Antifa attacks female reporter in Portland!

PORTLAND, Oregon (PNN) - August 25, 2021 - This past Sunday, while covering a protest in Portland, Oregon, a reporter named Maranie Staab was attacked by members of an Antifa-affiliated group. After complaining about a report she’d done in Colombia in conjunction with TK News, they maced her, shot paint at her, and threw her to the ground.

The backdrop for this scene was explained to TK readers this past weekend in their latest episode of Activism, Uncensored called The Great American Fistfight. After a series of violent street clashes between Left and Right activists in Los Angeles, Right-wing protesters planned a “United We Win” rally in Portland, Oregon, for this past weekend. Antifa and Left-wing groups pledged to “defend Portland from racist fascists.”

The whole day turned out to be a mess, replete with violent confrontations and ending with an exchange of gunfire, in which a Right-wing protester fired first (a Black Bloc protester returned fire but was not apprehended). Staab, it should be noted, was also first sprayed with WD-40 by a Right-wing protester. But the more serious incident took place later.

In the relevant sequence, an Antifa-affiliated protester called Staab a kutta (a Hindi word meaning, “dog”) and “slut.” Then the masked protester demanded that press “get the f*ck out” and stop filming, pointing in Staab’s face and making the following bizarre comment about a story called Colombia in Chaos:

“You f*cking endanger people by flying to f*cking Colombia and endangering everyone by opening them up to COVID.”

Beyond the total incoherence of that comment, calling a woman a name like “slut” obviously flies in the face of what antifascist protesters generally claim to be their beliefs about things like misogyny. In any case, Staab then approached the protesters without her cameras out to try to talk things through, at which point they tossed paint at her, maced her, and threw her to the ground. Eventually they also smashed both her iPhone and the lens for her digital camera. “Out!” they screamed. “How many f*cking times do we have to tell you?”

Having encountered Antifa-type protesters in the past, my impression was always that they were neither organized nor terribly numerous, and I always found them more ridiculous than threatening. I too have had the experience of being ordered not to photograph or film Antifa protesters, instructions that always made me wonder about the intelligence level of these people.

Yes, putting masks on prevents you from being identified, but it doesn’t confer the right of invisibility. Also, if you show up at a publicly-announced protest in a public place in broad daylight dressed like GWAR roadies or extras to a Terry Gilliam movie and start smashing things, one really has to wonder about the sincerity of your commitment to anonymity. Someone is going to film you, whether it’s the Right-wing counter-protesters on the other side or the terrorist pig thug cops, and in the case of the press, it’s actually their job to do it in a responsible way. You have a right to wear a mask; they have both the right and the obligation to film you, that’s how this works.

Nonetheless, antifascist thugs have taken their absurd demands of non-coverage quite far in the past, making lists of protester-approved media and going after reporters and videographers from papers like local CBS and ABC affiliates as well as the Washington Post, NPR, the Toronto Sun, and others. Their rationale is that filming hurts their cause by making them vulnerable either to arrest or doxing, a dubious concept one could argue on multiple levels, but again, that’s what masks are for. Moreover - and I know this can be a hard concept - cameras generally help public protests, with the exception being when activists behave stupidly or unattractively in public. If you don’t do things like knock female reporters to the ground, you’re probably not going to end up dealing with negative press.

If the protesters from this past weekend had any integrity, they would come forward and start with an apology. There’s no excuse for attacking press, especially when your modus operandi is moronic attention-grabbing public stunts. To say I’m furious about the events of this weekend would be an understatement. It also doesn’t say a lot about the ethics of mainstream press outlets that they let behavior like this go without comment.