Last Saturday night, 48-year-old Gabe Johnson was in his Portland home trying to sleep. Johnson lives in downtown Portland, a block away from the Justice Center, an area which has seen ongoing protests for just about two months.
He was in bed trying to sleep, but noise from the protests outside kept him awake. He counted 82 explosions in all that night. His air conditioner was running and thus bringing in air from the outside through the vents. Soon his home was overtaken by tear gas from the street below.
That’s when he decided he needed to take action. The next day, around noontime, he took several American flags and went down to the protests.
Up until that point he believed the protests were peaceful. He found soon after arriving that they were anything but.
“…I can tell you the experience was eye-opening,” Johnson told PJ Media during an interview. “I did not believe what I used to call the rhetoric about ANTIFA. I was thinking that maybe they’re just, you know, some punk kids or whatever it was, some righteous anger in there. I quickly found out that that’s not the case.”
Johnson, who worked for the Department of State after an eight-year career in the U.S. Marines has served a lot of duty overseas. He says ANTIFA anarchists in Portland are using the same tactics he’s seen used by terrorists overseas.
“They’re utilizing the same tactics that any other terrorist organization would,” he said. “They’ve got spotters with cameras that will follow you around, and they’ve got their thugs. Those are the guys with the baseball bats. They have people that will intimidate you in Black Lives Matter attire…the Black Lives Matter movement has turned into something else. Antifa has attached itself to this movement now and it’s taken it over.”
Johnson says he is not a conservative and does not support Donald Trump. He considers himself a moderate who is tired of watching America come apart at the seams.
“It’s beyond me how they can sit there and say that they’re not causing damage or rioting,” he says. “It’s a riot, and it’s real, and when you are on the front line and you’re looking back into that crowd, it is an angry mob that is built on doing as much destruction as possible.”
“Unfortunately, 90% of the people don’t look like me, but 99% of the people that I talk to don’t even live in Portland,” he says. “If you are down here at one of these movements or one of these protests, one of the things you’re going to notice is there’s a lot of out-of-state license plates. People are very brazen about the fact that no, they’re not from here.”
Johnson went down to the protests with his flag to start a conversation with people, he says. To exchange ideas.
Instead, he said he was both assaulted, both verbally and physically.
Protesters called him a coon, Uncle Tom, and the n-word—”with the -ER, not -a,” he says.
Several people stole his flags and stomped them on the ground. When an older black man, around 65 years old, grabbed one of the flags and handed it back to Johnson, a protester punched the man in the face and ran off.
Johnson now says that Portland police should use any means necessary, including force, to stop the riots and end the ongoing violence.
You can listen to the interview with Johnson here.
Photo by Tedder