Liberal Free Chat Zone

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Will Proud Boys, antifa showdown mark a tipping point for Portland?

By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
Aug 10, 3:16 PM

Summer is a time for bike rides and cold craft beer in Portland. Lately, it’s also been a time for bear spray and bursts of violence.

For nearly three years, rival political factions have descended on the city’s downtown. They’ve vented and raged. Too often, they’ve beaten and brawled with one another.

The demonstrations will return next week when right-wing activists from around the country plan to hold a waterfront rally to condemn anti-fascists, or antifa, and push to have their adversaries designated as domestic terrorists.

This time police and city leaders are more alarmed than usual.

“We’ve been sitting on a powder keg and everything is kind of coming to a head at this point,” Police Chief Danielle Outlaw told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview this week. “Not just because of what’s happening locally, but nationally.”

Cities across the U.S. have seen street skirmishes erupt between right- and left-wing groups since Donald Trump entered the White House, yet Portland has emerged as one of the most contested centers in the country’s culture wars.

Fanning the flames is the zeitgeist of incendiary political rhetoric, including recent remarks by President Trump, that has deepened divisions and resentment as partisan lines harden nationwide.

But a large share of the turmoil is Portland’s alone. Its long legacy of left-wing activism, notably its militant anti-fascists, has drawn the ire of the conservative movement as well as the pundits and politicians who lead it.

Meanwhile, the city’s liberal free speech tradition has allowed the bitter confrontations to continue while police struggle to keep the peace.

“It’s undeniable that the far-right has been able to achieve the outcome they’re looking for by coming here again and again,” said Lindsay Schubiner, program director for social justice group Western States Center, which monitors right-wing extremism from its base in Portland. “Whether that’s direct violence or viral media clips.”

ASSIGNING BLAME

Looming over next Saturday will be the double mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that have outraged many Americans and left them looking to assign blame.

In El Paso, authorities say a 21-year-old white man shot and killed 22 people at a Walmart and later confessed to officers that he targeted Mexicans. Most of the dead had Hispanic last names and eight were Mexican nationals.

Continued at:

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/08/will-proud-boys-antifa-showdown-mark-a-tipping-point-for-portland.html