Today in Cleetus Safaris

The media just can’t get enough of interviewing white conservatives. It’s a drug. Here’s the Oregon edition:

In the town of Gresham, 15 miles from the urban canyons of downtown Portland, Bonnie Johnson, a member of a Republican precinct committee, is on a waiting list for her first firearm, a Smith & Wesson revolver.

“I didn’t even want a gun,” said Ms. Johnson who grew up in the neighboring town of Boring. “But when you see all that’s going on in Portland, it scares you.”

Ms. Johnson took part in a flag-waving demonstration on Wednesday evening, joining a group of 50 or so people, many of them wearing hats and T-shirts in support of President Trump. They gathered at the Gresham civic center to show their patriotism and mourn the death of Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer who was shot on Saturday amid clashes between protesters from the right and left.

As a line of people beside Ms. Johnson waved American flags on a sidewalk, passing motorists honked in support, or in some cases raised a middle finger and shouted insults.

Wow, a Republican activists supports Republicans and hates leftist protestors? You don’t say!

“Conservatives feel angry and they feel treated unjustly and I guess the word is oppressed,” said Mr. James Buchal, chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, the county that includes Portland. He is also a lawyer representing Joey Gibson, leader of the far-right protest group Patriot Prayer, who is being sued by the owner of a Portland bar. The bar owner has accused Mr. Gibson of instigating a brawl last year and disrupting business.

And the lawyer of a fascist also thinks conservatives are oppressed by Black people not wanting to be killed by cops. Wow! Amazeballs!

But hey, this must be new right? If you went back to the 1990s, you’d definitely not see Oregon’s suburban and rural conservatives hating on Portland and Eugene!

“This is what we’re fighting against,” said Lon Mabon, waving a copy of a book called “Daddy’s Roommate,” which is intended to describe gay relationships to children. Mr. Mabon is the director of the conservative group sponsoring the initiative, Oregon Citizens Alliance.

“Cultural diversity is the buzzword being used to make homosexuals full-fledged minorities that require civil rights protection,” he said. “Homosexuality is not a civil right, but an aberration.”

Some legal scholars in the state say the measure could be used to remove homosexuals from teaching positions and state jobs, and as a basis to take books from libraries and deny parade permits and liquor licenses.

If the measure passes — and political experts give it a strong chance, based on previous support in the state for anti-gay measures — it could do for Oregon what David Duke did for Louisiana during his run for Governor last year. Similar to the problems raised in Louisiana when Mr. Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, made his unsuccessful bid, some business and convention groups outside the state have threatend to boycott Oregon.

While Oregon has long been considered a bastion of tolerance and innovative social policy, its voters have also come out against gay rights in several recent elections. Poll takers say there is little sympathy among the general electorate for homosexuals if they can be portrayed, as the Oregon conservatives have successfully done in the past, as demanding special rights. ‘Homosexuality Is Wrong’

The campaign, which largely plays on public fear of homosexuals, was used successfully by Mr. Mabon’s group in May, when the Oregon town of Springfield voted, by 55 percent to 45 percent, to become the nation’s first municipality to include anti-gay language in its city charter. The act bars Springfield from taking any steps that protect homosexuals and it says the town may not “promote, encourage or facilitate” homosexuality, sadism, masochism or pedophilia.

Four years ago, Mr. Mabon’s group led a successful statewide campaign to overturn an executive order by the Governor of Oregon that had barred discrimination against homosexuals. The statewide vote against gay rights was approved by 53 percent of the voters in 1988. ‘I No Longer Feel Entirely Safe’

That vote in Springfield in the spring of 92 was my senior year of high school. It was awesome having your town be a national symbol of hate and your friends supporting bigotry…..

What is new in 2020 compared to 1992 is that the foundations of fascism have been built up by three decades of the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump the rest. But the belief systems that lead to urban-rural divides? These are very longstanding and there literally nothing new under the sun, despite what the media wants you to believe. And that takes us to Wisconsin:

The eruption of civic strife has not yet yielded definitive answers about who will capture the vote-rich counties in the state’s southeastern corner, with polls showing a tight race in the state overall. But the political terrain in Wisconsin has been churning — possibly not to Biden’s benefit — with the respected Marquette Law School poll showing approval numbers for the racial justice demonstrations in the state declining from 61 percent in June to 48 percent in August. And interviews with more than a dozen voters here revealed that Trump’s efforts to present himself as the “law-and-order” candidate are hardening at least a portion of his support base.

Chatting over barbecue chicken wings at Papa Stache Pub and Eatery in Big Bend, Wis., Dawn Haag and Lori Wichman said that they both planned to vote for Trump and that the handling of the Kenosha turmoil only affirmed their decisions.

Wichman, 38, a bartender who said she voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but backed Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, attributes the rioting and property damage in Kenosha to a failure at the local level and not a lack of leadership in the White House.

“It needs to be fiercer, it needs to be just shut down,” Wichman said of the police response to rioting. “A lot of what happened was because of the state and down. It’s not under Trump’s watch. Any president cannot be in charge of everything. He gave all of the rights to all of the local authorities. He gave the governor the chance to do the right thing and [Tony] Evers did not do the right thing.”

Was Ron Johnson or Scott Walker unavailable for some hot takes about how they are reluctantly going to be voting for Donald Trump this fall?