Why Portland Violence will Never Change Anything

This is a forum where we invite the libertarian community of Multnomah County to provide analysis on the current events of our county. These opinions do not represent any official position by the association of individuals at Multnomah Libertarians. 

 Why Portland Violence will Never Change Anything - Tom Busse, a contribution for the Multnomah Libertarians News Op/Ed page. 

In the 1997 film, Wag the Dog¸ a top political spin-doctor makes the following statement:

It’s nothing new. During Reagan’s Administration 240 marines killed in Beirut, 24 hours we invade Grenada, That was their MO: Change the story, change the Lead, it’s not a new concept.

And on Sunday, as Americans were reflecting on 20 years of aggressive war in Afghanistan and the Biden administration was coming under fire for the withdraw, we suddenly find new headlines, “Shooting erupts and Antifa and Proud Boys clash violently in Portland.” This shifted real and substantive policy discussions away from the real world to the fake world of On-Location political theater. How convenient and timely. Central to the Libertarian party is the nonaggression principle – all members are asked to certify that they oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals. This doesn’t get Libertarians on TV. The Portland clashes also brand "anarchism" (a belief that people are basically good), as somehow violent, discrediting by association Libertarian principals of limited goverment.

In January this year, mainstream media revealed Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was a government informant and agent provocateur. I myself personally witnessed Tarrio incite violence at Portland’s Delta Park last year when I visited competing “BLM,” “Antifa,” and “Proud Boys” rallies. The word “informant” has a precise legal meaning distinct from someone who just talks to the government as an asset. An "informant" is directed and controlled by the government. Portland businesses with property damage caused by Tarrio’s FBI-instructed actions should ask hard questions, especially of Senator Ron Wyden who sits on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Tarrio should be subpoenaed to testify before congress about his informant work and government organizing of Portland violence. My first question would be: who is paying for Tarrio to travel all over the country?

In 1971 Louis Tackwood, an informant and employee of the Los Angeles Police Criminal Conspiracy Section and the California State Bureau of Identification and investigation held a press conference where he confessed to the creation of boogie “radical groups” operating exactly like Antifa and The Proud Boys today. Tackwood wrote extensively about police and intelligence tactics in his book, The Glass House Tapes, and his radio interviews survive online. The Symbionese Liberation Army of Patty Hearst Kidnapping fame, was famously a creation of the national security state, as exquisitely documented by historian Brad Schreiber as part of the California State Police's Operation Chaos.

To suggest such 1970’s tactics of goverment-created radical groups are a thing of the past is to suggest human nature has changed. In 2017, a former US Army Private turned whistleblower named Patrick Bergy revealed his product “Shadownet” had been used during the violent 2014 Ferguson protests. Bergy had worked for National Security Advisor Jim Jones for the US Army in Iraq creating social media organizing and psychological warfare tools for “interactive Internet Activities.” In 2014, Bergy ran a complicated traceroute, confirming the Ferguson protests were not grassroots and organic. Instead, they were catalyzed by a defense contractor named Dynology. These organizing tools can suck gullible young people in, lead them into violent action, and twist their perception of reality. “Antifa” and “Proud Boys” are not organic protests movements. They do not make any sense. The Portland Police Department and Oregon State Police are part of the spectacle. I know this for a fact. When I visited the “Proud Boys” demonstration last year, I happened to wear the police “color of the day,” which lead to some very interesting conversations.

Historian Schreiber concludes, the creation of the SLA lead to the militarization of the police. The recent Portland violence with its chant of “All Cops Are Bad” will lead to greater demands for law-and-order – and erosion of civil liberties. Portland has been used as a backlot for “psyops” before – In 2010, the FBI used an unfair entrapment tactic in manufacturing the Christmas Tree Bomber case. This reversed a 2004 decision by the city to pull out of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) created under the Patriot Act. In reality, JTTF was a way for the national security state to gather local police intelligence files, as revealed by the BlueLeaks hack in 2020. In the late 1990’s, the FBI manufactured Oregon-based “ecoterrorism” as part of Operation Backfire. In 1984, The Rajneeshpurim cult with connections to the CIA's MKULTRA "Mind control" program made national headlines with yet more political theater with the US Dept. of Justice for the District of Oregon. It distracted from the Iran-Contra hearings.

So, who is responsible for Portland’s violence? In 2018, the FBI was caught red-handed hiring crisis actors with a Los Angeles casting company to stage a neo-nazi rally in Long Beach, CA that would meet a violent protest by BLM. The FBI quickly made up an implausible excuse claiming it was an entrapment operation, and standing with the Chief of the Long Beach Police dept. to announce the arrest was Special Agent Ryan T. Young. He was subsequently promoted as the FBI’s Assistant Director of the Directorate of Intelligence shortly before Portland's violence erupted. If anybody knows what’s going on with "radicals" in Portland, it would be Young.

In 2016, British Filmmaker Adam Curtis released Hypernormalisation. He described the technique of political technology and “shape-shifting” by which goverments would create protests movements and counterprotest movements and then set the groups against each other. This is exactly what is going on in Portland. It destabilizes any coordinated opposition to the political structure. Clearly, Portland’s mainstream media has failed to expose Portland’s violence and destruction of property. Why is this? People want to live in the comfortable world created by their media and political leaders, even if it is a fiction.

Antifa and the Proud Boys are media distractions and dead ends. They have no leadership because they have no policy. They will change nothing. It is pure political theater “to change the story, change the lead, It’s not a new concept.”