elaborate
protestors outnumbered the police ~10:1 last night in downtown portland. after a couple hours of the most peaceful demonstration as you could reasonably expect, police announced that the protest had become unlawful because someone had lobbed a projectile at them. a handful of people from the crowd, who i can only assume were organizers, started addressing the crowd, assuring them that select leaders of the demonstration were in ‘negotiations’ with the police and that the protest would continue if they moved off of the streets into a nearby park. they did, then the police kettled them, dispersing the 9/10 of the crowd who were there just to demonstrate, and the rest of the night was a cat and mouse game between the police, who had deliberately escalated the situation, and the remaining part of the crowd who were down to buck. the protest organizers meanwhile got a photo-op with the police chief (or whoever) for their social media, while hewing to the police party line that the protest had been ruined by a handful of bad apples in the crowd. no mention of the behavior of the portland police department, no mention of the demands that had animated the protest, most notably, demilitarization of law enforcement -presumably something that would have been ‘negotiated’.
they willingly gave up the only kind of leverage they had -their numbers- in the hopes that good faith dialogue would get the police to take off their riot gear. how are you gonna negotiate if you don’t have any leverage? they arent occupying key spaces of the city, they arent shutting anything down. they largely cant because covid already did. their only plan of action is documenting getting rocked in the face by a gas canister and hoping that enough voting people will see that and think it’s fucked up.
maybe it’s because a lot of these protestors are kids and are naive about what the police want and how they operate, and about how peaceful a group of 10000 pissed off people can reasonably be, idk. whatever it is, it plays into getting rhetorically outflanked by the people you’re protesting. and then pundits like klein can spectacularly misread the room by thinking that the axis and the allies are actually the same people because they’re both at war and ‘feed off each other’.
