Portland's time to shine

The liberal town is once again the center of the political universe

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Over the last few months, I’ve been fascinated by what is happening in Portland. If you don’t already know, Portland is a fairly sizeable city in Oregon, not far from the west coast of the United States. It has a pretty liberal reputation which was satirized in the TV show Portlandia.

But because this is the United States, polarization is king, and a strong local liberal presence has led to a far right backlash. The expanses of the Pacific Northwest have long been a place where white supremacists and separatists have sought space to construct their racial Arcadia. When Oregon was still a territory and not yet a state, black people who lived there for longer than three years were punished by receiving 39 lashes, every six months, until the left. When it finally became a state, people of color were banned from entering it entirely (the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1866, made the clause unenforceable, but it wasn’t repealed until 1926).

In more recent years, Portland has attracted the modern incarnation of the American far right, groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. The Proud Boys have regularly gone on rampages in the city center, beating people up and disrupting school board meetings and book readings. In 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, Portland’s liberal masses started fighting back. There were several large-scale brawls from which the local police were conspicuously absent. At one, anti-fascist activist Michael Reinoehl shot and killed Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson. Reinoehl was later killed by federal marshals, with Trump boasting that they murdered him without trying to arrest him.

Which is all to say that Portland has some history. And now, in Trump’s second term, it’s back in the spotlight.

For the past few months, regular protests have been taking place outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland. The protests have been in keeping with the city’s zany but edgy reputation. There have been naked cyclists, people dressed as frogs, and scuffles between protesters, far-right counter-protests, federal agents, and local police. DHS and CBP agents have tear gassed the protesters, and an ICE agent allegedly threatened to shoot an ambulance driver. Normal scenes in Donald Trump’s America.

So far, what has been happening in Portland is nothing like a repeat of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people turned out. ICE agents monitoring the scene have mostly described it as “low energy”. And it’s all taking place on essentially one city block, just outside the ICE building.

But tune into right-wing media or wade into the fever swamp that is X, and you hear something quite different. Portland is burning.

I’ve long been fascinated by the way that right-wing media and people with authoritarian tendencies spin coverage of protests and riots. There might be violence occurring on two streets in a city of millions of people who are otherwise going about normal lives, yet some media outlets will want you to believe that the end of civilization is nigh. Social media has only heightened this tendency because we can now get first-person footage from anywhere at anytime. The supply of imagery for apocalyptic narratives has increased as a result.

In Portland, the city’s fractious recent history and the small-scale protests have come together to magnify this dynamic. Right-wing media and social influencers are obsessed with the city, following every nude cyclist and thrown punch with breathless abandon. A cottage industry of wannabe gonzo influencers stalk the protests, trying to generate footage which will make them famous and fan the flames even further. One was recently arrested after scuffling with protesters following the brutal pepper spraying of a 19 year old woman. Trump feted him at the White House shortly afterwards.

And that’s not all Trump has done in response to the concocted panic. He’s already declared the city to be in a state of complete lawlessness and ordering the National Guard in. A judge pushed back against this, saying that Trump’s depiction of events in the city “was simply untethered to the facts”. For now, the troops have been blocked by the courts from going - even as Trump has pointed to social media posts as evidence that they are needed.

It’s heartening that judges are standing up for some semblance of sanity and reality. But it’s also disturbing that social media allows events like those in Portland to be spun into such preposterous narratives - especially when you add in the content that is just completely fake. It’s hard to know the extent to which Trump and the people around him realize the ruse or whether they actually live in such a disconnected bubble that they take the heavily curated world of right-wing media as reality. I suspect it’s the latter, and that scares me even more than the former.