Squiddiddler wrote:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/flag-bearing-marine-veteran-recalls-horrific-experience-within-portland-riots
Nothing in this story conflicts with anything I've stated. You got a guy caught in the chaos that Trump created by sending in his goons. Perhaps you didn't understand what I meant by provocation? I was suggesting that federal agents were sent to Portland to provoke chaos.
Apparently they succeeded.
Now a city in chaos is going to generate a LOT of different stories. You may have had a hard time with the story I got from the Guardian. The media is all over Portland looking for perspectives that they know their audience wants to hear. There's left-wing media, right-wing media and everything in between and they're all in their looking for stories. Gabriel Johnson is a guy Fox picked up to extract a story that favors their narrative.
Were black people calling him the "n-word"?
It's likely.
Was he chased around with baseball bats?
ehhh... I think it's more likely that gestures were made and he was exaggerating to the reporter, but nevertheless, a lot of things can happen in chaos.
The sad thing here is that he was trying to use Old Glory as a unifying symbol and I think this was probably the very thing that drew the hostility. I think it's terrible that it's come to this but I think it has at least in the throes of a riot and I can think of two possible reasons for it...
For one, I think that for some Americans the flag of their nation is being hijacked by white supremacists.
A lot of people are protesting with BLM because they lost friends or relatives not just to police brutality but the bigger scope of brutality that comes from the white-on-black racism that our system is known for turning a blind eye toward. Here's the thing... white supremacists are HUGE on symbols and they never show up with an an American flag as if to claim it as theirs. After seeing is enough, I'm sure it burns down to an associative level in the mind of a black American.
The other possibility is the fact that they are in a city in which protesters are literally being attacked by federal forces and well, Old Glory represents the UNITED STATES of AMERICA, which is technically a reference to the federal government.
Either way, the guy was literally parading it through a riot. So it's hard not expect him to get *some* insults and gestures along the way. I didn't see much hostility in the video - in fact when he suggested people stand by him and his flag, I saw protesters doing just that. All of the hostility described was his word.
In any case, like I said... Lots of media, lot of stories with different messages. But none of that matters in a true analysis of the situation. The hundreds of stories the media can pull out of it can be sold and fed into public opinion but none of it changes...
The fact that civil unrest has increased since federal troops have arrived.
The likeliness that it was intentional based on one or more of the motives I've already described.
The fact that neither the city nor the state had requested any assistance.
This is why I am saying that your story changes nothing about my suggestions.