Meditations in an Emergency

10/16/2025

Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from officially designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem even claimed to have arrested in Portland “one of the girlfriends of one of the founders of Antifa,” which has never been a real organization, just a nickname for antifascists. Girlfriend of founder of imaginary group is, well, a very Kristi Noem category. But the right has been claiming the left is violent even longer than it’s been hallucinating about antifa. And because these claims are often used to justify crackdowns and suppression of First Amendment rights, they’re worth unpacking, especially as we head into the huge #NoKings demonstrations on Saturday.

An authoritarian is nothing without an enemy to justify his brutality, and imaginary or grossly exaggerated ones are often resorted to, or an already-marginalized minority is portrayed as a malevolent threat; under Trump both immigrants and the left and anyone standing up against ICE have been portrayed that way. Authoritarians routinely hype the peril we’re in if the enemy is not quashed, and of course that quashing customarily and conveniently requires a suspension of laws, a violation of rights, a seizure of power, or all of the above. Right now it’s being used to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading American cities.

It’s been widely said that ICE on behalf of the Trump Administration is currently seeking to provoke the kind of response that would justify escalation of the invasion of cities and violation of rights. This is why almost every group and movement aligned with progressive causes makes very clear statements of commitment to nonviolence, as a genuine statement of values and as a preventative against accusations of being terrorists.

The right also understands this, which is why some notable incidents of violence in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were false-flag operations by right-wing groups, including the murder of one guard and injury of another at an Oakland federal building by Air Force Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, who was associated with the far-right Boogaloo Boys, and another Boogaloo Boy incident in which a member shot into a police station in Minneapolis. Other right-wing violence at BLM protests in 2020 include many incidents of driving cars into crowds and the double homicide in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by Kyle Rittenhouse, who subsequently received massive support from right-wing donors and Republican politicians. But like the Seattle WTO twenty years earlier, the 2020 BLM protests are routinely described as violent.

No such demands for absolute nonviolence are placed on right-wing groups. Kirk himself had hardly been held accountable for Turning Point USA’s targeting of hundreds of educators that has led to years of campaigns of harrassment, including death threats. One such campaign targeting Rutgers history professor Mark Bray grew so menacing that last week the professor fled to Europe with his family. He was literally terrorized.

The January 6, 2021, attack on Congress was a convergence of violent groups, including the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys, who gouged, speared, sprayed, slugged and otherwise beat congressional police, vandalized the buildings, and sought to attack elected officials. The insurrectionists who had been convicted of crimes were pardoned by Trump upon his return to office. Right-wing violence is at an all-time high, and it now comes directly from the White House as, among other manifestations, ICE brutality. (It’s also striking that Republican legislators are said to obey Trump out of fear for their physical safety, not directly from the administration but from the stochastic terror it has fed and nurtured.)

To actually change the world usually takes years to decades and has a lot more to do with collective work to build coalitions, shift public opinion, or pass legislation, which happens through stuff like meetings, maybe some lawsuits, maybe some protests and public events, more meetings, definitely some fundraising. I’ve seen climate and environmental and indigenous and feminist and queer-rights victories, followed the underlying shifts in public opinion. None of it at the point of a gun, all of it from the kind of often tedious, sometimes exhilarating work of activism. I yearn for more films that show how the world actually does get changed – and less nonsense about violence on the left.