By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well folks, it’s official, Donald Trump has declared war on America. Probably should have saw that coming. After all, I’ve long argued that our dayglow duce isn’t an isolationist but merely the world’s shittiest imperialist. After trying and failing miserably to bring fascism to Nicaragua and Venezuela, Trump has set his sites on targets much more suited to his America First brand of colonialism. The one war our asshole in chief has managed to wage successfully after all has been the federal government’s war on undocumented brown children. He may have failed to give Israel Iran but he succeeded swimmingly at giving ICE Aztlan, setting up a veritable gulag archipelago of Chuckie Cheese concentration camps on the Rio Grande that would make Woodrow Wilson wet with envy. Now he’s sicking those same feds on America’s more belligerent third world neighborhoods, turning Seattle and Detroit into Managua and Caracas in a sad and evil attempt to fellate his flaccid poll numbers by publicly thrashing black people and their allies for demanding an end to police state apartheid.

In no metropolis has this spectacle of tyranny been more blatantly grotesque than in the throbbing streets of Portlandia, where a long tradition of protest and direct action has been met with all the bleak and eerie force of an Orwellian dystopia. Crowds of mothers, hipsters, activists, and veterans have been repeatedly provoked into defending their right to free assembly nightly by category 4 storms of teargas, rubber bullets, and flashbang devices, often fired directly into waves of unarmed civilians. A bevy of unmarked mystery meat in full combat regalia has swelled the streets in formation like paunchy, Slim Jim chomping, gestapo in heat. Some of them cruising the café lined avenues in windowless glorified rape vans, kidnapping random baristas and disappearing them like Operation Condor while a swarm of hopefully unarmed drones watched it all unfold from above. This is the kind of war Trump believes he can win. Portlandistan! Where the war comes to you…

Thank god for anarchists, who live to prove pompous bullies wrong. Every time the feds picked a fight with peaceful protesters, furious gutter punks in black weren’t far behind to throw it back at them like a fucking teargas canister, victoriously denying Trump his cheap victory by making fools of his overarmed goons with little more than keffiyehs, firecrackers, and that attitude the Bad Brains use to shout about. Daniel Ortega should be proud. Say what you want about these kids but for 60 days Trump brought the war home and for 60 days these motherfuckers fed it back to him. Now he’s forced to take Portlandistan on the road with his tail between his legs.

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