On Portland, Secret Police, And Fascism

The events that occurred on Friday in Portland, Oregon have caused quite an uproar. I personally chose to ignore the story for the Friday episode of my podcast Peaceful Globalist Review as the story was still developing and I did not want to have an uninformed opinion.

The story seemed quite basic, truth be told. Members of the Department Of Homeland Security arrested various members of Antifa in Portland, some of which were peacefully protesting and other of which were rioting.

Many are claiming this is an example of “secret police,” however, the police in question were clearly wearing uniforms for the Department Of Homeland Security. For that matter, I can’t help but notice that none of these people take issue with undercover cops, despite the fact that “undercover” is a synonym for “secret.”

Another claim made is that these people were “kidnapped” or “dragged against their will.” But wait a minute, how is that any different than the concept of arrest? People are (usually) not willfully arrested, they are “dragged against their will” by police officers.

In truth, the only reason I wrote an article about this is because of the assumption that libertarians should dogmatically scream at this. Senator Brain Schatz tweeted the following yesterday:

Libertarians should be freaking out about Portland.

Here are some more of Senator Schatz’s positions:

• He supports various forms of gun control
• He voted in favor of a Cyber security bill opposed by the vast majority of civil liberties groups
• He supports Universal Healthcare
• He called for a “strong response” to Myanmar

But he really cares about what libertarians want.

This has been progressives for the past day or so, the people who despise libertarians and our ideology are now demanding that we be mad over the same things they are.

As for the comparisons to Nazi Germany (which gained its power through a riot, might I add) and the Soviet Union, that comparison only makes sense in the most superficial sense. The people of those nations were arrested for a variety of reasons, however, the closest comparison is simple criticism of the government. The members of Antifa who were arrested for rioting, which is far off from being arrested for disagreeing with Joseph Stalin.

With that said, I still am not a supporter of the actions of the President. The fact is, it seems like the people of Portland agree with Antifa, hence why they have let Antifa run so much of the city.

At time of writing, Mayor of Portland Ted Wheeler has set that wishes for the Trump administration to remove any federal agents from the city of Portland. Deputy Director of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli, has said that the administration has no plan of doing such and actually wants to expand this nationwide.

I am against this, as historically police departments have been ran by the local and state governments. For that matter, doesn’t the Department Of Homeland Security have better things to do than arrest rioters in various cities?

For the record, this does not mean we are living under martial law. Martial law involves a suspension of various civil liberties, such as the right to a trail by jury, not just the federal government taking the role of police. However, I still do feel this should be something that city governments have to ask for, not something the federal government can just do.

It is also impossible to ignore that this is a political tactic. The president is still trying to run on a platform of “law and order” (said “law and order” has caused massive backlash because Americans tend to prefer not being dragged into windowless vans to the vague concept of “law and order”) as oppose to Biden’s “crime and chaos.” Mind you, Biden has a history of consistently being much tougher on crime than Donald Trump — as seen by the fact that the Trump campaign is also bragging about its “criminal justice reform,” that was suppose to replace Biden’s 1994 crime bill.

In truth, the Biden campaign has not once mentioned supporting “defunding the police.” Instead, he was talked about reforming the United States police system and changing the funding in various forms. This is a difference Republican politicians pretend to not understand, instead acting like the police must act like they do now — while going out of their way to make the police look as evil as possible.

This essay was very rambling and for that I apologize, but this situation is not something I could write one long article on. The fact is, this situation is very complicated, and requires a large amount of time to unpack both in what caused it and what it’s going to cause.