PDX Protest — Weird Shit
A flyer showed up distributed around NE yesterday, and it’s weird as shit. Seemingly titled “Anarchy as Order,” it sports the logo of Total Recall PAC — the organization spearheading the effort to recall Ted Wheeler as mayor of Portland. The thing is, Total Recall PAC disavows it entirely. They say they neither produced it nor authorized it, and they don’t seem to support it, either.
Which makes it a piece of disinformation propaganda. And that is really interesting.
The question boiling away at my head, then, is who did produce it. Given that it lies about being connected to Total Recall PAC, I can trust a single of its claims of provenance. That is to say, I can’t even trust that it’s anarchists that produced it.
There has been one or two occasions of a Direct Action flyer using misleading language about its connections to prominent local activist groups like Don’t Shoot PDX, so there is a bit of precedent, but I don’t remember it being an outright fabrication like this is. And that’s assuming that those autonomous direct actions were even called by actual anarchists and not, say, Boogaloos or accelerationist nazis. (Even after everything so far, that possibility is still not entirely off the table for me.)
What it most reminds me of is a video from maybe two or three months back, released on Twitter, featuring a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask, speaking with a digitally garbled voice, the video all glitched out and unsettling. It was super super ominous. It covered a lot of the same talking points as this flyer, with a very similar sounding tone.
But moreover, it had very similar-feeling cracks in the rhetorical structure — like two misaligned pieces of foundation.
For instance, the three columns in this flyer are “short-term,” “long-term,” and “permanent.” The first two terms refer to the length of time before the goal is to be achieved, while the third refers to how long the desired state is to last. They are not equivocal categories, leading to this fissure in the structure of their argument.
This does not, to me, speak of stupidity. To me, this speaks of underdeveloped critical thinking skills. It speaks of youth. This is exactly the sort of mistake teenagers would make.
There’s an instinctive pull toward producing groups of three. I’m not sure why, but it’s totally a thing. Ask any undergraduate professor. I could find several examples of it myself in this very blog. By succumbing to that pull, these propagandists sacrificed rhetorical cohesion. And that’s a mistake that just screams of the kind of thinking that is passionate but not yet sculpted by college. The kind of thinking that is not in the habit of examining itself for flaws.
And while I can’t remember the exact moments of disjoint from the video, I do remember having that exact same reaction. I’m maybe 60–70% confident that the video and this flyer came from the same source.
Teenage-style mistakes points to the Youth Liberation Front as a strong suspect. And the talking points in the video are directly in line with their stances. And many things in the flyer echo sentiments from black-bloc youth at the actions (like the “no cameras” thing). But there are some things that really stick out here as uncharacteristic:
- Putting Iannarone in charge of anything is generally out of character. The rhetoric from the protest scene against Iannarone in favor of Teressa Raiford. Maybe that’s changed in the time since Wheeler was re-elected, but, I dunno, it strikes me as unlikely.
- The terms “onboarding” and “onramp,” and generally all of the recruitment language, remind me very very much of the language nazis use when discussing recruitment and radicalization. Though perhaps they’re terms more broadly used in conversations about radicalization. I’ve seen “offramp” used in the context of deradicalization, but those were also organizations that specialized in deradicalizing neonazis and other white supremacist extremists. Regardless, it’d be sloppy to expose radicalization strategies.
- Arguing against police body cameras is directly opposed to the dominant position in the push for police accountability. I do kinda get it from an opsec standpoint: without body cams, there’s no body cam footage for officers to comb through later looking for identifying features and criminal offenses to later arrest people for (like has been going on with the January 6th siege on the capital). But it flies in the face of everyone in the police-accountability movement, and that’s super, super weird.
- Overburdening public safety resources is directly out of James Mason’s Siege, the accelerationist neonazi manifesto. It’s possible that this is also a strategy discussed in leftist collapse-the-system literature, I don’t know. But it is for sure a critical step in Mason’s vision of that process.
- Blatant talk of weaponizing the homeless is, well, fucking disgusting, and so obviously so to, like, anyone who gives a shit, that to publicaly state the intention is beyond stupid. Moreover, exposing the strategy inoculates the targets against it. It’s a strategy that hinges on people not knowing that its disingenuous manipulation.
It’s fuckin’ weird, man. If it actually is from the direction of the YLF, they have moved in some really unexpected directions. And so I’m actually pretty skeptical that they are the source.
My other top suspect is neonazis. I mean, there are teenaged neonazis, too. And if you’ve read this blog for any significant length of time, you know well my unshakable belief in the possibility that nazis have been instrumental to this last year of conflict from the very beginning. I’m still not unconvinced, and I don’t know that I ever will be.
My top suspect is actually Boogaloo Boys. There are a few in town, they come young enough, they’re connected enough, and they’ve attempted to stand in solidarity with ACAB protesters. Their values are 100% smash-the-System, and being ostensibly right-wing, I think they’d be more likely to adopt nazi-style language and tactics. Especially if, as I suspect, there are “ghost skins” (secret nazis) amongst their upper ranks, grooming and redpilling where they can. It would also explain the stark ideological mismatches, like with body cams. Further, for all their tactical gear and posturing, the local Boogaloo Bois consistently demonstrated cowardice on the ground, which would drive them more towards stealthy propaganda and counter/intelligence work. Shit like this would be fairly low-risk, as far as personal safety goes. Neither have they shown themselves to be particularly bright, potentially explaining the egregious missteps of inoculating the public by exposing their disinformation tactics. Out of anyone I can think of, the Boogaloo Bois tick the most boxes.
A more outlandish possibility that’s come to mind is that it comes from the state — whether that be PPB, Ted Wheeler’s office, the FBI, or anywhere in between — with the intent of creating divisiveness in the anarchist community, or to smear shit on the face of the anarchist movement in the eyes of the middle masses. Make people scared of anarchism. Certainly PPB seems to have developed a startling degree of skill at managing optics this summer. Makes me wonder where they learned it from so suddenly, but slow down, one piece of skullduggery at a time.
Of course there’s more everyday far-right groups like the Proud Boys, but they haven’t demonstrated this degree of subterfuge. Their tactics are more around high-visibility trolling, not sneaky delegitimizing.
Could be some more well-organized national far-right-aligned organization.
Could be actual anarchists running counterintelligence to combat a nazi operation infiltrating anarchist circles.
Could be Russia working through a local spy to destabilize Portland.
Could be Discordians just having a lark.
There are just so many possibilities. And I have nothing to go on but my own unreliable intuition. The two dominant beliefs on leftist Twitter seem to be that it’s run-of-the-mill far-right, pro-police bozos, or that it’s feds, but I haven’t seen them produce any real evidence of either.
My money’s on the Boogs, for now. It most cleanly explains the really mindfucky elements, and that’s really compelling. I absolutely have no hard evidence of this, but the shape of it fits, you know?
Anyway, my head hurts. Go away.
