On Saturday, February 19, activist Brandy Knightly was shot and killed, allegedly by a fascist gunman, Benjamin Smith, at a Portland protest. Smith is also accused of shooting four other protesters as a “Justice for Patrick Kimmons” march was about to begin. Kimmons, a 27-year-old Black man, was murdered by Portland pigs in 2018. People were also protesting the “no-knock-warrant” murder by Minneapolis police of Amir Locke on February 2, 2022.

A crew of women was working to set up a safety plan and reroute traffic a block or two ahead of the marchers. Dajah Beck, one of the  women in the crew, said a man came up to them and screamed that they were “violent terrorists,” repeatedly called them a misogynist vulgarity, and accused them of being responsible for violence in the city. According to Beck, the man said, “If I see you come past my house, I’ll shoot you.” Brandy “June” Knightly, who was also part of the women’s crew, then said, “You’re not going to scare us. You’re not going to intimidate us.” This was when, according to Beck, the man, 43-year-old Benjamin Smith, shot Knightly in the face. She died on the scene. Smith also shot and wounded four others.

Brandy Knightly, a 60-year-old white woman originally from New Orleans, had become involved in protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020—like tens of thousands of other people of all backgrounds across the country. On her Facebook page, Knightly had posted information about feeding “unhoused people” in Portland and efforts to obtain winter clothing for people in need. In October, she wrote, “We’re no better than Mississippi, et al. Oregon is fraught with racism too, at every level.” She became an active part of the struggle, and was known for paying “particular attention to helping people with disabilities or others who were vulnerable” and for defusing confrontational situations.¹ A friend described her as “a warm, giving and kind person who spent time trying to think of things she could do to make the world better and to make herself better in the world.”²

Smith has been charged with one count of murder in the second degree with a firearm, four counts of attempted murder in the first degree with a firearm, two counts of assault in the first degree with a firearm, and two counts of assault in the second degree with a firearm.

Beck wrote on Twitter, “We were unarmed traffic safety volunteers… Four women trying to de-escalate & he unloaded a 45 into us because he didn’t like being asked to leave and stop calling us terrorist c*nts. We were in high vis and dresses.”

Beck recorded the whole encounter on a GoPro attached to her motorcycle helmet, and this footage was taken by the police. A prosecutor in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office told a court later in the day that the video clearly documents an unprovoked rampage.

The video shows that Smith approached the women and confronted them, “yelling at them and demanding they leave the area,” prosecutors wrote. The women can be heard on the recording telling Smith “to leave them alone and return home.” Smith responds “by demanding they ‘make’ him leave and he approaches a participant aggressively, who pushes him back,” according to the prosecutors. Smith “continues to yell at participants and a few moments later … draws a handgun and fires at multiple people, striking five.”³

The shooting stopped when another protester reportedly shot Smith in his hip. Smith has been in the hospital in serious condition.

According to a police affidavit, one victim was struck in the neck and was in critical condition, paralyzed from the neck down; another person was struck in several places and was also hospitalized; and two others who were also struck were later released from the hospital.

The victims and other witnesses said that the attack had been unprovoked and that those shot by Smith had been unarmed. The next day people were outraged when the Portland police issued a press release saying the incident had “started with a confrontation between an armed homeowner and armed protesters.” In fact, Smith was not a “homeowner” but lived in an apartment he rented near the route of the planned protest march.

Smith’s roommate, Kristine Christenson, said she had lived with him for seven years and that Smith “talked about wanting to go shoot commies and antifa all the friggin’ time… He was angry at the mask mandates, he was angry at the damned liberals… Living with him has been getting progressively worse… I honestly have not felt very safe around him. His anger has gotten worse.” Christenson said Smith wore a shirt that said “Kyle Rittenhouse true patriot,” referring to the fascist who shot and killed two men and wounded two others at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. She said Smith had become increasingly rabid during the years of the Trump administration and that she sometimes heard him “yelling racial slurs in his room and deriding women.” A neighbor recounted that Smith threatened a homeless man with a gun for rummaging through trash bins.⁴

This murderous attack by a fascist gunman on unarmed activists is yet another act of fascist vigilante terror—an increasingly familiar pattern in Portland as well as other cities.⁵

But that’s not how the cops, media and Portland political leaders are presenting it.

Portland’s Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler described what happened as “another senseless act of gun violence.” In the face of actual evidence to the contrary, police described it as an “an argument between armed protesters and an armed homeowner.” The Associated Press concluded an article on the shooting with three paragraphs on the “plague of gun violence… fueled by gang-related arguments, drug deals gone wrong and disputes among homeless people.” The New York Times actually validated and amplified the fascist gunman’s “complaints” about protests in the city—after noting that even the Portland cops acknowledge using violence against protesters 6,000 times in 2020, the Times identifies the problem as protesters, writing that “the constant clashes, especially the ones that have devolved into vandalism, have exasperated many Portland residents, including the mayor.” ⁶

This whole incident and the aftermath show that there is no limit to the violence that the fascist forces will unleash against those who stand up for justice in this society… and, apparently, no limit to the contortions that liberal media and politicians will go through to deny and cover for this.