It is the case that the journalist who’s been covering a story but cannot be at the story stays glued to the story, and if she’s lucky, gets two people who were there to talk to her the next day. Hannah Ray Lambert, digital reporter for KOIN-TV in Portland, and Jeremy Lee Quinn, founder of and on-the-scene reporter for Public Report, were each kind enough to give me some of their time this morning.
Lambert’s been covering the protests since May and yesterday headed to Salem, the assumption being, because of what happened in DC on the 6th, that state capitols would come under assault. Turned out the action was in Portland, including attacking Democratic Party headquarters. Quinn started the day in Sacramento, but had a sense he should hop a plane to Portland, and did.
Two quotes from this morning, which hopefully dispel the idea that the protesters, of the type we are seeing here, have any appetite whatsoever for the Dems:
Quinn: “What was scrawled on the garage door of Nancy Pelosi’s home was, ‘WE WANT EVERYTHING’; they chanted that [last night] - I had never heard that one before - amongst the other chants, that were anti-Biden and anti-government. The unifying talking point that was going out before the inauguration for the West Coast anarchist/Antifa-aligned groups was, ‘No Prisons, No Police, No Presidents.’”
Lambert: “There’s no shortage of causes to get people out there. Even figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not radical enough. In one of the speeches after the initial smashing of Democratic headquarters, there was a speaker who was saying, ‘Even AOC is not good enough for us.’ It’s very far left. Nobody is really going to make them happy who’s in establishment politics right now.”
I’ve been on the ground with Lambert, who also produced the report that showed, of the 1000 protest-related arrests in Portland from May through October, charges were dropped 91% of the time; she and I talk about whether she sees this changing. (Spoiler alert: probably not.) I’ve not (yet!) met Quinn, but I did watch his interview, right after the Capitol rampage, with Bret Weinstein; link below (and, covering some of the same territory, my appearance with Bret last fall).
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