Portland, Oregon, is competing with San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle for the title of “Furthest Left City” on the Left Coast. Over the past several weeks, the “City of Roses” chalked up a couple more points toward winning this dubious honor. First of all, Portland was one of the earliest and most aggressive Blue Democrat cities out of the starting gate with an “Occupy ICE” campaign aimed at blockading the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices and terrorizing ICE employees. Starting in mid-June, hundreds of activists surrounded the Portland ICE office with a tent city, trashed the neighborhood, and harassed and threatened the local residents and businesses as well as the federal ICE office workers. Second, over the past weekend, hundreds of “Antifa” thugs (who describe themselves as anti-fascist, but use violent fascist-communist tactics) rioted and fought with Portland police as well as members of Patriot Prayer, a conservative group that was holding a rally in Portland’s Waterfront Park.

While much of the “mainstream” media either ignored or reported positively on the escalating radicalism of “Occupy ICE PDX” (as the Portland occupiers style their protest), social media videos and citizen journalists exposed it for the criminal, left-wing enterprise that it is. One of the few reports in an establishment media organ to credibly reveal the seamy underside of this faux “immigrant rights” operation is an August 3 article by Andy Ngo for the Wall Street Journal, entitled“Anarchy Breaks Out in Portland, With the Mayor’s Blessing.” The subtitle told more of the story that the rest of the liberal media have pretty well covered up: “A vicious mob targeted the ICE office and even a food cart. The police followed orders to do nothing.”

In his opening paragraph, Ngo let some malodorous facts replace the rosy fragrances that the media bouquets had floated about the anti-ICE/anti-Trump agitators. Reporting from the scene, he wrote:

“Along the trolley tracks behind the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, a biohazard cleanup crew works under police protection. It finds used needles and buckets of human waste simmering in nearly 100-degree heat. The smell of urine and feces fills the block. For more than five weeks, as many as 200 people had occupied the site to demand ICE’s immediate abolition. They’re gone now, but a community is left reeling. Thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy will do that.”

“A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19,” the WSJ reporter noted. “They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent ‘guards’ to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. ‘At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,’ the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week.”

Ngo reports on a federal ICE officer who was trailed by a car of protesters that had followed him to the summer camp where he was picking up his daughter. They then showed up at his home to intimidate him and his family. Another officer had his name and photograph plastered on a poster outside his home with the label, “Gestapo.”

Spewing Racist Epithets, but Hey, no Hate Crimes Here

Some idea of the intensity of the hate emanating from the Occupy “progressives” can be seen in a YouTube video of Occupy ICE PDX activists hounding a black ICE officer, repeatedly calling him a “F****** N***er” and a “piece of s***.” (Warning: the video has very harsh, profane language.)

The Oregonian reported that in e-mails obtained by its newsroom, “one African American officer reported to an administrator that protesters ‘began yelling racial slurs’ at him, including the N-word. The officer said he was also called a ‘blood traitor’ and an Uncle Tom.” “These racial slurs have been directed at me throughout the entire length of the deployment,” the officer wrote.

Another officer, who is described by The Oregonian as “a woman of Hispanic and Native American descent,” said she was “called derogatory terms for Hispanic people and told she is ‘a weak female’ and a ‘traitor.’” “I was berated for so long I can’t even remember everything that was told to me,” she wrote.

Naturally, Mayor Ted Wheeler and his fellow “progressives on the Portland Human Rights Commission have made no mention of this. CNN, the New York Times‚ and their fellow Fake News operatives have not found this to be newsworthy. Of course, if some unknown fringie attaches himself to a Trump rally and utters a statement that is (or can be twisted to appear to be) racist, the same progressives and their media allies can be counted on to obsess over it for days, weeks, months — indefinitely.

“The mob set up camp behind the [ICE] building, where they harassed journalists and banned photography,” Ngo reported. “The open-borders advocates also erected an 8-foot wall around their site. I walked through and saw young children, including infants, in squalid conditions and 90-degree heat. Every American flag was defaced. Anarchist and communist flags were unsoiled.”

Ngo interviewed local neighborhood residents and business owners who were physically attacked and threatened, and their property was damaged. “Lisa Leonard, a 53-year-old disabled resident, said occupiers hit her on her head, disabled her electric wheelchair, and lifted her in the air when she complained about loud drumming. She called police, who took a statement but made no arrests.

“Where were the police? Ngo asks. “Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner.”

Elected Collaborators

Hmmm. Does this sound familiar? It should; it’s a replay of the Occupy Wall Street operation of 2011. The epicenter of that Marxist-contrived event was Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in New York City’s financial district. In an article entitled Occupy Wall Street: Lawlessness & Communist Revolution, your reporter wrote at the time:

“This writer visited Zuccotti five times during the period of October 11-16. The packed space did indeed reek of raw sewage, unbathed bodies, and marijuana. And, contrary to the OWS propagandists and their media allies, the occupiers do not in any way resemble the 99 percent of Americans they claim to represent. Unlike the much larger Tea Party events all across the country over the past several years that drew millions of working-class and middle-class Americans fed up with run-away government spending, taxing, and regulation, the Occupy Wall Street gatherings can be aptly described (for the most part) as counter-culture freak shows: bongo-banging tie-dyed Sandalistas and Woodstock wannabes spouting Marxoid drivel and socialist cant. Banners and posters featuring images of, and quotes from, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Che Guevara, are plentiful. Some protesters do indeed also invoke Jefferson and Madison, but usually in a manner intended to fuse the statements of America’s Founding Fathers into an endorsement of anarchism, communism, or socialism.”

Like Mayor Wheeler, New York City’s mayor at the time, Michael Bloomberg, told the police to stand down, thus allowing the Occupy “demonstrators” to engage in illegal activities (blocking street and sidewalk traffic, tenting and camping in the park, using and selling drugs, violating curfews and noise levels, urinating and defecating on private and public property, disturbing the peace, accosting and threatening residents and passersby, etc.) without repercussion. This reporter interviewed residents, as well as owners of restaurants and shops in the area whose lives had been turned upside-down, and their businesses all but ruined by the invaders. Finally, after two months of this abuse, New Yorkers had had enough of the lawless freak show. Mayor Bloomberg was forced by public pressure (and the very real health threat posed by the filthy park conditions) to send in the police to evict the self-proclaimed “revolutionaries.” The taxpayers were stuck, as always, with the cleanup bill.

In Portland, Mayor Wheeler and City Council officials, such as Chloe Eudaly, were likewise forced by the health codes and growing public anger to finally evict the occupiers from their squalid squatter camp. However, they continue their solidarity with the protesters. On July 23, Commissioner Eudaly issued a statement defending and supporting the Occupy ICE PDX camp while also announcing her agreement with the occupiers’ decision to disband the encampment.

Ignoring abundant evidence to the contrary, Commissioner Eudaly asserted that:

“The camp was organized, peaceful, and successfully sparked a nationwide effort bringing attention to the despicable actions of the federal administration. The protesters were collaborative, respectful of the neighborhood, and I proudly stood with them and over 180 elected officials to call for the abolition of ICE. My office has since been in daily communication with the camp as we provided assistance where we could, including material support and liaising between the Department of Homeland Security and Portland protesters. I called for time on the City Council agenda to hear from protesters and the New Portlander Policy Commission. I also investigated legal recourse to revoke ICE’s Conditional Use permit, which regrettably is simply not an option at this time.”

Eudaly’s claims notwithstanding, it should have been clear from the get-go that the Occupy ICE PDX would be anything but “peaceful,” “collaborative,” and “respectful.” One of the first calls put out by Occupy ICE PDX organizers urging activists to join them in the Portland, as well as to initiate similar actions across the country, was made through the website ItsGoingDown.org, a principal conduit for the violent Antifa movement.

The Occupy ICE PDX leaders, in their call to action on ItsGoingDown.org stated:

“Beginning on Sunday, June 17th, community members from all walks of life, working together with the Direct Action Alliance, Portland Assembly, and the Portland Democratic Socialists of America, organized a protest in the area around an ICE facility in southwest Portland with legal support provided by the National Lawyers Guild….

“Make no mistake, ICE is a white supremacist organization following the orders of a white supremacist administration, and the intent of these policies is to discourage all nonwhite immigration, legal and illegal, and to preserve the power of the rapidly shrinking white majority….

“Portland has declared itself a sanctuary city, but this facility stands in the way of that…. Furthermore, the gates to our country must be opened, not closed. This means an immediate halt to the fascist policies accelerated by Trump…. We invite the rest of the country to join this movement, to gather and occupy your local ICE facility until it’s shut down….
F*** La Migra!”

In addition to employing Antifa’s standard, incendiary rhetoric that tars all opposition with the racist, fascist, white-supremacist labels, many of the Occupy ICE PDX agitators also wore the typical Antifa masks. These were obvious clues that this was an Antifa operation and that it would be anything but peaceful. If further clues were needed, they were provided by the organizers’ admission above concerning the key involvement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). As we have reported previously, the NLG has been for nearly a century (according to a 1950 congressional report) “the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party.”

However, the clear leadership of Antifa, the DSA, and NLG in the Occupy ICE PDX campaign did not deter Mayor Wheeler, Commissioner Eudaly, and other officials from actively supporting the agitators’ lawless and dangerous actions. This was a replay of similar actions by left-wing Democrat mayors around the country who have aided Antifa violence. They include Mayor Mike Signer of Charlottesville, Virginia; Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose;  Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans; Mayor Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley — to name but a few.

Following the disbanding of the Occupy ICE PDX camp, the Antifa agitators had a new ready-made target: Patriot Prayer. On August 4, members of Patriot Prayer and The Proud Boys held a rally in Portland that drew hundreds of masked Antifa counter-demonstrators. Washington-based freelance journalist Mike Bivins posted his own live video coverage and commentary from the event on Twitter. Among the notable things provided on his feeds that are rarely, if ever, shown in the national media are images and video of the all-black-clad Antifa group Bivins dubbed the “Soviet squad,” due to its members carrying red flags and wearing black helmets emblazoned with a red hammer and sickle. One of his videos shows members of the Soviet squad tugging on an American flag held by a male Patriot Prayer supporter, when another Antifa Soviet squadder comes up from behind and clobbers the Patriot Prayer man in the head with a bat, sending him to the ground bleeding and apparently in great pain. The Antifa attacker then faded back into the crowd. These are typical Antifa tactics, which we saw, for instance in the infamous case of the sneak attack with a heavy steel bike lock by an Antifa thug in Berkeley that was caught on video. The masked thug, who clobbered a man from behind, turned out to be Eric Clanton, a philosophy professor and “peace activist!”

The August 4 Patriot Prayer rally ended with Portland riot police separating the two opposing forces and using pepper spray, rubber bullets, bean-bag guns, and batons against the Antifa crowd, which had ratcheted up the violence to throwing missiles at the police. Police arrested four Antifa activists. As to be expected, the ACLU of Oregon called the Portland police response “completely unacceptable.” However, according to the ACLU, apparently, it is completely acceptable for their anarchist-communist clients to create mayhem and violate the rights of their fellow citizens.

Reprinted with permission from - The New American - by William F. Jasper

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