Photos by Doug Brown/Portland Mercury.
Around 4:30 p.m. on Friday, Portland police received a call regarding a disturbance on an eastbound MAX Train. A man who had been shouting racial obscenities and slurs at two young women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, had stabbed one person and slashed the throat of two others who had tried to intervene in his ranting and get him to leave the two girls alone. Two of those involved in the stabbing have died; one is expected to recover.
The man accused of the stabbing is one Jeremy Christian, a local right-wing extremist and white supremacist.
Perhaps ironically, the reason Christian is known to be a white supremacist is due to his appearance at a right-wing "March for Free Speech" in Portland, at which he threatened to shoot anyone, including police, who attempted to disarm him.
He was pictured at the event giving a Nazi salute:
So he loves free speech in which he gets to scream racial slurs and harass people on a bus, but is so outraged by others using their right to free speech to tell him to shut the hell up that he stabbed them to death.
Christian's Facebook page was found to be filled with racist memes, hate speech, anti-semitism and all manner of vile grossness.
Via Southern Poverty Law Center:
This past April 19, the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Christian praised Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh writing, “May all the Gods Bless Timothy McVeigh a TRUE PATRIOT!!!” In February 2016 he wrote, “I'm sure most of you don't remember but the American Nazi Party was taking care of a stretch of highway in Oregon about 10 years ago until ODOT took down their sign. Apparently Nazis don't have the freedom to exercise their civic duties in this State. Why? Because we live in a Fascist Police State run By "Liberal" "Multicultural" NAZIS!!!”
I feel like it's important to note here that his attitude is perfectly in line with the Right's new definition of free speech and the First Amendment. Not the stabbing, really, so much as the "You have the right to say offensive things to people, but if they tell you to shut up or refuse to listen to you or boycott your TV show's sponsors, they are violating your First Amendment rights" -- rather than the traditional definition of free speech being the government not being allowed to JAIL YOU for saying something they don't like. They've turned "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" into "If you disagree with what I say, you must keep that to yourself and instead defend me and how super great and smart I am for saying the awful thing I just said. And also watch my TV show and buy my products." Bullshit has consequences, and this is turning out to be one of them.
This, by the way, is the second stabbing murder committed by a white supremacist in the span of a week. Richard Collins III, an African-American Second Lieutenant in the US Army about to graduate from Bowie State University, was stabbed to death last Saturday by Sean Urbanski -- a University of Maryland student who belonged to a Facebook group called “Alt-Reich: Nation” -- for refusing to "step left" when told to.
Via The Nation:
Collins waited for an Uber ride along with two friends who were students at UMD at an on-campus bus stop. Urbanski walked up to them, and, according to witnesses, said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” Collins simply replied, “No.” He stood his ground. Urbanski then stabbed him in the chest and fled the scene. Collins died at the hospital.
Earlier this year, another white supremacist, James Harris Jackson stabbed 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Times Square as part of a plan he had to go around killing black men in order to dissuade them from having sex with white women.
Three's a trend? Violence from white supremacists has been a major problem in our country for decades, but there has absolutely been an uptick in these kinds of hate crimes since Trump's election. I'm not going to claim that he is responsible in the way that he is personally suggesting that racists go out and stab people they don't like -- but the fact is that, as a result of this past election, these people now feel that they, their views, and their anger are more culturally validated and shared by more people than they ever have been before.
[Photos by Doug Brown/Portland Mercury. Portland Mercury | SPLC]
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