By David Futrelle
You may have seen the video on Twitter: two federal law enforcement officers, kitted out as if they’re patrolling the streets of Kabul, march across a Portland street, grab a seemingly peaceful protester standing on the sidewalk and hustle him into an unmarked van. (If you haven’t seen the video, it’s below.)
It looks for all the world like a state-sponsored kidnapping, the sort of thing we’re more used to seeing in authoritarian regimes. But maybe that’s what we’re becoming.
As Willamette Week notes:
The sight of armed federal officers—who look dressed for overseas combat or the U.S. border they are trained to protect—is an alarming one for many citizens. The image summons memories of other moments of civil unrest in U.S. history: National Guardsmen shooting college students at Kent State in 1970, or federal troops responding to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
For the past several weeks, a ragtag army of federal law enforcement officials from four different departments, including Border Patrol and Homeland Security, have been running wild in downtown Portland, treating it like their own private fiefdom. They were send there, unrequested, by Donald Trump, who thinks they’re doing a “great job.” On Monday he said,
Portland was totally out of control. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. It’s not hard to do, if you know what you’re doing.”
The feds have already seriously injured one peaceful protester, whom they shot in the head with supposedly “less-lethal” ammunition while he was standing in the street holding a speaker over his head. His skull was fractured and he has had to undergo facial reconstruction surgery. Portland police are barred by a restraining order from using tear gas and “non-lethal” munitions on protesters, except in life-threatening circumstances; the feds are not.
Elected officials want them out. Oregon senator Ron Wyden has compared the federal officers to an “occupying army.” Portland mayor Ted Wheeler tweeted that “We do not want or need their help.”
The Portland Police have been making some questionable arrests themselves. In the video below, you can see an officer knock a bike rider to the ground and a swarm of police descend on him. It’s not clear what, if anything, the biker did to deserve such treatment.
What the feds are doing in Portland is indefensible, a clear attempt to intimidate all protesters, peaceful or otherwise and effectively deny them their right to protest. But the bigger worry is what Trump may do next. Trump has complained endlessly that the mayors of large cities like Chicago and Washington DC aren’t doing enough to control violence (and protests) in their streets, and has long threatened to send in the feds in to do the job for them, so to speak.
Is Portland merely a dry run for a much larger campaign to intimidate protesters in big, Democratic cities? Does he plan to use federal officers to intimidate voters come November? Is what’s happening in Portland a strange one-off experiment or is it just the beginning of a wave of political repression to come? What happens if heavily armed Trump supporters and “boogaloo” fanatics decide to get involved? I shudder to think.
Is there anything we can do about this? Nothing but raise our voices in protest and, for those able to, put our bodies on the line.
UPDATE: There’s finally some national news coverage of this. See this newer post of mine for links.
Below, you can find an assortment of Twitter threads I’ve found useful in making sense of what’s happening. (Just FYI, I don’t necessarily agree with all the analyses; I just think these threads contain helpful perspectives and useful information)
Feel free to post additional links in the comments below — articles, blog posts, tweets, etc. If you’re in Portland now and have seen this first hand, please share your story.
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O/T: Update on Graham Linehan:
Now that he has no Twitter account, he will be charging a subscription fee to read a newsletter of things he would say on Twitter. Seeing as it’s £90 a year, I have a hard time believing he’ll get more than a few dozen signups from even the most dedicated TERFs.
I suspect that the actions by the feds in Portland are, in part, an attempt to provoke more violent protest. Trump wants to run on “law and order”: what else has he got? But too many voters are unhappy with force being used against peaceful protests. Trump needs full-on riots, to be put down by feds because “Democrats are soft on crime”. Of course, armed officers will need to “protect” polling places in November.
@Naglfar, maybe Linehan should join OnlyFans? I hear that’s a good platform for monetising disgusting content.
An interesting perspective from (formerly) inside the Trump administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jul/17/the-guy-stinks-and-hes-a-racist-anthony-scaramucci-on-donald-trump
@Moggie
Eh, there’s enough trans* women on OnlyFans that I hope he keeps his distance. They don’t deserve harassment from his chaser ass.
Meanwhile, JK Rowling is also getting to see the financial consequences of her actions.
@Alan Robertshaw
In addition, sales figures have returned for his niece’s exposé: 950,000 copies on the first day. Though at this point I doubt any written argument will change the minds of hardcore Trump fans, as they just won’t read it.
The Lincoln Project has also started doing story hour reading selections from the book in their usual tone.
We like to say that the US has three levels of power – federal, state and local – but the reality is that only federal and state actually exist in the Constitution. Local government is a creation of the state. Cities are creations of the state. Atlanta exists legally as a construct of the state. So the state absolutely can overrule what local government wants to do.
https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/17/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation-and-the-police
Those at the top? They’re military soldiers in all but name. Of what use is the Posse Comitatus Act if it’s got such a gaping loophole?
And meanwhile Greece is becoming unstable again, there’s a pandemic on the loose, and there’s a genocide unfolding in China that has been described as “worst since the Holocaust”.
It feels like the 1930s. It feels like we’re on the verge of another world war.
@Surplus : they aren’t military soldiers. They are armed goons and lack all the features of a good soldier. Even if quite a bit of soldiers are just armed goons too…
I am not sure of the theory that Trump refuse to use the actual military for fear it refuse to follow him into a dictatorship, but it sure look like Trump use people he is 100% sure of their loyalties.
The growing signs of fascism are becoming ever more blatant and I’m scared for my American neighbours, and I’m scared for the rest of the world, and I’m scared about all the other disasters that are also bearing down upon us.
I don’t know what to do, but I suppose I just have to try. As has been said before, ‘it is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either’.
I’ll try to focus on the issues that I can help with.
More Trump tales.
After years of legal battles, the film finally get a release.
https://www.filmstories.co.uk/news/youve-been-trumped-too-getting-full-release-after-four-years-of-legal-battles/
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1283985043577282561
ACAB.
The most useful outcome of these uprisings is that a lot of liberals have stopped being bootlickers while pretending that the Constitution actually matters, and a lot of libertarians have stopped pretending to care about individual freedoms.
@Perry
Hopefully this also means conservatives will stop pretending to want “small government” and “states rights.” They weren’t fooling anyone before, but they have really made their stance clear now.
@Surplus: That’s messed up. Always knew DHS was bad news, this just cements it.
Welp, we’re fucked
RBG’s cancer has returned.
@Moggie
What’s the prognosis?
@moggie
How bad?
@Lainy:
See here:
https://twitter.com/adamliptak/status/1284157798851510272
Ah man
“While the ones who clearly heard my call / Are the first ones stood against the wall.”
The one silver lining: Trump has basically mobilized everything at this point, and it seems he can’t do much more than terrorize two mid-sized cities (Portland and DC). I mean, he hasn’t fully mobilized ICE yet and might not want to, and there may be other untapped reserves, but there’s only so many FedCops to go around and they have other jobs. Even adding in Eric Prince’s mercenary outfit (Blackwater/Xe/Academi/Whatever they’re calling themselves now) if they haven’t already, you could take a third mid-sized city, maybe even a fourth if they could mobilize the FBI somehow (I strongly suspect that the FBI would tell him to get lost, though, if they haven’t already)… but after that they’d have to start spreading themselves thin. At most he could “make an example of” a few cities this way, but so far that doesn’t seem to be working well.
That’s not to trivialize what’s happening in Portland and what happened in DC, just pointing out that there are limits to how bad things can get using this particular tactic.
@Snowberry : what you say is realistic. I do hope it’s true. I believe Trump didn’t tried too hard to get the army on his side, but I fear he could get its support somehow.
@Snowberry
I hope you’re right that he can’t get much worse, but at the same time I remember that we thought things couldn’t get worse before and they did.
At the same time, this has also probably also convinced a few people to take action against him and maybe even swayed a few voters away from him. Now that a few Republicans are even speaking out against him, maybe this will break more of his own party away. It’s a long shot, but this could still be a wake up call for some establishment Republicans.
I mean, who is he even going to recruit next after that? The Secret Service? Even less likely than the FBI. Inactive CIA field agents? They’re more spies than anything else, direct confrontations with the public is just not what they do. Also, probably not legal. Fish and Wildlife Bureau? Not trained for this sort of thing. And if by some chance he manages to scrape that far down the barrel, what even is left? Everything else I know of is bureaucrats, lawyers, and bean counters.
Oh, I have no doubt he’ll at least try to make things worse, and maybe even succeed. That’s why I said “this particular tactic”.