Left Coast Right Watch is a California-based news site covering politics and extremism.

On Monday, August 24, 2020 at approximately 1:00 PM a flyer began circulating on popular social media sites calling for a protest at 1401 Broadway in San Diego, California (San Diego Police Department Headquarters at 5:00 PM to show solidarity with protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Outrage over the August 23, 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man from Wisconsin, sparked protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Tensions were high as hundreds of people marched through Oakland on Wednesday evening to protest against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23. Speakers led the crowd in chanting the names of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Oakland’s own Oscar Grant who was killed by BART police in 2008.

The swelling crowd looms up and hits me psychically like a wave I couldn’t tell was too damn big.

“CHILD LIVES MATTER!”

“AGAIN!”

“CHILD LIVES MATTER!

On every corner of Hollywood and Vine, the foam from an internet swell hisses in my ears. I can’t even hear their babble for the semi-coherent conspiracy theories they’re evangelizing. It’s just the wash of the crazy tide. It’s Ten in the fucking morning and it’s over 95 degrees out. There’s hundreds of people. They’re like a single amoebic life form bubbling and grasping everything they can around it. They ritualistically all cross from their street corners into the middle of the intersection when the lights turn red and parade around with all their banners and signs and flags.

“SAVE THE CHILDREN. DESTROY THE PREDATORS,” one sign reads. “#PIZZAGATE,” another reads.

15 August 2020.

With a ululating war cry the assembling crowd takes the block and declares, "No cops. No prisons. Total abolition."

Video by James O'Ryan pic.twitter.com/in2rjpURfo

— LEFT COAST 𝘾𝘼𝘽𝘼𝙇 WATCH (@LCRWnews) August 25, 2020

An unusual scene began during a Black Lives Matter protest at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. Among the activists manning the western barricade, word rapidly spread that Proud Boys or some other form of alt-right militia was approaching the edge of the action in a limousine with a camera crew. Protesters and press alike couldn’t seem to believe what they were hearing and a decent size crowd formed behind the barricade.

Los Angeles sees itself as an idyllic melting pot. Every few miles is an entirely new community. Each town has its own individual culture and history. Many residents shelter in their own neighborhood’s bubble and have an unrealistic assumption that L.A. is free of racism and bigotry. But it’s right next door.

Residents of Tujunga and neighboring La Crescenta know all too well of the city’s past as a hotbed of white supremacy within L.A. County. Others do not.

Among various white supremacist groups in the area: Knights of The Ku Klux Klan, Atomwaffen Division, skinheads, Hells Angels, Peckerwoods.

Kenton Park is a rolling, twelve acre, green-space in this tightly-packed city. People from the neighborhood had begun quietly assembling on Sunday, August 9 2020, in socially-distanced and masked groups at the north end of the park since around 6 PM. Unlike the visually packed spaces in the city center so famous from national and international headlines, this scene is more reminiscent of pastoral, little “a” anarchists on holiday during the plague times. Another stark contrast to what national news shows and talking heads discuss, this crowd is noticeably diverse. Portland is a majority white city in the whitest state in the country. The larger number of BIPOC activists present here is indicative of both the neighborhood and the continuing dedication of activists of color to not only control the narrative but to create it.

It started with the Douglas County Public Library’s relatively benign proposed statement against bigotry.

“The Douglas County Public Library denounces all acts of racism, violence and disregard for human rights. We support #BlackLivesMatter,” the statement reads in part.

“Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help. I wish you good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior,” Sheriff Daniel J. Coverley said in a letter to the library’s board of trustees.