Antifa Declares Portland’s Streets ‘Our Streets’

So there’s this really whacked-out young lady just absolutely spitting high on rage with one of those weird Chelsea Girl fringe haircuts like skinhead molls used to wear back in the Age of Reagan and she is right at this moment very fixated on — and I am not making this up — kettle corn, that weird repulsive caramel-coated Dutch mutant popcorn varietal sold at state fairs and any place men in laced-up pirate blouses are gathered, and she’s just going on and on about it, screaming at the top of her skinny little lungs: “It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet!” and ain’t nobody listening, but that’s pretty clearly beside the point, psychically, from where this particular specimen is standing and chanting, working herself up into a kind of lathery confection-oriented trance as she contemplates the ineffable yin and yang of it all, kettle-corn-speaking.

I imagine that her head would explode if she found out that Oreo is making a kettle-corn-flavored sandwich cookie, and that it is — saints above! — vegan.

The kettle-corn girl is but one of many madcap escapees from the great mental ward of the Pacific Northwest out here making strange noises on the mean streets of downtown Portland on Election Night 2018, and her ecstatic om mani padme hum devotional to kettle corn is soon drowned out as her thuggish black-masked comrades begin their more straightforward and politically meaningful and considerably more comprehensible chant:

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!”

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!”

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!”

The thing is, the pointy-headed little black-shirted goons aren’t entirely wrong about that.

The official target of tonight’s march is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that some Top Gun–loving bureaucrat surely christened thus so that it could be called “ICE,” which sounds about 35 percent more jackbootilicious than you really want a law-enforcement agency serving a free people in a still-functional constitutional republic to sound. “Abolish ICE!” is the official theme of the evening, and the blackshirts return to it from time to time, but the real subject of tonight’s fugue is, pardon my Anglo-Saxon, “F*** the police!” which is developed in a kind of sloppy exposition in three or four different chants.

“A-C-A-B!”

“All cops are bastards!”

“A-C-A-B!”

“All cops are bastards!”

“A-C-A-B!”

“All cops are bastards!”

And these absolutely are their streets, as the two neutered Portland cops following them dutifully around make clear. The goons and thugs occasionally take a moment to amuse themselves by messing with the cops, screaming obscenities at them or committing flagrant but relatively minor violations of the law in front of them, daring them to do anything about it. The cops trudge and trundle on, calm as monks, pretending not to notice as the hoodlums pound on passing cars, block intersections, and menace bystanders. At the most public of public spaces in Portland, Pioneer Courthouse Square — “Portland’s living room,” they call it — the goons encounter a little bit of counterprotest, not from sad incel Proud Boys or the Klan or simply from other pissant neo-fascists wearing slightly different-color shirts — but from a young black man who intuits, not inaccurately, that this is mainly a bunch of rich-white-kid play-acting by little runts who make pretty good thugs when confronted with people in wheelchairs or little old ladies — more on that in a second — but who are basically chickensh** poseurs who are Down for the Cause only to the extent that it doesn’t stand between them and a soy latte and an MFA. He says as much, at higher volume than probably is really necessary — and the weaselly little munchkin blackshirts who had just a second before insisted that all cops are bastards! and boasted of their control of the streets turn immediately to the police for help. And the police, damn their eyes, help: They evict an actual peaceable protester, if a loud one, from the public square — in order to make room for mask-wearing, law-breaking, little-old-lady-assaulting hooligans.

A police vehicle cruises down the street a respectful distance behind the mob. The purported lawmen inside announce over the loudspeakers that they are there to assure this rabble of miscreants that they are there to help the mob “exercise your First Amendment rights safely,” so please stay on the sidewalk and obey the traffic laws. Naturally, the mob responds to this by immediately stepping off the sidewalk and violating the traffic laws. Not that there’s any need to — they just want to remind themselves, and the police, that they can.

Whose streets? That’s pretty clear.

On Portlandia, the mayor of Portland is played by Kyle MacLachlan (of Twin Peaks) as a goofy and generally earnest middle-aged municipal careerist trying to be cool. In real life, Portland’s mayor is Ted Wheeler, a sniveling little runt of a bureaucrat who professes to be “appalled” at the political violence that is now commonplace on the streets of Portland but complains that he is effectively unable to do anything about it. When Antifa thugs attacked a march held by Patriot Prayer, a local right-wing group, police reported seeing people brandishing guns, clubs, knives, and pepper spray. They made no arrests.

Owing to one of the eccentricities of Portland governance, the mayor is also the police commissioner. The police chief, who bears the wonderful inaptronym “Danielle Outlaw,” answers to him, as of course do the police themselves. According to Andy Ngo, a local journalist who has written for the Wall Street Journal and other publications about the Portland fascists who style themselves anti-fascists (and whose work on another topic appears elsewhere in this issue), the police are under orders to avoid creating “flashpoints,” meaning confrontations between police and hooligans that might look bad on video.

“The police are getting pushed from all sides,” Ngo says. “The Right feels like the police allow anarchy to happen on the streets, and the Left says that the police are protecting the ‘fascists.’ The mayor’s constituents are people who are sympathetic to Antifa. He’s come out verbally very hard against the right-wing groups and has been inaccurate in his description of them, describing them as white supremacists, which I don’t think is a fair description of Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys. When it comes to Antifa, sometimes he condemns their violence — but never their ideology.”

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