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“Rest in peace Jay,” wrote the president.
The words were directed at Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a 39-year-old activist who was shot and killed in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday night.
Donald Trump is selective who he cries with in public.
Aaron Danielson was a controversial choice.
When Danielson was killed in Portland last Saturday night, he was wearing a “Patriot Prayer” cap.
Patriot Prayer is a right-wing extremist association founded in Oregon, a state in the northwest corner of the United States with a long and violent history of racism. His event attracts supporters of white power. Violent fights often occur in meetings with left-wing activists.
A large caravan traveled through Oregon last weekend in support of Donald Trump, who hailed the participants as “great patriots.”
Photo: Mark Graves / The Oregonian / AP
The confrontations do not arise by chance. Street fighting is Patriot Prayers’ own business concept. The group took shape in 2016 with the goal of rallying support for Donald Trump in liberal cities along the progressive Northwest Coast and “liberating the conservatives” there.
The caravan in Portland that Patriot Prayer members participated in last Saturday night was one of those liberation operations. An estimated 600 vehicles drove into downtown Portland, where protests against police violence have been held daily since May. Trump’s flags were flying from the car accidents.
Members of Patriot Prayer, or people seen at the group’s events, have previously been convicted of serious crimes.
On April 29, 2017, Patriot Prayer organized a “March for Free Speech” in Portland. One of the participants was Jeremy Joseph Christian. He was sentenced earlier this year to life in prison for killing two men on a train in Portland. The men intervened when Christian harassed two black teenagers with racist harangues.
Last weekend, when the caravan arrived in Portland, Donald Trump called supporters “great patriots”.
Jeremy Joseph Christian killed two men who tried to stop Christian’s racist attacks on two teenagers.
Photo: Beth Nakamura / AP
The president’s stance on right-wing extremists in Portland is in line with his remarks about Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who on August 25 shot and killed two people in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin. It was during a demonstration against police violence, which emerged after the police shot a black man in the back with seven shots.
“It was an interesting situation,” Trump said of the Kyle Rittenhouse case. “I suppose he was in a difficult position. They probably would have killed him, but he’s under investigation.” The president believes that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
To legitimize from within the White House Serious street violence is violating a border, several US political scientists said this week. They see Trump’s positions as part of a re-election campaign that has fascist traits. The president hopes that the violence will benefit him politically.
Political scientist Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard University and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” says in a magazine interview that “this kind of fomenting violence for political purposes is worryingly close to what the movement did. Fascist in Europe “in the 1920s and 1930s.
President Trum visited the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, where a 17-year-old man shot dead two people in August during a rally against police violence.
Photo: Evan Vucci / AP
Levitsky is supported by historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University and author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” For Ben-Ghiat, Trump’s decision this week recalls the actions of the fascist Benito Mussolini before taking power in Italy in October 1922.
Mussolini encouraged street riots among armed supporters, black shirts and leftist protesters. “She used violence to destabilize Italian society in order to position herself as the person who could stop the violence.” That’s what Trump is doing now, “said Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
One of Trump’s advisers in the White House, Kellyanne Conway, confirms that violence is “good” for the president. In an interview with Fox News, Conway says: “The more chaos, lawlessness, vandalism and violence dominate, the better the clear choice between who is the best in public safety and law and order.” (Involved Donald Trump).
The shooting deaths in Portland on Saturday night and in Wisconsin the week before means that the US electoral movement has now entered the phase of “extreme polarization,” says Marc Rodriguez, a history professor at Portland State University.
Photo: Ben Hendren / TT
Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / TT
Photo: Privat / AP
Photo: Ted Shaffrey / AP
Photo: Ted Shaffrey / AP
Photo: John Rudoff / TT
Portland is a city of half a million people located in the northwest corner of the United States. A geographically peripheral location. At the same time, a kind of political center. That says something about the election campaign.
Oregon history is heavily marked by racism. In the mid-19th century, the state passed “emergency laws” designed to keep minorities out. A law passed in 1844 declared that every black person who appears in Oregon is “flogged twice a year until he leaves the territory.”
During the 1920s it was dominated The Legislative Assembly of the Ku Klux Klan of Oregon, which, among other things, pushed through legislation that would prevent Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land.
During the 1970s, associations such as Aryan Nations – Arisk Nation – to Oregon, drawn there by notions of preserved ethnic homogeneity.
Federal forces encounter tear gas protesters in Portland in late July.
Photo: Alisha Jucevic / AFP
Even today, few blacks live in Oregon. Of the 35 largest cities in the United States, Portland is the whitest. 71 percent of the population is white in Portland, compared to neighboring California, where the white population is 37 percent. During the protests this summer, it has been said that there are more Black Lives Matter billboards in Portland than there are black people.
That’s one of the reasons Black Lives Matter and other activist groups refuse to leave. Liza Lopetrone, a veterinarian, became involved in the Wall of Moms group this summer. It was a “wall of mothers” protesting the federal military police that Trump sent to Portland. Lopetrone was motivated by Oregon’s “extremely racist” history. “I’m not from here, but now I’m taking responsibility,” he said in an interview.
Trump’s legitimacy of political violence makes the electoral movement change its character. Violence is at the center. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is urged to mark against left-wing activists who use weapons and are dedicated to material destruction, a tail of the peaceful protests.
No one has yet been arrested for the shooting death of Aaron Danielson in Portland, but police are investigating a 48-year-old man. He is described as an Anti-Phase supporter who has completely risen in anti-police demonstrations this summer. The man has viewed the Portland clashes as a “final battle” that “can change everything,” according to an Instagram account bearing his name.
If convicted, the act is the first fatal attack that can be attributed to Antifa in 25 years, according to the anti-racist organization Anti-Defamation League.
On Thursday night, Trump wrote on Twitter: “Why don’t the police arrest the cold-blooded murderer of Aaron” Jay “Danielson? Everyone knows who that villain is. No wonder Portland is going to hell!“
Soon he was obeyed. During the arrest, Reinoehl was shot and killed by the police.
A “wall of mothers” during a demonstration of the importance of black lives in Portland.
Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP
Political advisers who believe that Trump will profit from the violence points to a kind of “inherent logic.” Older center-right voters who feel alienated from Black Lives Matter could be drawn to Trump when the protests turn violent. But so far there are few figures to support the theory.
It could form “a bloc of voters who support the protests but turn to Trump because of the riots,” Perry Bacon said on the FiveThirtyEight polling site. “But the crucial thing is that that group has not yet formed, despite the many opportunities.”
The majority of Americans, 65 percent, are behind protests against police violence. Although the gap is large between voters who identify as Democrats and Republicans respectively. The majority, 58 percent, agree that the police must reform.
A protester stands in front of Trump supporters during a rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Photo: Kerem Yucel / AFP
This week another case of police violence was highlighted. Family members of Daniel Prude, 41, released a film Wednesday to show that Prude, a black man, died in the suites of asphyxia by police. Seven police officers involved in the intervention have been suspended while New York State prosecutors investigate the case.
After Wednesday’s press conference, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the police station in Rochester, where Daniel Prude was arrested on March 23. Police responded with pepper spray and tear gas.
