The feds have stepped into the controversy over a Portland Police Bureau meme used in a training slideshow referring to protesters as “dirty hipp[ies].” Department of Justice attorneys sent police and city leaders a letter excoriating them for failure to divulge the slide in their investigation to determine if police mistreated the Left’s pet protesters in 2020.
The slide, inserted as the last page of a reported 2018 manual – pre-Summer of Love – about crowd control during riots, was meant to be a humorous send-off for officers. Instead, it has become a minor cause célèbre by the feds and the local media trying to find wrongdoing by the cops during the worst of the Antifa and BLM riots 2020.
The Summer of Love is what Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called it when Antifa and BLM engaged in an armed takeover of part of her city in the name of George Floyd. In the end, the rioters killed more people than Minneapolis Police, one of whom is in prison for Floyd’s death while in custody. The activists’ “police-free” takeover resulted in six shootings, including the death of a black teen by rioters at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – CHAZ – which later became the Capitol Hill Occupation Zone or CHOP. Another person was run over by a car. At least 30 people were arrested. Summer of Love, my ass.
Antifa “security” assassinated Trump supporter Aaron Danielson as he walked from a Trump rally on the streets of Portland in 2020.
Seattle and Portland have indulged the alt-Left, extremist protest culture for years. The two cities swap rioters on a routine basis. May Day melees by anarchists and Antifa, who are basically the same people in Portland, are legendary. Antifa and its Black Lives Matter sidekicks have run the streets in Portland for years. They’ve beaten journalists for daring to record their uncivil and felonious behavior. Independent working journalist Mike Strickland was beaten in 2016 and Andy Ngo, beaten in 2019 for the first time, filmed the radicals who found favor with Portland’s establishment and leadership.
Losses from the Summer of Love destruction in Portland haven’t been fully tallied, though there was at least $2.3 million in damage to the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and $23 million in nearby destruction. That doesn’t include firebombing the Portland Police union headquarters and local cop shops or the looting at Louis Vuitton and the Apple Store, which was set on fire twice. And the destruction continues. Just this past October, the Portland Professional Protesters did $500 thousand damage in a weekend rampage. Why? Just because.
Business and tourist activity has been decimated by the rioting.
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So it is against this backdrop that Portlanders are now asked to be scandalized by a slide that mocks “dirty hippies” reportedly inserted as early as 2018 as the last page of a 110-page training slide presentation. Antifa had to read through a lot of pages to be offended by the meme.
The slide features this tongue-in-cheek poem:
And the Lord said –
Woe be unto you, dirty hippy:
For thou stinketh of patchouli and BO;
For thou talk of Marx, yet know him not;
For thou hast bills, yet have not paid;
For thou hast dreadlocks and white skin.
And so I shall send among you,
My humble servants with hat, and bat,
That they may christen your heads with hickory.
And anoint your faces with pepper spray.
And once thou hast been cuffed and stuffed;
Once thou has been stitched and bandaged;
Perhaps thou shall learn,
I’m tired of your s**t.’
Amen.
The poem is reportedly the “Prayer of the Alt Knight — Based Stickman” and very, very bad according to the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center, which has become a parody of itself.
Now, of course, laughs are one thing, but perhaps the feds want to establish that, “but-for” the poem, the Left’s pet protesters would somehow have rioted unmolested by cops during the Summer of Love. At the very least, Merrick Garland’s attorneys are upset that someone in the city of Portland either knew or should have known about this slide. They claim in their letter that if they’d known of the offensive slide beforehand they “would have had the opportunity to provide substantial edits and decline to approve the training.” They’ve asked for all the materials by January 28 as part of a lawsuit against the cops.
The city has been under an Obama administration-era police department consent decree since 2014, allegedly for police treatment of mentally ill homeless people. The city was notified in April that it had not lived up to imposed reforms during the Antifa and BLM riots.
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The Oregonian reports that the feds are wondering if the heightened use-of-force incidents in the heightened Antifa/BLM riots had to do with the cops’ attitudes rather than the rioters. It reported that between “May 29, 2020, through Nov. 15, 2021, during the height of the protests in Portland sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Portland police used force more than 6,000 times,” according to the feds. DOJ attorneys allege that “police sometimes targeted people who attended protests but weren’t involved in any violence through ‘guilt by association’ or focused on people simply because they were slow-walking away when ordered to disperse, federal investigators found.” Of course, the feds don’t acknowledge that the “slow-walking” is part of Antifa and BLM’s training.
The BLM-affiliated group “Don’t Shoot Portland” brought a lawsuit against the Portland cops for their treatment during the 2020 protests. Years before, a Don’t Shoot Portland activist admitted in court that he, along with Antifa, conspired to attack journalist Mike Strickland at a public protest in July of 2016. They didn’t want him filming the street protest. Strickland was sent to jail when he pulled his legal handgun to back off the second attack that day by the thugs. No shots were fired and unholstering the gun held off the mob of more than ten people, but a Portland judge sent Strickland to jail for 40 days.
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