kontextmaschine:

So tomorrow there’s gonna be a big Proud Boys event in Portland, first big rightist event since a Patriot Prayer guy got killed downtown. It’s in an outlying park and it’s pretty much expected to be a lethal melee, so, heads up

So in bracing for this the (first openly bisexual in the US!) governor convened a joint state/county/local police command (incidentally, not bound by the restrictions Portland put on its own cops), and the US Marshals deputized the riot squad as federal officers (which ?? but might circumvent the local “reform” DA who’s showily not pressing protest charges)

But it was much smaller than feared, like 200 who had cooperated with police in planning and mostly hung out while leftists rallied in two separate locations.

Then as night fell and those day rallies gave way to the regular nightly mob, the fresh, augmented police force just showed up and tooled them up

The governor ended the state of emergency (early!) the next day but apparently the deputization lasts til next year, not clear what that means practically but the cops have been in playtime’s-over mode since.

My speculative read, originally mayor Ted Wheeler, who played up “resistance” stuff to hitch his centrism to gentry and underclass-activist Democratic energy and was staring down re-election, was like “sure, don’t let them set the courthouse on fire, but don’t be the bad guy, let them work out their energy and harness it in a useful way”

So when federal forces came in he went down for a photo op and took tear gas with everyone. But all this time and now it’s down to radicals and the radicalized that couldn’t be accommodated by any viable government, and pressure builds up and there’s now statewide and downtown coalitions behind suppression (and I’m sure Democrats over the non-metro PNW and nationally whispering about how Portland undermines the “elect us and we WON’T empower anarchist mobs!” message).

And if things do go unresty after Election Day, best to have stomped out the “form angry mobs and menace local government buildings” subculture before then.

(Portland is the basis of The Simpsons’ Springfield, and the depictions of “young punks vandalizing civil monuments with spray paint” and “dumb angry mob” were maybe less fictionalized than you thought)