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PortlandPortland officials and progressives unite to oppose far-right protestOregon pro-Trump organizers seem in disarray ahead of Sunday event but some on left still call for mayor to quit Jason Wilson in Portland, Oregon@ More
US Capitol attackMan charged in Capitol riot also engaged in rightwing street brawlViolence erupted between antifascist protesters and supporters of a far-right preacher Jason Wilson@ More
A group of mostly leftwing and anarchist protesters carrying signs against Joe Biden and police marched in Portland on inauguration day and damaged the headquarters of the Democratic party of Oregon, police said.Portland has been the site of frequent protests, many involving violent clashes between officers and demonstrators, ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Over the summer, there were demonstrations for more than 100 straight days.Some in the group of about 150 people in the protest smashed windows and spray-painted anarchist symbols at the political party building.Police said eight arrests were made in the area. Some demonstrators carried a sign reading “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge!” in response to “police murders” and “imperialist wars”. Others carried a banner declaring “We Are Ungovernable”.Police said on Twitter that officers on bicycles had entered the crowd to contact someone with a weapon and to remove poles affixed to a banner that they thought could be used as a weapon.Police said the crowd swarmed the officers and threw objects at authorities, who used a smoke canister to get away.The group was one of several that gathered in the city on inauguration day, police said. A car caravan in the city celebrated the transition of presidential power and urged policy change, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Another group gathered around 5pm in north-east Portland with speakers talking about police brutality.Ted Wheeler, the mayor, has decried what he described as a segment of violent agitators who detract from the message of police accountability and should be subject to more severe punishment.A group of about 100 people also marched in Seattle on Wednesday, where police said windows were broken at a federal courthouse and officers arrested three people. The crowd called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, outside the federal immigration court, several people set fire to an American flag, the Seattle Times reported. More
It was Labor Day. We were having a barbecue in our back garden when gale-force winds started out of nowhere. As we scrambled to hold down plates and glasses, our neighbour’s horse chestnut trees swayed menacingly, their leaves swirling around us.Over the next hour, smoke filled the air and the sky changed from bright blue to dirty grey. We moved everything inside and shut up the house. Soon after, the power went. We had no idea what was happening: rumours started online that protestors – some said Antifa, some said Proud Boys – were starting fires on the outskirts of the city.We soon learned the truth: a “rare wind event” had caused wildfires to spread rapidly across Oregon, including to forests south of Portland. As the week progressed, the fires and smoke intensified and people were evacuated from neighbouring towns. Portlanders now had three reasons to wear a mask: coronavirus, police teargas and deadly smoke.I refreshed local fire maps every 15 minutes, tracking the flames’ path. My husband and I discussed whether we should plan an escape route but we would have been met by smoke from other wildfires in almost any possible direction. Local government advice was to stay put unless an evacuation warning was issued. We held tight. More
Donald Trump signed a memo on Wednesday that threatened to cut funding to Democratic-led cities that the administration has characterized as “lawless” and “anarchist jurisdictions”, using his office to launch an extraordinary – if legally ineffective – attack on his political opponents ahead of the November election.“My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” the memorandum reads. “It is imperative that the federal government review the use of federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”The document compels William Barr, the attorney general, to develop a list of jurisdictions that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities” within the next fortnight. It also instructs Russell Vought, the White House budget director, to issue guidance in the next month on how federal agencies can restrict or disfavor “anarchist jurisdictions” in providing federal grants.Today @POTUS made clear that we will not continue to funnel taxpayer money to lawless cities that fail to restore law and order in their communities. We will explore all options. https://t.co/BDScgIG2uK— Russ Vought (@RussVought45) September 3, 2020
The president has often suggested that his political opponents, including Joe Biden, want to defund the police departments, despite the fact that most Democrats, including Biden, have said they do not endorse that approach to police reform. Pushing hardline “law and order” rhetoric, Trump has also pushed baseless conspiracy theories about leftwing violence amid protests against police brutality and systemic racism while refusing to condemn rightwing and white supremacist vigilantism.The memorandum that the White House shared on Wednesday night, which specifically names Portland, New York City, Seattle and Washington DC as examples of jurisdictions might lose federal funding, is unlikely to result in any of those cities losing significant funding, according to legal experts. Congress determines how funding is distributed, and agencies cannot “willy nilly restrict funding”, said Sam Berger, a former senior policy advisor at the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama administration.The five-page memorandum “reads like a campaign press release”, Berger told the Guardian. “The first two pages are a bizarre diatribe – that’s not what a government document looks like.”Even if federal agencies are able to find justification to reduce funding to certain cities, perhaps via grants linked to law enforcement, any funding restrictions are unlikely to hold up to legal challenges, he added.“The president obviously has no power to pick and choose which cities to cut off from congressionally appropriated funding,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar at Harvard, and recently the co-author of To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment. Trump “has no defunding spigot. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the Executive. Donald Trump must have slept through high school civics,” Tribe said in an email.New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the memo was “an illegal stunt”, noting that Trump “is not a king. He cannot ‘defund’ NYC.”This latest move from the president follows through on his growing disdain for American cities run by Democrats. During his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Trump railed against “rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities” and spoke of “left-wing anarchy and mayhem in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities”. More
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Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump tweeted a rare statement of condolences, as the confirmed death toll in the US climbed past 183,000.But the expression of regret was not for victims of Covid-19. Instead the president memorialized a member of a far-right group killed in Portland, Oregon on Saturday night.“Rest in peace Jay,” the president tweeted, referring to Aaron “Jay” Danielson, shot dead in clashes after a convoy of Trump supporters drove through an anti-racism protest.Trump is not often given to expressions of sympathy or understanding. But going back to the days when he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to call for the deaths of five wrongfully accused Black men in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, he has shown a lifelong penchant for inserting himself at raw public moments to inflame racist hatreds and fears.The difference now is that Trump is president, and that penchant has become the centerpiece of his re-election strategy. That much is plain from his Twitter feed, which on Sunday included footage of a Black man assaulting a white woman on a subway platform, apropos of nothing.“I think he only means to agitate things,” said Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. “He is campaigning. It’s clear his campaign is all about ‘law and order’, it’s a throwback to the past, and he’s going to do everything to disrupt law and order in this time.”It has been three years since Trump defended the “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia. It has been only two months since he branded anti-racist protesters “terrorists” and two weeks since he tweeted that “the history and culture of our great country [is] being ripped apart” with the removal of statues to Confederate leaders and generals.Trump has announced that he will visit Kenosha on Tuesday. The Wisconsin city has been the scene of protests after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, four times in the back as Blake reached into a car in which his children were sitting.Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who was both a Trump admirer and a self-styled law enforcement enthusiast, brought a semi-automatic rifle to the scene of protests in the city and killed two people, prosecutors say.Trump has expressed his support: on Friday the president “liked” a tweet thread beginning: “Kyle Rittenhouse is a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”Of the caravan of trucks flying Trump flags that drove into the anti-racism protests in Portland on Saturday, spraying mace and firing paintballs, Trump tweeted: “GREAT PATRIOTS!”A suspect held in the death of Danielson reportedly described himself as a supporter of “antifa”, a broad label applied to “anti-fascist” groups that Trump and the far right have accused of unsubstantiated acts of violence. Danielson was identified as a “friend and supporter” of the Patriot Prayer group, whose founder, a former Republican candidate for US Senate, has condemned white supremacy but which attracts white supremacist sympathizers.Trump’s planned Kenosha visit was seen by Bass and others as likely to inflame tensions at a time when calls for calm and mutual understanding are needed.“I think his visit has one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to agitate things and to make things worse,” Bass said.For others, Trump’s plan to visit Kenosha was ominously reminiscent of visits to scenes of other conflicts critics say he has fomented with incendiary tweets and by cheerleading violent actors.After a white gunman who warned of a “Hispanic invasion” killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas last year, Trump visited despite urging from local officials not to. At the scene, Trump boasted about progress on his border wall.A year earlier, Trump paid a similarly controversial visit to Pittsburgh, where a gunman who accused Jews of “committing genocide to his people” killed 11 at a synagogue.Joe Biden has directly tied Trump’s rhetoric to such incidents of violence, and accused the president of unleashing “the deepest, darkest forces in this nation”.“How far is it from Trump’s saying this ‘is an invasion’ to the shooter in El Paso declaring ‘this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas’?” Biden has tweeted. “Not far at all.”The Democratic nominee for president planned to visit Pittsburgh on Monday, “to lay out a core question voters face in this election: are you safe in Donald Trump’s America?”In released excerpts of his speech, he said: “This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence – because for years he has fomented it.”Trump, Biden added, “may believe mouthing the words ‘law and order’ makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows you how weak he is.”Writing for the Daily Beast, the columnist Michael Tomasky said trying to convince voters that Biden represents chaos would not work. The piece was titled “White People Aren’t as Racist or Stupid as Trump Thinks”.But four years ago, Trump showed he knew white voters, who made up 74% of the 2016 electorate, better than a lot of people. They voted 54%-39% for Trump, putting him where he is today. More
A fire lit inside a police union building by a small fraction of protesters in Portland overnight led the authorities to declare the situation a riot and then use flashbang munitions and smoke canisters to force hundreds away from the area.The flare-up in the Oregon city marred demonstrations that took place across Portland this weekend as part of protests that have continued daily, calling for police restructuring and systemic anti-racism reforms, since George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in May.Portland protests had been in a calmer vein since federal law enforcement agents withdrew in late July, but early Sunday saw a clash at the scene of the arson attack.It was the second time such a fire has been set in recent days. Though both fires were quickly put out, the incidents brought criticism of individuals who have been provoking police by damaging property and other belligerent tactics, in contrast to much wider, calmer protests, according to a report by the Oregonian.Three officers were hurt during efforts to clear a crowd of several hundred people outside the Portland Police Association building, police said in a statement.Rallies had been held earlier in the afternoon and evening throughout the city.Seneca Cayson, a black business owner who helped lead peaceful gatherings in downtown Portland, worries that incidents of vandalism and taunting of law enforcement by a tiny minority of the many thousands of white protesters turning out distracts from the main aims of the Black Lives Matter movement.But he speculated that such clashes also draw more attention to racial injustice and said of white rebels: “We are fighting alongside them to … be equal.”Many cite competing voices and the harsh glare of a national spotlight, which has reduced the situation to a culture war when the reality is much more complex.“It happens so much that the things that we care about get hijacked and get put on the back burner. And that just gets put into a big barrel with everything else,” said Neil Anderson, another local Black business owner. “We all want the same thing. But so often we get drowned out.”For many, part of breaking down racial barriers means taking funds from and restructuring the police entirely.Portland’s population is less than 6% black but people of color have been disproportionately stopped by a city program that created a gun violence reduction team.An analysis of police use of force published last month found that in 2019 officers were much more likely to use force against black people and particularly young black men than other groups, despite overall trends towards less use of force.“It is the entire culture of the Portland police bureau that is fundamentally unmanageable and must change,” said Jo Ann Hardesty, the city’s first black councilwoman and an activist who has pressed for police reform for three decades.“Thirty years is a long time to be asking for the exact same reforms. The difference now is there are tens of thousands of Portlanders who want the exact same thing,” Hardesty said.Police said demonstrators broke into the union building late Saturday, set the fire and were adding to it when officers made the riot declaration.Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler said violent protesters are serving as political “props” for Donald Trump in a divisive election season where the president is hammering on a law-and-order message.Meanwhile, Oregon state politicians will discuss on Monday in a special session passing a broader ban on police use of chokeholds and further restricting other use of force, the Oregonian reported on Sunday. More
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Federal agents accused of behaving like an ‘occupying army’ are said to be pulling out of Portland, Oregon, in an embarrassing climbdown by the White House, but many protesters are sceptical over whether the agents will actually withdraw from the city.
The force, which have been dubbed by some as ‘Donald Trump’s troops’, were sent in by the president a month ago to end what he called ‘anarchy’ during Black Lives Matter protests sparked after the police killing of George Floyd.
The Guardian’s Chris McGreal looks at what Trump was hoping to gain by sending paramilitaries into the city, if and how they will leave, and how their presence has fuelled anger among most residents
Federal agents show stronger force at Portland protests despite order to withdraw
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