Far-left revolutionary group Antifa went on yet another vandalism spree in Portland just hours after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration Wednesday. The group was seen carrying signs challenging Biden with the slogans “We Don’t Want Biden — We Want Revenge” underscored by a graphic of a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and “We are Ungovernable.”
In a video taken by The New York Times, black-clad rioters were seen marching in formation with drumming and chanting before facing a barrage of rubber bullets and tear gas from federal officers of the Department of Homeland Security. The conflict took place outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building. According to the Times, one Antifa member carried a microphone, declaring President Biden a “feckless puppet of the centrist Democratic establishment,” while another at a separate section of rioting burned a Biden flag in the street.
The insurgents sacked the local Democratic Party headquarters, smashing windows and spray-painting the anarchy symbol over the Party’s sign.
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According to KATU, a local affiliate of ABC, the protests were dubbed “J20” for January 20th. According to a search on KATU’s website, Antifa similarly rioted both in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected and in 2019 under the guise of an event coined “5th Annual March for Children’s Justice.”
Antifa expert and independent journalist Andy Ngo said that Antifa had been planning and organizing the riots in plain sight on Twitter for weeks without retribution; “In Seattle and Portland, there were simultaneous riots that were pre-planned and organized, and also advertised weeks ahead of time on Twitter,” he said in an interview with American Thought Leaders. “Twitter did nothing to take down some of these accounts that were promoting these riots.”
Portland Police arrested a total of 15 individuals, some of whom were found carrying incendiary devices. According to an article by Ngo in The Post Millennial, several of the rioters arrested had previously been arrested and released during 2020 riots. Many had their charges inexplicably dropped.
President Biden’s new Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, failed to denounce Antifa or the violence in a Friday press conference saying she hadn’t “spoken with him [Biden] specifically about those events.”
According to Seattle’s KOMO News, Mayor Ted Wheeler and Portland City Council similarly declined to speak out, instead, having the Mayor’s spokesperson issue the specious statement: “Violent threats, vandalism, and misogynistic and homophobic hate speech are unacceptable in our community.”
In 2016, when Antifa rioted on the day of Trump’s inauguration, Wheeler compared the riot to a Women’s March on Washington event held the day before when he said: “What can I say other than here we are today, the weather is worse, there are probably seven times as many people, it’s the same police contingent and everybody looks like they are having a great time,” according to KATU.
Twitter banned several Antifa-related accounts on Friday, including the prominent account “The Base,” which Andy Ngo describes as “an extremist bookstore in Brooklyn, NY that has been used as an Antifa training center.” The sweep took down approximately 70,000 followers, some of whom had been active since 2012.
Antifa wasn’t the only far-left target of big tech censorship. Breitbart reported Saturday that Facebook banned Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The social media giant did not give a reason for the ban. However, on Jan. 17, the SWP published an article in its publication The Socialist Worker titled The Social Media Bosses are not on our Side where the leftists said although it’s “understandable to feel cheered” about President Donald Trump’s squelching by big tech, “it does throw up questions about the precedent it sets.”
“A tiny group of people sit in Silicon Valley boardrooms and decide whether this violence is legitimate or illegitimate. These same people head up huge private corporations that can set out appeal processes that amplify or cut off voices,” said the publication.
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