The weekend before last, depraved far-right Trump supporters played Mad Max in downtown Portland, shooting paintball guns at pedestrians, leaping out of their truck cabs to beat up hapless counter-protestors, and terrorizing citizens using their vehicles as weapons, al-Qaeda style. The event was doubtless overshadowed by the killing of a Patriot Prayer member by a local antifa protestor (that the shooter was subsequently killed by US marshals as they closed in on him days later means that we may never have a full account of the confrontation between those two violent men). Here’s how Jonathan Maus described the downtown vehicular rampage at BikePortland:
As they powered through the streets, some of them sprayed bear mace and shot paintball guns indiscriminately on people in the street. In the clip above you can see drivers and huge trucks barreling through an intersection against a red light as people try to slow them down and/or scamper out of their way. Other clips showed a bicycle under the wheels of a car and a souped-up sedan driver who raced, full-throttle, through a busy street.
Yet the police stood by and did worse than nothing, at one point directing traffic on a nearby bridge to make it easier for these nut jobs to access city streets, and largely failing to intervene until the invading horde had departed. If the Portland Police Bureau doesn't see its job as including defending the citizenry from right-wing assaults, then their problems are even more serious than I thought. A police department unwilling to lift a hand against vigilante violence is a police department that has failed its public purpose.
These events of August 29th cannot be allowed to slide out of public consciousness. Antifa may be a pain in the ass, but the violence left-leaning protestors have committed in connection with the Black Lives Matter protests is dwarfed by the scale, and more importantly, anti-democratic intent, of the right-wing violence we see around the nation; many of these right-wingers are looking to commit violence against non-white Americans, intimidate political opponents, and even instigate civil war. If you can't tell the difference between these two threats, you don't belong in public service. In the case of Portland, the fact that the vigilantes had first participated in a Trump car and truck rally that had headed into the city is also remarkable. At this point, any false equivalences drawn with antifa fall away. You cannot imagine armed bands of Biden supporters making violent raids into heavily Trump areas and assaulting folks on the street (though this is indeed the fantastic propaganda that right-wing media outlets have been ginning up for months now, with tales of buses carrying BLM protestors to beat up and burn down white citizens and towns). In the reporting of what happened in downtown Portland, the fact that the violence spun out of a Trump rally has not garnered nearly sufficient scrutiny or condemnation.
Underlying this ominous Portland visitation is the high tempo of far-right violence that has accompanied the election of Donald Trump, and which the president has increasingly begun to actively incite as a key element of his re-election strategy to sow chaos and fear across the citizenry (among other things, he indicated his approval of the August 29 violence committed against Portlanders by the right-wing vigilantes). Such far-right violence has shadowed the BLM protests over the last few months. This Huffington Post article from a couple weeks ago found 497 incidents of “white vigilantes and far-right actors” appearing at BLM demonstrations, including “64 cases of simple assault, 38 incidents of vigilantes driving cars into demonstrators, and nine times shots were fired at protesters.” Six protestors were wounded by bullets; three died. There have also been “387 incidents of intimidation, such as people using racist slurs, making threats and brandishing firearms.”
A second key reference point is that such right-wing violence dwarves that carried out by left-leaning actors over the last decade and more (as far as I can tell, the death of the Patriot Prayer member in Portland was the first time a killing has been linked to an antifa member). A Center for Strategic & International Studies report from June of this year summarizes the situation:
Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.
Some, like the October 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue slayings in Pittsburgh and the massacre in an El Paso Walmart in August 2019, are seared into the public consciousness. Yet, in one of the greatest scandals of the Trump presidency, this administration has consistently downplayed the threat posed by right-wing extremists, choosing instead to conjure a phantom risk from antifa and anarchists.
Over at The Muckrake, Jared Yates Sexton points to the roving Trump caravans (they have now taken place in other locations, such as Los Angeles), alongside the right-wing media’s (and president’s) obscene defense of the vigilante murders in Kenosha by Kyle Rittenhouse, as a clear escalation of right-wing violence in the country. Pointing to America’s history of sectarian violence, such as in the antebellum and Civil War periods, he writes:
[I]n one failing state after another, groups of men, armed to the teeth, carrying flags and markers of their affiliation, have brazenly and aggressively entered the territory of their “enemies” and slaughtered with little regard.
This may sound foreign. It may sound outlandish. But we are watching the beginnings of a sectarian violence the likes of which we have not seen in this country for centuries. In the recent past, the Right has pushed its followers to the point of violence, but leaders in the party have shied away from promoting widespread aggression. Donald Trump has not and will not pause to use any means to maintain his hold on power.
In such a context, the failure of Portland’s mayor and police to respond to the Trumpist foray into Portland last week with appropriate urgency is a very bad sign of how effectively the city will protect its citizens from future incursions. In fact, such inaction will likely embolden these right-wing vigilantes.