Portland by Day vs. Portland by Night

The Washington Post admits that Portland's Peaceful Protests grow more vicious after the cameramen of the national news media head home for the night.

An interesting question is whether night owls and day larks differ politically or in terms of naiveté?

I first started thinking about this issue in my February 2021 review of Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, when Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland claimed ignorance about the riots that happened night after night after night in Seattle and Portland in the Pacific time zone in 2020. After all, how was he supposed to know what was happening to federal facilities when he was sleeping? I wrote:

Seriously, if you watched only the carefully curated national news, you’d have gotten the impression that (a) Antifa doesn’t exist; (b) Antifa is a civic betterment movement led by the public-spirited Wall of Moms; and (c) The peaceful protesters of Antifa were the Gandhi-like victims of Trumpian brutality.

On the other hand, some of us who are Pacific time zone night owls watched hundreds of Andy Ngo videos of what was happening in Seattle and Portland during the wee hours long after the national media had called a lid on their coverage of the Peaceful Protests. In Ngo’s simple video footage, the Antifada sure looked extremist and terrorizing

Ngo, a brave Portland journalist, writes in his new best-seller Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy:

…reports from legacy media outlets focused heavily on the alleged “block party” atmosphere of the occupation, repeating a talking point from [Seattle] Mayor [Jenny] Durkan. “The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrectionists—it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world.”… Of course, when media crews arrived at the gates of CHAZ during the day, this might have been believable…. At night, a whole different side of CHAZ emerged when the media crews and outside visitors left.

But how could a federal judge of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals like Judge Garland see what was happening to federal courthouses at night?

It’s dark out there!

If domestic terrorism doesn’t happen before the evening news, it didn’t happen.

Now, in 2025, the Washington Post gets around to noticing the day vs. night distinction in Portland protesting vs. rioting:

By Robert Klemko and Joshua Partlow

… In the weeks since Trump said he would send the National Guard to the city, two distinctly different scenes have developed. During the day, a crowd of mostly homegrown activists stage deliberately absurd protests designed to provoke or embarrass government officials, wearing pajamas, inflatable animal costumes, or, if all goes right at the planned Naked Bike Ride on Sunday, nothing at all.

But at night, the scene often turns violent, with leftist demonstrators exchanging blows with counterprotesters, at times shoving or spitting on federal law enforcement officers, lobbing fireworks and attacking conservative influencers and journalists. Portland police have largely held back, stepping in sporadically to make targeted arrests rather than clearing the block, to the frustration of federal authorities.

Who knows what the national media might notice next about Portland’s Mostly Peaceful Protestors after a mere half decade of promoting them as the Last Refuge of Democracy, such as the extraordinary fraction of transgenders among Antifa rioters?