Protests flare in Portland
Police seize weapons as demonstrators clash
PORTLAND, Ore. — Police arrested at least 13 people and seized metal poles, bear spray and other weapons Saturday as hundreds of far-right protesters and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators swarmed downtown Portland, Ore.
Authorities closed bridges and streets to try to keep the rival groups apart. The city’s mayor said the situation was “potentially dangerous and volatile,” and President Donald Trump tweeted “Portland is being watched very closely.”
As of early afternoon, most of the right-wing groups had left the area via a downtown bridge. Police used officers on bikes and in riot gear to keep black-clad, helmet-and mask-wearing anti-fascist protesters — known as antifa — from following them.
But hundreds of people remained downtown and on nearby streets, and there were skirmishes throughout the day. Police declared a gathering of mostly leftwing protesters near Pioneer Courthouse Square a “civil disturbance” and told people to leave.
One person was injured and transported via ambulance, and three other people were evaluated by medics, Portland Police spokeswoman Lt. Tina Jones said. The injuries were minor, she said.
Lt. Jones said at one point there were about 1,200 on the streets, but that number had fallen to about 400 late in the afternoon.
The events began late in the morning. Flag-waving members of the Proud Boys, Three Percenters militia group and others gathered downtown, some also wearing body armor and helmets. Police said they had seized the weapons, including shields, from multiple groups as they assembled along the Willamette River, which runs through the city.
In an interview Thursday, Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs said that his group was holding its End Domestic Terrorism rally in Portland to expose Rose City antifa members as criminals. “We will continue to come back until they start dealing with antifa as domestic terrorists,” said Mr. Biggs, 35, a Florida man and former staffer for the Infowars right-wing conspiracist website.
Mr. Biggs said that he aimed to take punches on Saturday, not throw them. “I want them to be violent, and I’m just going to sit there and take it, and everyone’s going to see who antifa really is,” he said.
More than two dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, were in the city for the right-wing rally that was expected to draw people from across the country. Portland police said all of the city’s 1,000 officers would be on duty for the gathering that was hyped on social media and elsewhere for weeks.
“Everybody’s playing a chess game,” said one police officer, who declined to give his name. Far-right leaders said they would seek to lure antifa activists into provoking violence, hoping to build evidence against them.
Meanwhile, members of the group Popular Mobilization, or Pop Mob, dressed as animals, a dinosaur and a giant banana, along with jugglers and a brass band, joined the fray in a less fraught demonstration.
The get-ups appeared to be in the spirit of “Keep Portland Weird,” the unofficial slogan of this quirky city of food carts, artisan doughnuts and naked bicycle rides. But Pop Mob’s organizer described the approach as a deliberate strategy to combat white supremacists without the violence employed by members of antifa.
Effie Baum said that Pop Mob aimed to thwart hatemongers’ creation of memes, such as a viral video showing a member of the “western chauvinist” Proud Boys punching an antifa protester in Portland last year. “A lot of their toxic masculinity and macho posturing can be combated by laughing at them and humiliating them,” Ms. Baum said.
In the days leading up to the event, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said people who espoused hate or engaged in violence were “not welcome.”
In a Saturday morning tweet, Mr. Trump wrote: “Hopefullythe Mayor will be able to properly do his job.”
He also wrote that “major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION of TERROR.’”
Many of the far-right demonstrators support a bill sponsored by Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Ted Cruz, RTexas, urging Congress to identify antifa, short for anti-fascists, as a domestic terrorist group.
Self-described anti-fascists had vowed to confront the rally, while leaders from the far right urged their followers to turn out in large numbers to protest the arrests of six members of rightwing groups in the run-up to the event.
Randy Blazak, a Portlandexpert on farright extremism, said that antifa violence ends up reinforcing the narrative of white supremacists, who come to Portland partly because the city’s population is predominantly white. “It fits the larger narrative that these white nationalists aren’t going up against oppressed minorities, they’re going up against entitled white middle-class young people who are oppressing their First Amendment rights.”
Pop Mob’s tactic of mocking extremists could be effective, Mr. Blazak said, or just avoiding the protests and showing support for immigrants, people of color and others targeted in the current political and cultural environment.
The antifa bill from Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Cruz is largely symbolic; there is no government list designating groups as domestic terrorist organizations, and the bill does not call on any federal agency to create one. It says simply that groups operating “under the banner of Antifa” should be labeled domestic terrorists.
The bill also asks the federal government to “redouble its efforts” to oppose domestic terrorism, including by white supremacists, and calls on the Senate to express “the need for the peaceful communication of varied ideas in the United States.”
The massacre in El Paso, Texas, earlier this month, in which a gunman killed 22 people, brought renewed calls for the creation of a law specifically outlawing domestic terrorism after police saidthe gunman had written a racist, anti-Latino manifesto.
Patriot Prayer’s Joey Gibson, who organized similar rallies in 2017 and 2018 that erupted in clashes, surrendered Friday on an arrest warrant for felony rioting. He was at a confrontation that broke out on May 1 outside a bar where antifa members had gathered after a May Day demonstration.
In a video he livestreamed on Facebook, Mr. Gibson accused the police of playing politics by arresting him but not the masked demonstrators who punched conservative blogger Andy Ngo at a June 29 rally that drew national attention.
A video of that attack went viral and led the Proud Boys, who have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to organize Saturday’s event.
Police continue to investigate several incidents from clasheson May 1 and June 29 and are politically neutral, Lt. Jones said.
In addition to the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, the white nationalist American Guard also said it would have members in Portland.
The Oath Keepers, another far-right militia group, said in a statement they were pulling out of the rally because organizers have not done enough to keep white supremacist groups away.
Now used to the mayhem, residents and event planners in the city have prepared accordingly. A 5K run was moved from one side of the Willamette River to the other toavoid the protest, and police posted a map on Twitter identifying a dozen other events that they said would not be affectedby the demonstration.
Rallies are so common in Portland in part because it is a hub for anarchists and radical political groups, drawn to the city’s reputation of upholding the rights to free speech and protest.
“We’re proud of our defense of these core American values,” Mr. Wheeler said in the video earlier this month.