Last fall, you might recall, there was a big debate on the left about whether or not the Obama administration and the Department of Homeland Security had ordered the crackdowns on the Occupy protests throughout the country. Naomi Wolf was perhaps the most prominent exponent of the claim that the crackdowns were organized/coordinated/ordered/directed—the specific allegation was always a mosh pit of roving verbs and changing charges—by the feds. I took the opposite position, pointing out that political repression in the US tends to be decentralized and local. I’ll admit I haven’t been following this particular issue much since then, but this latest report suggests I was right. Focusing mainly on the crackdown in Portland, it provides evidence that if anything […]