Three months in, violent demonstrations in Portland show no sign of ending. Police have declared eight riots in the first half of August and a total of 17 since the protests began at the end of May. More than 100 arrests have been made in the past three weeks alone.
National media have been mostly silent on this story, showing interest only in the presence of federal protective agents in the city. The disparity in attention is not hard to figure. For a press so rigorously set on opposition to the Trump administration, the only story of interest in Portland was the authoritarian implications of the president’s executive order aimed at protecting federal property. Insofar as the presence of serious and sustained violence on the part of the protesters was acknowledged at all by left-leaning media and Democratic Party functionaries, it was described as a reaction to Department of Homeland Security officers supposedly provoking unrest in the midst of an otherwise peaceful event. But this narrative is getting harder to maintain as the destruction continues, since federal law-enforcement officers have mostly left.
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