Case of Portland Man Who Defended Himself Against Antifa Mob Heads to Supreme Court
By Victoria Taft Sep 02, 2020 9:31 AM EST
AP Photo/Craig Mitchelldyer
For those who angrily wonder why someone doesn’t just defend themselves against Portland antifa rioters, I want you to pull up a chair because I’ve got a story to tell you. It’s a story still in search of a happy ending.
Four years ago last month, Mike Strickland was just a Portland videographer, who pretty much had the Portland protest-culture beat all to himself. He took video used by national news outlets of the bizarre world of Portland campus culture, street protests, and Portland political double standards.
He knew all the characters. Antifa meshed with anarchists who knew Don’t Shoot Portland who cross-pollinated with Black Lives Matter who protested with the International Socialist Organization who were Occupy and the unions. Rinse, repeat. If you had a fist on your logo you were in the Portland Professional Protester™ club.
The regular protesters left Strickland mostly alone to do his job and they did theirs: protesting, making a mess, screaming, and breaking things. May Day was and continues to be their high holy day.
The Portland Mob Used to Leave Him Alone
And then July 7, 2016, happened. Now Strickland must fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to get the justice that all those Portland protesters pretended all these years to care about.
They didn’t really care, of course. The protesters hung out in the streets talking on bullhorns, absorbed with their own sense of self-importance. They knocked over trash cans, held drum circles, and pretended to care about civil rights. And they were against the man, maaaan.
At one of the usual protests that July, just four months before President Trump was elected and antifa went into full meltdown mode, they decided that Strickland, known online as “Laughing at Liberals,” was through with making fun of them. It was, as one anarchist told me, the only reason they went after him. Oh, and that he was a so-called snitch. Reporting the news is “snitching” to this crowd. Holding a mirror up to them to show them how dumb they look was an unforgivable sin of the first order. Strickland had to go. Court testimony proves they conspired to get the journalist tossed out of a protest on a public street. The irony and hypocrisy of denying a reporter his First Amendment right to cover the news never occurred to the people who were allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights to assemble in the middle of a public street.
But the Portland Mob Conspired to Remove Him Using Force
It bears noting that at the pre-function gathering of this Don’t Shoot Portland – Black Lives Matter – antifa rally, there were speakers who talked about shooting cops, being armed, and about the open-carry laws in Oregon.
I reported in PJ Media in April of this year about Strickland losing his case at the Oregon Appeals Court.
Strickland was [recording] the event as he usually did with all of his equipment – including his properly concealed pistol, a Glock, for which he had a concealed carry license.The treatment of Strickland was Kafka-esque. The Portland star chamber.
A mob of Antifa members surrounded him, roughed him up, and then told him, “You need to get the f**k out of here!” Even though Strickland backed away from the thugs in the larger protest, he continued to shoot video. As he was leaving, the mob of masked antifa thugs ran toward Strickland and tried to surround him. This time he pulled his pistol to back them off. No shots were ever fired; Strickland’s finger never came close to the trigger. His gambit worked, however. They backed off and Strickland got away from the mob, eventually being arrested by the cops. He was released with a citation.
Charges against him grew from two misdemeanors to 21 counts, ten of which were felonies, within hours of Portland politicos getting an earful from one of Strickland’s favorite targets, an anti-Second Amendment group called “Ceasefire Oregon.” The politicos also seemed to take on faith the word of one of the conspirators who insisted Strickland must be a racist, even though he knew better.
Welcome to Portland ‘Justice’
His attorneys thought it was a self-defense case, but it was really a First Amendment case with Second Amendment components. The team forsook a jury trial when it was discovered that most of the people questioned in voir dire were anti-gun. There was even a person in the jury pool who belonged to the same group holding the protest where Strickland was assaulted. Welcome to Portland justice. The team went with a bench trial, which meant that a Portland trial judge would decide Strickland’s guilt or innocence.
His Portland attorneys, as well as the rest of the Portland legal establishment, were stunned when Strickland was found guilty on all counts. It was an easy self-defense case. There was video of it. But he now faced more than 50 years in prison.
In the social intersectional pecking order we’re all supposed to measure life by now, Strickland, a white male, didn’t make into the Left’s politically correct Venn diagram. He was on the outs.
It’s easy to see now in light of the months of rioting, with so much attention focused on Portland, that somebody should have done something about the riotous mob by now. The sad story you see on the nightly news features a police force that isn’t allowed to enforce the law, flaccid leadership at city hall, self-righteous elected leaders, and a district attorney who tells the cops that even if they arrest these rioters, he’ll just let them out.
Portland Judge Throws the Book a Strickland for Defending Himself From Antifa and BLM Mob
Strickland got the worst of it all. He got no benefit of the doubt. People in high places lied about him in the media.
The judge threw the book at him. He was forced to surrender his gun. He would not be allowed to practice his First Amendment right to cover the news for four years. That meant he had no job. Strickland spent 40 days in jail. The mob cheered.
In April, he lost his appeal in the Oregon Appeals Court. This week the Oregon State Supreme Court denied reconsideration of his case. It now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court where there’s absolutely no guarantee it will be considered.
Strickland Relishes the Next Step ‘Bigly’
Strickland’s attorney, Robert Barnes, relishes the next step. He predicted all along that the case of the Portland videographer would go to the Supreme Court. He is looking forward to getting out of Oregon’s activist courts. Strickland struck a note of humor about this next step for his case.
“I was hoping the issues would be rectified at the state level, but now that it’s out of the hands of Kate Brown’s lackeys, my odds of being treated fairly likely increase bigly.”
