When it becomes okay
to, you know, damage people's properties
and wake them up in the middle of the night
when terror is seen as
justified i think it's inevitable that
something terrible
is going to happen.
On Saturday, August 29, 2020,
a pro-Trump demonstrator was shot and killed
during ongoing street protests in Portland.
Last week, I interviewed, veteran journalist Nancy Rommelmann,
who has covered the Portland protests for Reason
and has talked to dozens of demonstrators,
trying to understand their mindsets and motivations.
She worries that as the protest movement continues,
it’s becoming increasingly restive, unfocused,
and headed into dangerous territory.
We go into 2020, which is obviously going to
be an election year,
then Covid hits, businesses close, and
the city
closed, and downtown became kind of
barren.
The schools are closed,
and everybody's home including tons and
tons of young people.
And then George Floyd is killed and the
the city explodes.
For a very long time, they were peaceful
protests.
You know moms and kids and
the line of cars that go around.
'Toot-toot!.'
But,
per usual, these things you've got a
small contingent that wants to
fuck shit up.
They showed up down at
Justice Center.
They broke the windows.
They threw furniture around.
They set a
fire.
I wrote a piece for Reason about
a woman that was trapped in the basement.
The problem is
the mayor and the city council basically
just said
'you're not going to arrest peaceful
protesters.'
They stand they keep
committing violence
against the Justice Center and also next
door, which is the Federal Building
in late July, a special response team
from U.S Customs and Border Patrol
showed up in tactical gear ostensibly to
protect federal property.
There were many bloody confrontations in
which protesters were tear gassed,
and some were caught on camera being
pulled into unmarked vans.
Nobody wants to be tear gassed but
you've been pelting the building with
flaming trash for three hours provoking
a reaction.
They are still
calling this free speech but they're
terrorizing citizens
and they march to the nearest place that
they
feel must be overtaken: police stations,
police unions,
a social services building, ICE
headquarters.
They trash it, they set fire to it, and
they go into the residential streets.
Now they're shining lights into people's
windows and saying,
"Get up motherfucker!
Get up.
I'm out here
every night, fighting for change
and we want you to know that and we want
you to be uncomfortable."
Some of these people are 20 years old
and I have said to them, you know,
what is it that you want, and it's like
'Defund the police!'
It's like, okay,
all right so then where do we go from
there.
I was at a march
where the police remained entirely passive, entirely.
They finally came
out because their union was being burnt
down for the that burnt down.
There was a
fire there.
They were
pelting it for the umpteenth time.
They finally just
stood there all the protesters like
got this close in their faces and then
they just turned around and left.
That was by order of Ted Wheeler.
I understand this idea they're trying to
provoke us.
If we
don't be provoked maybe it dies down.
But there's too much momentum.
And if it stays this hot i think it's
inevitable that something
terrible is going to happen.
And then whatever
side that terrible thing happens to
uses
to say, 'look now we're justified in doing x.'
If you're a 22-year-old, and you're home,
and you're not in school anymore, and
maybe your job has gone away because a
lot of jobs were lost in Portland,
you really are lost, and you are maybe
lost for identity, and maybe you're
looking for identity, and you're looking
for people to hang out with,
and then you find it, and then you put on
a, you know, an
outfit, and you go out every night, and
you feel energized, and I've had people
tell me this it's like
it really is an incredible feeling of
being part of something
Rommelmann worries that
a moral blindness
is overtaking the protesters.
I think that when
the definition of free speech or
peaceful protest starts to become very
elastic—when terror
is seen as justified, we've seen how
these things go
and they blame white supremacists of
Portland, or the city government, or the
cops
and they see what they're doing as
creating some sort of justice.