Sonic Youth Gossip - Portland, Oregon

"But here's the thing. Portland is kicking these fuckers ass right now. Since the feds arrived the protests have grown to almost 30x the size they were when the feds showed up. They come out with batons and pepper-balls and portlanders show up with hundreds of shields and form phalanxes and hold the line. They launch tear gas and people scoop the cans up with lacrosse sticks and toss them back at the feds while other people blow the gas back at them with leaf blowers and industrial fans. Gas masks and respirators are out of stock at every major supplier on the west coast (I got this from a hardware store owner in town who is trying to help supply demonstrators and is having to source his respirators from a company in Ohio because so many Portlanders are buying them up). They put snipers on the roof and they get chased down with flashlights and lasers. We are having ABSOLUTELY NONE of their white supremacist fascist bullshit. The RiotRibs people fire up the grills around 6 every night and they keep cooking til 4 or 5 AM and when the tear gas comes out they just put on respirators and keep on grilling, bumping old-school hip hop tunes on a portable sound system. The Feds are in way over their heads. There are 114 of them, and there are thousands and thousands of us. Every night I've been out they've escalated the scale and ferocity of their attacks and Portland just keeps showing up harder and harder, and staying clear and loud on the message that we are out here because Black Lives Matter. Despite all the violence and injuries and pain, people aren't scared. We believe that we will win, and there is solace in that certainty.

What scares me is these officers have no clue what they're doing. They are highly trained Border Patrol tactical troops and US Marshals, but most of them don't have protest training, and most of them haven't been trained on the weapons they're being asked to use either (this is per an internal DHS Memo by the way, not just random hearsay). Many of them at any given time are carrying live-round AR-15s. It makes them unpredictable, not because they are being clever but because they are doing shit that is illogical and makes no tactical sense. They're shooting weapons designed to explode overheard directly at people's chests. They're firing into crowds with things they can't aim. And they're doing it to black youth, and vets, and moms, and clergy members, and reporters, and medics. The first night I was there a vet at the fence around the courthouse went into a PTSD-induced catatonic attack when the first flashbang went off. Another medic and I ran to him and when we realized we couldn't move him (he was a big dude and clenched up tight in a ball), we tried to cover him with our bodies as the tear gas was going off. The feds response was to toss 7 more grenades over the fence directly at us, even though we were clearly no threat to them. All seven exploded within five feet of me. Later that evening I was treating a young woman who'd been hit in the hand with a canister. She told me she'd been hit in the head with a baton round two days before but came back because "what they don't understand is I'm ready to die for this shit. It's been too long, we're not letting it go away this time. I don't want to die, but if these fuckers kill me I'll know I died for something that fucking matters." It made me cry and she and I held each other for a minute as we moved out of the advancing cloud of tear gas. Despite Chad Wolfe's claim in a recent press conference that there were "no reports of injuries to demonstrators" hundreds of people each night are requiring medical care for gas, and dozens more for impact and burn injuries. But we keep coming. I've been treating anywhere from 15-50 people a night and I'm just one of the dozens of medics out here. You can taste the tear gas as soon as you get within a few blocks of the courthouse, it's been used so much it's just lingering in the air now. (Someone out there with an environmental or public health degree, there is a case study here with your name on it!)

These guys are out of control, they have no clear end goal, and they're losing. That's a scary combo. "