Remember the video of a guy getting beat on by feds in Portland and responding with double-birds? He's Chris David, a 6'2" 280-lb 53 yr old fmr SeaBee and varsity wrestler from USNA '88 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/us/portland-protests.html

“I’m appalled and disappointed at the feds’ behavior — that whoever led them and trained them allowed them to become this way,” Mr. David said. “This is a failure of leadership more than it is a failure of their own individual behavior towards me.”

He wasn't paying close attention to the protests until he saw the video of feds in cammies grabbing protesters off the street and tossing them in rented minivans. That made him get on the bus and head down to the protests himself last night

He thought it wasn't worth going down and risking potential covid exposure before, but Chris told me "it reached that threshold when I saw Pinochet-type behavior from our own government. That’s what got me out there"

"There was no attempt to de-escalate" on the part of the feds, he said. "They’re pissed that I'm standing in their way and I’m not moving."

Watching the video today, he thought of the cammied feds "They looked like little shrimps compared to me. I’m only 6’ 2” that’s not extraordinarily tall, that really surprised me."

He laughed and said of the cop who beat him with a baton "That little dude was really laying into me, wasn’t he?"

He gave props and thanks to a street medic named Tabs, who helped him after he walked away from the feds, and later got him into an ambulance

Chris didn't leave the hospital until around 5:30 a.m. and took an Uber home. When we spoke earlier this evening, he still had not gone to sleep yet

"Every organization reflects the nature of its leader," he said of the feds on the streets of Portland. "There are some leaders in that organization who have become seriously lost. I see it as a breakdown of leadership on a very fundamental level."

Suffice it to say I enjoyed the hell out of talking to Chris. You can follow him at @Tazerface16

He laughed at his Twitter account blowing up today, saying he had like 8 followers before all this happened. "My life has turned pretty dramatically weird over the past 12 hours," he told me. "I’m a pretty private person."