Now is the political moment to revisit Kurt Andersen's 2017 Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, “Hands Up. It’s Showtime.”. In it Anderson provides an analysis of the events around Ferguson Missouri, the associated paramilitary response, institutional rhetoric offered as it's rationale, and the ensuing representation seen in the media. “I’ve been studying Americans’ accelerating penchant for blending the fantastical into the real world", writes Anderson, "from Disneyland to reality TV, from themed restaurants to war reenactments to ubiquitous porn to Burning Man. So I started seeing evidence of the phenomenon in some very unlikely places - such as the excessive police response to the protests in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., where officers with AR-15s in Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter-Attack Trucks struck me as law enforcement doing war-fighting role play, cops playing soldiers on TV. After Ferguson showed Americans just how militarized our police have become, the Obama administration put restrictions on the federal program that had given police departments billions of dollars worth of military equipment. And I thought of the Ferguson spectacle again last week when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that President Trump would be removing all those new limits on the handouts of military hardware. Mr. Trump, of course, is a stupendous embodiment of my theory of the merger of fantasy and reality. As a business hustler and entertainer, then as candidate and president, he peddles over-the-top make-believe from his branded cologne and “university” and Ceausescu-esque residences to his WWE appearances and “The Apprentice” to the tales about millions of illegal 2016 voters and his predecessor’s birthplace. And he has depicted American cities as centers of “carnage,” turned monstrous cops like Joe Arpaio into celebrities, told the very opposite of the truth - “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years” - and encouraged the police to rough up suspects. Mr. Trump’s view of policing clearly derives from “Dirty Harry” fantasies, with he himself playing the beloved strongman commandant."
We now find ourselves at a social and political crossroads, wherein this "American carnage" has been reenvisioned as our fellow citizens, and can be seen acted out in a number of US cities, such is the case with, “Federal Agents Push into Portland Streets, Stretching Limits of Their Authority”. This has been executed in at least three separate dispatches to cities across the United States, and "From the Start, Federal Agents Demanded a Role in Suppressing Anti-Racist Protests". All of which assigned ludicrous nomenclature like Operation Diligent Valor, and Operation Legend, in addition to the surveillance of protests in at least 15 cities during the months of May and June prior. In the case of the latter, both manned and drone aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, Buffalo, and Philadelphia, among numerous other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection. These all being aspects of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol US borders for smugglers, trafficking, and illegal crossings. As widely reported in most major newspapers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, New York and The Los Angeles Times, under the claimed auspice of, “The agents in Portland are part of rapid deployment teams assembled by the Department of Homeland Security after Mr. Trump directed federal agencies to deploy additional personnel to protect statues, monuments and federal property during the continuing unrest." The teams, which include 2,000 officials from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, "are supporting the Federal Protective Service, an agency that already provides security at federal properties." These agents have been dispatched to Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., Customs and Border Protection have also sent drones, helicopters and planes to conduct surveillance of the protests across the country. But in truth, many of the arrests detailed in the articles contained herein are far removed from the federal sites in question, and no clear crimes are seen being committed in much of the footage or first-person accounts. In addition, as reported by the Los Angeles Times below, federal agents appeared to fire less-lethal munitions from slits in the facade of the federal courthouse, one officer walked the street while swinging a burning ball emitting tear gas, and camouflaged personnel drove in unmarked vans making arrests outside of the federal properties they are deployed to protect. Subsequently, Oregon state officials have a very different take on the motives and objectives of the dispatch of these federal troops, and have confronted the Justice Department and Homeland Security, "Portland Mayor to Trump: Get Your Troops Out of the City".
“Governor Brown said in an interview that she asked the acting homeland security secretary, Chad F. Wolf, to remove federal officials from the streets and that he refused. She said the Trump administration appeared to instead be using the situation for photo-ops to rally his supporters. “They are provoking confrontation for political purposes,” Ms. Brown said. Mr. Wolf, who arrived in Portland on Thursday, called the protesters a “violent mob” of anarchists emboldened by a lack of local enforcement. In response Wolf dispatched, “Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland”, and to which, "Portland Mayor Demands Trump Remove Federal Agents from City". In a statement, "Brown, said Trump was looking for a confrontation in the hopes of winning political points elsewhere, and for a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, which is causing rising numbers of infections in Oregon and across the nation. Brown’s spokesman, Charles Boyle, said arresting people without probable cause was “extraordinarily concerning and a violation of their civil liberties and constitutional rights”. The Oregon attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the US Department of Homeland Security, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Federal Protection Service, alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them. The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon said the federal agents appear to be violating people’s rights, which “should concern everyone in the United States”. But beyond generating content for the media cycle and current and future political campaigns, the normalizing effects of such misuses of power will have other far-reaching implications as noted by Jason Stanley, Yale philosophy professor and author of “How Fascism Works”. “Now, the spectacle should already worry us, because he did the spectacle in Lafayette Square,” Stanley writes, referring to Trump’s violent clearance of peaceful protesters from a park near the White House in June. "Then he did the spectacle in Portland. And when you allow too much spectacle, as it gets worse over time, people start to say, ‘This has been happening for awhile, what’s the big deal?’ The spectacle normalizes, and then you can’t tell - say it’s November - you can’t tell if it’s still spectacle any more."
Illustration credit: Daniel Zender
