Portland has joined Berkeley, New York, Charlottesville, and Seattle as liberal cities that have become flash points for far-right violence since Donald Trump took office.

Since then, social media has erupted with dozens of graphic, deadly, and specific threats from the far right to “shoot to kill antifa.” A gun scope was superimposed over a photo of two Portland activists with the words “End Domestic Terrorist’s.” In another image, a knife-wielding hand bloodily slashes the throat of an individual labeled “Rose City Antifa,” one of the oldest antifascist organizations in the country. Portland has joined Berkeley, New York, Charlottesville, and Seattle as liberal cities that have become flash points for far-right violence since Donald Trump took office in 2017. But Portland is unique in that the far right has turned the city into a regular battleground. Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.

Photo: Hilary Swift/The New York Times/Redux

It starts with Oregon’s history. The state was envisioned as a white utopia and barred black people from residency until 1926. To this day, Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 77 percent white and less then 6 percent black, and that racial homogeneity has proved for decades to be fertile recruiting ground for racist hate groups. Joseph Lowndes, associate professor of political science at University of Oregon and co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Producers: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” said that “in the 1980s, for groups like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Portland was a choice spot for their ‘10 percent strategy.’ That meant if the city was 10 percent or less people of color, the far right could organize working-class whites there as they believed they wouldn’t meet much resistance.” Oregon currently has a disproportionate number of hate groups and militias, while in the broader Pacific Northwest, many far-right groups participated in and were energized by the Bundy family’s armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon in early 2016. Speaking of the massive brawls in Portland, Lowndes said, “There is another legacy of the anti-authoritarian left, anarchists, and anti-fascists who also since the 1980s have been a militant street-oriented left.”

Left/top: Members of the antifa face police in riot gear at the buffer zone at counterprotests to pro-Trump Freedom Rally in downtown Portland, Ore., on June 4, 2017. Bottom/right: A year later in Portland, protesters demonstrate against police brutality towards those opposed to a large far-right rally, on June 3, 2018. Photo: Diego Diaz/Icon Sportswire/AP (left/top) and Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa/AP.

Hilary Swift/The New York Times/Redux

“The mayor’s office is scared of the police.”

“There’s fear inside of the mayor’s office [that] if they pushed on the police, there would be a police slowdown or strike,” the source said. “Within the police department, there are institutional biases toward Patriot Prayer and white supremacy.” Eileen Park, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said, “Those allegations are false. The Mayor’s Office has always respected and supported the work done by the members of the Portland Police Bureau,” adding that “they are true professionals and can always be relied upon to do the right thing to protect our city.” Contrast this with New York City. When 10 Proud Boys assaulted antifascists in Manhattan last October, police “stood by doing nothing,” according to the New York Times, and failed to arrest any of them. But in a city that is majority minority and home to more than 3 million immigrants, politicians were swift to blast the police inaction, forcing the New York Police Department to start identifying suspects and making arrests. In Portland, however, political cowardice is the rule. Evidence indicates that the Multnomah County District Attorney, which has jurisdiction over Portland, has been as lax in prosecuting far-right lawbreakers as police have been in arresting them. It’s not because the office doesn’t know who they are: Antifacist researchers in Portland have identified dozens of right-wing extremists who instigated and participated in streets fights on June 30, 2018, including Tarrio, the current Proud Boys leader. More than a year later, not one of those identified has been arrested in conjunction with that rally. And Tarrio appears so unconcerned about arrest that he is listed as a leader of Saturday’s rally.