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HERE & ABROAD
❧ DEEP DIVE: INTERVIEW — Trump tells Hegseth to send troops to Portland❧
On Saturday, President Trump posted to Truth Social that he was ordering troops to “War ravaged Portland.” By Sunday, Reuters reported that the Pentagon had called up 200 Oregon National Guard troops.
Back on planet Earth, Portland is nowhere near war. What the city has seen is consistent anti-ICE protests since June, but they have been relatively miniscule, drawing dozens, not hundreds, and largely focused on a single ICE building in South Portland. There have been skirmishes between protesters and ICE agents, though according to The Oregonian, a Portland Police Bureau assistant chief testified that at least some of the clashes have been “instigated” by ICE. Federal agents have used chemical munitions against the handful of protesters, so many that a resident of a nearby apartment complained that they were seeping into his home. Yet he was in support of the protesters, telling The Oregonian that Trump sending troops to the city is “ridiculous.”
Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 2
As Trump sends troops to more and more American cities, the largely peaceful Portland may not seem like the obvious next choice. Within the past week, a gunman opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing one person and injuring two others, and there was a shooting at a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Mich. that left four people dead and eight injured. Both of these are serious acts of violence that Trump could use as (still flimsy, still transparent) cover for putting boots on the ground.
But Trump and Portland have history: what political journalist Laura Jedeed called “unfinished business” from 2020. Jedeed is a veteran and a previous Portland resident who spent 2020 producing incredible reporting on the city’s Black Lives Matter protests. I called her up to get her read on the situation. An edited version of our conversation follows:
Emily Carmichael: First, why Portland?
Laura Jedeed: I am personally surprised it took him this long… I mean, it was the center of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest. That’s where he sent the federal agents in. Eventually he had to take them back out after the entire city basically said no and protested for a month. I was there for all of it. It was horrific, the feds were very violent, but he didn’t really accomplish what he meant to. He never really cowed the city. So there has been unfinished business there for him, and I’m not shocked that he wants to go back and maybe try to do it again.
EC: Every city has its own set of social and political features that are unique to it and will interact uniquely with Trump policy, especially something like sending in troops. What are those features in Portland?
LJ: Portland has a really, I think, unique legacy of anti-fascism in that they were kind of the epicenter for the Nazi-punks-fuck-off thing. Basically, in the 80s with the punk scene, there were these street brawls between the skinheads and the anti-fascist punks, and that legacy has carried on today. And on one hand, you know, that’s cool. Portland doesn’t put up with BS. They’re a very strongly anti-fascist community. On the other hand, it is a slightly less nuanced approach to the problem with fascism.
Read the rest of our conversation at the end of this newsletter.
Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 4, Issue 2
❧ In Other News ❧
❧THE RAPTURE DIDN’T HAPPEN. A nonzero portion of the population thought Tuesday, September 23, was going to be our last day on Earth, spawning RaptureTok as they prepared for the end of the world. We have lived to see another day, but Trump did seem to be moved by some kind of spirit on Tuesday as he gave an aggressive speech at the United Nations in New York City, telling European leaders, to their faces, that their “countries are going to hell” because of their migration policies. He later accused the UN building of shutting down an escalator he was riding, a nefarious plot to make the president fall forward and scratch his face. In a divine moment of creative inspiration, Trump’s followers have dubbed the affair escalatorgate. One word.
Art by Maxwell James from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 2, Issue 6
❧ MOLDOVAN PRIESTS ARE THE NEW RUSSIAN BOTS? We’re all familiar with Russia’s election interference toolkit: disinformation, cyberattacks, bots galore. Priests, I guess, are the logical next step. Reuters reported that Russia enticed Russian Orthodox clergy in Moldova with all-expenses-paid trips to religious sites in Moscow, then gave them gift cards with an upwards of $1,000. In return, the clergy had to start Telegram channels within their church community that pushed anti-western, anti-LGBTQ content. You know, the usual “Gay people will destroy your Christian lifestyle” schtick. Russia wants to pull Moldova, a previous member of the Soviet Union that has been courting the European Union, closer to Moscow. The country of 2.4 million held parliamentary elections on Sunday, pitting the ruling, pro-EU Party of Action and Solidarity, against the pro-Moscow Patriotic Electoral Bloc coalition. Still, it seems bribing priests isn’t the most effective tactic: the pro-EU party won a “clear parliamentary majority,” reports the Associated Press.
As you read this, a flotilla of over 40 boats, representing over 40 nations, are heading toward Gaza with aid. These intrepid civilians—among them, Greta Thunberg—plan to take on the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The stakes are high: though they are yet to arrive at the blockade, the flotilla has already sustained drone attacks. Current Affairs spoke with flotilla member Tommy Marcus as he sailed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Marcus has built a resume that includes getting “refugees safe passage from Afghanistan,” using “Airbnb to funnel cash to civilians under attack in Ukraine,” and “raising over $30 million for a variety of humanitarian causes.”
❧ In More News ❧
❧ RIP ASSATA SHAKUR, 1947-2025. An influential writer and Black Liberation activist, and Tupac Shakur’s godmother, Shakur is famous for her revolutionary book, Assata: An Autobiography. The book tells of her work as an activist and her legendary escape from prison after being convicted (wrongfully so, she writes) of murdering a police officer on the New Jersey Turnpike. Shakur fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum. She died in Havana on September 25 at age 78. FBI Director Kash Patel responded to the news with the same kind of vitriol that Shakur faced from the federal government throughout her life, tweeting, “Mourning her is spitting on the badge and the blood of every cop who gave their life in service.” That’s a lot of hate for a woman who once wrote this:
i believe in living.
i believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
i believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs;
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
i believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
i believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
Excerpted from “i believe in living.” Read the rest here.
Art by Aleksandra Waliszewska from Current Affairs Magazine, Vol. 4, Issue 4
❧ERIC ADAMS DROPS OUT OF NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL RACE. On Tuesday, New York City weirdo and crook — sorry, Mayor — Eric Adams was campaigning, as usual, for re-election, attending shul for the Jewish New Year and wearing a jacket that verged on camp, embroidered with huge Stars of David (Adams is not Jewish). On Sunday, after weeks polling in the single digits, Adams dropped his bid for re-election. His exit means Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo will now face off in November, mano-a-mano(-a-Curtis-Sliwa). Cuomo, who trails Mamdani in polls by double digits, is just hoping to pick up a few of Adams’ votes, while Mamdani has technically landed a Kamala Harris endorsement (she refused to say his name). The democratic socialist has recently gotten a small nudge from his left, however: former presidential candidate Ralph Nader is urging Mamdani to put his money where his mouth is and support a measure to tax every trade made on Wall Street.
“His influence will be felt for many, many years after he reluctantly leaves the public eye[...] wherever a new business is opening or 9/11 is happening, he’ll be there. Wherever there are haters who become waiters at your table of success, he’ll be there. And wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy (that one still works), he’ll be there too, congratulating the cop on a job well done.”
EC: A lot of local officials have been saying that Trump is trying to bait Portland and pleading with Portlanders not to take the bait. What do you make of that?
LJ: Portland, Portland knows itself. […] There’s the dynamic, first of all, where the government is more moderate than the protesters. But secondly, it is because the protest scene in Portland tends to be very spectacle heavy. A permitted march—they might refer to it as a parade. Generally speaking, the Portland protest scene believes that if you want to change things, civil disobedience is the way to do it.
I do think the idea that Portland is violent is very silly. Property destruction is a thing that happens in Portland. I’m not saying it’s never been violent, either. But mostly when people talk about how violent Portland is, what they mean is that protesters tend to be somewhat destructive of property, and so I think that the Portland officials are quite sensibly worried that if Trump sends troops in here as a provocation, then protesters will react in the same way that they’ve reacted historically, which is to go on and have civil disobedience style protests that involve breaking things, confrontations. Basically, camera ready for the kind of propaganda the Trump regime would like to create.
Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 2, Issue 6
EC: How aware do you think Trump is of this propensity for spectacle?
LJ: First of all, one can never know what’s in that man’s mind, to the extent that there are things in that man’s mind. […] But Portland is THE Antifa place in the mind of, I think, the country, and certainly in the mind of Trump, because of 2020. And so I think there’s a very good possibility they’re specifically hoping to set up a spectacle involving Antifa — like a person in [a] black bloc doing something that’s going to scare the country. I think it’s hard to think of any other reason why they would go in. This is a tiny protest, and in a single part of town, it’s just hard to imagine any other reason you’d want to go in there aside from petty revenge.
EC: This appears to be one cog in a larger operation to deploy the guard nationally, which in itself is just one part of this larger pattern of unprecedented federal overreach by the Trump administration. I’m curious what you make of this pattern.
LJ: I think that Trump’s declaration of antifa as domestic terror, and then following up with the national security order that basically tells the national security apparatus to go after people with a laundry list of beliefs that people on the left believe — like that there are more than two genders, and that trans people are valid, and that maybe the U.S. has made some mistakes in the past. These opinions are now, officially in his directive, considered sponsoring or encouraging terrorism, and I think the goal is to shut down dissent. And the question of exactly how that’s going to shake out is an open one, but they’re moving very rapidly in that direction, and I’m very concerned. Whether he ends up going into Portland or not, It seems like the goal is to freeze dissent.
Laura reached out to me after last Sunday night’s larger protests in Portland and wanted to add, “It's wonderful to see Portland rise to the occasion, as they did when federal agents came to the city in 2020. Hundreds are now standing up to Trump in peaceful defiance of his ridiculous narrative.”
Image: “Approaching Hedgehog” by Charlie From Bristol is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK
Hedgehogs make history
Our animal fact this week comes courtesy of a Bluesky post by Jack Graham, a co-host of the podcast “I Don’t Speak German,” vis-a-vis Current Affairs associate editor Alex Skopic, who called this fact “outstanding.” The name “hedgehog” first appeared around 1450 in England, as feudalism was giving way to capitalism and land was being cordoned off with, you guessed it, hedges. And that’s exactly where you’d find these pig-nosed (hence, the “-hog”) critters, living in these new plant walls. Yes, the term “hedgehog” literally documents the rise of capitalism. What’s more, “hedge” could carry a negative connotation, associated with the margins of society and the peasantry. By dubbing them hedgehogs, we have to assume that property owners were being condescending to one of the cutest mammals to ever live—so not classy, so new money.
Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Alex Skopic and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Nathan J. Robinson. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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