ExtremismPortland and Kenosha Violence Was Predictable – and Preventable

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Published 16 September 2020

The U.S. reached a deadly moment in protests over racial injustice, as back-to-back shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, on 25 August and 29 took the lives of three people and seriously injured another. It was tragic – but not surprising. The shooters and victims in Kenosha and Portland reflect an escalating risk of spontaneous violence as heavily armed citizen vigilantes and individuals mobilize at demonstrations and protests.

The U.S. reached a deadly moment in protests over racial injustice, as back-to-back shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, on Aug. 25 and 29 took the lives of three people and seriously injured another.

It was tragic – but not surprising.

The alleged shooters were at the protests for different reasons: One was a pro-police supporter who believed he was protecting local businesses in Kenosha and the other an “antifa supporter” and “fixture of anti-police demonstrations”  in Portland. The victims included apparent supporters of Black Lives Matter protests and a supporter of a far-right group. Together, they reflect an escalating risk of spontaneous violence as heavily armed citizen vigilantes and individuals mobilize at demonstrations and protests.

As a scholar of extremism and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, I have spent the past few months watching people mobilize across the political spectrum – about Second Amendment rights, state shelter-in-place orders and police brutality, and in reaction to those protests – while leaders respond insufficiently to the threat of violence.

Foreseeable Conflict
I wasn’t the only one expecting violence. In mid-July, terrorism expert J.J. McNab testified before Congress about her concern “that there will be a shootout at one or more of the Black Lives Matter protests,” warning of the dangers of having heavily armed groups with conflicting goals at the same events.

The danger existed long before that, though. In my new book, “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right,” I explain that the past three years – from the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, through mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso to this more recent violence – have shown the growing activity of the extremist fringe in U.S. society.

Yet over the past year, the presence of a wide range of militia and vigilante groups has repeatedly caught local communities and national leaders unprepared to handle the threat they pose.

The pandemic has changed some things: The threat from planned extremist violence, like in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 and Poway, California the following month, is probably lower now – in part because there are fewer large public gatherings for extremists to target. But the threat of spontaneous violence – especially at protests organized around racial injustice and police brutality – is high.