OK, I'm watching Curious George with my baby and I figure there's no time like the present to share videos from last night.
Guess I'll take it from the top?
I was putting on my gasmask when the 1st rush started. Green gas to start the night.
This was in response to graffiti.
DHS pushed us up Moody, stopped, then pushed again. Deployed gas liberally.
@2lesslegs, a figure throughout this thread, chews them out.
A DHS officer uses his gun mounted strobe light on press and legal observers.
DHS retreated after that rush, which was honestly pretty light.
But the second push... I include this footage of "nothing really happening until it's happening" so that you can see how confusing it is when the feds/cops suddenly decide to get aggressive.
*squeaky pigs*
Here's where they start REALLY wilding.
Notice the camo-clad guys with light up helmets.
Notice the focus on harassing the handicapped and members of press.
Get ready for the firing squad.
Police spend two minutes shooting at an umbrella wall a full city block away.
I walk up to see what crime the umbrellas are committing.
I can't find one.
Feds continued assaulting the umbrella wall and advanced. Seem really triggered by umbrellas.
The umbrellas back up till they are adjacent to the Biketown installment.
Anti-fascism... Just Do It.
"Well that shit's crazy."
The barrage on the umbrellas continued even after I stopped filming to snap flicks.
Orange and yellow gas deployed.
If you watch, you'll see a flashbang knock the leaves off a nearby tree.
That last rush scattered the protest, leaving small blackclad and armored groups refueling all around S. Waterfront for about an hour before some of the crowd reformed at ICE.
I called this a "megaphone speech" last night. I was in a giving mood.
Some people called it a night.
Whatever I thought of the speech, the feds seemed to REALLY hate it. I was genuinely surprised to see them come out again. People were literally packing up to leave and then this.
Oh, and the aggressive fed is harassing @TheRealCoryElia toward the end.
The fidgity fed with the giant bottle of mace/pepper spray is definitely trying to compensate for something.
Decided to get a closer look at the replacement refs as a unit.
The blue light helmets seem to be in command.
Or maybe the red lights are in command...
Cops push us down the block into more officers who tell us to move back, and then the first group of officers say we're impeding them.
Cornballs.
Dustin tells a loud group he can fend for himself against a fed holding a gas grenade.
"Y'all are fucking ridiculous."
@2lesslegs goes in on an especially chuddy troupe of feds who seem to take glee in kennelling disabled people and press.
Cory gets shoved by a fed.
A fed drops his gas dispenser and nearly loses it to the crowd.
When I said last night that DHS was guarding a public street I was not lying.
Dustin explains how he was arrested for opening the fire hydrants on the parallel back street (which is a ludicrous assertion).
A fed with an IronMan-style chest light blinds me a couple of times.
Just as we thought they were pulling back, more orange gas and munitions.
A friend briefly shields me with an umbrella but pulls back when lights focus on us.
As one officer yells at KohzKah, another grabs me by the backpack and yells at me to move while holding me. I yank hard enough to pull loose and the same officer ducks back around & hard tackles a handicapped woman.
At the end of the frame, the police are harassing Dustin. WTF.
I almost forgot that one fed flicked his baton out like that... then fumbled with a gas canister in his other tiny hand. Goober.
The sloppily arrested person is taken away in dramatic fashion as legal observers get her info.
Finally the feds just said "Fuck It" and Warzone'd the whole area so they could retreat.
A dedicated leafblower ventures into the smoke. I tried to follow, but a leak in my mask seal left me tasting green gas. Twas delicious!
This was my last video of the night.
Of all the flavors, I must say, green is the best. CS Verde.
See y'all tonight.
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Sitting here hungry, thinking about the first week of the 2020 protests when I tried to catch a gas canister off the first bounce and it ended up being a flashbang.
I ran around deaf and half blind for a while minute. Shout out to the homies.
We were real traumatized out there. Some of us have yet to recover.
It's hard to explain how watching our nightmares unfold from the hands of our city, state and federal government radicalized us and left us distrustful of everyone.
I truly thought I was going to be murdered by a LEO before I turned 40. And I was OK with that.
Betsy Johnson has the support of the cops, big timber, the PDX business community and Nike. And when I say "support", I mean she has around $5M in campaign funds and no one else in the governor's race is anywhere near close.
Where is the resistance?
Betsy is a Joe Manchin style Democrat-turned-Independent.
Low scores on labor, environment, gun control, etc. Not a Republican in name, but for reasons unbeknownst.
Ever heard of People for Portland? The right-wing dark-money group who wants to ban homelessness by herding undesirables into forced shelters?
America: Where everybody is ready to fake fight over things that don't actually matter instead of focusing on making the very obvious changes that are within reach.
America: Where everyone knows the fight is a ruse but we play along anyway because the alternative is actually fighting.
Abolishing police without constructing and using publicly accepted restorative justice practices IN REALITY simply leads to increased public support of policing and vigilantism.
We have to create the alternative we want to see. We have to communicate it. We have to model it.
People keep asking where leftists collectively lost the carrot and its right there.
Why do mostly white anon leftists attack leftists of color? Because leftists of color typically work in actual physical communities where RJ is used in praxis.
So they call us all apologists.
For a lot of the Twitter-left, this is a show. Stirring up mess is the fuel for their ONLINE engagement, so they prioritize gossip as real work. Then they log off.
But if we look at this behavior through an restorative justice lens, what space is created for change? Zero.
Far worse things have happened since, but I hadn't thought about that in a while and it popped out as the moment I stopped fucking with people.
It was also an early example to me that white people def understand restorative justice when it comes to themselves.
The boy who pushed me never faced any consequence. Later that year, I quit school to homeschool. I don't recall how much this had to do with it. Might ask my mom.