Go beyond keeping protests peaceful, Portland, pretend ICE headquarters is invisible. By Portland resident Hal M. Brown If anything leave them our famous Voodoo Doughnuts.

The slogan above is derived from an American antiwar slogan from the hippie subculture during the Vietnam War era. It was popularized by Charlotte E. Keyes in her 1966 article for McCall’s magazine titled “Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came.” It was also the title of a movie.

Trump has gone beyond declaring war on American democracy, on us. He is currently engaged in waging this war. The ICE building in Portland (pictured below) has become a symbol of his war here in my city. 

Because of this, our current antiwar protestors are gathering there to express their outrage.

Trump and his Gestapo couldn’t be happier about this. Here in Portland, we have a temporary reprieve as long as they abide by Judge Karin Immergut’s order.

This gives the major influencers in Portland and Oregon, the mayor, governor, police chief, and others a chance to mount a major campaign to make sure protests are small and peaceful. We must not give them reasons to claim that we are the war-torn city they want to depict us as.

Like so many people who feel strongly about an issue, Portlanders don’t want to be told not to do something. There will be those who want to be one of the “handful” of protestors at the ICE building. It should be easy to make sure those who do go there are peaceful, but keeping the group so small it could be barely called a crowd will be a challenge.

There are plenty of places to protest in and around downtown Portland. There’s no way to get around the fact that this building is symbolic. It is really tempting to protest there. I urge resisting the temptation.

In Chicago yesterday supposedly one or more people tried to ram ICE vehicles with their cars. This led to a woman being shot. This is the absolute worst way to protest. In Chicago, Portland, and elsewhere we must not to give federal agents or troops any reason to react with violence. 

I think it is vital that whatever these agents of authoritarianism do is documented but mostly this happens out in the community. In what I think is an architecturally ugly building in Portland, here’s what they are doing:

The office is where ICE agents take people after they’re arrested and before they’re sent to a long-term detention facility. It also serves as a place for immigrants to do required check-ins with immigration authorities and for other immigration-related appointments.

“People go in there for various kinds of interviews,” said Robert Brown, a volunteer with the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition.

U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Democrat who represents portions of Portland and the rest of Oregon’s 1st Congressional District, recently toured the building with other members of Congress. They were told about 70 people go through the field office each month for processing, she said.

The building also has temporary cells where people are held while they’re being processed. (From article)

In the Portland building they are probably consuming our famous VooDoo Doughuts.

I suggest that if anyone wants to go to the ICE building they go bearing the gift of VooDoo Donuts. Leave them at the front door. Tempt the agents to eat these delicious Portland treats.

Let them feed their faces, dress up like they’re about to raid a drug kingpin’s lair, and leave the building and see

They WANT to see protestors. It gives them a thrill. It makes them feel powerful. It is best to ignore them. After all they are just coming and going into a building. It is best to make sure their activities are documented when they do their actual dirty work.

Trump and his Gestapo henchmen / henchwomen want Portland to give them a party so they can happily dance in swinging their big black assault rifles. They want that party. They want a war with us. That would be their party. I ask what would happen if they gave a party and nobody came?

Addendum:

Because of a jog in the city boundries even though I’m a half hour drive from downtown I have a Portland address. Therefore I can honestly say I am a Portlander even though I really live in a suburb.

I have a VooDoo Doughnuts strore oless than a mile from where I live:

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That anyone would even think of sending the 82nd Airborne to Portland should send chills of terror down the spines of all democracy loving Americans, By Hal M. Brown

 

The foreground above is from Spartan Military Prints and the background is from a tourist website showing a typical Portland street screen with a colorfully painted building like many others in the downtown area. That I would even take the time to put this together is nothing short of horrifying.

Not having any idea what to write I just read this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other Trump officials entertained sending the U.S. Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to respond to protests in what the president has referred to as “war-ravaged“ Portland, Oregon, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday night.

Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Anthony Salisbury — in exchanges over the third-party messaging app Signal that were reportedly viewable from a “crowded, public space” in Minnesota — texted with officials such as Hegseth’s adviser Patrick Weaver, who wrote that the defense secretary wanted Trump to explicitly tell him to send troops into Portland.

“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver wrote.

Weaver described the 82nd Airborne — an infantry division that has parachuted into combat zones ranging from World War I and II to wars in the Middle East — as the “top tier” rapid reaction force abroad.

“So it will cause a lot of headlines,” he wrote. “Probably why he wants potus to tell him to do it.”

Below is the illustration the Daily Beast (subscription) used for their article:

Note that they are calling this “Signalgate 2.0” because this will be the second time this app was used for messages meant to be confidential. This is hardly the main story here, and I say this not just because I live in Portland and yesterday walking back from dinner we heard a helicopter above and looked up and saw it was military. I said I wonder if it is headed downtown and then realized it was going away from the city. Perhaps it had already been there. That we would even think this way is horrendous, but on Oct. 1st there was this article:

If the 82nd Airborne comes to Portland we may be seeing these: 

Not only are these airborne death bringing machines meant for actual warfare, but when they fly overhead making a loud roar impossible to ignore, they can intimidating as hell if you fear them. 

Most of us have heard them around here. Sometimes they belong to our National Guard on exercises, though more often they are the decidely friendly looking Coast Guard Blackhawks which we know are meant to be live savers and not life takers. We see them all the time when we go to the Vancouver Waterfront Park where they often fly over the Columbia River.

Addendum:

Here are a few of the comments to the HUFFPOST article:

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Trump is the Baby Balloon enabled, unleashed, and unrestrained, By Hal M. Brown

 

The skin is the largest human organ. 

Look up Trump and thin skinned and you will find how many people, including his psychologist cousin Mary Trump, have described his, metaphorically, as extremely thin skinned.

Clicking above will enlarge the image. You can look up the articles yourself.

Trump had to endure a number of abrasions to his thin skin in recent years. He had to sit through the Correspondent’s Dinner where he was roundly roasted by Barack Obama. He also had to sit through the entire E. Jean Carroll trial (but at least he got a useful mug shot photo out of this). And he had to suffer the indignation of the Russia election meddling probe which suggested he needed their help to be the winner he has all of his self-esteem invested in claiming to be. 

I think one thing that got to him more than may be obvious is the famous Baby Balloon. (See Wikipedia where the entry about it is part of their series about him.)

I can’t find an estimate of how many mini-versions of the balloon were sold. Let’s say it was a lot and Trump couldn’t have been pleased about this. This is from this TPM 2018 article:

Here’s another:

I have no doubt Trump was well aware of the balloons and, as someone who has had great success marketing himself, he no doubt was cognizant that people were making money mocking him with a decidedly unflattering depiction of him in a diaper.

What is open to speculation is whether this got to him in a deeper way, in a way he wasn’t consciously aware of. Harsh and punitive toilet training is often considered by experts to be detremential to healthy personality development. Here’s a Google search.

Click below to enlarge:

Whether one wants to take a Freudian view or not, it is clear that being depicted as a tantrum throwing baby, not only with large helium filled balloons which make the news, but with smaller balloons at protests (sold for as little as $10 on Amazon) has to get to him at some level. 

He fancies himself the master of the insult, so if he see himself being called “Diaper Don” if he’s honest with himself he’d recognize that this is a damn good one. I think it is far better than Shifty Shift, Pocahontas, Ron DeSanctimonious, Kamabla, and even Sleepy Joe (See the entire list here and judge for yourself.) In fact, I think it is one of the best insulting nicknames for any politician since Tricky Dick.

What the country is being subjected to now is this mentally warped leader acting like a anally impaired fixated baby having tantrums unleashing his rage. His target isn’t his parents. It is enemies, whether real people like James Comey, random brown skinned people, women in general, poor people, or unfortunate possible drug smugglers in speed boats. 

Addendum:

This is unrelated to this particular Substack, but Sabrina Haake brought it to my attention as worth sharing. I agree:

I have often referenced quotes from Sun Tzu as he does. 

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