Portland Mayor Tear Gassed By Federal Agents; had to escape from the mob

Portland mayor tear-gassed 

by federal officers, warns 

'somebody's going to die' 

during chaotic protests

USA Today,
23 July, 2020

Ore. – Mayor Ted Wheeler was tear-gassed by federal officers along with a large crowd of protesters late Wednesday night after he tried for hours to calm angry activists demanding police reform from City Hall and calling for federal authorities to withdraw from this mostly liberal, mostly white city. 

The mayor was caught in a chaotic display of violence and mayhem that began around 11:15 p.m., after protesters threw flaming bags of garbage over a fence protecting the federal courthouse, prompting officers to fire tear gas at the crowd.

Wheeler had spent many hours in the thick of the protest, attempting to answer questions from the crowd, which booed and jeered as he tried to explain a lengthy process for making changes. He acknowledged that he's a "white, privileged male."

"Obviously, we have a long way to go," Wheeler said. "Everyone here has a job to do, all of us."

Before the crowd was tear-gassed, Wheeler huddled with leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement who demanded he move more quickly to reform the police department.

Some activists said they were worried the fight over federal agents overshadowed their demands for change and vowed to keep the pressure on Wheeler and city officials. One mother pointed out that Wheeler showed up to the protests only after other white mothers attending the demonstrations over the weekend were tear-gassed.

"Enough is enough," the crowd chanted. "Enough is enough."

Thousands of protesters alternately booed and interrogated Wheeler after hundreds of mothers dubbed "the Wall of Moms" led a march downtown against police brutality. Many protesters carried signs demanding the withdrawal of federal agents dispatched last week by President Donald Trump over the objection of Wheeler and other officials.

“It’s hard to breathe, it’s a lot harder to breathe than I thought,” Wheeler told The Washington Post after he was tear-gassed. “This is abhorrent. This is beneath us.”

Trump said he sent federal law enforcement officers in to restore order. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said agents were in Portland primarily to protect federal buildings such as the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse, a target of protesters. 

Contractors surrounded the building with a tall metal-and-concrete fence Wednesday, and prosecutors warned that anyone who breached it would be arrested. In court files, officials said protesters inflicted more than $50,000 in damage to federal buildings in Portland, including tearing down security cameras and shattering glass doors.

Tai Carpenter, the board president of Don’t Shoot PDX, a Portland-based, nonprofit group advocating for social change, said the majority of protesters were exercising their First Amendment rights. She called the federal response disproportionate.

A person wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt emblem of the communist Soviet Union confronts federal agents on July 21 outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., during a night of protests.

“It’s not a bunch of anarchists on the front lines,” said Carpenter, 29. “It’s moms singing and dads with leaf blowers to disperse tear gas. It’s not nearly as out of control as people think. I’m scared that the federal officers being here is going to result in someone being murdered.”

Wheeler echoed those concerns after speaking to protesters Wednesday night.

"President Trump needs to focus on coronavirus and get his troops out of the city. My biggest fear is that somebody's going to die," Wheeler said. "I want them to leave. This is going to come to a city near you if we don't stop it."

The mayor walked a fine line of blasting the federal government while addressing a crowd that days earlier, before federal officials swept into the city, had been organizing in opposition to his office. As mayor, Wheeler helps set the city's budget priorities. As police commissioner, he helps sets law enforcement priorities.

Some activists said his criticism of the federal government rang hollow, given the clashes between city police and protesters.

"You need to be doing more than you are doing. You say you are doing stuff. We haven't seen it," activist Teal Lindseth, 21, told him Wednesday night. 

Protesters were reenergized against what they call heavy-handed federal intervention after nearly two months of demonstrations. They said they were seizing a groundswell of national support to continue pushing for an overhaul in policing.

Wednesday night again saw large numbers of white, middle-aged residents joining the protests, which have drawn hundreds of activists nearly every night since the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died on Memorial Day after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes over a report of an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.

Federal officials have repeatedly referred to protesters as anarchists, and federal agents fired tear gas at the crowds.

Forty-two people have been arrested by federal agents in the past few days, several of them over accusations that they pried open the front doors of the courthouse and scuffled with officers inside.

"Attempted arson is not a peaceful protest. Physically attacking law enforcement is not freedom of speech. Destruction of property is not peaceful assembly," Wolfe said in a statement. "Criminals perpetrating these crimes are being arrested … not law-abiding protesters."

Wednesday, contractors raced to finish ringing the courthouse with 8-foot-high metal-and-concrete barricades, the sounds of air compressors and electric screw guns echoing across the street to the protest encampment.

Kitty-corner from the courthouse, park rangers removed metal benches from Chapman Square, a small park where many protesters rested and regrouped during overnight clashes. There was no evidence the city planned to evict the protest encampment from Lownsdale Square, directly across Southwest 3rd Avenue from the courthouse.

In that encampment, protesters erected tents and barbecue grills, offering free food. Other sites within the encampment provide basic hygiene supplies, including masks and hand-washing stations to protect against the spread of COVID-19, as well as water and eye rinses for protesters hit with tear gas or pepper spray.

As at other protest sites around the country, including the now-defunct Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in Seattle, tourists stopped by to take selfies, angering protesters who fretted that their message was being ignored while their encampment became a tourist attraction during the daytime.

Wednesday, four volunteer medics aiding protesters sued city police and the federal government, arguing their constitutional rights were violated by law enforcement officers targeting them with tear gas and rubber bullets. Filed with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawsuit says law enforcement officials at all levels mistreated protesters.

"Defendants’ conduct is part of a longstanding pattern of assaulting and threatening protest medics to prevent them from rendering aid to protesters, journalists, neutral legal observers, and their fellow protest medics," the lawsuit says. "Since President Trump ordered federal agents to go to Portland to quell protests, the federal defendants have been coordinating with the Portland police to violently disperse demonstrators, neutrals, and medics standing behind a medical-supply table. The federal Defendants use the same types (or worse) of force – chemical irritants, rubber bullets, batons – as the Portland Police. And they have emerged from unmarked vehicles clad in unmarked uniforms to abduct suspected protesters."

Before Wheeler appeared in the crowd Wednesday, many protesters linked arms and lined the street next to the federal courthouse. Lindseth joined the crowd, alongside yellow-shirted moms and hundreds of other activists forming a human wall to protect the protest.

"Hey, look, Trump wanted a wall," she said with a grin. "So we're giving him one!"

Instead of silencing the city's protesters, she said, the president bestowed on them a larger platform by sending in federal officers. 

"Trump keeps talking about Portland. People keep talking about Portland. People know us," Lindseth said. "We feel like the whole world has seen us."



But, that wasn't the only thing that happened:

Portland Mayor Tear Gassed By Federal Agents During Wednesday Protest

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler went to the protest-turned-riot outside the Justice Center and federal courthouse on 22 July, 2020. Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters threw explosives at the courthouse and set the side of the building on fire. Wheeler was protected by a professional security detail of at least five plain-clothes body guards. He condemned the response from the federal government at the riot, saying, “I saw nothing that provoked this response.”

From Zero Hedge;

Like the liberal white male mayor of Minneapolis learned when he had the temerity to stand up and tell a crowd of angry protesters that he wouldn't support disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has struggled to connect with the throngs of angry, young and (mostly) white crowds of impressionable college students and disgruntled post-grads who have flooded the area outside a federal courthouse in downtown Portland for nearly 2 months straight, SARS-CoV-2 be damned.

Many of these demonstrators probably aren't even from Portland. And it's clear that their animosity toward Wheeler - who also serves as Police Commissioner - stems not from any personal failing on his part, but rather due to his role in "the system", and the fact that he's a white man. But that hasn't dissuaded Wheeler from trying to pander to them, anyway, guided perhaps by misguided political strategists who feel that the hard-core protesters truly have the public's sympathy. Over the past 10 days, as federal agents have moved to defend the federal courthouse mentioned above from vandals and enforce laws after Wheeler pulled out the local cops, Wheeler has sided with the rabble over the government he was elected to represent, denouncing the federal "stormtroopers" who have been "abducting" residents of his city, according to the AP.

This has done nothing to quell the unrest (many of the people out there on the barricade night after night after night are clearly being supported by somebody - even if that somebody is the absentee father who nevertheless left them a generous trust). So on Wednesday night, Wheeler took his 'revolutionary' kayfabe to the next level and wandered down to the courthouse, where he stood up and took his tear-gassing, an act that was filmed by eager journalists. But not before holding an hours long "listening session" with the aggrieved.

The footage of Wheeler's tear-gassing, and his reaction, have gone viral overnight.

When Wheeler tried to address the crowd, he was enthusiastically booed, the AP reported.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, said it was the first time he’d been tear gassed and appeared slightly dazed and coughed as he put on a pair of goggles someone handed him and drank water. He didn’t leave his spot at the front, however, and continued to take gas. Around Wheeler, the protest raged, with demonstrators lighting a large fire in the space between the fence and the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and the pop-pop-pop of federal agents deploying tear gas and stun grenades into the crowd.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the federal agents knew Wheeler was in the crowd when they used the tear gas.

Earlier in the night, Wheeler was mostly jeered as he tried to rally demonstrators who have clashed nightly with federal agents but was briefly applauded when he shouted “Black Lives Matter” and pumped his fist in the air. The mayor has opposed federal agents’ presence in Oregon’s largest city, but he has faced harsh criticism from many sides and his presence wasn’t welcomed by many, who yelled and swore at him.

"I want to thank the thousands of you who have come out to oppose the Trump administration’s occupation of this city,” Wheeler told hundreds of people gathered downtown near the federal courthouse. “The reason this is important is it is not just happening in Portland ... we’re on the front line here in Portland.”

After listening to Wheeler throw them under the bus for political gain, we imagine the federal agents doing the gassing were only too happy to comply.

Once the gas hit, the crowd of protesters, eager to put the mayor in his place, started jeering once more. "Eat that sh*t! Eat that sh*t!" one deranged protester shouted at the mayor, who was starting to look ill, something that was noticeable even with the facemask.

Meanwhile, what were Wheeler's "peaceful protesters" doing Wednesday night? The same thing they do every night - try to burn down the courthouse.

Watching Wheeler gasp for breath, we couldn't help but think that the mayor could probably learn a valuable political lesson from a classic "Chappelle's Show" sketch: "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong".

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