A recent column by Nick Kristof of the New York Times asks for help finding “Trump’s ‘anarchists’ in Portland.”
Kristof, who has been covering the goings-on in Portland, tells of a doctor who has been offering “humanitarian aid” to those who have suffered from gas and impact munitions. His implication is clear.
Oddly enough, Kristof is highly dissonant about it all. Could the doctor and his volunteers be anarchists? “No, they’ve imposed order on the anarchy of the street by establishing qualifications for field medics and a hierarchy among them,” he writes. OK, so anarchy is afoot?
He probes elsewhere but finds nothing, only musicians, activists, and technicians. No anarchists here. But wait: “OK, I’ll fess up,” he writes. “Sure there are anarchists and antifa activists in the Portland protests, just as there are radiologists and electricians, lawyers and mechanics.”
Bingo. And so Kristof had to concede that Portland has seen violent groups because there’s no way to avoid it. Ball bearings and canned food didn’t hurl themselves at the police. Windows didn’t break themselves. Police didn’t barricade themselves inside their own precinct, from the outside, and try to light the building on fire. Somehow, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler found a way to avoid acknowledging that.
Kristof at least acknowledges it, though he attempts to temper the reality by reminding us of all those protesters who have day jobs. But “there are normal people here” is not a functional rebuke of serious concerns about violence, not even close.
The challenge here is that Kristof has a point. “Report on the ground here and any single narrative feels too simplistic,” he writes. “The protesters aren’t all peaceful, nor are they primarily violent.” That’s entirely believable. The scores of images, the video, the reporting all support the notion that thousands of people have been peaceful in their actions rather than destructive. It’s Kristof’s message, and it has been Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis’s message.
In a July 8 press conference, Davis said of the violent actors, “This is a relatively small number of people. At its largest, these agitator-type groups have been maybe a couple thousand. There’s 640,000 people that live in this city, so I still don’t believe that those actions represent the values of this community.” Admittedly, things got even worse in the following weeks, but presumably, Davis would have still held to those comments had he given an update over the violent weekend.
What bewilders is that Kristof and the Portland police are both saying the same thing, and yet they are saying something entirely different. The proportionality question for Kristof means that the violence is insignificant, not worthy of being stopped. For Davis, it makes no difference how many out of the whole threaten to turn Portland on its head; it’s a large enough number to matter.
Making judgments about Portland proves challenging because the events have a lot of texture. For example, when does an officer take it too far? Or when does a peaceful protester become an accomplice to violence? Davis outlined a tactic whereby a “peaceful” bunch forms a line with hands raised, while villains behind the line launch fireworks and projectiles over at officers. It’s on video. You can almost hear them saying, “What? I didn’t do anything.”
Reject President Trump or his framing, but hiding behind a proportion to pretend that nothing troubling has been happening there is nearly parody.
