Wednesday, August 05, 2020

Friday, July 24, 2020

Siege of Portland, July 24


This happened around two in the morning.

Siege Notes, July 24: On the Fringe

The day before yesterday a lone police cruiser was moving slowly past the former Apple store, now shrine to George Floyd,  around 10 PM. Then I saw a very young woman with shimmering blonde hair, sitting in the passenger seat. I wondered for a moment if someone had gotten hold of a police car and gone joyriding. Something was off.
A single cruiser can't operate unmolested in and around antifa territory and this one was close.

"I know you ain't looking for me..." a negro bellowed from somewhere.

The girl scanned the crowd with a look of concern; the cop's bald head low and dark on his side as he gingerly made his way through the hostile ground. It only occurred to me a moment later this had to be a crime victim and cop looking for a suspect--or missing person.

I gave a homeless guy a sympathetic look as I ducked into the 7/11 on 4th and Taylor downtown. In normal times its corner is dominated by the hardest homeless cases; now it operates on the edge and sometimes in the midst of our nightly riots. Inside an ugly little black teenager, odd looking and sounding with an accent I can't place, is threatening to start breaking stuff over something or other. A motley cast of antifa and assorted weirdos line up, observing social distancing. I bought a pack of cigarettes from an exhausted Arab, watching his screen of multiple security cameras through weary, bloodshot eyes.

The panhandler had made me with that damn sympathetic look I gave him, and promptly accosted me on the way out.
"Need a light?" He asks.
"Thanks I got it." I say.
Needing a break and always looking to blend in, I sat with him for a bit. He wasn't crazy, but an absolute physical wreck. Cancer is eating him from the inside out he tells me, and he can't get treatment. He's making his pitch for charity before asking outright. There are bank-shot panhandler appeals--recently a homeless guy handed me a dime, and asked for a dollar. This guy's thing is more of a long-sell, or at least he had me pegged for it.

"These other guys, they can't prove it." He says of other panhandlers' woe. "I can." He pulls up his pant leg and shows me a withered calf splotched with little dark clouds of melanoma.
He needs fifteen dollars for a bed, he says and I give him ten.
"We should be able to raise you five more dollars." I say. He's eying the twenty I wasn't willing to give him. "Put out a cup or something. All these people."
He chortles with a rheumy thump
"These people?"
"Nobody's giving you money?"
"Hell no."
"Well there's all that food, that's pretty cool?" Antifa's "Riot Ribs" grill-tent cooks up barbecue and hands out food all day.
"I haven't gotten any. All that food and I haven't got shit. These fuckers."
He stops a light-skinned young negro but doesn't get far before the man says, with neither disdain nor sympathy, "I haven't got any money", and rolls.
"See what I mean?" He laughs, with as much good nature as he can muster.
I took back my ten, gave him the twenty, and waded back into the night.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Siege of Soros: The Livestreams for July 21 through 22



5:03:03 Woman beaten unconscious on street. "She's kicking her face!" The livestreamer complains and is chased off the street. I speculated here that she had blurred the screen to protect them but I think her connection was at fault.

Courtesy of AustinZone YouTube channel.

There is almost six hours worth of various livestreams here. I'll try to go through and timestamp various points as I find time. It was an eventful and typical night. The antifa livestreamers are doing remarkable work on the ground documenting it all, despite their bias. On second thought, no one reads this blog so I won't waste the time. Go listen to livestream debates by hack YouTubers, if that's your thing. You deserve this, bastards!
I kid.

Hello darkness my old friend...


Siege Notes, Portland July 21: Good Morning Vietnam

Portland's insurrectionists are more numerous, organized and energized as a result of President Trump's surge of federal law enforcement into the city, now on day fifty-something of the Siege of Soros, but who's counting.

Contrary to Trump's claim, they have not restored order and haven't done--not necessarily their fault--a fine job. In fact at this point he's only managed to place the feds in the same untenable position the police they've come to relieve were in before--the force they need to use is used against them immediately, and so far quite effectively, by treacherous media and political leaders presenting them as military atrocities to a benighted public.

Trump and the poor grunts of federal law enforcement have acquired their own Vietnam. No, Johnny Rambo, you don't get to win this time either.

After introducing harsher riot control measures--lots of tear gas and various munitions--on the first two nights and putting antifa on their heels, the feds have retreated to their fortified courthouse. They are now pursuing the same strategy of the police earlier, ceding the streets and only clearing rioters when their physical attacks on the building get out of hand, as when they try to set the plywood fortifications on fire. Last night they managed to pull away a large section of plywood framing and start in on the exposed (but impressively sturdy) glass underneath.

Today concrete blocks are going up and welders are fusing together heavier fencing in an attempt to stop antifa from dismantling it and barricading the doors, as has become routine. The city recaptured the three affected park blocks last week, declaring them closed for repairs and fencing them off with chain link fencing that is easily removable in sections. At the same time Portland police were being withdrawn from the streets--and abandoning the feds to antifa outfitted with the mobile siege barriers they've made of the dismantled fencing, and invigorated by the victory of recapturing their after-dark autonomous zone.

The Portland Police Bureau has been forbidden from communicating with the feds, and a controversy is brewing over a violation of that after the revelation an office of the PPB has been communicating with the feds next door. Longtime progressive anti-cop activist Jo Ann Hardesty is applying it to her effort to gain control of the police bureau (the mayor serves as commissioner now, but it's not clear what that means). No one locally is questioning the extraordinary (unprecedented?) move of isolating the feds.

With the new front opened, now against Trump's putative brownshirts, antifa continues to show improvement in organization and tactics. Nightly now their teams of bikes--motorcycles, bicycles, scooters--move in rapid response teams to blockade streets and observers are stationed on the perimeter of the three-block radius antifa now claims nightly with impunity. Their autonomy is only disturbed by riot police after they've managed, after much effort, to draw the "pigs" out of their fort by setting fires and barricades and trying to break inside.

Journalists enjoy some protections from arrest and dispersal (last night I watched one of the antifa livestreamers unmolested behind federal lines as they cleared out Lownsdale Square; agents escorted her out at her request after she became nervous) as a result of a restraining order granted by a liberal federal judge and ally from within the besieged walls of the courthouse. But any journalist on the ground identified as unallied or suspect is immediately set upon by the crowd. One was beaten last night.

Another beating for unknown reasons left someone knocked out on the street. The cries of those around suggest it was a woman:



Portland's coup-complicit local journalists are glorying in their role and the national attention. "Portland journalists are killing it" one enthused after promoting another local going on national television.
So far the narrative holds and they continue to win.

Monday, July 20, 2020

Siege Notes, July 20: Keep Portland Cruel

Salmon Street in between 4th and 3rd Avenues is very rough during the day. Antifa hangers-on and homeless crazies predominate on the short block bordering what is in effect antifa occupied territory--Lownsdale Park across from the US District Court.

Homeless schizophrenics and the like are attracted to the camp with its free food and excitement. Ranters are pleased to have a somewhat captive audience, and can be seen inveigling, completely ignored, among the crowd.

I was in front of the federal courthouse on Sunday when I heard angry shouting. Nothing unusual here and now, but it persisted so I made my way over to the corner of Salmon to have a look. Someone was taunting someone over getting "knocked out".

An older homeless man lay propped up on an elbow in the middle of the street surrounded by protesters. I think someone offered to get an antifa medic when he shouted defiantly.

"I want an ambulance. I want 911."

A pair of women watched with me for a moment. I told them what I knew. A thirty-something nice liberal lady, clearly distressed but apologetic, pointed out the homeless man was a troublesome character who'd been clashing with people for days.
"He needs help." I said like an idiot. "I mean, professional."
She nodded under eyes arched in concern. I walked away thinking to myself, yes, help from, you know, police and paramedics.

And it fell to the most wretched to expose their hypocrisy and bear their wrath. 
--not in the Bible, as far as I know

 Paramedics and police would normally have been on hand in ten minutes and would have handled the situation with the care and restraint determined by the terms of an Obama-era lawsuit and ensuing consent decree.
 This after an investigation by race man Eric Holder's Justice Department couldn't contrive enough evidence for Jo Ann Hardesty and other local anti-cop activists to warrant a finding of racial bias. Certainly that wasn't for lack of trying.

I was surprised and concerned to see an hour later from the other side of antifa-occupied Lownsdale Park the confrontation with the homeless man was still going on. Someone restrained from attacking him a scrawny kid who flailed away in the air furious, or pretending to be. The old guy had lost his pants I could see. Various people were shouting.

"Are they getting violent over there?" a big guy, a suburban dad with a tribal tattoo, had gotten out of his car, phone in hand.

"Yeah." I said, restraining the urge to say "You appear normal. So am I."

His wife pleaded with him to get in the car.

Another fellow, a stout biker/hipster type walking a muscular pit bull with huge spike collar--sympathies uncertain--got out his phone and, probably, called 911. The confrontation there had been going on almost an hour at this point. A bus was stopped for a time and I thought, stupidly, the driver would take the old guy away.

I ventured into the middle of Lownsdale and watched the standoff for a while, afraid to film in the midst of antifa and sympathizers, who own the park now by day as well as night as a result of their inspired redoubling in the face of the feds attempts to restore the city.

I went back to the sidewalk and headed north, thinking I'd come wide around to observe, maybe dare to film, when a wiped-out looking kid, tall with greasy locks and a nose ring that looked like it was fashioned out of a paper clip, approached.

"What's this?" He asked, pointing to my hand, without hostility.
"It's my selfie stick. I use it to take pictures and video."
"Can I see it?"
Against my better judgement I handed it to him.
"I'm an artist." With the stick he indicated a poster on the ground with a couple of letters and crude shapes. I rested my hands on my knees and made a show of appreciating it.
"Cool."
A spectral negro sidled up to us, his eyes between the mask and dark cap he wore took me in with that familiar black look: wide-eyed and wary. I took out a cigarette and gave one to the kid--who turned out to be 28, by his account. I offered one to the black; he took it wordlessly.

As I spent some ten minutes sitting on the sidewalk listening to the young man's story, a homeless man standing nearby streamed a continual narrative to the oblivious stream of people passing by.

"...I was a real badass..."

As for the young man's story , it was incoherent and probably a lie--his biker father didn't want to be a hit-man for the Mob and left the life to raise a family. But he treated his son too harshly and scarred him. Doctors have told him he showed symptoms of schizophrenia, but he didn't believe it. He's an Indian he says, and practices Indian magic.

"...knew a guy, used to work out..."

A girl with a shaved head came over and gave instructions, something about keeping an eye out for something--I sat there invisible--and he assured her he would, but I think he forgot immediately after she left.

"...I'm a magician, motherfucker..." the homeless guy happens to say at some point.

"Yes, yes, we've established that." The young man responded, smirking at me and rolling his eyes in the direction of the speaker.

I worried for a moment he might try to keep the selfie stick when I got up and brushed myself off, but he remained friendly.

"Good luck." I said, shaking his hand, only later thinking of Covid.

I went to the standoff on Salmon, and joined a pair of sane-looking older Portlanders standng nearby watching with concern. No one was filming so I didn't. The old guy still didn't have his pants and bled from a cut over the eye.

"This is fucked up." A man said. I nodded in agreement.

"People called 911. They won't come here" he said. We were across and one street over from the police station.

A fat man in a late-model Cadillac, clothes and car sharing an Italian gangster aesthetic, shouted from the curb.
"Fuck him. He's been giving people shit...fuck that bastard."

"Yeah, yeah, anyway...it's just fucked up" the other guy said.

The irony of it would no doubt be lost on antifa if they were paying attention to it. The old guy refused to leave the street, just as they do, and their response was to brutalize him and humiliate him--but not too much perhaps, certainly nothing he isn't used to--and then to hand him over to the detested authorities. Eventually an ambulance and police unit extracted him after about two hours.

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