Horst Wessel
Trump is having success in stoking violence.
A person was shot and killed in downtown Portland Saturday night as a pro-Trump car caravan wound its way through city streets, clashing with counterprotesters along the way.
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Images from the scene Saturday night show a man wearing a hat featuring the logo of Patriot Prayer, a group that has regularly attended, hosted and engaged in violence at Portland protests through the years. The man was also wearing a “Thin Blue Line” patch on his shorts, indicating support for the police.
The shooting occurred around 8:45 p.m. near the corner of Southwest Third Avenue and Alder Street. Portland police are investigating it as a homicide.
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The lead-up to Saturday’s “Trump cruise rally” generated fear of yet more violence from both sides. A post pinned to the Facebook event page, which drew some 2,500 attendees, discouraged people from openly carrying firearms and instead encouraged concealed carry.
It’s all so Weimar.
Videos posted online show people in flag-adorned trucks driving through groups of protesters, firing paintball guns at crowds and deploying what appears to be pepper spray. Individual cars or groups of counterdemonstrators tried to break the caravan’s steady stream, blocking them with vehicles and bodies, which sometimes led to dangerous, tense confrontations.
And then somebody got shot. Nice job, Don.
I am still not sure if this “look what Trump is making me do” gambit is a good strategy for the left wing.
An old friend of mine said today that of course people were rioting because Trump is so awful.
I reminded her of how we both lived through the Reagan years feeling angry and concerned a lot of the time but we did not go burn down the grocery store and then declare “look what Reagan made us do”
As horrible and incompetent as Trump is, I fear that us using the classic abuser’s line of “look what you made me do” to excuse violent rioting is wrong. It makes us no better than the violent factions of the right wing who cause harm and then claim “look what Soros/Obama/feminists/etc. made us do”
I know that none of the male-dominated groups currently running around in the streets attacking each other and acting like feces-flinging gibbons are going to listen to an old feminist. So, well, just going to post this as my opinion, worth exactly what I charge for it.
I take the view at this point if you’re not black and yet are choosing to do this shit you really ought not to.
Spot on. And a demagogue like Trump can sit on the sidelines deploring both aggressive and defensive violence, and dog-whistling the Right to serve up more;because it suits him to do so, particularly in this pre-election period.
It also serves the Right’s cause to send in agents provocateurs to the street demonstrations to stir up trouble; as happened in Weimar Germany.
People must be free to demonstrate in the streets over political issues. But I would urge any doing so to be on guard against agents provocateurs in their own ranks, and to form their own detachments to defend shops, infrastructure and other property from mindless and not-so-mindless hooligans.
Defenders have a great moral advantage over aggressors, which is why both sides in every military conflict in history have claimed to be the defenders, and to have right, plus a selection from God, Allah, Zarathustra, Jehovah and The Eye in the Sky on their side.
@#1: See what you made me do is straight out of the textbook by Eric Berne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
Omar, you’re too right. I remember back when I was a kid and brought protest groups to Washington, we would make sure everybody was trained to understand the virtual certainty that a person who was advocating violence was a plant. We’ve already seen plausible reports of agents provocateurs setting bombs in Portland and breaking windows in Minneapolis (the famous “Umbrella Man”).
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/portland-police-seek-former-navy-seal-investigation
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/us/umbrella-man-associated-white-supremacist-group-george-floyd/index.html
At this point, I agree with many other people who say that the protests have, with the help of such infiltrators, been turned more to the purposes of the Trump regime than to those of progress. The man who was shot in Portland will not be the last. We have all heard before that, when faced with a mysterious crime, we ought to ask ourselves first cui bono? Shooting of an actual protestor would have looked bad for Vanilla ISIS. Shooting of a right-winger can be turned to useful propaganda purposes by the regime. Therefore, I consider it most likely he was a useful idiot, shot by another infiltrator.
I agree with you; if there’s to be any use for continued protests, it requires a pivot to defense: next time a hillbilly caravan rolls through, the protestors should focus on defending their neighborhoods instead of engaging the creeps. The right-wing media empire is huge and well-funded. Any molehill created by the protestors can be sold as a mountain repeatedly.
This is so commonplace. It happened with a lot of environmental protests, too, as well as environmental advocacy groups. Earth First! (a group that already had problems) was often infiltrated. Even the more peace advocating groups are often infiltrated. Bombs seem a favorite tool of the agents provocateurs.
The interesting thing to me is why this didn’t happen with the women’s marches. Perhaps the delusion that women are always good, kind, and caring made people worried they wouldn’t be believed if they tried it? I don’t know.
I dunno how much of a useful idiot Bishop was; I’ve met him once or twice. He famously got excommunicated from the Oregon X-wing groups for cheering on that subway stabber a few years back and had been arrested for bringing a broken down assault rifle to a protest (probably because it was concealed). What that says about the situation, I dunno, but there it is…
In addition to that, Trump appears to be having serious episodes of losing the plot pretty completely; if the story below in the Melbourne ‘Age’ is anything to go by. He is tweeting like a cage full of canaries.
Interesting times.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/twitter-barrage-trump-embraces-fringe-theories-on-protests-and-the-coronavirus-20200831-p55qzj.html
Well after months of complaining about mythical antifa caravans coming to towns and villages to raise havoc they finally found an out of state ( staged and came from Vancouver, Washington) caravan invading a community to raise havoc.
Unfortunately for the delusional it was a pro demented donnie caravan of dunderheads and trigger happy octane junkies.