The story of Ben Kerensa, the loutish and violent Antifa activist who conspired with others to attack citizen journalist Mike Strickland to violently prevent him from filming a Don’t Shoot Portland/Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, has taken yet another – ironic – turn.
You’ll recall that Strickland was attacked by ‘protesters’ who, according to court testimony, conspired to confront and attack the successful YouTuber who kept a close and skeptical eye on Portland’s protest culture.
Strickland covered Portland’s Professional Protesters, Inc.™* for years without incident. On July 7, 2016, however, activists decided Strickland needed to go. They surrounded Strickland and hit him with, among other things, Antifa flag sticks to harm and intimidate him and push him away from the protest. Kerensa led this effort.
Strickland filmed throughout the attack and afterwards. When multiple activists came back to attack him again, Strickland, a licensed conceal/carry permit holder, drew his pistol. No shots were fired and no one else, except Strickland, was hurt. Strickland, a well-trained gun owner, showed a poised discipline and never let his finger get close to the trigger. For defending himself against a band of thugs bent on stopping him from performing a First-Amendment-protected activity, Strickland was arrested, jailed and convicted for drawing his weapon. His case is on appeal.
Four months later – four months! – and mere days after the days’ long violent anti-Trump protests seen on national news, yet another nation-wide, orchestrated ‘protest’ was planned in Portland concerning the Dakota Pipeline.
Kerensa was filming the protest that day and was told by a Portland Police sergeant that it was illegal to film a cop. That’s patently untrue and Kerensa knew it. He filed a complaint against the sergeant. Though cops are allowed to lie to the public – what, you didn’t know that? – the officer, who claimed he lied to de-escalate the protest, an understandable move after an avalanche of violent protests, was found to have to have violated the spirit of truthiness (or something) required by the Citizens Oversight Board. In January of 2018, the ironically-named Police Chief, Danielle Outlaw, ratified the findings of the Board.
Now comes December 2018 and the Portland Police Citizens Review Committee, having taken none of the violent protest history into consideration, voted to sustain Kerensa’s complaint against the sergeant. The Oregonian reported:
Committee members said they were perplexed by the captain’s reasoning for her finding, even though Sgt. Erin Smith acknowledged he misrepresented the law to get protester Benjamin Kerensa to stop videotaping him during a Nov. 30, 2016 demonstration in front of fuel storage facilities in Northwest Portland over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Kerensa, who is thought by activists to be a police ‘snitch,’ said he had every right to film the protest:
“I had the constitutional right to film the police. There’s no circumstances [sic] where an officer should be allowed to infringe on First Amendment rights.’’
It is a First Amendment protected activity to film protests, something Kerensa violently ignored only four months before.
But, just as Portland Judge Thomas Ryan did before in the Strickland case, the Review Committee ignored reality to take the word of an Antifa thug, bomb hoaxer, police impersonator and violent felon over the word of a cop, whose job we thought was to protect people from violent people like Benjamin Kerensa.
Let’s leave the Committee’s idiocy aside for a second and go to my main point of this post. The ironic and retch-inducing cant of this thug cannot be overstated. Four months after he attacked Strickland for filming a protest and violently deprived him of his First Amendment rights, Kerensa himself was filming a protest and piously stood on the Constitution for his right to film a protest and a cop.
One got the support of Portland leadership. The other didn’t.
Strickland was jailed for defending himself against a Kerensa-led violent mob bent on beating him again. Kerensa is viewed as some sort of freedom fighter and is embraced by the ACLU (which never lifted a finger to help Strickland).
Only in Portland.
Editor’s note:
As I’ve chronicled here and will continue to do, Kerensa’s bizarre attempts to reinvent himself into a public do-gooder reveal him as a fabulist and dangerous man. Now the convicted bomb threat hoaxer, hacker, thug and police and FBI impersonator has reinvented himself into a practicing Muslim.
*sarcasm
