By The Intrepid in Nosideism — 13 Apr 2025

Portland Still Gets the Spotlight (Field Notes of an FPV Drone)

8:12 a.m.
The tea’s just starting to steep. The dog’s doing that thing where she paws my elbow until I look at her, then forgets what she wanted. Outside, the city slowly wakes. The bridges haven’t moved. But something did.

It’s been a week since Portland’s April 5 showing—10,000 people, give or take, stepping out across the steel and concrete arteries that hold the city together. I didn’t march that time. I watched. Read. Cross-checked turnout claims while petting the dog. This isn’t a dispatch from the front. It’s more like piloting a drone with a shaky signal—trying to follow the shape of things from just far enough above to see the pattern. And maybe ask:

Help me understand how we got here.

I. The Math That Doesn’t Feel Like Protest

Organizers say 10,000. X says 12. Media says little. Depending on which Portland you mean—city proper? metro sprawl? the unincorporated zones near Clackamas?—that turnout is either a symbolic groundswell or a rounding error. I ran the numbers. The 2% claim doesn’t hold. But 1.6% of city dwellers is nothing to scoff at. That’s still a mass of bodies moving in rhythm. Still ripples.

The number’s wobbly. The feeling’s not.

II. What the Other 98% Remember

8:49 a.m.
The tea’s gone lukewarm. The dog’s snoring now, twitching through whatever dreamscape rescue dogs wander—maybe chasing a bird across a desert sky, maybe just reliving yesterday’s walkies. I glance again at footage from last weekend: chants under overpasses, people waving handmade signs with shaky marker lines.

2020 left a mark here that no protest infographic fully accounts for. Not just on the plywood windows and the boarded-up businesses, but in the nervous system of the city. For a hundred nights, Portland became a national spectacle: tear gas curling through downtown, unmarked vans scooping folks off the sidewalk, press badges turned into targets. “Antifa playground,” the pundits called it. “Ground zero.” And then they moved on.

But the city didn’t. The people who live here—the other 98% who weren’t out last week—remember what that season cost them. Rent checks that didn’t land. A restaurant job that never came back. The creeping feeling that your city’s story was no longer your own.

They’re not uninterested. They’re just tired of being the canvas.

Not everyone wants to be a symbol.

Interlude: From the Other Side of the Gorge

Last Saturday, 12:47 p.m.
I wasn’t on the bridge. I was across the river, sitting in a coffee shop in Bingen, Washington, with a pastry that flaked just right and a mug that stayed warm in both hands. The clouds were doing that Columbia River thing—sweeping low and fast, like they had somewhere better to be.

Later there was BBQ in Hood River. Someone’s kid was chasing a dog. Folks stood in line, trying to figure out what on the menu wouldn’t be sold out by the time they got to the counter. The protests felt a million miles away—but not unimportant. Just… somewhere else. Someone else’s Saturday.

III. DOGE and the Limits of the Blue Bubble

10:35 a.m.
I think about last week‘s protest signs—“Save Our Social Security,” “No to DOGE,” “Hands Off My Check”—and about the tariff whiplash and Treasury yields.

In Portland, DOGE—the Defense of Government Entitlements working group, spearheaded by Elon Musk and greenlit by executive order—remains the villain of the day. Protesters treated it like a sentient monster, capable of dismantling retirement systems with a few keystrokes. Maybe they’re not wrong.

But Portland’s blue bubble isn’t where that fight will be won or lost.

The city’s elected officials already stand opposed. Senators Wyden and Merkley, Representatives like Salinas and Bonamici—they’ve made their positions clear: Social Security stays. Musk’s austerity bots can shove it. Protest signs in Waterfront Park are, at best, reinforcement. At worst, ritualized shouting into an already sympathetic canyon.

The battle lines are east of the Cascades. North of the Columbia. In towns like Kennewick, in counties where people bristle at the word “entitlement.” The algorithmic shears of DOGE cut deepest where people already feel cut off. Yet they vote as they always have.

I don’t fault the marchers. Symbolic action still matters. But it’s not Portland’s senators who need swaying. It’s the swing-state moderates and district-straddling Democrats doing electoral calculus. The ones who read their hometown’s letters to the editor before reading your tweet. The ones who will trade a vote against DOGE for a vote in favor of something more visible—like border security or the SAFE Act.

The bubble isn’t the enemy. But it isn’t the front line either.

IV. On Surveillance, Cynicism, and Staying Home Anyway

Last Saturday, 4:03 p.m.
The food coma had long set in by the time I checked in on my feeds. A few new messages—reminders to scrub metadata, to wear masks even outdoors, to avoid live-posting from the ground. It felt familiar. Like a safety drill from a job I used to have. Muscle memory laced with something colder.

Nobody I know is under the illusion that we’re not being watched.

The protest opsec packets this time weren’t revolutionary—just recycled lessons from 2020, updated for a world where AI does the scraping and the data never really disappears. Facial recognition doesn’t care if you meant well. And those “free actors”—bad-faith agitators, clout chasers, militia-curious onlookers—don’t care if your chant was peaceful. All it takes is one moment, out of context, repackaged for someone else’s narrative.

It’s not fear so much as fatigue. The kind that settles in your joints. The kind that keeps people from marching not because they disagree, but because they can already see the post-game footage being weaponized.

So they stay home. Or walk the protest route without signs. Or hover on the edge with sunglasses and no phone, watching. Or they just spend their Saturday in Bingen, sipping coffee and letting the march pass like weather.

This doesn’t mean the movement is dead. Just quieter. More subterranean. Less about spectacle and more about persistence.

And maybe that’s the adjustment we’re all learning to make: knowing that every action is observed, sometimes recorded, often misunderstood—and deciding to move anyway. Or not. And making peace with whichever choice you land on.

V. Transparency Clause (for the Record)

10:55 a.m.
I wasn’t at the march. I didn’t organize, chant, or livestream. I didn’t wear black or blue. I drank coffee, pet the dog, read posts, checked turnout math, and watched the clouds. I’m not claiming neutrality—just distance. Sometimes chosen, sometimes inherited.

I support the goals of the movement. I worry about what happens if it fades. I worry just as much about what happens when it’s ignored, misread, or hollowed out by media fatigue. I’m suspicious of charismatic narratives and cautious around stats that sound too clean. I like questions better than declarations.

I don’t speak for anyone but myself. I’ve lived in and near this city long enough to remember when protests didn’t conjure memories of ozone and tactical gear. I’ve seen good people get chewed up by movements and by institutions. I’ve made spreadsheets when I could’ve made calls. I’ve stayed home when I could’ve showed up.

This isn’t guilt. It’s just gravity.

So here’s where I’m coming from:

I believe Social Security should be protected, not privatized or gamified by tech billionaires.
I believe surveillance chills action, even when the action is just.
I believe Portland carries too much symbolic weight, and that weight breaks things.
I believe the dog knows something I don’t.