Antifa Seizes North Portland Residential Neighborhood
5 years ago
From a reader, this report from Portland (which you will not hear from the legacy media, at least, not honestly).
A group of guards watch the entrance to a barricaded section of road in North Portland. They’re armed, masked, and dressed in black—from their balaclavas to their boots to their bulletproof vests. It’s intimidating, but they’re also laughing with each other, which gives the barricade a feeling similar to entering a nightclub. Can you walk in or will the bouncer tell you to scram?
It’s actually a site of protest and siege: what the guards will later name the Red House Eviction Defense, or RHED. It takes the shape of a series of street obstructions that cut off three blocks of road from regular car and foot traffic. At the center of the blockades stands the Kinney family home—known as the “Red House on Mississippi”—home to a Black Afro-Indigenous family for three generations.
For six days, the activists guarding the gates have defied City Hall, chased off police, and captured national attention by occupying these blocks in a campaign to defend the three-bedroom house from seizure due to foreclosure.
They argue the foreclosure resulted from confusing, predatory lending practices and is the latest case of racist gentrification in the historically Black neighborhood of Albina. They also entered a fraught Kinney family legal saga that included reports of animal abuse on the property and the eldest son’s assertion that he is a “sovereign citizen” outside the reach of the U.S. court system.
The eviction defense was a remarkable escalation in activist tactics—the seizing of a residential neighborhood by an armed resistance to the legal system. By Dec. 13, it appeared to have worked: The Kinney family raised enough money to buy back the house, and Mayor Ted Wheeler brokered a deal to remove the barricades.
For five nights, Portland’s attention was fixed on this intersection. It was easy enough to walk through, but the armed guards deterred many. On any given night there were between 100 and 200 people inside the campground. We were two of them.
On this night, the blockade is brand new. Mississippi is blocked at its intersection with North Skidmore by tall, improvised fences of wood, furniture and scrap metal. Farther in, similar structures stand, suggesting fortifications for tactical retreat. Czech hedgehogs (six-armed metal posts that are difficult to drive over) and spike strips (planks with nails sticking through them) lie scattered across the asphalt to impede barricade-busting vehicles. There are more blockades to the east and to the west, one block out on either side, with checkpoints at every entry.
Expecting a morning raid by Portland police, a small crowd begins to gather before dawn by an inner barricade. Most of the activists are still asleep, many on miscellaneous mattresses close to the barricades.
Some of the awake activists are making coffee, surrounded by helmeted members of Portland’s independent press, who have covered protests for months. A figure in black approaches the press. “If you don’t want your camera smashed, you should leave,” he says.
Moments later, a water bottle flies over the barricade, slamming into one journalist’s backpack. Another bottle follows but misses.
Realize that the police were in retreat because they are under no legal obligation to defend or protect the residents in this neighborhood.
Also realize that if any of the residents were intent on stopping this, they waited far too late. Allowing them to become ensconced gives Antifa the tactical edge. The residents were thus unable to resist in any meaningful way.
Then again, most residents of Portland elected the officials who put up with, and even defend, these thugs. So most of them are communists, and wouldn’t choose to defend their neighborhood anyway.
Even if a patriot lived there, he is essentially alone. It matters where you live, and it matters who your neighbors are.
And tactical planning matters. You cannot resists thugs who have body armor and AR-15s if you don’t have body armor and AR-15s. And you cannot resist them well unless you can fight from behind pre-built cover and concealment (or at least, cover and concealment that you know exists because of prior scouting).
There are lots of lessons for us all.
