Christopher David, from Portland, Oregon, attended the US Naval Academy for four years and then served as an officer for eight years in the Marine Corps of Civil Engineers. He recently attended a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, where he was attacked by federal officials, as seen in a video that went viral. He spoke to “CBS Sunday Morning” about his experience:
I saw on Twitter or on television, there are videos of men wearing combat uniforms without insignia, essentially kidnapping people from the streets of Portland and placing them in unmarked trucks.
I was very concerned about that. If we can’t identify who these people are, anyone could buy surplus military uniforms and start kidnapping people on the streets of Portland. It is a very slippery slope.
One of the things he wanted to do was try to talk to some of these law enforcement officers and find out why they thought they still kept their oath to the Constitution when they were doing unconstitutional things. I wanted to go down and see what this was all about.
This was actually my first protest. I waited a couple of hours. No one left the court building. So, I decided that I would go home at that time. And that’s around 10:45. And they came out like a phalanx running. And I saw that and I went out of the park to the street just in front of the courthouse, and I stayed there and after they broke up with people at the intersection, they surrounded me.
He was so strong and so excited that he basically had to yell, “Why are you violating your oath to the Constitution?” I don’t think they heard me. They were not interested in dialogue.
After they essentially surrounded me, one of them pointed a semi-automatic weapon at me. And that’s when I stood firm on that point. I’d rather be beaten than shot.
There was a little man to my left who decided he was going to try to cut me like a redwood tree. And finally he hit my hand and broke it. And then, I wasn’t reacting the way they wanted me to react, so they started spraying pepper spray directly on my face. If you’ve ever had pepper spray directly on your face, that pretty much ends any conversation.
Zane Sparling, Portland Tribune / Twitter
I turned around, gave them a rather rude gesture, and when I turned to go to the park to get away from them, a giant cloud of tear gas enveloped me. I don’t think it’s a reasonable response to what happened that night.
Before they appeared, the protests were already beginning to subside a little. They have been escalated by the federal government, by the Department of Homeland Security. And I can only speculate on the reasons why they are doing this.
I think in some respects it is optics. If they can’t find a liberal city with chaos and protests, they will do one. And in this case, Portland is the test case. This is a way to light gas, because none of us talk about Black Lives Matter anymore, we are talking about an old white guy who takes a beating. And that’s a change in that conversation that shouldn’t be happening.
We need to bring that conversation to Black Lives Matter and understand why we were originally here. Our city has intentionally become a war zone. And I don’t think it will improve anytime soon.
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