Q: What was it like for you to be exposed?
A: It was awful. I woke up and half of my friends were just gone. Everybody was talking about me. I got threats, I got told that I had to leave the city. It wasn’t exactly explicit, but it was implied that bad things would happen to me if I showed up at certain places.
lol
“I admired [Sgt. Niiya] because he was another person like myself who was doing a job that isn’t super-common—there’s not a lot of Asian cops. I admired him for it.”
the tactical problem of left-identitarianism in a nutshell
“It’s only certain people, hardcore anarchists, who have totally negative opinions toward the police and government.”
‘hardcore’ anarchists…as opposed to all the other anarchists who quite like them? Tbh this is where the whole “antifa is a broad church that welcomes everyone” stuff gets dangerous – you can’t be pro-cop and anti-fascist, these liberal poseurs need to gtfo, they are all snitches waiting to happen
Statement on Rose City Antifa’s Facebook page: The Willamette Week just published an article “What It’s Like to Betray Antifa to the Cops” by Katie Shepherd (we are not going to post a link) which gives an extremely distorted account of a person named Tan’s relationship with RCA and the Portland antifa community. Shepherd essentially uses this situation as an opportunity to craft a hit piece on antifa. Her narrative was so thoroughly cherry-picked that she was unable to use any of the statement we sent her other than one word “infiltrator” which was presented bereft of context. For that reason we have decided to publish the response we sent to Shepherd in its entirety.It should be noted that RCA has had a fraught relationship with WW for many years. This will be the third hit piece WW has published on our group. WW has a poor track record in general covering the left, often portraying activists unfavorably (ie- Cop Watch, In Other Words, and many others). Corey Pein was doing some good work for WW which gave us hope that the publication was perhaps improving and changing course post-Trump. In fact we altered our policy of not providing comment to WW, which had been in place since 2009 when James Pitkin published a piece portraying local white supremacists as innocent victims of RCA. At any rate, this latest hunk of sensationalist garbage hypes up a pretty mundane situation with Tan into an opportunity to trot out some standard stereotypes about antifa as well as to create a fearful, distrustful environment among protestors. Guess the WW leopard never changes its spots. Here’s what we said to Shepherd:“Describing Tan as having "participated” in our group is incorrect. Our group is a well-vetted collective of anti-fascist activists. Tan has never been part of that collective.One aspect of our collective’s anti-fascist activism is staging events. Many people outside of our immediate group show up at our events, which are generally open to the public. Riot cops, in full uniform, come to
our events whether we like it or not.The presence of police and their agents at our events is a serious concern, just as it is at all protests. It serves to intimidate activists, and repress those fighting for justice. For people protesting in this day and age, the presence of law enforcement and malicious agents of all kinds is now accepted only in the form of a risk that cannot be avoided. As always, we encourage activists to seek out good security culture, and organize only with those they know and trust.Without getting too deep into specifics, I would say that the sort of information about our group that an agent could pick up by inter-mixing into the crowd at our public events is pretty limited. It would be about the same that the riot cops might gain, just by observing the crowd. Police agents mixing with the crowd at protests is a constant concern. So while we do not take police repression of activists lightly, we certainly wouldn’t treat this one infiltrator as a danger above and beyond the standard danger of state repression. And, if this one particular person stops showing up to Portland protests, we would certainly not consider that that danger has decreased.“
Mooncustafer 