A Report Back on Community Defense at Oregon City’s First Pride

Report back on community defense of Pride in Oregon City, Oregon. Originally posted to Sabot Media.

This article is published as a critique of the coverage of the Pride event and ongoing local news narratives surrounding community defense of marginalized groups in Oregon City (OC), Or. We are co-writing this with antifascists involved with the organized community defense efforts undertaken to protect Oregon City’s first Pride event. We will take a look at the history of antifascist actions and subsequent media failings leading up to the event, as well as looking to press coverage of Pride itself, and the antifascist community defense that took place.

The curve of revolution is more of a zig-zag than a straight line or an actual curve, I’ve heard it said. Big gains are made with every big equity movement, to be met in the aftermath by sharecropping, Jim Crow, the era of mass incarceration and so on so on as we continue this dance of push and pull and as we this country is on the heels of the biggest mobilization of racial justice activists in it’s history we are facing a heavy backlash that finally has cornered the Good Ol’ Party in to removing the center right conservative mask and all but going fully fascist. Literally tens of millions turned out to march and aggressively protest police killings of Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd in May, 2020, who’s murder came on the heels of the equally disturbing killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and countless more before them have lost their lives without white America even flinching or giving acknowledgment. This time was different. Here in the Portland, Oregon area, near nightly protests lasted almost two full years and made major accomplishments and scored huge victories beyond what most would have thought ever possible just months prior.

But as we zig we inevitably zag and find ourselves in the midst of that reactionary backlash that follows every great equity movement and we’re learning there’s good strong reason for that third antifa arrow and the concept of anti-reactionary conservatism that it symbolizes and represents. The alarmist tones that always animated the voices of right-wing America have been whipped in to so much fear and frenzy that the group mentality has lost any hint of composure. With it went the ability to keep up that calm conservative facade, plummeting rapidly in to the full personification of the neo-fascist, brutally racist agenda they have always tried to veil through double talk and pseudo traditionalism. It’s the responsibility of the antifascist far radical left to beat it back whenever this tide of xenophobia rises. And right now as the path of revolutions blazes forward, that traditionalist xenophobic backlash is on the rise and has this country on either the precipice of falling in full on fascism or total abolition, as the center disappears more and more daily and falls out from under us entirely. The agenda of the Christian Right is openly calling for outright  fascism. The parallels between that agenda and what is historically recognized as a fascist state are far too drastically identical. The militant far leftist faction is calling out for equity through through the extremity of total abolition and an end to police and prison entirely, knowing full well that this system is built on oppression and doing full well what it is made to do. A state this authoritarian has high tendency to fall in to the hands of fascists and the most dedicated of both factions are going all in.

All this tension was at the boiling point going into the week of July that Oregon City had designated for it’s first ever Pride Night. Local fascists were vowing to shut it down and had most recently been busy making violent threats on public libraries in the Portland area for taking part in story-time events where some of the prominent big name local Drag Queens would read some of their favorite children’s books to groups of kids and parents who showed up for them.

If you think calling for gun violence on librarians and other public library staff or threatening retaliatory mass shootings on a children’s library story-time event was below the neo-fascist Christian Right wing fanatics in current control of the Republican Party think again. Fascists were calling in death threats on any venue that was willing to hold any form of all ages LGBTQ inclusion events and calling Drag Queens groomers for reading children’s books to children, all while they were carefully grooming their own children to commit hate crimes in their adolescent, teenage or adult future… go figure.

They were even successful in scaring the Tigard Public library staff so much that they not only shut the June 11th ‘Story-time with Poison Waters’ event down but they closed the library for the entire day and the criminally insane-would be-librarian killers showed up for a nice celebratory flag wave in the parking lot of the library they had successfully shut down. Gross all around, I know, but it would at least seem a likely and logical time to try and potentially identify the mass shooting and/or bomb threat callers here. So, what you got on this Tigard PD? License plates? Maybe some phone records? Live domestic terror suspects who made threats on a public institution where kids hang out in the open… that’s low hanging career improving fruit ripe for the pickin’. The very same people who called in bomb threats are waving flags in the parking lot like right fucking now, anyone home? Right.. prob just kids making crank calls. Good damn police work boys. Yeeesh, backlash indeed, but at least we know our local suburban ‘Defenders of Public Safety’ are on it.

No one was hurt by actual gun violence but there’s witness testimony and forensic evidence from the date in question that leads us to believe between roughly three to four dozen tall-cans of domestic malt liquor were shotgunned in the 23 minutes fascists had occupied the parking lot and were left behind to rust abandoned and alone in the parking lot.

But as they zag, we once again must zig and now the goal is to understand the way local tensions are flaring up around the very different factions battling for influence in this region and beyond, in multi-faceted ongoing attempts to execute their very different opposing agendas. We need to go back to the events that led up to this crossroads. Not only the events themselves but how the media portrays this power struggle as extremist left vs equivalent extremist right in cooperation with local government and law enforcement agencies to push misleading or outright false and insanely dangerous narratives in order to protect or defend their own bottom lines and self interest predicated in those status quo’s, rather than reporting with more of an honest and unbiased perspective on… well, you know, the truth.

LEAD UP

Our story begins in the summer of 2020, under the cruel haze of expired tear gas and the shadows of rigid colonizers, a group of mostly Native antifascist Indigenous bloc activists from around the country had come to Portland to organize in the heat of the early unrest. ‘The Indigenous Day of Rage’ was ready to make liberal Portland show it’s true colonizer colors.

Statues of two historically racist colonizers Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln are toppled and the Oregon historical society is vandalized in the organized defiance of the night. The Portland Police Bureau declared a riot.

On the cement standing block where Lincoln’s bust once stood ‘Dakota 38’ was graffitied in spray paint. It’s a beautiful sight, and one that would become iconic to the Portland protests and turn liberal Portland upside down in their own colonizer apologist form of rage.

The tag on the block is in reference to one of the most famous atrocities Lincoln directly ordered against the Indigenous people who lived on Dakota land. Land he was eager to steal by any forceful means and any amount of bloodshed he felt necessary for westward expansion and it is in reference to the 38 Dakota men who were hung in a single day. When referring to that night, The Oregonian, which is the states most widely circulated newspaper, omitted the word “Indigenous” and simply referred to the event as “The Day of Rage” and framed it as the work of angry white teenage and twenty somethings in black bloc, to continue the narrative that they were constantly pushing of a reckless antifa faction co-opting the BLM movement and spreading destruction and disorder without any aim or purpose. This “outside agitator” narrative is a common counter-revolutionary tactic used by the media and the police to spread fear and mistrust of radical antifascists.

In all the marches and direct actions I went to during the 2020-21 unrest, not a single action was led by ‘white anarchists’. The movement was a decentralized collective, but BIPOC leadership and Indigenous Bloc, especially Black and Indigenous Women were at the forefront and the center of the organizing and led every March, DA, protest demonstration, or vigil that was held. In my opinion the movement sustained itself as long as it did through their relentlessness and superb organizing which kept everyone in attendance well protected, fed if hungry, and hydrated while stressing collective safety and community building in chants and speeches to the point where those habits became ingrained.

Local news shat all over their exhaustive hard work and careful planning, devaluing it constantly from any and every angle they could, while downplaying unchecked excessive police brutality and massive tear gas attacks against demonstrators, who fiercely challenged them but never instigated any actual violence that caused severe or even mild bodily injury to a single police officer. The gas affected thousands of homes and Portland citizens who were uninvolved in the protests, but no officer was ever disciplined. Even after the state banned the use of the CS gas that they deployed nightly without care or fear of consequences.

“Some people just want to watch the world burn, that’s what we’re dealing with here” -Portland Mayor/Portland Police Bureau Commissioner Ted Wheeler

Thanks. Tear gas Teddy.

Now if you wanna talk about senseless acts of actual violence, if you would please get your bureau under control and have them cool off on your namesake chemical warfare that would be super. A year from now you’re gonna have to hear about the one year old who developed asthma and chronic breathing from your goon squad from openly breaking international wartime code of conduct and defying the Geneva convention articles by launching all that CS gas in dense residential areas…in peacetime…at nonviolent protestors. At the time of this quote Portland police were responsible for over 400 Police brutality complaints filed against them by the ACLU and other independent third party watchdog media groups that witnessed it or had video proof of experiencing it as press and bystanders. By far the highest in total in the country for any city or law enforcement agency during the unrest. By contrast NYC was next highest on the list of American cities at 101 complaints filed.

The open cooperation between the police and white nationalists was also never reported in local news, though it occurred on a regular basis. One exception to this was during the wildfires, where a Clackamas County Sheriff trained and informed armed white nationalists affiliated with neo-Nazis, the Proud Boys, and other far-Right groups on how to open carry and set up roadblocks and checkpoints to stop local people who were evacuating their homes and towns and how to not get any kind of criminal charge or have any trouble with the law while doing so. According to the senior officer involved “in order to check for ‘suspicious antifa members’” who the Sheriffs deputy claimed were responsible for starting the wildfires. He was mere months away from retiring, so when Clackamas County forced his paid retirement with full pension and all his benefits intact it didn’t feel like much of a punishment was being handed down.

During those wildfires the protest community which was becoming a faction capable of legitimately challenging the cities ruling establishment, put the nightly demonstrations on hold after nearly 60 days straight and shifted gears to disaster relief. A donation site and outdoor kitchen with grill was erected by Lloyd Center, and the old shut down movie theater parking lot became a relief site where displaced evacuees could park their RV’s, set up tents, get their three meals a day and help themselves to any and all donations of food, beverages, and personal hygiene supplies which were coming in faster than they could be sorted. Mental health professionals were also on site nearly 24/7 for trauma and grief counseling. Cash/bank transfer donations were used to fund hotel rooms for displaced families and people without any other shelter. The massively successful call to action and mutual aid effort provided more direct relief for disaster victims than the city or state by a long shot and without any of the red tape, bureaucratic institutional policies, practices, or complex paperwork.

Again, the news was nearly silent until extreme pressure was placed on them by the public, since the effort was so visible and comprehensively successful in providing the direct relief that the state and city were not. The very few articles published by local press were very short, downplayed, and simplified to the point where the effort was portrayed as not much more than a canned food drive and within 36 hours the site was told they had to be shut down and vacate the empty unused parking lot by Portland police or it would be forcefully removed and that the same would happen anywhere else in Multnomah County if it popped back up. At which time the site was moved to a church parking lot in Portland suburb Milwaukee just south of the city and Multnomah County. Many of the displaced families had no where else to go except the Clackamas town center mall parking lot where the city was telling them to park but no food, hygiene amenities, or health services were being offered whatsoever. Just a place to park the RV for those fortunate enough to have one.

Of course the forced removal of the disaster relief/mutual aid site went uncovered by the local news, as to be expected. None of us could pretend to be surprised any more by any of this openly bias and outright dishonest coverage by the local major media players. Nor by their cooperation with the Portland Police Bureau (who had officers routinely and very openly allying co-oped with white nationalists, wearing the black and yellow Pittsburgh pirate hats that the proud boys wear for gang solidarity, and flashing the 3Percenter gang sign out the window of their cop cruisers or off the riot wagon at demonstrators on a consistent basis.)

BEFORE THE EVENT

It was on June 11th 2023, when one of the Portland area’s most prominent drag performers, Poison Waters, was scheduled to have the earlier mentioned event called Drag Queen Story Time and after multiple threats by right-wing groups remember the event was cancelled, and even worse much of the community was in disbelief when they closed the entire library for the entire day of the scheduled event. The fascist groups who made the direct threats showed up to the library to celebrate in the parking lot and terrorized the town for three long and agonizingly terrible hours with a two gallon moonshine ho down and a old fashion fascist flag waving.

I can try to make light of a dark moment by poking at the hilarity of the cultural traditions these white neo-fascist Christians are so desperate to defend and preserve, but let’s not forget in these are the people who commit the vast majority of mass shootings. The message sent by those delivering these threats of violence is coming through clear enough, even if the response by local news and city leadership has been haphazard at best, and downright wrong at times.

In the minds of Christian right-wing America, and the fascist sympathizing misogynist goon squad that is the Republican Party today, only heterosexual cis people get to interact publicly or read to children and their parents. Even at a public library funded equally by the taxes of every city taxpayer. Their “right” to decide what can or can’t be read, or who can or can’t do the reading, stomps on the rights of all others who want a voice in the use of their public libraries. This goes with the book bans and ‘parental rights’ argument that is permeating the educational systems and undercutting democratic processes in schools around the country. When books are getting banned or attempted to from local libraries and school districts when they contain any content that has to do with anything LGBTQ, or speaks to any kind of inclusion or diversity whatsoever, we have a fascism rising problem, America.

This means that even to acknowledge to children in libraries or teenagers in school that queer or trans people exist is akin to violating their parental rights. While the student’s rights, and that of a parent that sees the issue from any other viewpoint, gets stomped on and swept away. To allow an LGBTQ person to speak or read to them is intentionally skewed by them and called ‘grooming’ by the dim cavernous hollows of their stunted minds and bigoted belief systems, even as they groom their own children to commit hate crimes as adults, priming them with hate speech from the time they are toddlers.

They call in bomb threats and threaten to turn public libraries in to a bloodbath over voluntarily attended story time readings by LGBTQ people and anything that promotes acceptance of them. The Christian right are not out here spitting violent hate speech over a loss of their so-called ‘parental rights’. They are outright endorsing violent extremism and sympathize with fascists, mass shooters, police who kill unarmed Black Americans like it’s a sport, and use their hate speech to groom children to commit violent hate crimes as adults. And yet these are the lunatics who are going to steer the decisions of who is allowed to read to children at a public library in a Suburb of Portland Oregon?

The June 11th closure of The Tigard Public Library for Poison Waters’ Drag Queen Story Time was a huge mind-blowing collapse of leadership from the decision-makers responsible, even if it was out of concern for safety. It sets the worst possible example of what to do in the face of violent threats against marginalized people. But there was something to be gained from this lapse in judgement, as it also infuriated and reignited the unifying spark in a collective and the groups they are connected with, to reforge the only real shield that marginalized people in this region can defend on and anywhere in this country: militant antifascists and the strength of their supporting cast within the mutual aid networks that help source their cause.

Many of the people who would step up within the antifascist and LGBTQ community to answer back were those who stepped to the plate when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered, and when DHS troops were called out like attack dogs. The same folks who brought the Portland Police Bureau to their knees and almost broke them under the weight of mass retirements. Those who showed up when the Portland Police killed Robert Delgado in Lents Park. Those who tore down the statues of racist colonizers on the ‘Indigenous Day of Rage’ and made liberal centrist Democrats scream in fury and grief more than they ever would over a police killing of BIPOC. Or over the threat of mass shooting at a local library by domestic terrorists who fancy themselves patriotic, over an LGBTQ acceptance based family friendly children’s event. A group that by now, was very well seasoned in collective resistance and community defense.

Then with another suburb of Portland (this one with a long and dark history of white supremacy and xenophobia), Oregon City, holding its first Pride Night just two weekends after the closure and cancellation in Tigard, and with the event organizers and hosting venues also facing death threats and the same kind of fascist tactics, this time the outcome would be very different. No thanks to the Oregon City Police (who have white supremacist fascist allies all throughout the dept.), who were praised after the event by the Mayor, and the media, as well as the hired security; when neither of them were a deciding factor in the slightest. Instead it was that collective of dedicated antifascists who were responsible for the events safety with an extremely well coordinated and organized community defense effort, proving that they have more passion in their hearts for defending their own communities than fascists have hate in theirs.

PRESS COVERAGE OF THE EVENT

On Saturday June 26th 2023, the day of the OC Pride event, a brawl broke out between rivaling fascist groups the Rose City Nationalists, and the Proud Boys. Because of the massive community defense effort by an ongoing non-centralized collective of antifascists, the fascists didn’t come close to the event and thus were isolated to their own space nearby. We will never know but the brawl could have popped off due to fragile and stunted male egos internalizing their shame of being afraid to confront the far more numerous contingent of so called “snowflakes and rainbow people” and instead turned the toxicity toward each other when there were no undefended leftists to easily target or that could be isolated or provoked as violence was never the intention of the community defense group and they took every precaution to prevent violence of any form against anyone in attendance of OC Pride.

This fight was reported on by numerous stations locally, nationally, and even internationally. Much of this coverage, especially the local coverage much of the other stuff is based on, has been highly slanted and missing several key points. First of all, local station KOIN6 reported the clash happening between “protestors and counter-protestors” in the short article they published on the event, which has since been deleted. On the other hand KGW made no mention at all of the fight nor ‘counter protesters’ or the community defense and gave credit to OC police for keeping the event ‘peaceful.’ Local activists believe these omissions are more intentional acts of bias slanted against our community rather than lazy or sloppy journalism.

There is concern going forward about the consistent and continual local media bias against the only group of people who are able or willing to defend marginalized groups in our community (such as BIPOC, queer, and the houseless) in a region full of fascist groups and violent police allied with the far-Right, and how to handle or combat the bias and threat it poses.

With their investment in the status quo, members of the community, including local activists and independent reporters, are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that the local news outlets that dominate the traditional market will never report a truthful version of events if it means giving antifascists or militant leftists an ounce of good publicity, and will continue to push the false and extremely dangerous narrative that we are every inch just as much as violent fascist groups, while enabling the far-Right and their police allies in doing so. This is why having our own alternative media sources is so critical. Without having away to advance our own narratives we fall prey to the market of major news editors who will always advocate for the status quo. Even so, the community feels there is a definite need to apply pressure and push back against this bias and agenda driven local news narrative.

THE EVENT ITSELF

White nationalist groups who came with intentions to intimidate and incite violence at a family event had made violent death threats against LGBTQ hosts and performers as well as owners of venues hosting all ages drag shows and drag queen story-time events in the weeks leading up to OC Pride. The original host pulled out because of all the threats they received. Because of the numbers of people who showed up from the community, the unfriendlies chose not to come close.

On the day of the OC Pride festival the fascists did not come within a quarter mile of Pride event festivities due to a large and coordinated community defense presence that had organized ahead of time with the intent to shut down any sign of violence before it started. Community defenders took up positions in groups inside the interior and around the perimeter entry points and put a huge amount of effort in to keeping the event safe and secure without having to use any militant tactics like open carrying and chose not to bloc up, favoring grey to look a bit less threatening, knowing the usual black with balaclavas and gear could scare people away who came to enjoy a family friendly pride event with their queer loved ones.

Instead of employing more militant tactics, people instead opted to utilize sheer numbers, with teams taking care to scout the outer perimeter, be in constant communication about any potential dangers or threats, and deescalate any attempt to provoke violence anywhere within the interior of the event or in sight of it. Tactical positions were chosen for the entry points and within the event’s interior, and groups were placed there. It was clear to all that planning and organization of this community defense action for this event was well thought out and well executed. The difficulty of protecting a family friendly event as large as OC Pride made it a delicate task to keep people safe while not scaring people with the sight of guns and ski masks. The vast majority of the participants of the fascists contingents were known and identified by dedicated antifascists prior to the event. Many have been regular players in entrenched far-Right circles. Additionally deescalation was prioritized since any clash between the fascists and antifascists in this context would put everyone in danger. This makes the terrible coverage by KOIN6 such a twist of the knife; organizers worked and planned really hard to prevent violence and protect the community, yet none of this was reported on by the corporate press.

At least a dozen individuals who attended the event went out of their way to express their gratitude for the community defense effort. At least one father to a queer youth specifically stated that they had to come to the event concealed carrying to protect their family from the threat of white nationalists, but felt they were able to relax upon entry once recognizing the security presence in place.

This article has been edited from the original version for readability and length.