Patriot Coalition: Leaked Messages Show Far-Right Group's Plans for Portland Violence

[icymist]

September 23, 2020
Far-Right
Portland
The summer of 2020 has seen the city of Portland, Oregon, become a symbol and a venue for the further, dramatic polarization of the United States. More than a hundred nights of intense protests against police violence by left-wing activists have led to further police violence in response, and to President Donald Trump declaring the city a “beehive of terrorists” and an “anarchist jurisdiction.” A great deal of reporting has been dedicated to the city’s leftist protesters. Less national attention has been focused on those who perceive the protesters as their enemies: a network of “Patriot” militias and extremist groups, who have in recent weeks been staging violent confrontations in Portland’s downtown streets.

Bellingcat has acquired several months of chat logs from the Patriot Coalition of Oregon, a network of pro-Trump, pro-police activists. These chat logs were provided by an infiltrator affiliated with the antifascist collective Eugene Antifa. We were also given login information for the infiltrator’s account on GroupMe, a secure messaging app owned by Microsoft. This allowed us to directly observe the group’s communications, to verify the information provided to us and to export a log of those chats directly from the application. (Many posts contain spelling and grammatical errors, which we have not altered.)

These logs provide an intimate look inside a growing insurgent network, and shed new light on episodes of armed conflict which are already on the public record. Topics of conversation include plans for violence in the streets of Portland, celebration of acts of thuggery and even discussions about harming elected leaders and journalists. More than anything, the chats catalog the rapid radicalization of Patriot Coalition’s membership, many of whom express a willingness to kill their perceived left-wing enemies.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/09/23/patriot-coalition-far-right-chat-logs-violence/

Long article, but worth the read. Very informative.

[The Magistrate]

1. That Is A Good Site, Ma'am

I recall them from the invasion of Ukraine --- their exposure of Russian propaganda was superb.

[icymist]

2. Thank you. This is some scary stuff here.

I'm having a hard time digesting that these are Americans actually talking about harming and killing other Americans over political beliefs. The part that seems to bother me most is that some of them actually believe they are patriots' by planning and committing this violence. The paranoia and neurosis they have astounds:

Members also refer to the patrols to prevent Antifa from starting fires as “hunting” and talk about setting up “game cameras” to watch certain areas.

T.Durden then added his belief that the second amendment was written for situations like this: “so we the people could hold our elected officials to account for their wrong doing.”

He wrote: “Oregon Voting!! Where are the votes collected?? How many registered voters are there?? Will we be watching the collection station for weird crap like truck loads of votes coming in in the middle of the night?? I’m not even sure if we can vote in person in Oregon. If so where?? There is a LOT more to this ‘war’ than smashing heads in and making trophy ear and tooth necklaces.”

This is crazy!

[wnylib]

3. Should the authors turn over this info to the FBI

for monitoring, or would the FBI be constrained by how it was obtained? The group is discussing plans for domestic terrorism. I'm thinking that this article should at least be given widespread media coverage, but then I also don't like the idea of giving these domestic terrorists more publicity.