The summer of 2020 was a time nationwide unrest, but the protests in Portland, Oregon attracted a particularly rabid fascination. The then-President of the United States of America and his supporters encouraged the idea that there was a massive conspiracy of hyper-organized anarchist anti-fascists in the city working under direct orders from George Soros and/or the Democratic National Committee to cause civil unrest and destabilize the region in order to ensure a Democratic victory in the upcoming election. Protestors, activists, journalists, and even casual, uninvolved citizens claimed that they were being harassed and/or detained without charges and warrants by various law enforcement-adjacent authorities — and it was never quite clear which agencies were doing the arresting, which made it even more difficult for anyone to get any answers or accountability.
These weren't just rumors, though. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon recently made public an internal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security that revealed the full scope of the Department's tyrannical activity in Portland that summer. Gizmodo summed up the report pretty well here:
The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump's false claims about "Antifa," an "organization" that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed.
The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers' protest containment; "twisted efforts," Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting "baseless conspiracy theories" to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president's "political gain." The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the "friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests" — up to and including "First Amendment speech activity." Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an "anarchist extremist" specifically because "sufficient facts" were never found "to support such a characterization."
One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily "thrown together," adding they "didn't even know why some of the people were arrested." In some cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they "just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested." Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it "concerning," the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from "nonviolent crimes." These included trespassing, though it was unclear to analysts and investigators whether the cases had "any relationship to federal property," the report says.
To recap: authorities detained people without cause in order to collect massive dossiers of information with the deliberate intention of finding random connections that they could use to create the illusion of an Antifa conspiracy in order to further justify this exact kind of fascist activity across the country.
Anyone who claims they're concerned about "free speech" and the "Deep State" need look no further than what DHS did that summer under orders of the Acting Director Chad Wolf (whose appointment wasn't even legal in the first place). These are the exact same tactics that the US has always used to manufacture both domestically and abroad — but this time, it wasn't even targeting a specific ethnic group or community. They roped in everyone left-ish leaning person they could find in Portland. That should terrify everyone.
…and yet, I'm sure there are plenty of people who will continue to insist that the DNC-funded Antifa conspiracy was real, and that this is all just a ruse by the deeper Deep State.
Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump [Dell Cameron / Gizmodo]
Office of Intelligence and Analysis Operations in Portland — PDF [Department of Homeland Security]
Image: Geraldshields11 / Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)