Angry Planet - On the Frontlines of the Battle of Portland

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

This episode is a special double feature. We here at War College think that the deployment of Federal officers to American cities is one of the most important stories of 2020 and we booked two different guests to discuss it.First, we speak with Robert Evans. Evans is a conflict journalist whose work has appeared in Bellingcat. His most recent article there is What You Need to Know About the Battle of Portland and is required reading on this topic. He’s also the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, and a Portland resident who has been on the street of the city covering the events for weeks now.We also spoke with Alan Chin. Chin is a photographer, professor, and writer. He’s covered conflict in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia … and now, the United States. He gives us a broader perspective on the protests and what’s happening outside of Portland.Oh, and he and Jason are childhood friends.Robert Evans recorded 7/23/20Evans report on the Battle of PortlandWho are the Portland protests?The rhythm of nightly street combatThe history of the Portland Police DepartmentTear gas, flash bangs, and murder holesAlan Chin recorded 7/22/20The stress of the pandemicBurning police cars in NYCLessons learned from Occupy Wall StreetChina’s protestsWar College has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://warcollege.substack.com/You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. It's possible that live rounds will be fired, right? And that's been true with the Portland police, too. They always have guns. Like, we've always known, everyone who's actually been on the ground has always known,

live rounds are a possibility at any moment in this. And with the feds, like, they're coming out not just with the less than lethals. A lot of them are carrying M-4s. And there were moments during like Monday where a phalanx would be advancing on this crowd of federal officers shooting pepper balls and rubber bullets at them. And people would be throwing bottles at men within four assault rivals from within the phalanx. And so it's like at some point it does feel like things will escalate to a fatal level. They very nearly have a few times already. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Field. The whole world was watching over the last few weeks as videos of federal agents and unmarked vehicles disappeared protesters from the streets of Portland, Oregon. One journalist has been in Portland since the beginning, Robert Evans.

Evans is a conflict journalist whose work has appeared in Bellingant. His most recent article there is What You Need to Know About the Battle of Portland and is required reading for this topic. He's also the host. of The Behind the Bastards podcast and a Portland resident who's been on the streets of the city covering the events for weeks now. Robert, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

All right, so let's get some just real basic stuff out of the way if we can. So can you kind of start at the beginning, I guess. Like how did all of these protests begin? And has it been pretty sustained over the past 50 days, essentially since the death of George Floyd? Yeah, completely sustained. So it started out, you know, we had on the 27th of May kind of while things in Minneapolis were reaching their peak, a group of activists of color, indigenous activists occupied the steps of the justice center, which is police headquarters in the local jail in downtown Portland. They were there for a couple of nights. Another activist group, the Youth Liberation Front, like brought in more kind of bodies to help hold the territory.

They set up tents. They had like one raid by the police on the 28th, but it was pretty low-key, very few people involved until the 29th when there was a mass rally at Peninsula Park in North Portland. And that rally then marched like two or three miles down to the Justice Center. It was several thousand people. By the time the rally got there, the crowd at the Justice Center had grown to around 1,000 people as well. And both crowds kind of met one another, and there were no police in sight, right? the police kind of had abandoned the area. So this crowd of thousands of people, like a night or two after the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis,

are just standing around the Justice Center in Portland. And it becomes very clear, like just by the kind of energy in the air that, like, oh, this crowd is going to, they're going to fuck up the Justice Center, right? They're going to try to light this thing on fire. And sure enough, they did. They all broke in and people started lighting fires and shooting in fireworks. And it was like, you know, it was the thing happened that, you know, I think if you knew Portland and knew the streets here, Like, it was, you were aware, like, what that crowd was going to do once it reached critical mass.

And so the police came out, um, they did the only gentlemanly thing they've really done during this and said, like, okay, everybody, if you're, you know, if you're here with your kids, if you're here with your dogs, we're about to start shooting at you. So it's time for you to leave. If you're, you know, if you're not willing to get shot at. Um, so like kind of, you know, about half the crowd kind of broke apart and left. And, you know, around a thousand people kind of ranked up and started yelling at the cops and they started shooting out tear gas. And that dispersed the crowd and into two or three groups who then spent the night kind of running from cops through the city looting buildings and burning banks along their way. And that was riot night in Portland. And after that, every other night the rioting has been, I would say, directed by police as opposed to kind of coming from the people of the city itself.

The next night there was like a protest that tried to occupy an intersection and the police just started beating people in the face with batons. and then tear gassed a bunch of traffic, including just, you know, hundreds of motorists who were just in the city. And a bunch of houseless people. They were just pumping tear gas into the streets. And they did the same thing the next night. After this huge rally of like 10,000 people marched and surrounded the Justice Center,

you know, once it had dissipated enough that they felt safe gassing it, they gassed the hell out of it. And then police were just driving around the street and moving vehicles, shooting at people from moving vehicles, like shooting at lone people. Like, I was standing alone in the street with my press pass out, and they shot me with a grenade. So, you know, that... Wait, wait, wait, wait.

What kind of grenade are we talking about? Oh, with a tear gas grenade. Okay. Yeah, so things like that, like the next kind of, on that Monday, there was another mass mass gathering. But this one was, you know, the Sunday mass gathering was kind of, the activist at the front of it on the bullhorn was a person named Lilith Sinclair, who was a local activist in Portland and very radical.

police abolitionist. And then on Monday, the mass gathering happened again, but it was kind of taken over by a new group of people who were really focused on the idea of not having a confrontation with the police, trying to talk with them. And they let a march around, and the police stayed away, and they successfully marched into the city and marched back, and nobody got hurt. And also a lot of activists were like, well, what the hell was the point of this, right? Like, what the hell was the point of just, like, marching into downtown and marching back?

This seems useless. So the next night, when that same group, which eventually became the organization Rose City Justice, let another big peaceable march. About a thousand people broke off and confronted the police at a fence that they had erected to block people off from the part of town where the Justice Center was held. And the crowd stood outside that fence, and the Portland police began shooting impact munitions into the crowd until the crowd threw bottles. And then once the crowd had thrown water bottles at the police, the police started tear gassing everybody. And again, tear gasped hundreds of motorists and basically kettled the protest with walls of tear gas. I had to run through like three different walls of tear gas just to get out of there with like riot police grabbing at me. It was terrifying.

And the pictures from that night are just out really just an unbelievable amount of gas. And, you know, motorists were like driving into crowds and stuff, blinded by gas. It was horrible. And so after that night, the things kind of took up this rhythm of there would be one group of, you know, peaceful, protesters who would run around shouting peaceful protest and, you know, do everything they could to avoid any confrontation with the police. And then there was an increasingly hardened group who showed up prepared to do, you know, to get into a scrape with the cops, you know, knowing that we're going to get shot at, knowing that was the goal and trying to get better at using like these

Hong Kong tactics, working with shields, working with leaf blowers, working with traffic cones to actually put stuff out. And that kind of continued for a month or so, right? And And, you know, for the later half of June, for the most of it, like the demonstrations were kind of slowly shrinking. So there would be a demonstration at the Justice Center every night. As often as not it would end violently, those got smaller and smaller. There would be occasional other demonstrations. You know, the Youth Liberation Front tried to occupy the North Precinct, built barricades, got kicked out and tear gassed and beaten pretty bad. There was a march on the Portland Police Union headquarters.

They arrested three journalists and just horribly assaulted people. It was a really brutal night. So that kind of stuff kept happening right up until the fourth. And on the fourth, we had our largest gathering since early June. It was another like thousand people or so who all showed up at the courthouse and the Justice Center and just started shooting fireworks at both of them. And they were mostly aimed at the Justice Center at first to kind of give like a fireworks show to the people incarcerated inside. You can see some of them cheering.

So that was happening. And then eventually the LRAD. started warning people not to shoot at the federal courthouse, which people had been doing occasionally, but it hadn't been folks focus. But as a rule, whenever a police LRAD tells the crowd to do, not to do something, that's what they're going to do next. So everybody focused their fire on the courthouse. And this kind of siege erupted with protesters shooting commercial fireworks at the

murder slits that the feds had cut in the walls of the courthouse to shoot out from. And the feds firing out, just pumping impact munitions into the crowd from there and dumping tear gas and eventually they had to sally out with batons to like force people back. And there was just this big running street battle through Portland. And this was the first really good crowd we had in terms of their ability to actually stand toe to toe with law enforcement for a long period of time. You know, we'd had crowds getting better, but this was the first time they did it all night. Like the crowd successfully beat back the police, escaped the police, marched back and

reoccupied the justice center courtyard, which had never happened before. So that was a nice night. But after that, the feds became more and more involved. And, you know, the demonstrations, the fourth was kind of an outlier. The demonstrations continued to shrink. And eventually it was just these terrifying situation where maybe 200 people, often more like 100 would be outside the Justice Center, just getting the piss knocked out of them by federal agents, these horrible, brutal tackling arrests, impact munitions shot directly into bodies. Those nights were terrifying. You never knew if you were going to get grabbed. It was just it was the worst. And it started. that was the night where that was the period of time kind of um or mid-july you know from like the the fifth or the sixth up till like the 14th or so that was the period where I felt like the journalist core in Portland was like kind of on the edge of cracking like people were really it was it was tough it's tough it's easier when there's a big crowd and people are holding up it's really tough to go out there and record when people are just getting wailed on and they were just getting wailed on.

And the thing that changed that was Donovan LaBella getting shot in the skull and the video of that going viral was the federal snatch fan video going viral. And then President Trump declaring the protests quelled. Like that all happened and suddenly huge crowds of people were showing up again. And now things are very much in a different state. And you're getting thousands of people every night and they are better at fighting the police and the feds than I've ever seen. They've gotten the phalanxes down. You've got dozens of people showing up with leaf blowers to blow away tear gas. You've got these really organized crowds who have gotten good, who actually on Monday night, like, started tearing down the outside walls of the courthouse and breaking the windows.

And when the feds came out and started pumping rounds into everybody, the crowd fought them back inside. And, like, the night ended with, like, federal agents shooting out of murder slits and protesters throwing bottles at their gun hands. And, you know, since then, the fighting has continued, and it's been kind of back and forth. And, you know, eventually every night, pretty much the protests get small enough that the feds, you know, the feds mess people up. But there's victories throughout the night and really impressive coordination that you're seeing on the ground there. And, yeah, that's kind of where we are right now. And it's a situation where no one really knows where things are going. going to end or where things are going to go next.

Any night, it's possible that live rounds will be fired, right? And that's been true with the Portland police, too. They always have guns. Like, we've always known, everyone who's actually been on the ground has always known, live rounds are a possibility at any moment in this. And with the feds, like, they're coming out not just with the less than lethal. A lot of them are carrying M-4s. And there were moments during, like, Monday, where a phalanx would be advancing on this

crowd of federal officers shooting pepper balls and rubber bullets at them. and people would be throwing bottles at men with him for assault rivals from within the phalanx. And so it's like at some point it does feel like things will escalate to a fatal level. They very nearly have a few times already. There was a de-arrest where people like pulled someone, tackled a federal agent trying to arrest someone, and he pulled his sidearm on them. So it's a very dangerous situation out here in the streets. at some point, I do feel like the worst is going to happen. At the same time, there's just so much, like, hope right now and this kind of, this kind

of spirit of joyful resistance that it is addictive. It's hard to, like, stay away from it. Even on the nights when, like, you need to rest, it's hard to, like, leave your friends in the journalism corps kind of outside, like out in the street when you're not going out. Even though it's necessary for everybody to take breaks, it's hard to take breaks right now. Even though everyone knows at some point, you will be out there the night it goes wrong. I don't know. It's a strange situation.

Who are the protesters? Who are these people who have learned to operate in phalanxes and bring looseblowers and stuff like that? Are they locals, black, white? What can you tell us about them? That would say broadly, Portland's the whitest city in the United States. So obviously, majority white. I would say the protests are generally more diverse than the general population of Portland. The people who are doing this stuff, mostly in their, either teens or in their 20s and 30s, people from all walks of life.

You know, there's people who, you know, are managers at grocery stores. There's lawyers and doctors and nurses who show up there. There's kids who are still in high school. A lot of those folks, including some of the folks who are kind of most radical. You know, there's farmers and stuff, like people who come in from, like, slightly outside of town. live up on the mountain or something. There's old punks. There's sharp skinheads against racial prejudice.

There's like kind of older anti-fascist activists who do a lot of like the really technical stuff. So a lot of like the people doing the kind of load bearing work working as medics, doing like route patrol and stuff for like the marches to clear intersections. You know, those are a lot of like more experienced kind of anti-fascist and anarchist organizers who are kind of taking on these more technical roles so that the newer folks can, you know, do the shield wall stuff, you know, get to grips with the feds.

But it's a pretty, it's becoming increasingly, especially over the last couple of weeks, broad subsection of Portland society. Like on Monday, I listened to like middle class suburban moms talk about wanting to get sledgehammers to break down the doors of a federal courthouse. And then I watched them try to kick down the doors of a federal courthouse. So, yeah, it's increasingly, an increasingly wide swath of the city's population. What are the goals here on the protester side? I mean, obviously at immediate, like, cessation of DHS operations in the area and for them to leave, right? But beyond that, like, what is the driving force here? Or is it just defiance?

You know, people want the, the DHS out. People want most, I would say most of the crowd who is actually staying into the night to confront these people, want the Portland police abolished. But at minimum, we're talking about defunding, right? people want what Seattle got. They want a 50% cut in the police budget, I think, is kind of the minimum that I hear from the folks who are really out there. You know, you'll hear some people who are more like, oh, just cut 50 million and, you know, reform it. But I would say most of the people I talk to want them either abolished or like a 50% cut in the police budget. And then there's demands like people want all of the arrested prisoners to have their charges dropped,

all of the protesters who have been arrested to have their charges dropped. People want all of the, or they want like, there's individual officers people want to see like charged with crimes because of the assaults they've done on people. You know, there's a demand that the money that gets cut by the police be reinvested into the black community in Portland, the indigenous community in Portland. I would say those are kind of as close to demands as you get. But there's also, you know, there's a lot of especially among,

kind of the more committed anarchist chunk of the crowd. There's a real understanding that, like, this isn't about, like, making demands is not the job of the people out here every night. The job of the people out here every night is to resist and force, force as, like, as much, as close to a surrender as we can out of law enforcement. And, like, coming in with demands means that it's a negotiation, and we're not willing to negotiate with them. So you do get that attitude as well.

You know, I don't want to paint everyone as one thing or another, because there are a lot of different kinds of folks with different ideas out here. But I would say you don't see a lot of people among the hardcore fight in the cops crowd who do not support police abolition. Another piece of important context, I think here is I think people not from Portland will look at this. And even before the DHS showed up, I think that a lot of it's pretty wild. Can you kind of explain the history of the Portland Police Department and why it

specifically as being pushed back against so hard? Well, for one thing, just Oregon in general has a real long history of racism. It's the only U.S. state that was founded as a whites-only sanctuary for whiteness. The Portland Police Bureau have a very long history of racism. In 1921, they partnered with the Ku Klux Klan and let the Klan pick about 150-man force who the police gave guns and arresting powers to and who didn't have badges or display their names and were basically a vigilante crime-fighting force that, worked alongside the Portland Police Bureau.

They are one of the most violent police departments in the country, and there's some evidence based on calculations people of making recently that over the less 50 days, there have been more excessive force complaints against Portland police than police and any other department in the country, including the NYPD and the LAPD. So they're a very historically violent police force, they really, especially in terms of their crowd control tactics. You know, in 2018 during a protest, they very famously shot. man in the back of the head with a grenade and nearly killed him.

So there's a lot of anger at the police prior to this. And, you know, they have a history, like many other police departments, of killing Blackmen. You know, that is a thing that has continuously happened. And like with the shooting of Quanties Hayes, the police union blamed his mom, basically. So there's a lot of anger at the police union. And by the way, while the police chief and the sheriff have been talking about how they're not working with the federal aviation.

The head of the Portland Police Union, Daryl Turner, met with, was meeting with federal agents to plan their coordination. And they very clearly have worked together a number of times. Although over the last few nights, it does seem like the police have kind of abandoned them. Yeah, that was my next question is like what level of coordination are you seeing? Can you speak about that a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, at times I've seen literally riot lines that were a mix of Portland police and federal agents both shooting at me at the same time. So I don't know, like, how much more coordination you can get than two groups of men standing in a line and firing at the same group of people together, right? That seems like coordination to me.

You also get federal agents moving as a block alongside police moving as a block and kind of attacking two different chunks of the crowd and pushing it two different chunks. You know, like, I don't know, like, how much more they could be working together. Like, they're clearly marching in a line and fighting together. So they're not just protecting courthouses. at this point, right? You know, over the last few nights, they've been kind of forced into the courthouse, but no, that is not the only thing they've done.

Like on the fourth, well after the crowd was away from the courthouse, there were still federal agents in the street shooting at the crowd, you know, as people were like running through downtown and stuff. What are the civil authorities doing? You know, I know we have this video now of Ted Wheeler going down there

and being in the tear gas, but... Yeah, I mean, he, I think he's doing, it because his opponent in the November mayoral runoff, Sarah E. O'Rone, has been out a few nights and gotten tear gassed on a couple of different nights. And she's very much closed the gap with him because people are angry about all of the times he tear gassed crowds because he's the police commissioner. And boy, howdy, have they tear gassed a lot of crowds. So I actually got to yell at him last night while he was getting tear gassed because I'm very

angry at him because I've been tear gassed somewhere between one and two hundred times by his police officers over the last 50-something days. So I have no sympathy for the man. He's clearly trying to redirect protests that have been largely directed against the Portland Police Bureau, against the federal agents, because that's something that he can, like, portray himself as standing up on, you know, the side of righteousness for. But, you know, his police did essentially the same stuff as federal agents. They're just worse at it.

It's very strange, though, because Portland's reputation around the country is, you know, know, the people from the skit were, like, put a bird on it or, like, knowing, you know, exactly what part of the coop your chicken lived in before you ate it. I mean, what should people around the country know? I mean, you know, they should know that Portland hasn't always had their reputation. Portlandia gave it, right? In the 1990s, George H.W. Bush showed up in Portland. Yeah, in 1990, actually. Bush's vice president, Dan Quayle showed up in town to raise funds for Oregon GOP candidates.

And like a bunch of protesters showed up and swallowed food dye to vomit and red, white, and blue in front of the Hilton where Quail was staying. They had some really, like, famously vicious protests against the Gulf War that were, like, suppressed violently by the Portland Police Bureau. And anyway, it acquired, Portland acquired the nickname Little Beirut from George W. Bush during. this period of time. So like Portland's reputation in the early 90s was as this place where people were really pretty hardcore with their demonstrations. And the green scare and the suppression of the environmental, you know, activist movement really hit Portland pretty hard. And then, you know, gentrification and stuff affected the city. And I think what we've been seeing over the last couple of months is the old Portland kind of coming back, right? And there's been a very,

like conscious understanding like a lot of the particularly activist of color who are out in the streets or people who like you know lived in parts of north Portland before it became too gentrified and expensive and so there's a lot of anger at that aspect of things and like this this I think a lot of general anger that like Portland became kind of this laughing stock as this this kind of neoliberal um um um a hive of silliness um and folks there's there's a real sense of pride returning just because of how long folks have kept this up, right? That, like, this isn't, you know, Portland isn't this place where people engage in performative wokeness.

It's this place where people take to the streets and repeatedly assault federal agents to get them to leave the city. That is, that is the reputation, Portland, I think, is acquiring. And it's being done, you know, it's this understanding on behalf, I think, of a lot of demonstrators that like this has been a really famously bad place for black people and indigenous people to live over the last several generations. And that that needs to change and maybe the only way to make it right as members of the white majority is to go out and get the shit kicked out of you by the police, you know, because that's the only way, you know, people can, that's the only way people know to try

to make a difference. Nothing else seems to work. So like this is what they're doing. I just really want to drive home this point. I think one more story will help do it. Can you tell us about the white supremacist, because white supremacist connections to the Portland Police Department and the weapon caches?

Oh, boy, yeah. I mean, there's a few connections. So there was this officer, I think, is Mark Kruger. Kruger's his last name, at least, who was caught in 2010, maintaining shrines to dead Nazis, like actual straight-up World War II Nazis. And he got, like, in trouble for that. And then the Portland Police Union defended him in court

and got him an apology, and he retired with a full pension. So that's not ideal. But then, yeah, during the, we had for the last couple of years these dueling rallies between, like, you know, the proud boys and a local group called Patriot Prayer and anti-fascists. And they would get really ugly sometimes. They're big brawls and stuff. And on one occasion, a group of these proud boys who were from out of town, so they didn't have a legal right to carry guns in the city. importantly, they didn't have concealed carry permits and stuff. were caught by police on the roof of a building with scoped rifles,

like setting up a sniper's nest, basically, overlooking this protest. And the police, like, didn't tell anyone. Like, they made folks put the guns back in their car, but they didn't tell the mayor. They didn't, like, report, like, they didn't let anyone know what had occurred. And what seemed to be a pretty clear public safety hazard, right? They just didn't tell anyone. And then it came out later that, like, one of,

of the Portland police officers, a lieutenant named Jeff Nea, had been in regular coordination with Joey Gibson, the head of Patriot Prayer, and that, like, they'd actively worked together and he'd given them, like, warnings about areas to avoid, did not get searched by the police for weapons. Like, it's all very sketchy.

The Portland police have, in general, a really sketchy reputation, or a really sketchy history with these far-right groups, which is part of, again, why there's so much anger against them. Can you tell us about one of the big, one of the kind of the through lines of these stories has been the way the federal officers are conducting themselves. And by that, I mean, like, what they look like, are they easy to identify?

What are they kidded out with? I mean, they look like soldiers. Like, I don't know how else to describe. They look like the guys, I mean, they're more heavily armed than the guys I was embedded with in Mosul for damn sure. They're wearing, like, full military body armor, not riot. armor. They are, some of them are armed with normal M-4s. A lot of them are armed with these essentially like very similar to M-4s, but they fire

paintballs and pepper balls. And they use military tactics, right? They don't, they don't use riot police tactics. When they shoot at you, they shoot at you the way a soldier would with a rifle, right? They are firing for suppression in that way. They use, the kind of tactics they use are kind of famously unprepared. predictable, right? The Portland police, there's kind of a rhythm. You can rely on specific warnings that they will give you at specific times before things, you know, get violent. The feds

just come out and start fucking people up. And I think they make a real effort to be unpredictable in their responses because it keeps people off balance. You know, they're frightening. They're very frightening to go up against, especially when they're actually outside of the walls of their courthouse and grabbing people. They, you know, and you can see. You can see. see Donovan Labella, who they nearly killed, the round, the rubber bullet they shot him with, it was right in the center of his forehead. It was a dead eye headshot, you know? It wasn't an accident. It was not something, it was not a coincidence that Donovan got shot in the head. He was like 30 feet away from them. The people that they've arrested, do we have any idea how many what they're

being charged with, where they're being held, what that process is like? As best as we can tell at this point, it should be after last night, I couldn't tell you exactly how many they got last night, but it's somewhere closing it on 50 at this point. And some of them we have charges for. Some people, of the people who were picked up by vans, were at least without charges. But a lot of folks stay in there for days before anyone finds anything about them. You know, their bail doesn't come up or anything. So, yeah, you are, for a lot of these people, they're spending time in jail and nobody

really knows what's happening to them. At this point, I don't think anyone is, like, missing, right? but it's obviously concerning, especially since, again, some of the reports we have from people who were snatched by the vans are those folks weren't even charged with crimes. They weren't told they were being detained. They were just grabbed off the street, had like something pushed over their head to blind them and were like interrogated, which is unsettling. What's the nature of the interrogation been like? Have you talked to anyone that's been through that? Yeah, I've talked to a couple of people who have been through that.

I mean, they're just mostly just kind of searching them to see what equipment they have on them and to see, like, running their face and stuff to see if they have evidence of the person committing a crime. It doesn't, at this point, they mostly seem to be going after attempting two targets, specifically people who have been doing stuff like shining lasers at them. But they also, like some of the street arrests, it seemed like they were just going after people who were dressed in black block. and even though like it became very clear to them generally that those people didn't have anything on them right like the one of the people who was arrested recalls them saying like well this you know this is basically a waste of time like this guy doesn't have anything there's nothing for and he got he got let go but he was just kind of dragged into a van blindfolded and you know yelled at for a while until he was let go in the

street um you know it's been again kind of an uh disorienting but also like inconsistent thing because a number of people have also gotten real serious federal charges thrown against them. Yeah, like what kind of charges? Because this is really interesting. It sounds like if they wanted to arrest people, if that was the goal, they'd have a lot more than 50, right? Yeah, I mean, it's harder to arrest people lately.

But it's also like they've pulled in more people than they've actually charged, right? So not everyone they pull in gets arrested. Some of these people do get released. it is, but a lot of the folks who were getting charged, they're getting charged with stuff like assaulting a federal officer. So one person I'm aware of was chalk, went up to the courthouse to lay out in chalk, surveyors chalk, the boundary lines of federal property so that people would know, because the feds were at that point snatching anybody who crossed onto their side of the street.

So people would be in the street, not even aware that they were on federal property, and U.S. marshals would like tackle them and drag them into the courthouse. So this person came up with surveyors chalk to just chalk out. on the ground, the borders of federal property. And they went out and they tackled this person to the ground, arrested them very violently, took their service dog away from them. And because this person, out of the, like, if somebody tackles you and starts handcuffing you, you might wriggle around a bit, right?

It's hard for people to, like, keep in mind, okay, don't move at all, go completely limp. Like, that's hard to do when you are being tackled and violently arrested. but if you move around it all, if you wiggle it all, that's assault on a federal officer. And now you're getting charged with a felony. Yikes. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah. What's the sacred fence?

Yeah, so that's a little bit of a – so starting on Sunday night, it must have been. No, no, starting on Tuesday night, they had this fence. I mean, the fence was on Monday. People didn't really assault the fence Monday. They didn't assault the fence Tuesday either. But there was this fence put up to keep people far away from the Justice Center to try to limit where the protests could be. And so people started marching up to the fence. And at this point, people were still way too nervous to actually attack police property.

So the police would say, don't touch the fence. And a couple of people might, like, put their hands on it. And then they'd get shot at by impact munitions or even tear gassed. And it became this, like, really farcical thing of, like, a crowd would march up to the fence. and like maybe someone would touch it with their finger or they wouldn't touch it at all and the police would just start shooting at people. And so I, I, I, the thing that was really striking to me was that the police were putting vastly more care into protecting this wrought iron fit or this, sorry, into protecting this chain leak fence than they were to protecting human life because they were actively assaulting people repeatedly just to make sure that nobody even touched the fence. So I started referring to it as the sacred fence because it, it was clearly like more sacred to them than human life because they were again tear gassing

random people in traffic to protect this fence. And the term took off among Portland protesters. And so for weeks afterwards, until the fence went away, there were rallies at the sacred fence. That got increasingly, people would get increasingly bold about what they did to the fence. So people started cutting holes in the fence. They started throwing things through the fence. At one point, somebody started dumping pig feed over the fence and saying, you know, oink, oink, come out and get it.

And eventually, like, people just got to the point where they were straight up tearing down the fence most nights and, like, using pieces of the fence to make barricades. At another point, they tore down a huge chunk of the fence and then threw it over the fence. So the fence became this kind of rallying point until the police finally took it down. And now there's a fence back up around the federal courthouse, which protesters have so far, like, twice torn down. As a rule, Portland protesters don't like fences. So that has become very much a consistent theme throughout these protests is people are really not, they're not jazzed when they see a fence put up. Yeah, it's interesting you said that people seem to be treating the fence or the federal authorities seem to be treating the fence with more reverence than they are treating human life. because I feel like I've seen it featured in so much of the, you know, like Republican senators and Congresspeople and media personalities saying, like, you know, this is anarchy what's going on in Portland.

Look at what they're doing to this fence, especially today. And that's more of just a comment than a question. And you also said they've got, there's concrete barriers now, too, that have been erected? Yeah, yeah, they put up concrete vehicle barriers behind the fence now at the federal courthouse. And last night, people didn't really seem to have it. They also welded chunks of the fence together because they used the same kind of fence on Sunday, but it wasn't like the different sections weren't actually welded together. So people were able to like pull them apart pretty easily with kind of just hand tools and muscle.

That was not, people were not capable of that last night. They didn't have the right tools or whatnot. I don't know if folks are going to like bring power tools and tear this fence down, nor do I know how the feds would react. But yeah, the fence is much more reinforcing. than it's been before. And certainly last night, people didn't really have a great, they were able to break open one of the doors to get inside the courthouse,

but they were not really able to take the fence down. So it's kind of, again, every night, a bit of a mystery as to like what is going to happen and what is going to be done. So who's in charge of the federal officers or forces, whatever we want to call them? We don't really have, I mean, Chad Wolf is in charge of the agency, right? And so he's kind of been the focus of people's ire. But no, we have no real clear idea of who's in charge and who's calling the shots. But presumably there's somebody in that courthouse who is the head who's like coordinating everything, right?

Yeah, one has, it's a military unit, right? One assumes there's a fairly strict chain of command going on there. I just, I'm not aware that anyone has that information, really. What do you? They operate like a military unit. Like, it's clearly not just like dudes doing their thing. They're very coordinated. Like, they know what they're doing.

So, yeah, I assume there's a pretty strict hierarchy at some level. What do you make of this list that they released on their website that is all of the charges and bad things that are going on in Portland and why they have to be there? I thought it was very silly. For one thing, more than half of it, I think, was violent anarchists have graffitied an object, which, I don't know, not my definition of violence. there's a lot of fucking lies on it. They noted that something that appeared to be a pipe bomb had been found as if a pipe bomb had been found, when in reality it was just somebody, a metal tube that somebody had put together to make a glass breaker to, like, break windows and stuff. And no one has been charged with a pipe bomb or any pipe bomb-related crimes because nobody brought a pipe bomb to any of these events.

You know, DHS has been putting up pictures of, like, people's shields when they arrest folks to, like, talk about how violent they are for bringing shield. and gas masks, which are, again, protective objects. So, yeah, it's, I think it's silly. I think the things they're claiming are serious or silly. I even think it's silly that they claim officers have gotten concussions, because they're claiming what gave them concussions are fireworks. And number one, I've had a lot of those fireworks blow up in front of me. Number two, I've had hundreds of police flashbangs go off within inches of me often.

So if your guys have fucking concussions, so do why. And so does everybody that your guys have been. throwing that shit at. So I got no fucking sympathy for you, right? Like, there's a continuum of force. That's a thing that exists. That's the thing you have to think about as someone who considers when force is justified. And if they're allowed to be throwing grenades at it, on, on Tuesday night, there were people lying on the ground that they'd knocked down and they were just dropping flashbang grenades onto their bodies, right? Like, I don't give a shit if they've got concussions. I don't give a shit if some of them got blinded by lasers. They're doing much worse things to

people every single night. So if the crowd fights back, like, I don't know, from a moral standpoint, from an ethical standpoint, I don't think the crowd's done anything wrong. There's a battle in the courts over the tear gas specifically right now. What's the state of that what's going on? Weren't they supposed to stop using it? Well, just the police. The Portland police are not supposed to be using it.

But the way that it's kind of been set up is that the Portland police are only allowed to use it if they think that lives are at risk. and if it's a riot, lives are by definition at risk, because a riot is obviously inherently a life-threatening situation. So what has happened is the police now just declare a riot when they went to tear gas people. So a week or so ago, maybe two weeks now, there was a protest at the Portland Police Union headquarters, the second one. And, you know, a crowd that was very peaceful. I saw a couple of water bottles checked, right? But, like, nobody was doing anything serious.

They were just standing and yelling at the police. and eventually the police very suddenly declared a riot. And nobody was really sure initially why they had declared a riot. And it came out later, their justification was that somebody had broken a window on the police union headquarters. And almost immediately video came out. There's a very clear video of this. There's a guy filming one of the cops in the riot line, and the cop knocks his phone out of his hand, and the dude's phone hits the window of the building and breaks it.

And so then they declare a riot and start tear gassing people in neighborhoods. And they've gotten just increasingly, like, that's been the police bureau's kind of response to being told they can't tear gas people is like, oh, but we can tear gas people if it's a riot, so we'll just declare riots all the time. Now, the feds don't do that. They don't have to do that. They don't declare anything. They just start shooting. What do you see is your responsibility here and how you cover this? You know, there's a responsibility for objectivity in terms of how you,

cover what is happening on the ground. So you should attempt to show both the actions being taken by protesters and the actions being taken by law enforcement to the best of your ability. Now, we're also in a situation, I think, where you're looking at an out-of-control police state trying to lock people away in holes for forever. So from an ethical standpoint, like, I take actions whenever possible not to film faces and to avoid filming identifying marks on people, unless we're right in front of the courthouse steps, at which case, every one of is on high-deaf cameras at all times right in front of the courthouse. At that point, I don't feel as much of a need to worry about it. But like out inactions in the street and stuff,

I try to not expose people's identities because I think it's unethical to expose them to the violence of the state in that way, especially since I haven't seen any of them harm human life. I also think, you know, as a journalist, my attitudes towards how to cover this were a bit different on night one than they are on night 55, right? At this point, I've seen so much brutality directed against people, no matter what they do, right? Like, people are criticizing folks who now they're lighting fires and trying to break into the courthouse, but I've seen them have just as much violence used against them for just standing in an intersection, you know? It seems like the police try their best to hurt people no matter what they do. And so I think my responsibility as a

journalist is not to pretend like these are two equal sides. In the same way that when I was in Mosul, nobody expected me to give ISIS a fair shake, right? Nobody expected for me to like try to report on ISIS's side of events. Because there was a general understanding that like, well, it's important to talk about, you know, the crimes committed by the Iraqi military, excessive use of force by the Iraqi military. You know, these guys, you know, like people like the counterterrorism forces, you know, engage or harming civilians and stuff like that was important to report on. But nobody felt it was important to pretend that ISIS was, you know, somehow an equally valid side in this thing. And that's kind of where I'm landing with law enforcement here, you know.

And it's because of the amount of, you can only watch people get clubbed in the face while lying on the ground so many times. People get shot in the body with grenades for standing, you know, on a street that they pay taxes for. before you decide, you know, however imperfect the protesters are, however ill-considered sometimes the actions they take may seem or be, they're not randomly doing violence to human beings. And the police are. How do you stay safe? I don't. I get shot repeatedly. I mean, I wear my body armor.

I have plate body armor and a helmet. So does my one of my crew members, Beatrix, got shot in the head with a grenade. that exploded on her helmet last night. Thankfully, she has a very high-quality European firefighter helmet with a face shield. But, yeah, you know, you wear armor. You try to protect yourself because you will be shot. As a journalist, you will be shot.

How many nights have you been out? I don't know. It's got to be somewhere near 40 at this point. I couldn't tell you exactly. You know, not every night. I've taken my breaks. But yeah, somewhere closing in on 40, it's got to be. So what's it like there during the day?

Oh, it's fine. Yeah? Yeah, people are gathered in the courtyard, smaller groups. Riot ribs is usually up in cooking. But it's fine. And like the thing is for all as aggressive and violent as this uprising has become, it's very contained to police property, to the federal courthouse, to the justice center, and to like the other police precincts and union buildings.

People aren't destroying random stuff. You know, that happened on riot night a bit, but like you go three or four blocks away and downtown's perfectly normal. You know, you go, you know, five minutes away and you won't see any signs at all of the uprising. Where I live, you know, in my part of town, I don't see any signs that this is going on other than the odd bit of like someone will put up like a, you know, put up some like protest signs or something on like a flagpole. or not a flagpole, but a power pole. So again, like, for all of the reputation this has in four is violent and extreme as a lot of what's happening is, it is very contained. People are not destroying the city of Portland. People are not making the city of Portland unlivable.

People are going after very specific and geographically limited targets for very specific reasons. Okay, so this is rolling out other places. what do you have like what advice do you have for the rest of the country get out into the streets be ungovernable get good at forming phalanxes buy some leaf blowers those seem to work really well and accept that if you really want to make a difference and actually win this thing and halt the kind of spread of authoritarianism that is is taking over our country you're going to have to get out into the streets and do it voting isn't

going to be enough. Like, these people are armed and angry. Like, I'm talking about these federal agents, these, particularly CBP agents, you know, these ice guys. These folks are, and a lot of your local police who are very violent are well paid and heavily armed and will fight to maintain their privileges. And that's really what they're doing, is they're fighting to maintain their ability to get money to use violence on people. And if you want to stop that, you're going to have to get out into the streets and prove that they can't get away with it. You know, they do not have the ability to maintain this forever, especially if enough people get involved.

So it is a matter of you have to be willing to show up and show up for a long time, right? People in Portland had to keep this going for a long time, for weeks where it felt hopeless, where it felt like we were losing every single night. People kept coming out. And that's why things have progressed to the stage that they have, because folks just didn't give up. And that's the only thing, if you're worried about these feds coming in and taking over chunks of your city and disappearing people, the only thing that's going to protect you

is that, is showing up with a group of people and staying out into the streets. But how do you explain this and make it important to people from, like where we're from, Robert, from the Texans, the people in other parts of the country who don't understand, like don't see it the same way? You know, at the end of the day, what you have here is a large group of people who are willing to risk their lives and their freedom every night to protect their rights, to protect their rights to not have, to not live in a police state. At the end of the day, it's the most American thing possible, really, including the property destruction. You know, this nation, one of its founding acts, the Boston Tea Party, was an act of costumed men protesting. by destroying property.

So the idea that this is un-American, that this is terrorism, that doesn't hold up to me. This is the most American thing imaginable. It is people very angry that the government has overstepped its boundary and is infringing upon their liberties. And it is people fighting back physically to stop that. What would people in Portland do if the feds packed up, got all their stuff onto a Humvee and drove, you know, drove out? What do you think would happen next?

I think there'd be a pretty good party. You know, that's one of the big mysteries, right? Especially as this movement's gotten larger, one of the things that made it larger is the specifically people being scared and angry at the Fetts. So one of my worries, as someone who is very angry at the Portland Police Bureau, because again, probably been tear gassed by the Portland Police between 100 and 200 times, have watched them literally tear gas children, rather angry at them. but the um i do worry that if the feds leave um obviously that would be a good thing but if the feds leave uh people might be like all right well we did it and then the police are still here and still just as much of a problem and you know they leave kind of the hardcore of the movement to get the shit kicked out of them by the police um i i won't i'm not happy i would not be happy with that um my

hope is that you know people force the feds out and then turn right back to the police until they get, you know, at least another 50 million cut from their budget, honestly. And ideally, 50, I mean, ideally, we do what Minneapolis is doing and we just get rid of them and replace them with something else. I would consider, you know, a 50% budget cut to be a significant victory, though, you know? That would be a lot. But at least, let's cut more money out of their budget. Let's cut more officers out of their budget.

And let's take and destroy their military grade weaponry, right? I don't want to just hear them get an injunction. I want to see their grenade launchers get holes punched in them. How does all this end, do you think? Nobody knows. That's one thing I think, you know, speaking to, speaking as a member of the Portland Press Corps and someone who talks to all the other people at the Portland Press Corps, nobody has a damn idea of where this is going to end.

Everybody is kind of constantly shocked that it's gotten as far as it has. So I have no idea. I just have no idea. Robert Evans, thank you so much for coming on. to War College and walking us through this. Yeah, thanks for having me on. And please stay safe. Yeah, I'll do my best.

All right, War College listeners, we were going to pause for a break. That was Robert Evans. We are pivoting, though. We're going to kind of expand our scope here a little bit. We're going to jump on with Alan Chin, who has been all over the country and has been talking or has seen lots of protests, lots of places, and has also covered war zones and can give us some kind of context about what it's like for a war correspondent to come home and cover these things and what he feels about what's going on. So stay tuned for that after the break.

Well, War College listeners, thank you for sticking around for part two of our domestic disturbance special. I suppose we can call it. This is Alan Chen. Chen is a photographer, professor, and writer. He's covered conflict in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Now the United States. Oh, and he and Jason are childhood friends. Sir, thank you so much for joining us.

With pleasure. So this is what I've covered. That's relevant, I think, to this conversation. I don't think we can leave out the pandemic. So I did spend a week in a funeral home in Jersey City, New Jersey, where, of course, the cases were 10 times normal. I did. And then, of course, the protest started, and I started in New York.

In the initial days when there was a lot of clashes on the streets and police cars were being burned. And, you know, I have some pretty dramatic images of that kind of thing. And then, of course, Mayor de Blasios put in a curfew. And so, which was a very strange thing in New York City, right? The city that never sleeps with a curfew. And so I covered that. And then for many different reasons, I've come down south. I'm currently in Mississippi right now.

I've been here based out of here for the last month or so, and we'll be for another week or so. And from here I sell it. I was able to sally forth to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Trump, of course, had his now perhaps infamous rally. And the Trump campaign denied a credential for me to enter the hall, which I was actually relieved about. But the action on the streets was very interesting.

Both of the pro-Trump people that had to do. shown up for the rally and also protesters against that. I did get to go to Jackson, Mississippi a couple of times for the formal renunciation by the state legislature here in Mississippi of removing the Confederate flag from its state flag from the Mississippi state flag, right? So that was interesting, maybe for lack of protests. There were about seven, you know, after all this talk of, you know, of, you know, people that want to so-called defend their heritage and so on.

There were all of seven people with Confederate flags, or should I say Mississippi, Confederate flags. And then I did spend a day in Richmond, Virginia, which has been the locus of all these statues that have been removed, and one that hasn't yet, the one, the biggest one of Robert E. Lee, where that statue hasn't been removed, but it's become a, it's been repurposed, so to speak. And then I was just in Atlanta, Georgia, where the death of Congressman John Lewis

actually inspired a spontaneous outpouring of mourning as people left flowers and notes and had a spontaneous march and candle-light vigil for Congressman Lewis. And that wasn't a protest, say, but it was the same real overlap with the people that are protesting, and obviously, Congressman Lillust stood for, you know, the civil rights movement and more broadly on many

social justice issues. So that's kind of what I've been doing for the last couple months. And so it's a little bit of clashes and conflicts, a little bit, interestingly, of situations where it de-escalated, and there wasn't conflicts. And just, you know, I'm focusing on some of these symbols like the statues and flags. Can we talk a bit about New York? Because that's where you saw some of the really the heart of the protests. And that's where you and I grew up. And I agree with you.

Seeing a curfew there is just flat out strange. But could you talk about like those first few nights and what you saw? Absolutely. So New York has a long history and tradition of protest from the left. You know, it's where Occupy Wall Street started, most recently. And I've been covering these protests on and off my whole life, right? And I will tell you, I have never seen police cars burning the way I did when this current wave of protests reached New York.

It started in Minneapolis, as we know, where George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. and in New York, I honestly thought that, of course, people would come out and express their solidarity and their sense of mourning and grief, you know, for this, you know, really latest example of police violence. But I didn't think that it would spill over. I didn't think it would spill over for two reasons. One, because we are and were the most worst hit by the parents. pandemic, and so I thought New York had other problems. And secondly, of course, yeah, you can be in solidarity with somebody in Minneapolis or in Louisville or Georgia or anywhere. But, you know, it's not, you know, we often, unfortunately, have had these incidents right in New York City, right?

In Staten Island and Howard Beach and other places, Crown Heights. And so, you know, when the incident isn't right at home, I thought maybe the protest would be more symbolic. and I'll get back to that in a minute. But for some reason, and I'm not sure, you know, there were many accusations of outside agitators of both the left and the right. You know, no one has quite really have enough information on that

to know how true any of those accusations are. Let me put it this way. I don't think it's impossible. I think it's possible that there were, you know, an individual or individuals who were more than normally motivated, so to speak, right? And again, I'm not going to pretend to know if it was from this group or that group of the right or the left or whoever.

But the level of violence that started happening was really interesting, because on the streets there was, the NYPD doesn't have a great relationship with protesters and doesn't have a great relationship with people of color in general. And so there was tension, but it was tension that I was used to. And then the next thing I knew, there was a burning police car and it was a melee. Right. And then, of course, the police didn't help themselves because they were recorded, you know,

driving a police car into a crowd of, you know, pedestrian protesters. They were recorded, I think, smashing a young woman protester to the ground, you know, who wasn't doing anything to threaten them. Right. The MIPD definitely committed. its share of obvious and egregious kind of violations of the rules, so to speak. That being said, again, I have the level of attacks that they also received was unusual and new for me in New York. And so, yeah, but of course, let me put this straight. you know, I got hit on the head by a police baton.

I was very lucky that I was wearing my bike helmet because, you know, I know how to do these things. So it didn't hurt me. If I hadn't been wearing a bite of helmet, I would probably, you know, have a golf ball-sized lump on my head. You know, so I have no love or sympathy for the NYPD and the way they conduct civil situations. I think they could learn a lot from, you know, more de-escalatory tactics and, you know, visions. But that being said, I've never seen them hit like that. You know, there were over 20 police cars burned in one night, and I saw two of them, you know. And that's quite a scene, you know, because when I saw bricks actually being thrown at the police.

you know, so that's new for New York. And without getting too deep into it, I think it's fairly obvious where my own political and cultural sympathies lie. But I think as a journalist and as a professional journalist, my whole career, like I said, I think it can be pretty balanced, just, you know, looking at it.

So on the one hand, the police committed, you know, some real, you know, really overstep the bounds. On the other hand, they themselves were receiving some hits. Now, chicken and egg, right? Who started it? No idea. And probably no way to ever really find out.

I will also say compared to other situations in the weeks and months since, New York has calmed down greatly. And I don't think that's because of the curfew. And I don't think it's because the police department is so incredibly woke, so to speak. but I do think that two things for all the things that the NYPD did do wrong they were using the batons hit on the head with stick and they were using pepper spray

which you need to be about six feet away from somebody or really even five or four feet to use pepper spray efficiently nasty stuff but they did not use tear gas they did not use flashbangs they did not use the same sound cannon that I think they had even used

the last time around back in the 2000s when it was protest for the RNC. They did not do the mass arrest tactic, which was very controversial during Occupy Wall Street, where they would literally take a piece of plastic

fencing and surround an area and arrest everybody in it, even if you were a grandmother with a baby, even if you were an accredited journalist, even if you were it didn't matter who you were, right? They would do these mass arrests of hundreds and even thousands of

people and there were lawsuits and obviously re-evaluation about that. So they didn't do that. I think we're in the weeds now, right? We're looking at the devil in the details. But I do think that's partially why. I do

think that, you know, for all these reasons, New York in the end, you know, kind of calm down pretty quickly. I would like to add also that the looting that we saw, and I hate that word, but I will use it in this case,

the attacks on property, the breaking of windows and the theft of things, you know, from many Manhattan businesses. That was documented that the people that were doing that were not protesters, right? There were documented videos. of small organized groups driving up with vehicles, breaking windows, and, you know, removing things from businesses. That's not a protester, clearly.

That's a criminal element. Same in D.C., actually. I mean, we had very separate protests from people who were breaking into things, and they hit actually completely different parts of the city. Exactly. Exactly. So I think for, I think we should be really careful not to conflate that. I think that's really important. That I think there were an art, you know, kind of a criminal element, professional criminals, if you will,

who quickly saw this as an opportunity, you know, for a quick profit, you know, much to way that a day trader perhaps, you know, has to function looking at the market trends, right? Like, you know, here's an opportunity. Let's grab it. Let's move quickly because, you know, we know it's going to end soon. And that's what they did. Whereas the protesters, let us be clear, there were definitely elements, perhaps, among protesters who were interested in having these clashes, you know, with the police, right?

But they were not, for the most part, that I saw interested in either destroying or seizing property. Earlier in the conversation, you'd said that you think the pandemic is really important context here. And that's something I'm not seeing kind of in a lot of mainstream coverage is how that has really elevated tensions. especially in places like New York. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. And so like I said, I initially thought that because we have been so hard hit by the initial pandemic, that we wouldn't be that interested in mass protest. And in fact, the opposite turned out to be true. And thinking about it, I now believe, and again, not scientifically, but just anecdotally, and from my observation, I now believe that's because actually the pandemic hitting New York hard meant that we were also economically

hit really hard, right? Maybe more than another place is we have a large population of young people in service economy jobs which have all disappeared, right? And although our state unemployment system is far from the worst, you know, there were many hundreds of thousands of people that had problems navigating that bureaucracy to get their assistance that they are entitled to. So, you know, So maybe in New York we had a larger than normal number, especially of young people that are very unhappy, and I think legitimately so, right? You know, if you are working a pretty low-wage job, which is tough in New York to begin with, but let's remember that is actually true for the majority of New Yorkers. People think of New Yorkers as a very wealthy, you know, city, the center of commerce and all that's true. Wall Street, that's Park Avenue.

that's all true and those people are very visible. But it's probably 70% or more of the population that sustains that 20%, right? 25%. And those people, you know, and I count myself as one of them. You know, I am a working class New Yorker. I think journalists, freelance journalists, like myself, certainly fall into that category now. You know, and so I think there was a lot of people. of pent-up anger because of the pandemic and the failure of the response, especially on a

federal level, right? We don't need to dive into Andrew Cuomo and his thing and how the pandemic in some ways has helped him politically as governor of New York. But I think it's pretty clear that any average New Yorker on the street of any age or economic background was very disappointed and frustrated by the national response to the pandemic, because we were the epicenter for those long weeks and months, and to not see the federal government have a more proactive role and to see, in fact, yes, Angel Cuomo and to a much different level, Bill de Boisio, the mayor, having to take those leadership roles

was, on the one hand, interesting and reassuring, but on the other hand, deeply frustrating and disappointing. So I don't think you can leave that out. And I do think that because we had such a high death toll, you did have, and of course those deaths hitting minority and people of color communities especially hard, I don't think you can discount that either in a city that does have a large people of color POC population

that was hit hard by the pandemic. And again, in ways that are perceived to be unfair, you know, I think a lot of people were in mourning, you know, if not for someone that they themselves lost in their family, certainly in their extended communities. That's almost a given, right? And for a young person especially who was in this situation, perhaps being laid off from their not very well-paid job and then not being able to get that assistance and unemployment benefits easily. And then perhaps having a loved one or at least someone in their circle, you know, die or become very gravely ill from COVID, you know. And then you see what happens in, you know, with George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and all these other things. And obviously it's happened before in New York.

I think it all just boils over, you know. You're going to get on the street. I met protesters who were very young, who are 19, 20 years old. A lot of them are community college students. or people like that, right? So they are, you could say, in many ways, and this is often the case, they are the people, the bridges. They're the people perhaps with parents that never went to college,

and they're the first ones to be in college, and therefore they're both receiving a higher education, but also part of that is becoming deeply aware and analytical about systemic racism, about systemic poverty. And, you know, the list is endless, of course. But they stepped up to it. And let me pivot a little bit. Unlike in previous protest movements,

Occupy Wall Street, there was this famous human microphone thing, right? Where people would say, Mike, check! And people in the crowd would have to repeat what a speaker said. And the reason they did that back in 2011, was because bohorns had been prohibited by the NYPD. You know, you're not supposed to use amplified music or noise or speech on the street without a permit in New York City, right? And so the organizers did what they thought was a smart thing back in 2011.

And they said, okay, we'll do this kind of collaborative human microphone mic check thing. Well, guess what? as a kind of organizing tool that maybe is very kind of smart and interesting, but as a way of letting a crowd know what's going on, it sucks, right? And so what's happened this time around? Everybody uses a bullhorn. And you know what? In this current context, do you think the NYPD or any other police force is going to try

to make an arrest just because somebody's using a bullhorn? Uh-uh. Right? So protests adapt to the times and different efficiencies emerge. Because these protests are happening in hot weather, every protest that I've seen in New York, in Richmond, in Atlanta, has a vehicle or two that the organizers use to stock up with water and gatorade and, you know, things like that. And so as people are on these long marches, you know, they will hand out water, right? And we'll make sure that everyone who's participating can be hydrated, right? they have they work very closely with the ACOU and the other legal observers they work closely with their own movement medics

this has really emerged I think in the last 10 years where where you have these they'll usually have a duct tape red duct tape red cross on them and you can see you can identify them because they have their satchels and many of them in fact do have real medical training they might be you know paramedic you know, paramedics or EMTs or, you know, and as we saw in this most recent case in Portland, the naval officer who was attacked by the federal forces was basically the first medical assistant he received was from a team of these, what I would call movement medics, right? And they stabilized him and they got him to the hospital. So they've actually, again, regardless of one's political orientation or perspective on these things, you know, you have to just analyze that, right? Like the medics are good.

Keeping people hydrated with the vehicle is good. Using a bullhorn so you can actually effectively communicate is good. How much do you think both sides of these protests have learned from occupying? in 2011. How much is like an evolution of what did and didn't work back then? Well, I think the police and the government in some ways learned the wrong lesson. Well, I'll start with the protesters. The protesters' biggest mistake, from my point of view, in 2011 with Occupy, was that they were very proud of it being a leaderless movement, right? and that this was meant to be a decentralized, you know, a real kind of uprising from the people.

And in a way, it was very effective initially. You know, it certainly tapped into a nationwide reservoir of discontent and of dissent. That's true. Again, whether you agree with it or not, that's absolutely true. And they were very good at that. But they didn't, because of the leaderless nature and because of, of, of how diffuse it was, I don't think Occupy was very good at stating actual goals and stating what would be points to declare victory and what would be points, you know.

And so it kind of went on too long. And so the police and the governments, city and state and federal governments, I think learned the lesson that if we wait them out long enough, then we can just crack down as hard as we want. In the end, they cleared out Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in a swooping operation, right? And they went in and they just tore it up. And they did that in many, many cities across the country. And I think they learned the wrong lesson, which is like, yeah, you know, it's going to be this little game of Canton mouse, but at a certain point, you just have to hit them hard and you will break the movement. And as we're seeing in Portland, I don't think that's

necessarily true. I think, you know, 2011 was a very different time in this country, economically and politically, culturally. It was before Trump. Obviously, some of these economic underlying issues remain the same of the recovery, not having benefited, you know, enough people. And so there's a reservoir of poverty and a reservoir of economic instability that I think drives all of these things. Obviously, also. Also, the racial things haven't changed, and that's, I think, part of what's driving these protests now, the sense that, you know, it seems that every time there is an incident involving a person of color, you know, suffering a, you know, being killed or beaten up, or, you know, there's protests, and then, you know, a year later, it happens again, and then there's another round of protest. And then a year after that, it happens again, and there's another round of protest. I think there's this real sense of frustration, right? You combine that with the pandemic, like we're talking about. You combine that with Donald Trump being the president and his policies, which seem calculated to cater to his base. And I think you have an explosive mix, right? You put all these pieces of it together, and I think it's an explosive mix. And therefore, it's been exploding.

One thing, though, that I've seen in Washington, where, you know, I've been going down to the protests. And in Richmond also, just to sort of document them. And Black Lives Matter Plaza, which, you know, that was the first place where they started painting Black Lives Matter onto the street. And it's right near the White House. I mean, it's a block away. Things are, it's now a T-shirt shop. And people are having a good time and it's very relaxed.

I mean, I saw what you're talking about with people with water bottles and medical training. and sandwiches and all that. And it was pretty much after the first couple of nights, it was a good mood in the place. Now, though, I'm not sure that it's a protest at all. Well, that's a great point, Jason, and I would like to address that. I think part of that is that some police departments,

and here you really do see a divergence, right, between the ones that are continuing to crack down and the ones that have de-escalated. Some police departments have made a conscious decision to de-escalate, right? And that's controversial in itself, and I don't think we need to get too deep into that. But just tactically, I think the decision to de-escalate works.

It means, it does not mean, as some might have feared, that, oh, my God, we're just going to have more, you know, quote-unquote looting and more, quote-unquote, quote, you know, rioting, right? It actually didn't mean that. It doesn't mean that, right? If the police take a step back and don't confront the protesters at every inch and rather just let them do their thing, two things actually happen.

One, either the protesters truly peacefully protest without incident and go home, right? And everybody's kind of happy. Or they do stay. They persist. and they turn a site or sites actually into something that is not per se a protest, but something more akin to a festival even, right? That's happened at what they've renamed Marcus David Peters Circle,

the Robert Lee Circle, in Richmond, right? It's happened, like you said, in D.C. It's happened, I think, a little bit around City Hall in New York, although I haven't been there. And I think that's just ended, and I'm not sure exactly how. But, you know, in Atlanta, you know, in both Richmond and Atlanta, and I did not see a single police officer. They weren't even following in a police car.

Maybe there was an un-uniform, plainclothes observer, I'm sure, in the crowd. That wouldn't surprise me. But there was no overt police presence on any of these things in Richmond or Atlanta. And guess what? No windows were broken, right? right? Nothing was stolen, no cars were burned, right? People marched, they chanted, they sang. And yes, and when they weren't doing that, they were playing touch football. A marching band showed up and performed in Richmond. You know, yeah, they're selling T-shirts and sandwiches or giving them away for pay what you want. Yeah, I think in some ways that speaks to the success of de-escalation.

I want to ask you about that in sort of comparison to other countries that you've been to, because you haven't just covered wars. I mean, you've been there for protests as well. Yeah. Have you seen this kind of tactic work there or what works in other circumstances? So I think the main difference between the United States and most countries I've been to is that since the Civil War, we basically have made sacred. We have made part of this idea of American exceptionalism that our incarnation of the state,

when I say that, I mean local, federal, and state authorities, It's pretty sacred and that everything has a legal recourse and that the purpose of protest is symbolic. It is to win hearts and minds. If we get enough people in the streets that will really convince Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy that, yes, you know, Voting Rights Act is a good idea, right? A fair housing act is a good idea and so on, right? And so protests on the streets in this country is supposed to be,

the way you win is not by storming the White House or the Capitol or the Supreme Court and burning them or occupying them. The way you win is by convincing the people in those buildings to make decisions in your favor, right? That seems obvious, but I think it needs to be stated these days. In almost every other country, and I include countries like France, which had an attempted military coup as recently as 1962. Right. Even in countries like Germany, which of course, you know, reunified as recently as 1991,

creating a whole new body politic, right? In almost every other country in the world, you do not have or you did not have this belief in the system ultimately working. And I know you can pick apart what I just said from many different angles, so I don't want to dive too deep into that. but in general, I think we can say that.

So when you have a mass protest movement in Tahrir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring that I covered, the goal was not to convince Mubarak to all of a sudden become a nice person because I knew that wasn't going to happen, right? The goal was to get rid of him, and they did. Now, then it didn't turn out really the way anyone wanted, but, right, there was a goal. The goal was not a symbolic goal. It was an actual tactical goal, and it happened. Tiananmen Square in China in 1989,

where I actually began my career, because I was 18 years old, and just by circumstance, I found myself there in the Beijing Spring and witnessed a little bit of the massacre that occurred, right? And same thing, in a way, right? The goal of the student movement in Beijing wasn't to overthrow the Communist Party,

but the Communist Party of China could not perceive any other reason for them to be there, and so they reacted as if, right? And it's funny, in 1989, it is probably true that they were such an old-fashioned dictatorship and brutal that, you know, they probably didn't even have tear gas, right? There's nothing between your fist and a machine gun in 1989, right? So the only answer was, okay, send in the tanks for machine gun people, and they did. I've seen movements in Serbia, in the ex-Eugoslavia, and that's just a really, so you have, you have these extreme examples of China and Egypt, right?

Then you have what I would call a kind of middle example, which is like Yugoslavia, because there was a war going on, several wars, in fact, right? The wars in Croatia and Bosnia and then Kosovo. but when thin Belgrade, which had been the capital of the entire Yugoslav Union and remained the capital of Romp, Serbia, the war never came to the streets of Belgrade, except during the U.S. airstrikes briefly. And so within Serbia itself, there was a democracy, right, a pretense of one. Yes, it was a democracy in which nationalists and right-wing parties won and did things that we wouldn't consider democratic. sound familiar, right? That was Milosevic.

Milosevic was a duly elected leader, right? And so the movement of dissent against him was, on the one hand, just to dissent against his nationalist and brutal policies. And on the other hand, you know, on a certain point, the way he was finally removed was that he tried to steal an election in Ottoman. of 2000, you know, it was clear that the Socialist Party had lost, but he was hanging on to power, and the movement turned from being symbolic into being real. They drove with bulldozers, and they did storm the federal parliament building, and the Army decided that this wasn't

worth a war, because they already had fought three wars and lost them all. And so there was a peaceful transitional power, as there should have been all along because there had been an election and, you know, the opposition had won. It's interesting. Sorry, I just interrupt, though. I mean, the U.S. is also in a very different situation, both in terms of the protests and the way we're set up. The protests are taking on city by city, partly because our police enforcement is

city by city. They're local departments. It's interesting. one thing about Portland is that it's unusual in the United States for federal forces to be involved. Even when we bring in our national guards, national guards are local, or at least within the state. So I can tell you, yes, and I can tell you on one hand, the number of cases when federal forces were used. in 1956 the 101st Airborne Division was sent to desegregate Little Rock,

Arkansas Central High School, very famous images from that. In 1962, federal marshals, the predecessors in fact of the forces now in Portland, were sent to help desegregate the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss, in Oxford,

just up the road from where I am now. And if you read those and listen to those recordings, the Kennedy administration had to scrounge to find 400 federal marshals who were armed with 38 caliber revolvers

and sent them in, right? What a different world, right? And despite all the brutality of that time, of the 60s, overt segregation and racism, despite all of that, right, it seems in some ways a far more civilized way of fighting than what we're seeing now, where we have this heavily militarized and well-armed units.

Yeah, and that's exactly right. And what's even more ironic, of course, is that any student of the 60s and 70s knows that the feds were supposed to be the good guys, right? Or more progressive, good. Okay, I'm not going to use words like that. but the feds were supposed to be the more progressive and in favor of social change, you know, supporting court, Supreme Court and other decisions and legislative laws that were passed, like the Voting Rights Act, the feds were supposed to enforce that, right?

And they did, or somewhat. Now, and state's rights was a euphemism, right? States rights was a way for southern states in particular to justify their continued use of segregation and other oppressive policies. And now it's kind of flipped 100%. Right? Now states, especially states with more liberal governors and mayors and so on, are definitely taking the opposite approach. And the federal government is, yeah, it's deeply troubling, I think. Yeah, another thing which you did touch on is the militarization of police inside the United States, individual forces.

All of those MRAPs and other armored vehicles, Humvees, anything else, that has been given or sold at incredibly cheap prices to local police, departments because of the war's ending or sort of ending in Iraq and other places. How does that affect the dynamic do you think? I think, and I can speak to this really as a photographer and as someone in visual media, I think perception is really important. I think if you're a protester or just anybody and a police officer or law enforcement comes to you and, you know, that officer is carrying a 38 caliber revolver and is wearing a shirt,

you know, and even if their behavior is then maybe in ways that you don't like, that's one thing. And you perceive one thing. If that same officer or comes to you dressed with a flat jacket, body armor, with a military Kevlar helmet, you know, with an assault right. as his sidearm instead of a revolver with, you know, clips of ammunition, you know, I think that creates a barrier for that interaction to be where I think we envision it, right? Which is that of a police officer, law enforcement officer, having an interaction with a citizen, you know, with this common goal, if you will, of, of, of,

civil society. I think the moment that that gap widens, it's troubling because it means that that communication, even if it's simple, and of course sometimes it isn't, that even the simplest communication

now has to go through this filter of body armor and automatic weapons and so on, right? And also the uniform, right? In 1962, there was no way you could confuse, a soldier from a cop.

Soldiers look like soldiers, right? They wore U.S. Army or U.S. Marines, whatever, uniforms. Cops wore cop uniforms and had police caps, right? And again, and this is without any judgment on what they're doing to you, right? Even if your interaction is really negative, they look different. Today, I can't tell the difference often, and I don't think anybody else can. I don't even think they themselves can often. And everybody's wearing these fatigues, camouflage, right?

Everybody's wearing the standard cavalier. Everybody has the standard AR-15 slash M-16 or M-4 derivative weapons, right? Who's a soldier? Who's a cop? Who's a citizen militia, for that matter, in the open carry states? So just what do you see as the lessons that the, you, U.S. can and should learn, and where do you see things going from here? So I think, again, as someone who is a photographer and practices visual journalism,

I think that it would really behoove authorities, the people who control, have a monopoly of force. It would really behoove them to look at these images with this critical eye, right? And to understand that this is a society that ultimately does rest on hearts and minds, it rests on symbolic and cultural power to drive its politics. This is not a society in which we wish for it to rest on tactical victory, right? And again, from the protest side, your goal is not to burn the police station down. Your goal is to change how the police work. And, yes, occasionally a police station might get burned like in Minneapolis. But overall, you know, I think that's the whole point.

And from the police side or the government side, the point is not to imprison tens of thousands of protesters and to crush the movement or to, as they said, quote, dominate the battle space. That is not the goal, right? The goal is actually simply to have enough civil society so that decisions impacting all these things can be made in the public. sphere, right? And at the ballot box and so on. I fear that we are drifting from that. And I'm, of course, I'm not the only one who has that fear. But I think the visual elements of it,

the photography and video and audio recording of this, is crucial to how we understand and perceive this, right? Because people can, why are we talking about Portland? Because we have seen those videos and photographs and listened to the sound of what's happening, right? you know, why are we talking about Black Lives Matter Plaza? Because we've seen the visual germ photograph, right? By the way, of what it looks like.

You know, there's huge letters on the street next to the White House, right? The visuals of this dominant this conversation and how these visuals are made by people like me and also just by non-professionals, citizen journalists, right? How these visuals are made, how they're then seen, right? because it's not just me and you who are talking about it right now. It's every person, every person who sees a photograph or a video for a few seconds on their phone, right? The cumulative impact of that is how this is all seen. When you have a camera, one thing that's very interesting to me,

and I don't think people really think about it, is that you point the lens in one direction. you make a choice every time you take a picture. Sometimes it's instinct, I know, but you know, you're pointing towards either the protesters or the police. Every once in a while you get a side view and you get to see both. But what do you think about objectivity in covering a protest, like any kind of protest? Do you think there is such a thing?

No, but I do think there is ethical best practices. Okay. Okay. None of us is without our own personal opinions, and those opinions are built on our whole life experience, right? And, you know, we're not going to argue about who's right and who's wrong journalistically, right? But there's no gain in that. But what we can say for any journalist, regardless of her affiliation, no matter who they might be working for, whether they are freelancer staff,

whether they are just a citizen journalist, even, you know, a person with a camera at any given moment, there's always a universal best practices, right? And I think that means some really basic, obvious things, right? As journalists, we don't set things up. We don't, and by setting up, I mean we don't tell people what to do, right? we don't afterwards in our post-production use Photoshop or the equivalent to manipulate the image

in ways that are intentionally and recognizably not reality. We don't, you know, and even when we write out captions or descriptions, make our descriptions, we try to use language. And this is why I don't like words like looting and rioting. because they are so racially and class loaded, right? We try to use language that is descriptive and accurate without, you know, being, yeah, without being biased in those ways. And so as long as we stick to those ethical best practices,

you know, where we operate, and really we have to stick to them, right? you know, no, you don't Photoshop things. No, you don't tell people what to do. If you miss the shot, you miss the shot, you wait for something else to happen. You don't tell that person to do it again, okay? Oh, and the last one, to our best of our ability, we try to get as much information as we can, right? So even sometimes after we make the shot, you ask somebody, oh, what's your name and why are you here? And you let them tell you rather than you speculate, right?

So that's, you know, and these are, you know, any journalism student will say, oh, you know, this, we covered that in the first 10 minutes. Of course we did, because they are so fundamental. And so that all being said, though, obviously to your point, Jason, how we frame it, yes, that's going to be up to us. How I move. And in a protest, some of these are fast-moving situations with some physical risk, you know, And yeah, like I said, I was hit on the head, you know, most recently. You can slip and fall, right? You're running around.

You're moving. And you have to be really both tactical, just about, you know, I'm obviously not going to make a picture if I'm going to, you know, if it's too physically risky. But also who and what you choose. And, yes, I am very careful when. So my role, and I like to believe, is that I serve my very own subjective sense of aesthetics above all, right? So I'm making what I think are quote unquote good pictures or even what I would call good, bad pictures, the iconic and the anti-iconic. That's a different conversation. That's what I'm thinking about, right?

Which is the mathematics of the frame and the symbolic value of the subjects in the frame, right? But because of that, I do try to be very careful. Like, if someone is obese, I am more careful about how I photograph them, right? Because I don't want to make people look bad if intentionally. If somebody is, you know, in the middle of a certain kind of facial gesture, if they're speaking, it can sometimes look very different than what's really happening. People can look angry, sad, happy, all in the same second, even, depending on how the face is moving. And I think when you're looking through your take as a photographer, when you're editing it, choosing it, selecting it, you have to keep down in mind, right?

You might have a picture. It looks like this guy is so dramatic, right? You know, he has his fist raised and he's screaming and he's so angry. but maybe in fact he's celebrating something, right? Because people will do that if they're celebrating something too, right? So we have to be really careful about that. And that is subjective. It's imperfect, right?

It's only as best as we can understand it. But I think we still have to do that. I'm careful, honestly, with, you know, the way we look at this. You know, sometimes it's a peaceful demonstration. people show up with guns, right? And obviously guns are photogenic because it's a hot button subject. So do I just throw in my, you know, eight pictures of people with guns when it was a protest where like actually the main vibe was, as you're saying, eating sandwiches, right?

Maybe I can have one picture out of 20 that shows someone with a gun, but eight pictures out of 20 or eight pictures out of 10 that show people with guns when in fact eight people were eating sandwiches would really be wrong. Yeah, that's interesting because it's not just what you as the photographer choose, but it's also what the editor can choose. And sometimes you have, especially in the old world newspapers, you had a spot for one photo or maybe two. And so you're deciding what a protest was, what it actually was and how the world's going

to see it. I guess we're better off now because at least people can see 20 photographs in a photo gallery. But even so, there's only one that leads. Yeah. Right. And even, and I think in social media, it's kind of, there's really about the one image in each post. Right. And so I'm very careful of that, right?

And so I think about that now, because I have some pictures that I think are great images and are loaded with meaning, but maybe it's the wrong meaning for a particular context. Maybe that's a picture I can use when I make a book later, right? Because then it's not in a context where it's driving an immediate conversation, but it's more of a looking back, right? That's different, right? And I think as editors, right, good point, as editors of our own work, right? Because, of course, before the editor sees anything,

I have to decide, I'm not showing the editor of 1,200 pictures I made. I'm showing 20 or 30, right, at most. And yes, they're going to use one or eight, right? Maybe there's an eight-picture slideshow, or maybe there's a one picture, like you said. But I'm not going to give a thousand for obvious reasons. I'm giving, yeah, at most, 40. And from that 40, they are going to pick, you know, 10, 8.

But again, I don't, I can't front-load it, right? I can't have 10 of my 40 be pictures of people with guns if that wasn't what it was about. So anyway, I think about those issues a lot, and I don't claim to be perfect about it. I'm sure I'm guilty of overly sensationalizing something occasionally, even if I didn't mean to. I'm sure I'm guilty of portraying people in a way that they wouldn't like

through no fault of their own. I'm sure I'm guilty of all of these things. But, you know, I accept that, and I'm not going to walk back from that because that is the price of working as a photographer in public space, right? Let's not forget that. We're moving in the world,

and you know what, if you chose to wear your least attractive hat today, that was your choice too, right? And yeah. So let me just bring it back around, and this will be the last question for you. Sure. When you're making those choices,

and in this case, we're seeing the results of those choices. Do you think we're getting an accurate picture in the media of what's happening during these protests? Do you think that we're likely to be getting an accurate picture of Portland, for example? Okay. I would phrase that this way. I think we actually are getting a pretty accurate picture of Portland, of the Portland protest movement

and the conflict between the protests and the authorities. I think that is accurate. By the way, I don't just mean if you look at CNN once. I mean, if the aggregate, right? If you look at people's Instagram and Facebook and Twitter feeds,

if you look at CNN, if you look at Fox, you know, if you look at the aggregate of coverage that's available in the public sphere, And obviously no one of us can look at all of it. But if you look at a representative sample, let's say, right? I think it is because it is representative and because we have so many voices now, right?

You can pick and choose. You have Fox, you have CNN, you have MSNBC, you have the New York Times, you have Portland's own stations and newspapers and channels, and you do have, yeah, people's social media accounts. All that is public. So if you just take one or two of each of those buckets, right? That's 10 minutes a day.

I think you will get a very fair and accurate view of what's happening in this particular conflict. It is not, however, an accurate picture of Portland, the city, which is a city of, I think, a million people in its metro area, right? Or at least a few hundred thousand, many hundreds of thousands. It is not an accurate picture of the fact that probably 10 blocks away or even 8 blocks away, or in some cases even literally around the corner, someone might be having a cappuccino or a glass of white wine, right? Because daily life goes on, always does. That was even true in Syria. Exactly.

Exactly. It was true in Baghdad. During the American invasion of Iraq, I got stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Baghdad while gun battles were still raging in what is now called the Green Zone, the Palace District, right? I couldn't believe it. I was so frustrated. I was stuck in traffic. People were honking their horns.

And literally, because, you know, 10 streets away, there was a full Apache helicopters, you know, full-blown thing, right? And I couldn't get to it quickly enough because, yeah, you know, that happens. That happens in real life. It happens in war. It happens in protest. It happens in anything.

And I think people that are outside the business, perhaps, yeah, you're right. Don't realize. or think about that enough, right? Because in that 10 minutes, right, even if you're getting, like I said, a fairly accurate representative sample and therefore a fairly accurate picture of what the story is about, it's that, right? It's not this. This being, you know, the much larger circle of daily life and business and culture and

so on. Well, Alan, I want to just say thank you for a wonderful conversation and for you coming on the show. And maybe we'll have you on again. Get to Portland. Get to Portland. We'll definitely have you on again. I'm not flying in this COVID time. I'm doing all this by road. That's it for this week, War College listeners.

War College is a production of War College LLC. It is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. We have a substack, which you should. subscribe to warcollege. Actually, you know what? I'll let you in a little secret. Angryplanet.substack.com.

A little hint at some big things coming at your local war college. It's just changing, I think, for the better. You can also still find us on our website at warcollegepodcast.com, where you can get to all the socials and figure out all the different places to listen to us and drop us a line. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.