Thread by @NancyRomm

I click “refresh” on #kenosha and watch what took months to explode in Portland reach conflagration overnight. I watch MSNBC’s Ari Velshi stand in front of what is a legit raging fire and tell the cameras that the protests are mostly peaceful.

I keep an eye on Louisville, understanding the vise the city is in, that the killing of Breonna Taylor by police has created its own demands, its own appetites, which run like a current through the country.

“He killed that girl,” the woman says into the phone. “He should get manslaughter.” She is the black companion of an elderly white woman, sitting mute on a bench in Carroll Gardens.

I see the Governor of Oregon declare a state of emergency in preparation for a rally by the Proud Boys, to which the city has denied a permit to gather.

I stay on the FBI website until 3am, looking for data that supports denying one group but not another, looking because I’ve seen many factions involved in violence. What does the governor know that I don't? Why does one group sounds all the alarms, and another, few-to-none?

Call the latter protestors, demonstrators, anarchists, antifa, black bloc, the rightful residents of the ambit of Portlandia, no longer the ha-ha of the TV show, but hard now, and angry...

... angry at the police, at the mayor, at the press, anger within its own ranks and at anyone who mistakes its mission for anything other than just.

“We’ve tried for 20 years to do it another way,” the college boy tells me, of his support for setting fire to police stations. “Nothing changes except with violence.”

When I ask if he wants to substantiate the idea, if he knows that movements that practice violence often wind up justifying murder, he walks away.

"Justice requires contact with reality," Sam Harris said, on a recent episode of his “Making Sense” podcast.

"It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself."

The question asked in the episode’s title, “Can We Pull Back from the Brink?” seemed applicable to who is and is not allowed to gather in Portland and express their views. Antifa affiliates have their right to free assembly defended.

I also defend it, despite the season’s only murder (of Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson, whose name in memoriam is not chanted) having been committed by someone claiming to be “100% ANTIFA ALL THE WAY!”

I don’t think he was. I think Michael Reinoehl was a lost person attracted by the flame of a movement that might give him the standing he was unable to achieve on his own. He took a vile shortcut to achieve that. Now he is dead too.

The Proud Boys rally went for the most part peaceably, by the way.

All factions, from the mayor to the head of the Proud Boys to the police to protestors, claim their side won the day.