What’s behind the Portland incursion, universities impose loyalty tests, hip-hop standards
The battle for Portland — and for January 6Portland, Oregon, is the latest target of Donald Trump’s militarized ire. Following months of protest against the ICE presence there, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has moved to federalize and deploy 200 Oregon National Guard troops to the city, which has (along with the state) sued to stop the move.
Why Portland, though? It’s the West Coast’s bastion of weird, but demonstrations this summer have been relatively small, far smaller than the large George Floyd-sparked protests that put tens of thousands of Portlanders in the streets. As Anna Griffin of The New York Times reports, the trigger was Trump’s television habit:
A Fox News report in September that intermingled images of the small nightly protests at an ICE facility in Portland over the summer with video from the much larger 2020 protests prompted the president to say he “didn’t know that was still going on,” and to threaten to send in troops.
It’s disturbing enough that Trump’s belief in a “war-ravaged” Portland that is “like living in hell” comes out of a confusion of television and reality. And it’d be bad enough if it were only confusion — of a piece with his posting of an AI-rendered video of himself pitching imaginary miracle cures, or his fixation on elevator sabotage? But he isn’t the only one rewriting reality, and where Trump is turning protestors into insurrectionists, his allies are doing the opposite, the better to confuse the rest of us. Earlier this month, Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk relaunched a panel to investigate what “really” happened on January 6, 2021. But what story do congressional Republicans want to tell?“
They can’t even seem to settle on which conspiracy theory they want to advance,” said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who served on the previous Jan. 6 panel and serves on the new one. “Was it Antifa? Did it not happen at all? Did Donald Trump really win the election? They can’t figure out what it is they want to say, and it’s because it’s just a tissue of lies and conspiracy theories.”
In a way, it doesn’t matter so much what story they choose — whatever direction the investigation goes, it helps obfuscate the history of the event that started in earnest with Trump’s inauguration-day pardon of the participants. The more confusing, the better. But will Americans really develop, as George Orwell wrote of the citizens of 1984’s dystopia, the “ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary” — or can they learn to see through the fog?
Source: MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: Trump launches invasion of his own TV screen