Last summer during the BLM protests a lot of folk wrote in to say that they not only appreciated my work, but some of those were worried that they wouldn’t be able to head into the gas the way I had. It’s not an irrational question. Portland has well over a million people in the metro area and BLM was getting only a thousand people on monday nights, and not always much over 5000 on weekend nights. As far as I know, the crowds never hit 15k at any time when I was there. We’re talking about numbers between one third of a percent and one percent of the metro population coming downtown, with another tenth of one percent showing up for simultaneous actions at Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct (there were also some protests out at East Precinct, but they weren’t every night and probably no larger than the ones at North). More than 99% of people weren’t coming out on a nightly basis, and it’s likely that more than 95% of people never showed up for even a single night. So, yes, some people sympathetic to BLM weren’t showing up for BLM.

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