PORTLAND, Ore. -- Police arrested at least 13 people and seized metal poles, bear spray and other weapons Saturday as hundreds of far-right protesters and anti-fascist counterdemonstrators swarmed downtown Portland.
Authorities closed bridges and streets to try to keep the rival groups apart. President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday that "Portland is being watched very closely" and that the government was considering naming the anti-fascists known as antifa "an organization of terror."
Joe Biggs, a member of the all-male Proud Boys, said he had organized the "End Domestic Terrorism" rally in response to the beating of conservative writer Andy Ngo in clashes at Portland in June. Many people have blamed masked antifa members for the beating, which was captured on video. No one has been charged in the assault, which police are investigating.
Biggs, a former writer for the right-wing Infowars website, said before the rally that his goal was to provoke antifa members. "I want them to be violent, and I'm just going to sit there and take it, and everyone's going to see who antifa really is," he said.
After the rally, when a reporter with The Oregonian asked whether that message had been conveyed, Biggs replied: "Go look at President Trump's Twitter. He talked about Portland, said he's watching antifa. That's all we wanted. We wanted national attention, and we got it."
Rose City Antifa, which is based in Portland and is one of the oldest and most organized antifa groups, had encouraged its followers to attend the rally.
By early afternoon, most of the right-wing groups -- the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters militia group and others -- had left the area via a downtown bridge. Police used officers on bikes and in riot gear to keep black-clad, helmet- and mask-wearing antifa members from following those groups.
Hundreds of people remained in the downtown area and on nearby streets in the afternoon, and there were some skirmishes. Portland police spokeswoman Lt. Tina Jones said one person was injured and was transported via ambulance.
In the days leading up the event, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said people who espoused hate or engaged in violence were "not welcome."
Not all who gathered Saturday were with right-wing groups or antifa. Members of the group Popular Mobilization, or Pop Mob, dressed as animals, a dinosaur and a giant banana, along with jugglers and a brass band.
Organizer Effie Baum said the goal was to combat white supremacists without the violence employed by members of antifa, calling the Proud Boys a "western chauvinist" group.
"A lot of their toxic masculinity and macho posturing can be combated by laughing at them and humiliating them," Baum said.
Patriot Prayer's Joey Gibson, who organized similar right-wing rallies in 2017 and 2018 that broke into clashes, surrendered Friday on an arrest warrant of felony rioting. He appeared at the rally Saturday.
Gibson has accused Portland police of playing politics by arresting him but not the demonstrators who beat up Ngo on June 29. The police and the mayor have repeatedly said they would not target any political group but rather would seek to stop any violence.
The Proud Boys, who take their name from the song "Proud of Your Boy" from the stage version of Disney's Aladdin, have clashed with antifa before. Two members of the group are on trial in New York after being charged with attempted assault in an attack on people believed to be members of antifa.
In addition to the Proud Boys and Three Percenters -- whose name is derived from the notion that only 3% of American colonists fought against the British in the Revolutionary War -- the white nationalist American Guard also said it would have members in Portland.
The Oath Keepers, another far-right militia group, said in a statement that it would not attend the rally because organizers had not done enough to keep white supremacist groups away.
"It would be best for the patriot/conservative cause if this August 17 rally were simply canceled," the group's founder, Stewart Rhodes, wrote last week.
Randy Blazak, a Portland-based expert on far-right extremism, said white supremacists go to Portland partly because of the city's reputation for upholding the right of free speech, and partly because the city's population is predominantly white.
"It fits the larger narrative that these white nationalists aren't going up against oppressed minorities, they're going up against entitled white middle-class young people who are oppressing their First Amendment rights," Blazak said.
Trump late Saturday appeared to support the notion that antifa is oppressing Americans' constitutional rights, retweeting Republican Dan Bongino's argument that "antifa" means "anti-First Amendment."
Information for this article was contributed by Gillian Flaccus of The Associated Press; by Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs of The New York Times; and by Richard Read of the Los Angeles Times.
A Section on 08/18/2019