 When it becomes okay to, you know, damage people's properties and wake them up in the middle of the night, when terror is seen as justified, I think it's inevitable that something terrible is going to happen. On Saturday, August 29th, a pro-Trump demonstrator was shot and killed during ongoing street protests in Portland. Last week, I interviewed veteran journalist Nancy Rommelman, who has covered the Portland protests for reason and has talked to dozens of demonstrators, trying to understand their mindsets and motivations. She worries that as the protest movement continues, it's becoming increasingly restive, unfocused and headed into dangerous territory. We go into 2020, which is obviously going to be an election year, then COVID hits, business is closed, and the city closed and downtown became kind of barren. The schools are closed and everybody's home, including tons and tons of young people, and then George Floyd is killed, and the city explodes. For a very long time, they wore peaceful protests, you know, moms and kids in the line of cars that go around to to, but per usual, these things, you've got a small contingent that wants to fuck shit up. They showed up down at Justice Center. They broke the windows. They threw furniture around. They set a fire. I wrote a piece for a reason about a woman that was trapped in the basement. The problem is the mayor and the city council basically just said, you're not going to arrest peaceful protesters. They say they keep committing violence against the Justice Center and also next door, which is the federal building. In late July, a special response team from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol showed up in tactical gear, ostensibly to protect federal property. There were many bloody confrontations in which protesters were tear-gassed and some were caught on camera being pulled into unmarked vans. Nobody wants to be tear-gassed, but you've been pelting the building with flaming trash for three hours provoking a reaction. They are still calling this free speech, but they're terrorizing citizens and they march to the nearest place that they feel must be overtaken. Police stations, police unions, social services building, ice headquarters, they trash it. They set fire to it and they go into the residential streets. Now they're shining lights into people's windows and saying, get up, motherfucker, get up. I'm out here every night fighting for change and we want you to know that and we want you to be uncomfortable. Some of these people are 20 years old and I have said, what is it that you want? And it's like, defund the police. It's like, okay. All right, so then where do we go from there? I was at a march where the police remained entirely passive, entirely late. They finally came out because their union was being burnt down for the, not burnt down, there was a fire there, they were pelting it for the umpteenth time. They finally just stood there. All the protesters like got this close in their faces and then they just turned around and left. That was by order of Ted Wheeler. I understand this idea. They're trying to provoke us. If we don't be provoked, maybe it dies down, but there's too much momentum. And if it stays this hot, I think it's inevitable that something terrible is going to happen. And then whatever side that terrible thing happens to uses it to say, look, now we're justified in doing X. If you're a 22 year old and you're home and you're not in school anymore, and maybe your job has gone away because a lot of jobs were lost in Portland, you really are lost and you are maybe lost for identity and maybe you're looking for identity and you're looking for people to hang out with and then you find it and then you put on a you know an outfit and you go out every night and you feel energized and I have had people tell me this. It's like it really is an incredible feeling of being part of something. Rommelman worries that a moral blindness is overtaking the protesters. I think that when the definition of free speech or peaceful protest starts to become very elastic, when terror is seen as justified, we've seen how these things go and they blame white supremacists of Portland or the city government or the cops and they see what they're doing as creating some sort of justice.