https://taibbi.substack.com/p/enough-is-enough-antifa-attacks-reporter
Antifa’s influence may be exaggerated, but it’s not a mythical Snuffleupagus, either, as they showed in attacking reporter Maranie Staab from our partner News2Share this past weekend.
This past Sunday, while covering a protest in Portland, Oregon for our video partner News2Share, a reporter named Maranie Staab was attacked by members of an Antifa-affiliated group. After complaining about a report she’d done in Colombia in conjunction with TK News, they maced her, shot paint at her, and threw her to the ground.
The backdrop for this scene was explained to TK readers this past weekend in our latest episode of “Activism, Uncensored” called “The Great American Fistfight.” After a series of violent street clashes between left and right activists in Los Angeles, right-wing protesters planned a “United We Win” rally in Portland, Oregon for this past weekend. Antifa and left-wing groups pledged to “defend Portland from racist fascists.” News2Share’s Ford Fischer predicted violence, and he unfortunately turned out to be right.
The exact sequence of events will be detailed in a longer report Ford has coming — the whole day turned out to be a mess, replete with violent confrontations and ending with an exchange of gunfire, in which a right-wing protester fired first (a Black Bloc protester returned fire but was not apprehended). Staab, it should be noted, was also first sprayed with WD-40 by a right-wing protester. But the more serious incident took place later.
In the relevant sequence, an Antifa-affiliated protester called Staab a kutta (a Hindi word meaning, “dog,” apparently) and “slut.” Then the masked protester demanded that press “get the fuck out” and stop filming, pointing in Staab’s face and making the following bizarre comment about a story we ran in July called “Colombia in Chaos”:
You fucking endanger people by flying to fucking Colombia and endangering everyone by opening them up to Covid!
Beyond the total incoherence of that comment generally, calling a woman a name like “slut” obviously flies in the face of what antifascist protesters generally claim to be their beliefs about things like misogyny. In any case, Staab then approached the protesters without her cameras out to try to talk things through, at which point they tossed paint at her, maced her, and threw her to the ground. Eventually, they also smashed both her iPhone and the lens for her digital camera. “Out!” they screamed. “How many fucking times do we have to tell you?”
