Two people arrested after man says he was assaulted outside Portland bar for wearing MAGA hat

Wasn’t there some warning going around about incendiary rhetoric a while ago? It used to be that a MAGA hat just meant that you supported President Trump and his agenda, but now that the conventional wisdom is that Trump is an unabashed white supremacist, people like Alyssa Milano have been able to publish op-eds about how the MAGA hat is the new Klan hood and there’s no leaving the house in one without knowing what it is you’re projecting.

And over at NBC News, Noah Berlatsky wrote a piece on Covington Catholic High School’s Nicholas Sandmann comparing the MAGA hat to a swastika. “Ideally I do not want a world in which children wander out in public with symbols of hate on their head because they think it’s cool,” he wrote.

So it should be no surprise that plenty of people are saying a Portland man knew was he was getting himself into when he word a MAGA hat to a bar and claims he was assaulted. Two people have been arrested, although there’s an argument over who started it.

Man says he was assaulted outside Portland bar for wearing 'MAGA' hat; two people arrested https://t.co/5OLXcobHvb pic.twitter.com/E9IfR56zy7

— FOX 12 Oregon KPTV (@fox12oregon) August 26, 2019

Portland: Adebisi A. Okuneye & Leopold A. Hauser were arrested & charged with third degree assault for allegedly attacking a man wearing a MAGA hat at a bar. https://t.co/hJ6ccilIyK pic.twitter.com/lsQCqnKD9i

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 26, 2019

KATU Portland reports:

[Luke] Lenzner said he and his wife were having a date night when they went to the bar for a drink. He said the bartender told them they were closing so they went to leave. As he walked out he said a customer, [Adebisi ] Okuneye, talked to him.

“The lady asked me, ‘Is that a MAGA hat?’ I pointed at the top of my hat and said, ‘Yes it is,'” Lenzner said. “Then the next thing I know she’s running around the corner attacking me trying to take my hat off… People surrounded, started surrounding me and my wife and calling my wife a whole bunch of names — ‘racist b***,’ pardon my language. But yeah, ‘white trash’ and they’re calling me a racist person. They don’t even know me. I’m not racist whatsoever. And next thing I know when I have all these people around me, I get sucker-punched by the guy with the beard right in the nose.”

That suspect with the beard, Hauser, denied Lenzner’s claims. Lenzner said [Leopold] Hauser broke his nose.