This is a good article about Portland:

Were most people in Portland stunned when Trump was elected? Sure, but they did not malinger, they marched, they marched and marched and kept marching, women’s marches, “Not my President!” marches, marches for LBGTQ rights, for minority rights, an Earth Day march, a May Day march, marches against homelessness and ICE, for police accountability and immigrant rights, so many marches an alt-weekly ran a “Resistance & Rallies” listings category. Marching provided the warm spurt that doing something can bring, and if they did not seem to have much effect on the machinations of government, they at least brought people together. Including, it must be said, unwanted people. While marchers might have been moved to bring donuts and deodorant to the Occupy Wall Street squatters in 2011, these new kids, these anti-fascists with their dark hoodies, did not seem so much about protest as revolution, the news showed them setting cars on fire and smashing storefronts. Or maybe those were other people in hoodies? It was hard to tell, the marches had become confusing. Anyone was potentially frightening now but especially another new faction, these Nazi-lite looking guys carrying flags, throwing punches, maybe deflecting punches but did it matter? Portland was not going to become the next Charlottesville, not when the city’s historical record included the 1988 beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant by a group of thugs calling itself White Aryan Resistance. But why go back that far? There was the 2017 stabbing deaths aboard the light rail of two good Samaritans as they tried to protect two teenage girls—one a Muslim in a hijab, one who was black—from a ranting self-described “white nationalist.” And yes, the killer had a history of mental illness, but still, he’d expressed support for Trump, and anyone who supported Trump was by association a racist and a threat, and there was no room for that kind of hate in Portland, not at public assemblies meant to promote peace, and maybe the authorities needed to do something about these people.

ht: Samizdata