I feel deeply apologetic about the state of the Portland anarchist scene, and how few good ways there are for new folks to plug in. A vast amount of infrastructure is now gone.

To understand this requires understanding three huge fucked up things that happened seven years ago:

1) The 2012 grand jury (and the squat raids that paralleled it).

2) Basically everyone left the Portland IWW over then-members defending Tomas The Child Molester

3) A shitty statement read in the Patriarchy In The Movement conference and some social capital games.

The Grand Jury raids targeted a number of my friends and send a number more anarchists to prison for refusing to testify. This meant that some of the best anarchists in town were missing for years. Plus Leah talked under pressure and didn't relay what she said, causing splits.

The Tomas affair was basically a textbook example of how not to handle shit. A shitbag admitted to sexually assaulting a child to his then-partner. A number of people in the wobs wanted "restorative justice" in a way that would keep Tomas at IWW shit or ran other cover.

Basically every single anarchist I knew in town, many of them longtime labor organizers, left the wobs over the bullshit. A remaining clique inside was eventually exposed as in league with the Sparts, a pro-NAMBLA trotskyist org.

Eventually, I am told, this clique was expelled and with the wob membership turnover almost none of the new membership knows anything about this history. But since all the labor organizers I know burned bridges with the IWW over this, I'm out of touch with the current chapter.

The Patriarchy In The Movement drama is simultaneously some of the most opaque shit to outsiders, but was by far the most consequential schism in portland activist history.

The fallout touched everything, affected every org collapse. Still splits everyone over 30.

Probably the most infuriating thing about the Patriarchy In The Movement shit was how it was aggressively misrepresented at the national level.

Many will remember this viral video where Kristian Williams was chanted down by a group of younger queer folk.

To understand that event -- and the astonishing cross ideological coalition of good old boys in anarchy who collaborated to shape national narratives about it -- we have to go back to the beginning.

Once upon a time a friend of mine was in a hella abusive relationship. Her partner at the time was an outright physically violent shitbag. This much is contested by no one. We did a whole coordinated operation to get her moved out safely and quickly with him distracted.

Into this context comes a wob with a ton of social capital at the national level, Peter Little.

Pete decides he's gonna handle the accountability of the violent abuser, act as a go-between to relay the needs of the survivor from her circle of support.

Pete was, not so incidentally, *friends* with the abuser.

And what followed was a long period of misrepresentation to the survivor and her support while spreading lies about the survivor through his national social capital networks.

The sheer level of manipulation and aggressive badmouthing of the survivor in order to run cover for his friend was pretty much only revealed at once after it had been going on for a long while. Phone tree level shit.

And when Pete's behavior starts to come out two of the local orgs (now deceased as a result) he was in went to bat for him. Hella 503 & Bring The Ruckus.

They play a "we'll look into his behavior" game. Meanwhile the social capital games go into overdrive against the survivor.

Among the fun things that happened involved an even more prominent white old boy anarchist saying 'it sucks but survivors are just too broken to be allowed to stay in the anarchist movement, they're just crazy and disruptive', plus doxing an antifa activist "accidentally"

(This is also broadly around the time a local antiracist activist got shot in an attempted assassination and then-local neonazi Trigger Tom tried to create a list of local anarchists along with addresses, etc, on Stormfront for cops / fash death squads)

Anyway as a consequence of the wider defenses of Pete's bullshit / closing ranks / lying about the survivor in the radical milieu shit started to fall apart. A ton of people returned their grant money to the Institute for Anarchist Studies in protest of their ties to this stuff.

MEANWHILE, kinda outside the established portland anarchist scene proper, Occupy had been happening. Eventually bringing a ton of new people into the anarchist movement, whereupon many were learning, 'oh shit, the scene often fall short of our values and ideals re patriarchy.'

Out of all this comes a conference, Patriarchy In The Movement. To talk about the ways radicals can fall short and build solidarity towards struggling for something better.

Well the folks on Pete's team feel existentially threatened by this...

They're *certain* they're gonna get called out at this conference, that it's all about them, so they preemptively draft a statement to counter that.

Towards the end of the conference, having not been called out, they have a non-man representative interrupt & read the statement.

It's fuckin TERRIBLE. A ton of baited leading rhetorical questions like "must we ALWAYS believe survivors?" "are survivors ALWAYS right?" all the standard basic whaddaboutisms and strawmanning every alt-lite youtuber pulls.

The conference attendees are all pissed.

What had just been some quiet background national-level whispering against a survivor to defend ye old boys suddenly spat in the faces of every survivor in every activist scene in the PNW far beyond the older pdx anarchist circles where shit had been initially brewing.

And who edited & contributed to that statement? Kristian Williams.

Kristian, it should be said, was a friendly acquaintance of mine at the time, we kickboxed together, were both heavily involved in the political repression committee responding to the grand jury.

At the next meeting a number of us that were friendly towards Kristian tried to ask him about his rumored heavy involvement in the statement. I stress, we were being deeply sincerely charitable, trying to understand him.

He clammed the fuck up and utterly refused to engage.

We didn't come at it like an inquisition, we were trying to find a resolution, some level of rapprochement. Looking for some way to resolve the tensions. There were poly relationships at stake. People didn't want the coming schism.

Kristian chose his side.

And thereupon Kristian published some incredibly disingenuous accounts.

Many anarchists will remember this piece which still gets widely shared on a national level. The first five paragraphs are stunningly deliberately misleading account of shit: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kristian-williams-the-politics-of-denunciation

The theory content of that piece is deeply skewed and framed to present some trivially valid points so as to get outsiders around the nation to read their local grievances into the PDX situation at the time. And so a flurry of "have you heard about these crazy bitches" commenced.

One of the most amusing consequences of this was that while the Old Boys joining ranks in Portland against the feminists were mostly stodgy red anarchists or even at worst maoists, they saw loud and impassioned defenses from many nihilists and postleftists outside the PNW.

When Kristian's panel at PSU was protested by younger queer kids (and the cops were called on the protesters) basically every old white dude anarchist in america made a facebook post decrying the kids and tut-tuting about how bad things were getting.

In the following two years I was twice invited into older, richer, more social capital'd anarchist circles and essentially had book deals dangled in front of me with the implicit rider that I had to play nice.

I've been airing dirty laundry and chucking molotovs ever since.

One thing that Kristian didn't misrepresent however, was how utterly apocalyptic the Patriarchy In The Movement drama was for the Portland scene.

It broke this city, it demolished orgs (a good thing), and it made it impossible to organize anything across the anarchist scene.

To simplify a complex tapestry the pdx scene fractured on Syndicalist & Bookchinist versus Insurrecto & Antifascist lines (more representing social circles than ideology proper).

And this schism killed businesses, projects, orgs, etc. Contributed to the Red & Black's death.

(Another other side of the Red & Black's death was that Rose City Antifa called out a truther at CityBikes who was platforming holocaust denialism, CityBikes refused to kick him and fought RCA, with R&B siding with RCA and losing business for it.)

Anyway, all of this is a major part of why there's no large and accessible anarchist institutions in Portland to onboard new people. And why much of the older generation in the background is split so viciously between Team Bitter Bitches and Team Good Old Boys.

Additionally when many of the grand jury targets finally returned they've been sidelined and ridiculed by younger folks who had Old Boys whispering in their ear.

I mean an ancom with almost two decades' work this city got called a cop by kids at occupy ICE who didn't know him.

So the fractured landscape of portland has contributed to fractured epistemologies.

I don't have any issue with the young folk in the IWW who have no memory of the Tomas fight or PITM, but it's also disheartening.

It feels like we can never LEARN from the past or build on it.