I have a family member who lives a mile or so from the Portland riot epicenter. He hasn’t participated himself, but gets his reports online and from friends (who may or may not have firsthand experience, not clear). He’s been a life-long leftist and longtime Portland resident. He’s a great guy when he’s not talking about politics or health.

I just talked with him for the fist time since the riots started, and thought people might be interested in how things are being viewed “behind enemy lines.”

For the record, he’s perennially hard-up for money, is highly intelligent (in an impractical way), considers himself utterly counter-culture, yet maintains a (presumably digital) subscription to the New York Times. Make of that what you will.

Note that I completely avoided the topic of the riots in our talk because I know he’s still on the default hard-left Portland side, and connecting with family is more important than politics (I’ve made sure he has no clue I’ve long been a total Trump supporter). So this is all stuff he apparently felt compelled to share with me. It was fascinating to see things from his point of view.

Here we go:

• Homeland Security is occupying the city because President Trump is overreacting. Trump is overreacting because he watches Fox News, who is overdramatizing the situation.

• The riots are completely contained in a few-block radius, and “conservative news coverage” is blowing it out of proportion. Life is basically normal in Portland.

• He sometimes can smell tear gas, and it’s noisy with helicopters and the sound of flash-bangs etc. He commented on several bangs as we were talking.

• There were one or two nights of looting at the beginning, but that was caused by the anomaly of white people coming in from the suburbs. Now it’s just peaceful protesters being unilaterally attacked by the authorities.

• The protests are “nonviolent mask-wearing family events” until they get tear-gassed, at which point antifa goes nuts.

• This is good, because it keeps the riot police occupied so the families and disabled protesters can escape.

• Each time they tear-gas the protesters the protests get bigger.

• Around midnight is when the “nice normal protesters” go home, after which the “testosterone crazed antifa types” get in conflict with the police. He says he’s irritated at both sides for this part, so at least he’s not in the camps that either deify or deny the existence of antifa. He told me a while ago that what antifa does seems to depend on who you ask, so he’s at least aware that differing opinions exist about our black-clad defenders of peace. So there’s that.

So essentially if Trump would just turn off the TV, Homeland Security could then go home and stop escalating the work of the peaceful, family, disabled protesters, and life would return to normal.

Except that it’s already normal because these riots are so localized that it’s no big deal at all. So little of a deal that he needs to expound about them to me at length to make sure I know how little of a deal they are. With the sound of flash-bangs in the distance.

So calm down everybody, turns out we’re just overreacting!