Thread by @NancyRomm

I wondered last week whether Portland’s notorious rainy season might move in early and dampen activists’ enthusiasm for setting fire to police stations. Instead, Oregon got wildfires, which have burned more than a million acres and left at least ten people dead.

The smoke was so bad over Portland that residents were advised to stay indoors and all city parks were closed.

Can we credit the noxious conditions for bringing the nightly protests all but to a halt?

Maybe, though I think a hesitancy crept in earlier, after the August 29th shooting death of Aaron Danielson, by self-styled antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl, himself later killed by police seeking to arrest him.

Most of us have seen video of the murder, taken after pro-Trump supporters staged a truck caravan in Portland.

Though filmed at a distance, the video shows Danielson and a fellow Patriot Prayer member walking before Reinoehl steps from a parking garage, shoots Danielson in the chest, and runs away.

Danielson’s murder might have been spun to serve the activists’ preferred narrative; that the death, while unfortunate, should properly be laid at the feet of the white supremacists invading their city and posing a constant threat to public safety.

That the metrics on this are weak – August 29th was the 94th night of protests but only, by my count, the second time conservative groups came en masse – might also have been elided, so long as you didn't need the players to hew too closely to the roles you needed them to play.

First, Danielson was not a white supremacist, though good luck getting that message across, what with Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Oregon Governor Kate Brown and the ACLU and the SPLU categorizing Patriot Prayer as a “hate group.”

He was a guy who co-owned a moving company; whose (black) former girlfriend posthumously recalled him as “the sweetest goofball,” who loved dogs. Few sought to put this much flesh on Danielson.

Reporting that he was wearing a Patriot Prayer hat, that was enough; stay in your lane.

Reinoehl also proved problematic.

Despite his claim to be “100% ANTIFA all the way” and to have shot Danielson in order to save “a friend of mine of color” (no evidence of this has surfaced), he was tough to mold into a hero or martyr.

At 48, he was twice the age of many activists; he had a long criminal record; he bought the gun used in the murder from his teenage son for a quarter-pound of weed and $100.

And if I might see Reinoehl as indicative of a hothead attracted to the glow of a movement rather than any of to its stated goals, he nevertheless presented ethical and optical problems for activists. Best, maybe, not to comment.

Some could not resist.

The night Danielson was murdered, I saw video of a young woman in homemade-riot gear shouting into a megaphone, “I am not sad that a f***ing fascist died tonight.” Her brethren cheered. That they would celebrate the shooting of one man by another was heartbreaking.

It showed me how benighted the movement was, and also, how young its practitioners were, how ignorant of history.

These were kids raised on PlayStation and Hot Pockets, not under Pol Pot, and no matter how loud the shouts that there was genocide on the streets of Portland, the facts did not bear this out.

I thought this cognizant dissonance might create some reluctant revolutionaries, people who could no longer sync the sound with the picture, not with the picture drawing the Michael Reinoehls of the world and, increasingly, home-style militia pledging to turn engagement with…

…the activists into an actual shooting war.

“We’re not going out anymore,” a young woman and her fiancé told me earlier this week; that the violence had become too much; they were staying home instead and playing Catan.

I wondered if doing so would cause them to be ostracized, to maybe become targets themselves. Possibly, the young woman said.

“But they make enemies of anybody, right?” she said.

That she was ready to withdraw her support, to help tamp down what her presence had helped build, made me think of the Smokey the Bear slogan: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

Only the people who made this movement can stop it; it won’t be stopped by wildfires, or by rain, or by Trump, and certainly not by local officials hamstrung by their attempts at appeasement.

The desire to do something other than set fires will come when people instead want to play boardgames, when the pandemic eases up, when people can return to school or work, when the industry that has driven them to celebrate destruction blooms into something like love.