Saturday Rewind: Pluck against tyranny
The Portland Chicken is due in court again next week in a civil rights battle that has a federal judge thinking about authoritarianism.
The man known as the Portland Chicken faces off in federal court again against Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Department of Homeland Security on Monday, seeking to extend a temporary restraining order that he won weeks ago to protect the rights of protesters and journalists.
Activist Jack Dickinson, a.k.a. the Portland Chicken, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that produced this blistering warning about the threat of authoritarianism in the United States last month.
“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated,” U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon wrote in a 22-page opinion and order. “In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads. We have been here before and have previously returned to the right path, notwithstanding an occasional detour. In helping our nation find its constitutional compass, an impartial and independent judiciary operating under the rule of law has a responsibility that it may not shirk.”
In a video interview, Dickinson told All Rise News about the inspiration for the costume, and his American Civil Liberties Union attorney Kelly Simon shed light on the state of the litigation.
“I think the goal was to meet fascism with a sense of absurdity and with a sense of kind of poking fun at this regime that was trying to instill a lot of terror in people,” Dickinson said. “The chicken— I’ve talked about this before — was kind of a reference to the TACO acronym that arose for Trump with his tariff policies. And so I just kind of figured it would be a topical fitting costume. And then it turns out that fluorescent yellow works well as a visual tool, regardless of the context.”
The goal, he said, isn’t to make light about the threat to U.S. democracy.
“What it is meant to represent is kind of punching back at the power that they think they are displaying in this moment and kind of cutting through that with a little bit of whimsy or tactical frivolity, as some people will call it,” Dickinson said.
Filed as a class action, Dickinson v. Trump lists an elderly couple among its co-plaintiffs. Laurie Eckman, 84, joined the action after a federal agent shot her in the head with a pepper ball, causing her to bleed profusely. Her 83-year-old husband Richard Eckman, a retired Navy veteran, had his walker struck with chemical munitions, according to the lawsuit.
“They have no idea why the federal government and its agents decided to come out of the Portland ICE Building and release all manner of munitions, pepper balls, tear gas on the crowd that day,” Kelly Simon said in the interview. “And that's the pattern that we're seeing.”
An evidentiary hearing begins on Monday to determine whether to extend a ruling restricting the use of “chemical or projectile munitions” against protesters and press.
Watch my full interview with Dickinson and Simon on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF. Paid subscribers can watch that video — and others that ran this week — ad-free below.
Below the paywall:
An attorney discusses his fight to release the second volume of Jack Smith’s report.
A lawyer who helped beat Trump’s tariffs explains why the next wave are dead letters.
A British historian explains why the Epstein files caught fire in the U.K.
