops is very much not recommended by basically everyone. And boy would PNWYLF have a thing or two to say about negotiating with cops.

If the cops do, however, seek to find local direct-action abolitionist leaders to negotiate with, it illustrates a truly colossal disconnect between PPB’s schema of what is happening in Portland, and the decentralized, leaderless movement that is actually happening in Portland.

The other particularly noteworthy happening was when a man who was on his own property chanting supportively was attacked by three across-the-street neighbors. This was the first in a string of genuinely violent incidents this weekend.

On Saturday, an ironically right-wing flag-waving rally against domestic terrorism was, of course, counter-protested, and the clash devolved into violence as both sides maced each other, flag wavers shot paintbals at counter-protesters, and counter-protesters shot silly string at flag wavers. The violence culminated in two 9mm rounds being fired into the crowd of counter-protesters. It’s unfathomable how no one got hit in such a target-rich environment. Could they have possibly been blanks? I mean, maybe. Like an extreme variant on brandishing a gun or firing into the air by one who wants to scare or provoke rather than face actual murder charges. I never heard whether bullet holes were found or not. I’m sure what the guy did was still a crime of some form.

On Sunday night, two people downtown were assaulted by BLM protesters. The story as reported in the Mercury isn’t as detailed as I wish it were, but from the sounds of it, there was a verbal altercation that led to the assault of a woman, and a man who had attempted to de-escalate the fight got into his silver pickup (which had been seen earlier driving aggressively, prompting fears of ramming attacks), crashed the truck and was drug out and beaten by those same people. The man was kicked repeatedly in the head and required hospitalization.

Prominent community organizers from Moms United for Black Lives (aka “Wall of Moms”) have decried these attacks as being a stain on the movement. I’m curious how the “no-wrong-way-to-protest” crowd is reacting to all of this.

These attacks in turn pissed off a nutritional consultant with no criminal record, who stormed at least four businesses in the Kerns neighborhood with a baseball bat, demanding they remove their BLM signs or doing it himself. No one reported being directly threatened with the bat, and the guy seemed furious but easily scared. After his arrest, he said he carried the bat for self-defense, without the intent to hit anyone. It shouldn’t take a forensic sociologist to see that the presence of the bat increased the odds of him having something to defend against. Thankfully it didn’t come to that.

My first night back on the “job” welcomed me with more novelty as a march began at Colonel Summers Park, on Belmont and 20th. Their destination was the MCSO office at SE Grand and Hawthorne. I think this was completely unexpected: the windows were completely unboarded, and not an officer was in sight.

The vibe was chill for about 15 minutes. Over the following half-hour, a trio of dumpster fires were lit, security cameras were painted over, “ACAB” graffiti was sprayed on the building, an office window was broken, and flaming something thrown inside, where it caught some desk papers on fire.

“What did you see?” “Didn’t see shit!”

The fire went out on its own as these protesters were once again foiled by OSHA flame-retardancy standards.

At long last, the cops showed up and DJ LRAD immediately declared a riot. Bullrushes pushed people east and north, and standoffs were short as the cops quickly backed down. There were something like three or four rushes total. They got pushed as far north as Sandy and made their way back down to march around Ladd’s Addition for a while to “wake up rich white people,” before standing around indecisively, at which point Portland Protest Bureau took the lead and marched them back to Col. Summers.

The theme I see in the past string of days is broken narratives:

1. Violent attacks from neighbors breaks the common belief that the neighbors are universally in support of the protests.
2. Violent attacks from BLM protesters challenges the notion that the protesters are always reacting to immediate violence and never instigating it.
3. A novel starting point/target building furthers the picture that the whole of Portland is under siege.
4. Vandalism of an unprotected building summarily disproves the oft-repeated claim that things do not escalate without police presence.

Paranoia brain is demanding I give it some space here. I’m honestly getting sick of its whisper, but here you go:

The breaking of narratives would be of great interest to anyone looking to discredit and dismantle these protests. In this case, law enforcement would be culpable, such as PPB or even the FBI (who are currenlty investigating the pipe bombing of protesters). Point 4 is the most suspicious in this light, given the completely unprotected nature of the building and the length of time it took cops to show up. Letting undercovers bust some shit up in order to communicate to the masses that the protesters will be destructive whether or not police are present is… a feasible story. Though the FBI especially is interested in de-escalation and stability in a way that such building-busting does not support.

The other most likely infiltrator would of course be my old nemeses, accelerationist neonazis. Point 2 is the most in line with this. The primary bodies of accelerationist literature are… not subtle. Blunt violence is more the tool of highlight, rather than subtle psychological manipulation. Posing as protesters and beating the shit out of some right-wingers is well in line. Which is not ruling out the possibility of an evil-genius Machiavellian neonazi, and there’s still at least one really big unanswered question from the early days of the protests that will be clearer whenever I finally get around to dealing with the field recordings, but your average accelerationist is just gonna bust some heads and shoot some people, not expertly manipulate a mob.

But then we’ve got PNW Youth Liberation Front, who celebrated the fire inside the MCSO office, calling it “a beautiful sight to see,” convincing me that there’s no need whatsoever for these narrative-breaking happenings to be anything but the natural escalation of a small but growing number of radically millitant protesters.

So, you know, who knows? The clock marches on regardless.