Portland (and Seattle, but that’s not relevant here) is a city that has internal politics divided between technocratic Warren-style libs and a vaguely-anarchist populist left. The urban Pacific NW is viewed by the rural PNW as imposing its politics onto the rest of those states, which are deeply reactionary, because at the state level, both WA and OR have a weak sort of popular front that has thus far simply kept reelecting libs and using the referendum processes of the states to push to the left of their elected officials (it’s not impossible that WA gets single payer healthcare through an initiative in the next two years, for instance). As a result, reactionaries like to gather in these cities to attack minority communities and generally try to terrorize the cities and get them to spend a lot of money on security, while producing propaganda about how dangerous those cities are.

In reality, Portland is fairly safe, even if its cops are complete psychopaths. It was one of the centers of resistance during the uprising for Black Lives, which is used by the chuds to pretend the whole city was somehow burned down (it was not in any way). This then turned into the myth that antifascists were lighting fires in rural Oregon during last year’s brutal fire season. The whole thing is batshit and the worst part of Portland are its shitty, racist police with the first police union in the US and its insanely high cost of living.

There was an exchange of gunfire when a proud boy fired at counter protesters who returned fire. Nobody was injured but things are escalating still. That was on the 22nd. They’re also about to see mass evictions in the middle of the on going pandemic just before winter.