The Conservative Trans Woman Who Went Undercover With Antifa in Portland
A trans woman, conservative, and former tugboat captain who says she's "a weird activist/analyst-type person right now," Smith soon became galvanized to find out more about a group that dressed as revolutionaries and took their fight to the streets. What was animating them? Trump animus? The romance of revolution? The boredom and frustration of COVID sequestration? An unfocused desire to
up?
When the feds were in Portland, they were presented as overreacting, a presentation helped by innumerable people with PRESS written across their clothing flooding the internet with images that presented protesters wholly as victims of an authoritarian regime.
That's their [antifa's] objective. It's not a tactical thing. That's why all the "press" is there, the sympathetic press. They're trying to create propaganda. They know how the police are going to react, so they carefully calibrate what they do to try to provoke the police into reacting and then filming it. They want to try to push public opinion in favor of removing the police. The police aren't perfect, but what a police force is, it's putting force under an objective third party, under government control. Antifa wants to separate the police from the populace.
People think antifa and they picture people in black. Antifa is bigger than that. Black bloc is a tactic. Dressing in black, it's a tactic. You don't have to dress in black to be antifa. You don't even have to hit the streets. There are people who work in tech, hackers who never hit the streets, and they're still antifa. [The media] play these little word games, "Oh, antifa doesn't exist." Yes and no. It's not an organization where you have to sign up for a membership. It's one of those things where it's just a loose-knit network of people.
I wouldn't say the majority of people in Portland are sympathetic to antifa, but you've got a lot of people that either are apathetic or don't think it matters or they're scared. You put all of those people together, maybe you have a majority. There's a woman running for mayor that is openly pro-antifa, a woman who was photographed wearing a skirt with Chairman Mao's face on it. It could be that Portland is the place where antifa goes Main Street.