Thread by @JewhadiTM

When a Killing Becomes a Rorschach Test: Dispatch From Portland

Different factions in Portland react to a death in the streets
via @NancyRomm reason.com/2020/09/01/whe… via @reason

The country is in the grip of a hallucinatory fever, one that has people seeing as monstrous or heroic any action that confirms that their side is right and the other is wrong.

This was on display Sunday morning, when individuals and media accounts rationalized the point-blank killing of Aaron J. "Jay" Danielson: They claimed that he was an outsider (Danielson lived in Portland)...

that he'd been coming at the killer while a gun was in his hand (it would prove to be a can of Mace), that the murder of Danielson (who was white) was "a bit of justice for the black people that were killed by police" (at odds with any version of morality)...

.. and, always, that he was wearing a Patriot Prayer baseball cap.

Patriot Prayer and its founder, Joey Gibson, are characterized by left-wing activists and protesters as right-wing extremists who come to Portland to bash heads and stoke division and, thus, are the enemy.

Though Patriot Prayer had maintained virtually no presence in Portland since the protests began—up until Danielson's murder by a self-proclaimed supporter of antifa, that is—that did not deter activists from seeing the murder as nothing to be sorry about.

On Sunday morning, I watched a video of people cheering Danielson's death. It is both an abomination and evidence of any movement's ultimate failure.

You cannot celebrate the shooting of one man by another, no matter how much you claim the killing conforms to your sense of justice, and expect to achieve justice.

Did any on the activist side feel contrition? Maybe.

The morning after the murder, some people associated with antifa seemed spooked that a person on "their" side had gone ahead and done the killing that had been crackling in the air for weeks.

One member tweeted that he'd gone home early Saturday night because he felt things were getting hot downtown and intimated it was OK for others to do the same, a sentiment that contradicts the nightly chant of, "Stay together! Stay tight! We do this every night!"

Another member, who at first asked me to promote the idea that "last night's shooter acted in self-defense," went quiet after video revealed this was not the case and the shooter was positively identified as being on the pro-antifa side.

Which raises the question: What counts as being on someone's side? The shooter, Michael Reinoehl, was a 48-year-old with a troubled past and a police record who in the spring locked in on #BlackLivesMatter as a place he might find purchase.

In a post on his Instagram account, he wrote: "Every Revolution needs people that are willing and ready to fight…I am 100% ANTIFA all the way! I am willing to fight for my brothers and sisters!…#Antifa #blaklivesmatter [sic] #fuckthepolice"

In July, Reinoehl was filmed saying he'd been shot while protecting BLM protesters; also, that he'd brought along his young daughter (seen eating from a takeout container in the front seat of a car)

"I'm trying to give her an education…she's going to be contributing to running this new country that we're fighting for."

What we can know today is that his actions are a symptom of what happens when a movement gets such a glow that it attracts people ready to take things to the next level. For most people, fatal violence causes an instinct to recoil, to take a step back and reconsider.

But not for everyone. The night after Danielson's murder, activists again tried to burn a police station. The night after that, they were back at Mayor Ted Wheeler's apartment building, setting fires.

That things will get worse before they get better seems inevitable; a movement that justifies intimidation and violence moves in only one direction, and anyone who says they did not see this coming to the streets of Portland has not been paying attention.

"He was courageous, but very gentle," Joey Gibson said. It had been 19 hours since his friend Danielson had been shot and killed. Gibson, 36, was back home in Vancouver, Washington, just north of Portland.

It had been one day since he and other members of Patriot Prayer had decided at the last minute to join a truck caravan in support of President Trump they'd seen publicized on Facebook.

"It wasn't even a Patriot Prayer thing," he said. "We just went down with a bunch of guys."

The day after Danielson was killed, @KateBrownForOR released a statement. "The right-wing group Patriot Prayer and self-proclaimed militia members drove into downtown Portland last night, armed and looking for a fight," she declared.

"Every Oregonian has the right to freely express their views without fear of deadly violence. I will not allow Patriot Prayer and armed white supremacists to bring more bloodshed to our streets."

While any protest death can become a political football, some are deemed more useful than others in advancing a narrative.

If we want to transcend the deadly impasse at which we find ourselves, we cannot start assigning value to one person's life but not another's, no matter how doing so mixes up the picture.”