Escalation

The proverbial shit got real when demonstraters against President Trump's "Muslim ban" shutting down Portland's airport attacked a tiny group of counter-protesters and knocked a man unconscious.

The mob was barely contained as they cheered the assault (from Infowars):



News accounts are describing the counter-demonstrators as pro-Trump but that isn't entirely accurate. This is the same group of extreme evangelists I recorded harrying anti-Trump demonstrators previously at the Inaugural Day protests in downtown Portland:

 

Somehow these guys held out for over an hour, alone amid a hostile crowd of thousands, creating a virtual blizzard of triggered snowflakes. The last time I checked on them they had been splattered with refuse and some sort of thick red liquid. The speaker here who you can't quite see looks to me to be the same guy who was knocked out.

The video above I took with my camera. These poor quality videos are converted from Periscope broadcasts I took of the same event.




Some anti-Trump protesters created a cordon around the evangelists to keep their fellows off of them. One of the evangelicals' tormentors here I think is the same protest group leader who was charged a few days ago for sex with a minor (seventeen-year old twink via grindr, it appears--he's already a registered sex offender for his juvenile record):



And this has nothing to do with any of that specifically but I thought I should inform you that democracy is now a hate crime:



I encountered a similar group outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, employing the same means and rhetoric:



These groups are being described as "Westboro" wherever they're encountered, but as far as I can tell they're not affiliated with the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. Their defense of Trump appears to be mostly opportunistic. The still-active original Westboros, unsurprisingly judging from their anti-Americanism and anti-militarism, actually protested Trump's inauguration.

Our local Westboros, like the guys at the RNC, seem to have seized on a qualified pro-Trump narrative as a means of provoking their primary enemy, degeneracy, so well-represented by the social justice movement.

The airport assault represents an escalation to violence the local media appears uninterested in noting.