There was another Antifa “protest” in Portland last night. A few dozen people gathered outside the ICE facility that has been the focus of attention in the past and they succeeded in drawing police out of the building. An unlawful assembly was declared and a couple of arrests were made:
Two antifa black bloc militants were arrested at the Portland ICE facility tonight. One of the arrestees (who is fully covered) shouts that the officers are anti-Semitic for arresting him. #PortlandRiots #antifa pic.twitter.com/fZ4jk5XnJp
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) November 25, 2020
When confronted the small Antifa group ran away:
Antifa rioters run away from federal officers outside the Portland ICE building after taunting them tonight. #PortlandRiots #antifa pic.twitter.com/lcL70sh1AA
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) November 25, 2020
And then they resumed doing what they do every night, vandalize things that don’t belong to them:
Antifa black bloc rioters spray something on a passing honking truck in southwest Portland. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/xvxrNIVxLo
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) November 25, 2020
Monday night a group of anarchists vandalized a car that just happened to be passing nearby one of their gatherings. Someone jumped on the car and smashed the windshield and then walked away laughing. There was a 7-year-old child in the backseat who was terrified by what happened. What was the point of this destruction? There wasn’t one, but if you ask them why they are out on the street every night they’ll claim it’s for social justice and Black Lives Matter.
Earlier this month the LA Times published a story about the divide between BLM supporters who allegedly want to keep things peaceful and the anarchists who want to smash windows, statues and whatever else captures their very limited span of attention. The LA Times piece was focused on the recent decision by anarchists to vandalize a Democratic Party HQ in Portland. Suddenly it seemed that vandalism wasn’t quite as cool as it had been before.
Monday, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) published a kind of follow-up piece on the divide between black BLM activists in the city and the white anarchists who gradually made themselves the face of the protests. The piece opens by pointing out that it wasn’t always this way. Initially, black BLM activists were leading the nightly protests, until some of them got canceled:
“We always made sure that Black faces were in the front and … it was beautiful,” [Devin] Boss said. “And then a lot of it slowly started seeping away. A lot of whiteness started seeping into the forefront. A lot of white voices started seeping into the front.”
Boss and [Darren] Golden would also prove to be lightning rods in the local activist scene. They were among the first leaders to be toppled by a tumultuous protest movement that is defiantly leaderless and rife with subplots, cliques and personality conflicts…
A little more than three weeks into the protests, an anonymous Twitter account spread old tweets of Golden being disrespectful to women. His LinkedIn profile started making the rounds online, showing he had been in the Air Force security forces, the branch’s military police equivalent. Golden guarded nuclear weapons in the Air Force, but as he became more well known as an organizer, critics quickly accused him of being a former police officer and collaborating with law enforcement.
“I was targeted directly,” he said. “Somebody went back seven years on my Twitter account, through tens of thousands of tweets, to find something that they found incendiary.
Yes, well, that kind of purity politics and callout culture is how the left operates today. No one is safe from being canceled for long. But as Boss and Golden see it, the early BLM movement was accomplishing something, like defunding the police. Now it seems that violent, mostly white anarchists have taken over:
For months, an anonymous Twitter account calling itself the Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front has been a repository for organizing information, helping to spread anarchist propaganda, advocating violence and encouraging followers to “burn down the American plantation.”
The Liberation Front account tweeted in July criticizing Rose City Justice for “pacifying the nightly justice center action,” and admonished its followers to “stop blindly listening to people with megaphones.”…
Multiple sources confirmed to OPB that its Twitter account, long shrouded in mystery, was started and run by a white teenager who grew up in suburban Portland. That person said they’ve since moved on from the group.
I wonder if the white teen who was running the Youth Liberation Front Twitter account still lives in his parent’s basement. I can almost hear him now: Mom, can you get my laundry I’m smashing the fash!
Ultimately I don’t feel sorry for anyone involved in this mess. If BLM doesn’t like what Antifa is doing in their name, they could step up and say so. But they haven’t and probably won’t because they take a no enemies on the left approach. And for a time I’m sure some of them found the anarchists useful. But their support comes at a price and this is it. You can’t maintain a coherent message if you partner with people who just want to break things and curse at cops every night.
The left has made its radical bed, now it can lie in it. Even progressives like Mayor Wheeler who has done all he can to coddle Antifa seem to have turned their backs on the nightly violence and extremism. The mob is still out there shouting at cops and breaking things but no one is listening anymore.
