Portland: A June 30 Reportback

The neo-Fascist groups Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys are planning yet another in their series of rallies of Aug. 4 in Portland, Oregon. The only mission they have is to engage in the violence antifa gets accused of instigating, and this reportback from the June 30 outing suggests they are getting help.

Defend PDX

On June 30th hundreds of local antifascists and union workers showed up in downtown Portland to oppose the fascistic group Patriot Prayer and their street brawlers, the Proud Boys.

As our affinity group showed up at around 2PM, there were approximately 50-75 antifascists in Chapman Park, directly across the street from Terry Shrunk park, where Patriot Prayer was holding their rally. Terry Shrunk is federally held property and sits directly across from the federal building. Upon arrival we noticed that heavily armed DHS agents had already encircled the park and set up two sets of barriers, one around the internal park and one around the sidewalk, removing the sidewalk for public use. This was a new strategy by the feds which effectively stopped us from disrupting the rally.

We watched as Patriot Prayer swelled their numbers with two large bus loads of various fascists and reactionaries flown in from around the country. After a couple hours their rally started with similar numbers on the antifascist and patriot sides. The next hour was filled with chants of solidarity and rejection of the fascist state from our side, homophobic and racist slurs from the patriot side. Something we noted right away was the lack of familiar faces from the patriots, well over three quarters of their crowd were from out of state.

During the rally, Portland police continued to swarm our park confiscating self defense tools and attempting to intimidate us, then they swooped in and arrested two well known antifascist comrades for pending charges from a previous protest (they also arrested two fascists under the same pretense). This was targeted intimidation and a somewhat successful attempt to disorient us. As a side note, if these comrades had protected their identities better we may have avoided this.

After an hour, Patriot Prayer set off to march, the beginning of the march was met with fierce opposition until the moment DHS began firing tear gas pellets indiscriminately at counterprotesters. This was effective in the sense that it dispersed our crowd into many directions, leaving us exposed and outnumbered. 20-30 antifascists rallied half blinded by irritants and attempted to cut off the march at the next street. After a short face off Portland police fired flash bangs into the crowd of antifascists, dispersing our numbers further. At this point 100-150 fascists charged us with clubs, flagpoles, tazers, and other weapons. We were vastly outnumbered at this point and disarmed by the police. That being said this small group held their own and pushed the fash back but not without us taking some very serious injuries. There were a number of antifascists that got caught on their own and were cowardly beaten by groups of ten plus fascists with weapons. After this short melee we were able to regroup, continue to challenge them and within ten minutes the march permit was revoked and declared a riot. The fash continued to mill around and were eventually made to disperse from the area with large numbers of police babysitters. The antifascists continued to challenge them until they got back on their bus and set off to the relative comfort of suburbia.

Some critical takeaways for us are, first the police continue to refine their strategies. These strategies are almost exclusively meant to target antifascists. We have to start to plan more extensively, having self defense tools stashed in other areas is a good start. We should think about alternatives as well, the cops had a plan to keep us away from the march and it worked, a secondary plan would have been useful. The cops are ostensibly on the side of the fash and that isn’t going to change, so our planning should always have a two pronged approach. Secondly, we’ve seen that the fash will come in from all over the country to get a shot at an antifa. We also hopefully all realize now that they want us dead and our response should keep that in mind. We have to continue to make our communities realize how important it is to show up and refute the fascist incursion. Lastly and most importantly in my opinion, we have to maintain solidarity in our bloc. Our strength is in numbers and had we stayed tight and faced off with the full power of the bloc we could have avoided injuries to our comrades and showed the door to the fash much quicker.

If folks in your area are able to connect orgs and infinity groups for coordinated actions, please make this happen. The fash move in unison and employ militaristic strategy, we have to match them, the state wants us to fear working together, we have to get over this. It’s also very important to recognize the people putting in the hard antifascist work outside of street battles and quite frankly this needs to increase in intensity, this is where we beat them, away from the eyes of their friends, the cops.

-Solidarity with all antifascist fighters from PDX