Dispatch from war-ravaged Portland

Typing quietly from my underground bunker

There was a moment back in 2016 when legacy media outlets gingerly danced around calling Donald Trump a liar. Earnest, albeit ill-informed, punditry circulated: Can we even call the president that? In reflection, like so much else, the hesitance seems absurd. The man built a career out of fabrication, illusion, chronic lying. Assuming the office of president was going to change that is to turn a blind eye to everything we know about human psychology.

Becoming inured to your nation’s leader gaslighting you on a daily basis is never comfortable. Sure, there were bulwarks during phase one. Trump promised them gone for phase two; he didn’t lie about that. Now we’re entertained by RFK Jr, Pam Bondi, Mike Johnson, Stephen Miller, the entire collection of MAGA’s misfit toys lying every time they step in front of a camera. By nature or nurture is irrelevant. The lie is now the point, whether it’s Kennedy blatantly making shit up about vaccines or Bondi showing up to Congress with a prefabricated list of talking points while refusing to answer a single question.

The gaslighting hit a lot closer to home in recent days. Since moving to Portland in 2022, I’ve been subjected to many wild claims about this city. Mostly, we shrug it off. I’ve also watched locals pretend drug decriminalization went well for us—legislation I support, provided it’s properly funded and well thought out, which this was not. As with many things in life, the truth about Portland’s state of being lies somewhere near the middle, though usually further away from what outsiders perceive. It is a lovely, beautiful, struggling city.

But the war-ravaged shit is just too much to take. The ICE facility is located directly across the bike path from the Tesla showroom, an irony that is what it is. I’ve traveled over that path 100+ times, according to my bike’s GPS data. South Waterfront is one of my favorite areas cycle through, housing the Bridge of the People, the only Willamette River crossing void of cars, designed for walking, running, cycling, buses, and light rail. Portland designed highway entrances and local roads very wrong, yet they’ve gotten some things right, especially when accommodating non-vehicular mobility.

South Waterfront, where ICE sits, is a success story when looked at through the lens of economic development: it’s one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the nation. The former industrial land has been built up over the last two decades, now housing high-rise luxury condos and apartments with coffee shops, pilates studios, and boutique pet groomers. ICE is caddy corner to an apartment building that—gasp—offers affordable housing, including 42 apartment specifically targeting veterans. Two blocks down sit Oregon Ballet Theatre and The Old Spaghetti Factory.

ICE is the outlier. People generally ignore it, until we can’t.

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Portland is a city of protest. Beginning in June, a handful of citizens set up a tent next to ICE, in front of a heated storage facility. And I mean a handful, as I rarely saw two handfuls communing under that tent. Late last month, before Trump decided to put a target on our back, ICE agents called the protests “low energy.”

Another key to this story: Portland, like Oregon overall, is overwhelmingly white. We’re the only state in which Black exclusion laws were written into our constitution, a legacy that has not been inviting to non-whites. The language wasn’t completely removed until 2002, and even then, not every politician voted for its absence.

Every decade since has reminded residents of the type of American that roughed it on the Oregon Trail. The Chinatown fire of 1873. Local politicians flirting with (and becoming) the KKK in the ‘20s. Vanport. Mulugeta Seraw. We’re not as colorless as Boise, Scottsdale, or Spokane, but no one will accuse us of melting many pots.

Even this data deceives, because a lot of people (especially Fox News viewers) think of Portland as downtown, when most of it is not. You’ll find much more diversity east of 82nd Ave, regions where most people closer to the river rarely if ever venture out to. Unlike ICE raids in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or southern states, there simply isn’t the volume here to protest. The number of raids hasn’t been zero, but the level of protests have been proportionate to the actions. Low energy.

Making claims of Portland being war-ravaged more bizarre than usual. Sure, we know Trump was watching footage from 2020. We know images of Los Angeles in 1992 and South America have been weaponized when discussing Portland in 2025. We know the MAGA propaganda machine is spinning in full fury trying to create a story where none exists.

I’m convinced someone in this masculinity-crazed administration watched Edward Norton beating himself up in Fight Club and thought, yeah, that’s how we’ll get Portland.

What do they get in response? Roughly 100 people showing up (in a city of 635,000) for Kristi Noem’s photo opp with conservative trolls Nick Sortor and Benny Johnson, including one in a chicken costume (who’s been out there for weeks). You get a dude in a frog costume and now, post-Noem, a unicorn and Godzilla. You get an Emergency World Naked Bike Ride because for some unknown reason Portlanders love showing off their pasty bodies. You get the absurdity of grown white people using their privilege to mock an absurd group of people who hate being mocked.

That is one thing Portland has to offer: white privilege. Mockery is our superpower. This isn’t a group of brown people living on the outskirts of Chicago, nor brown people simply walking down a street. Politics is always local, even when the federal government flys loud helicopters over neighborhoods for no good reason except to waste taxpayer money.

Of course, there’s another reason: power. Robert Evans produced an eye-opening episode of It Could Happen Here in 2019, speculating that the Second American Civil War is likely to take place in Portland.

Portland is a famously liberal city, but it’s lodged in the middle of some extremely conservative rural and suburban communities in a state with an extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership. Portland, Oregon is actually a great microcosm for the entire country. That way, you’ve got conservative gun owning America versus bleeding heart gun grabbing liberals. So tempers are high in that area.

The following year, Evans got his hand broke by a right-wing agitator during the George Floyd protests. Like ICE, these took place on a single city block. Then, as now, right-wing media made it seem like the entire city was in flames.

This time is even more egregious. Floyd occurred during an already tense time due to Covid lockdowns. Tensions are different now. We have an administration willing to come into our city, have their social media lackeys film every second, then go on Fox News and YouTube to tell everyone what they saw through the lens of their smartphones isn’t what they saw. They’ll assure Portlanders what we all see with our own eyes isn’t what we’re seeing. Then dear leader watches their reports in order to finally unleash what Project 2025 has been instructing all along: the Insurrection Act.

One might wonder what the law defines as an “insurrection,” and it’s woefully undefined. Updated modern language merely calls it “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellions.” While the Supreme Court has upheld that the president alone can decide the meaning of these words, it reserved for itself a chance to review the constitutionality of the military’s actions. But the courts would have to enforce that provision.

Which is where the satire ends, where our privilege stops. We’re seeing shades of violence already: one agent intentionally sprayed the frog’s air hole—which could have killed him—for trying to help someone off the ground. In Chicago, an agent shot a minister in the head with a rubber bullet, then laughed it off.

If you think, well, it’s not my city, guess again: ICE is expanding its footprint from real-life protests to online resistance by building out a 24/7 media surveillance team:

United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed into intelligence for deportation raids and arrests.

This has nothing to do with stopping protestors, as evidenced by yesterday’s “Antifa roundtable.” Sortor was given time to lie about his Portland “activism.” Longtime Portland troll Andy Ngo and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec were at the table. Brandi Kruse lavished in Trump calling her “very attractive.”

Seattle resident Katie Daviscourt stole the show, offering bonkers testimony about an Antifa house a block from the ICE facility that certainly doesn’t exist. She claims to have worked as a reporter for 10 years yet is only 25 years old. Sadly, media outlets like Fox News and Daily Mail are uncritically repeating claims that she suffered a black eye while “reporting” in Portland, even as social media posts reveal an entirely different reality.

Exactly what this administration is creating: a world that doesn’t exist in order to construct the one they desire. History shows that never works out well in the long run.

In the shorter term, however, Portland is burning. And we all sit here, gazing around in disbelief at the clean air, bracing for the fires they’re determined on setting.