Behind the Bastards - Episode 3: Uprising: A Guide From Portland: The Birth of an Uprising

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Over the course of June, 2020, BLM protests in most of the country either fizzled out or started to wane in frequency. Portland kept right on going, every single night, without break. In this episode we explain the infrastructure of resistance that gave birth to the Portland Uprising, and we talk about the fateful decision that turned President Trump's eyes towards the City of Roses.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to be made. A lot of money. I'm listening to what they're paying for these things. It was an incredible amount of money.

You knew the painting was fake. Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Before Breakfast on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. We started the series by asking, why Portland? And the most accurate answer to that question is the history lesson we gave in Episode 1. But the most direct answer to why the city of Portland became the nexus of an uprising starts with a bunch of teenagers and a statue of George Washington. Joan Garrison Davis was there. Here's what he experienced.

On Thursday, June 18th, I set out for a park in East Portland. The Teenage Activist Group, Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front, or just the YLF, posted on their Twitter account that something was planned for 8pm. So I made my way, expecting something interesting to happen. The previous night, the YLF and some new Black organizers had set up an autonomous zone-style occupation in front of the mayor's apartment in the Upscale Pearl District. Inspired by Seattle's Capital Hill Occupied Protest slash Capital Hill Autonomous Zone. Come morning, not enough bodies were present at the attempted autonomous zone

to resist the riot police who arrived to clear the area. After the very short-lived autonomous zone, I had wondered what the YLF had planned next. As 8pm approached on that Thursday, only a little over a dozen people gathered at the original. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meeting spot. The small group were mostly in black block. Black block is a tactic that originated with German anti-globalization protesters. It involves wearing all black clothing to make it difficult to identify specific people. Shortly after I arrived, the crowd had began marching north. They decided to take the sidewalk instead of the street due to their low numbers.

In a matter of minutes, the crowd arrived at their apparent destination, the Portland German American Society, which features a large statue of George Washington out in front of the building. Activists started by draping an American flag over the face of the statue and lighting it ablaze. People spray-painted the base and statue itself, writing Genocidal Colonist, Slave Owner, and 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to America. Slowly, more people arrived as calls for support were made out over social media. The few dozen people in attendance started attaching nylon straps to the head of the statue and began pulling back and forth. By 11pm, the statue of George Washington had been completely torn down. The crowd quickly left, calling the night a success, and police arrived a little over half an hour later.

At the time, no one could have known that this small action would trigger a series of events that would turn Portland's BLM protests into the biggest story in the entire country. I'm gonna be real if you take... I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on Season 1 of the Hit Murder Mystery podcast, Lethal Lit, a Tig Torres mystery, out now. And then tune in for all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9th.

Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal Lit on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Whit. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast, while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today, I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm gonna break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app, on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Roxanne Gay, host of the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask? Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week, I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say.

We're gonna talk about feminism, race, writing in books, and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just gonna share with you a movie, or a book, or maybe some music, or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, the Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right-wing media reacted to the toppling of the George Washington statue, as expected. A narrative was spun that police were letting a violent mob of Antifa rioters go around town destroying property without consequence. Pundits criticized protesters for erasing history.

The Portland police defended their failure to stop the toppling of the statue by complaining that they'd been occupied with a concurrent protest at the Justice Center fence. They stated, By this point, three weeks into the protests, dozens of Portlanders had been arrested at actions, yet a narrative had begun to spread on right-wing media that there had been no consequences for protesters engaging in destructive activity. The toppling of George Washington flipped a switch in national far-right media, and suddenly Portland was a symbol of everything wrong with the left. Here's President Trump on the campaign trail.

Two days ago, leftist radicals in Portland, Oregon ripped down a statue of George Washington. And wrapped it in an American flag and set the American flag on fire. Democrat. All Democrat. Everything I tell you is Democrat. And you know, we ought to do something, Mr. Senators. We have two great Senators. We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year. There are a lot of things wrong with that statement. First off, some of the folks who took down that statue would find being called a Democrat insulting.

Also, the Supreme Court has ruled that burning an American flag is a constitutionally protected form of free speech. Portland protesters toppling a George Washington statue seems to have inspired the president to suggest legislation that would ban not just the toppling of statues, which was already illegal, but flag-burning in similar acts of protest. As it turned out, Donald Trump would follow through on the idea of criminalizing that sort of behavior. But why would protesters go through all the trouble of tumbling down statues in the first place? We talked with some members of the YLF, the Youth Liberation Front, to get their perspective. Since the president of the United States has threatened these, again, literal children, repeatedly, we've redubbed the audio in order to protect their identities.

Because they represent monuments to people who are white supremacists and genocidal, and as an anarchist, I think every statue to a human should be torn down because they don't believe in idolizing anyone, but especially, like, people who led the way for colonization and just awful atrocities in their lifetime. President Trump's fury over the George Washington action threw the Youth Liberation Front into the national spotlight. But that statue was not actually the first to fall in Portland, and it would not be the last. Though the YLF would become synonymous with a more radical, militant segment of the protests, acting under the cover of night, the first statue to come down in Portland was actually at Thomas Jefferson High School, one of the only remaining majority black schools in the state.

On the afternoon of June 14th, as a large, peaceful march led by Rose City Justice departed from Jefferson, the statue of the school's namesake was torn from its pedestal by a small, enthusiastic group in broad daylight. Picking up the rest of the story is my colleague and partner in getting horribly tear-gassed, Elaine Kenshin. Toppling statues of historical slaveholders became a nationwide trend during the first three weeks of the George Floyd protests. By the time the George Washington statue at the Portland, German-American Association came down, 18 other statues had fallen to crowds across the country. In the weeks that followed, at least 17 more statues would meet the same fate, and many more would be quietly relocated for their own protection.

Just as the YLF's vandalism of the Washington statue fits into a larger context of statue toppling, the YLF themselves are only one part of Portland's activist ecosystem, originally emerging from a loose coalition of anti-racist and anti-Trump high school groups. Here are two YLF members talking about the genesis of the group in 2018-2019. The comrades who started it made a lot of connections with the Occupy ICE and started running things, running the social media. I think we were really born. It came out of like really sporadic school protests, just like whatever was happening. And it was something that people felt was really important back then.

The group slowly moved towards like anti-fascism and youth liberation, trying to interest ageism as well in those spaces, and I think it definitely went that direction completely June 29th. Yeah, that was like a big anti-fascist and fascist rally in Portland. And I definitely think that kind of sparked a turning point, where I think like the organization really blossomed from there. Yeah, we started off as like a very liberal group, like one of those many boring student activist groups that just like participated in walkouts.

But then we started to take a more radical turn. Like our first protest that I was involved with was for a gun control rally, and that's yeah, that's really cringe-looking back, because now we're all like insurrectionary anarchists. Oh, I think it definitely moved from that into a more radical stance after June 29th, and then came August 17th, which was another big rally in Portland, where, yeah, I mean, like a good amount of focus was placed on us all of a sudden. Yeah, and I think it kind of just continued after that.

Jacob Ueros, the founder of Direct Action Alliance, says he first encountered what would eventually become the YLF in March of 2017, while organizing to counter a far-right demonstration in the wealthy suburb of Lake Oswego. It would be, you know, Rose City, Antifa, Direct Action Alliance, PMWYLF, which I think had back then it was still called Oregonians against Trump or something like that. But that's when we first started organizing together to confront the right wing, was during that time in March of 2017 through May of 2017, and then after that it was this coordinated effort.

Jacob says the Direct Action Alliance was formed out of a sense of desperation in late 2016. Yeah, after the election, I just didn't want to keep wasting my time in politics, and I felt this really big sense of urgency, and around that time was when they started attacking people at Standing Rock. And both of my kids are citizens of the Cherokee Nation. My partner is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and they were all really upset about it, and I was really upset about it. Jacob had been an activist for a while, previous to this point,

and he was already familiar with Portland organizers who had risen to prominence with the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2014. These include Danielle James and the founder of Don't Shoot Portland, Teresa Rayford. We each have our own individual thing that we really focus on, except for in the Direct Action Alliance we kind of just do everything, but most groups have their own thing that they focus on, but we're all the same people helping each other behind the scenes. So when YLF is working, focusing on something that's anti-police, right?

It's the same people who organize the large, peaceful BLM rallies who are working with them to support them. And so that's where the intersection is. We're all one big family here in Portland. It's not like in other cities where we actually have to build alliances. People have been active in the city for so long, and have been seeing the same faces for so long. I'd say it all goes back to Teresa Rayford.

She's the one who took it from 2011 when the Occupy movement happened and kind of molded that energy into something where Portland became an activist scene again. The city wasn't very active. It kind of lost its edge until Teresa Rayford came along and started pushing people to come out to show up to fight back. When Quanice Hayes was killed, she was out there calling everyone to come out, do something about it. And I'd say that she was, I'd say she's at the core of it.

I mean, most of the people who I've met, who I've coordinated with, who I've worked with, all of those groups that I just mentioned to you, I met all of them at Don't Shoot Portland rallies way back before Trump was president. Rayford had originally formed Don't Shoot PDX in response to the killing of Michael Brown and Ferguson, but the failed PPB shooting of teenager Quanice Hayes in February 2017 gave a new local urgency to calls for police accountability

and came in the midst of an upswing of far-right mobilizations targeting Portland. Every city has certain defining moments, traumas which galvanize the community, spur the creation of new coalitions, and give rise to new organizing strategies. One of those defining moments for Portland came in May of 2017, a white supremacist named Jeremy Christian murdered two people on a max light rail train.

The day before the killings, Christian assaulted another Portlander, Demetria Hester. Here she recounts her experience. Okay, so three years ago, Jeremy Joseph Christian attacked me. He's a white known supremacist that's here in Oregon that the police knew about, everybody the mayor knew about. Everybody just knew about him because he had set the tone at every march stating how much he hates the races, anyone that wasn't white and wanted to harm or kill anyone

that wasn't of that descent of being white and Christian. So he verbally attacked me for three stops on the max in May 2017. Front and center, often with a bullhorn in hand, Demetria became one of the most recognizable voices of Portland's 2020 protests. The man she's describing, Jeremy Christian, was a regular attendee of far-right rallies in the Portland area. That night, Demetria offended off Christian with pepper spray. Police responded, but Christian was not detained.

He got away to kill the people the next day. On that same green line, he was looking for me because I maced him the night before. He encountered two, one African-American lady and one lady who had a Habib on. She thought she was Muslim, so he verbally started attacking these little girls under 18. Three men came into their rescues,

defending them and trying to de-escalate the problem, but he stabbed two of them and killed them and stabbed a third and tried to kill him. The police got the call not to even use force when they got the call that he did this on the max. This just shows you how the police play a part in everything he did and the reason why he got away was what he did. When they actually caught him,

he was still wielding the knife that he killed people with. He threatened four people on his way to when they detained him and the only reason they detained him again was because the public was following him. They didn't even shoot him with rubber bullets or a tear gas or anything with a knife in his hand and threatening the police. He was able to throw the knife on the police car,

drinking his wine that he had in another Gatorade bottle and after they detained him, he bragged about what he did. Ricky John Best and Taliesin Namkai Mechi died in the attack. The third man, Micah Fletcher, survived. A few weeks before the murders, Christian had attended a right-wing free speech event in the Montevilla neighborhood of Portland. The rally aimed to build on the momentum of the Lake Oswego event in March.

Micah Fletcher, the only survivor of the stabbings, had been in Montevilla as well, counter-protesting alongside Direct Action Alliance, Rose City and Tifa and what would eventually become the YLF. In some ways, Portland is a very small town. After the murders, far-right rallies in Portland continued. Anti-fascist counter-protests were large and spirited at first, but as Effie Baum describes, that didn't last.

And in the year since that, we had seen the counter-demonstrations dwindle to just basically a small black block that was showing up to counter them. And on June 30th, it had turned into a really, really violent event where a lot of folks on our side got pretty seriously hurt and some of them had to go to the hospital and sustained skull fractures and there was that video of, you know, Ethan Nordin or Rufio, you know, knocking out somebody

and that kind of, you know, became the viral, proud boy sensation it did and really kind of, you know, did a lot for recruitment for them. And so we decided that what we needed in Portland was a strong organizing effort to get as many people as possible to show up to oppose them when they have these rallies. Effie is part of a group called PopMop, short for popular mobilization. Their goal is to use innovative and community-friendly organizing tactics

to foster a big-tent approach to anti-fascism. We plan pretty closely with Roe City and Tifa and DSA, pretty much all of our events that we've had have been in partnership with at least those two organizations and for various events we've had coalitions of up to 30, you know, plus organizations at various times have signed on to different actions that we've had involving groups like Jobs with Justice and like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship

and Queer Liberation Front, Symbiosis and Portland Assembly. There's a lot of different organizations. Since 2018, PopMop has countered far-right events with online fundraisers, hundreds of free vegan milkshakes, and anti-fascist dance parties. When the George Floyd protests began, they took on a different role. So one thing is that we've always had a very, very narrow mission as an organization and we've been really intentional about

trying to stick within the scope of that mission, which is inspiring people to show up and oppose the far-right. And so we didn't feel like we were in a position where we should be leading anything. So we instead agreed as a group that we wanted to operate in a support role only. And one of the things that we've done over the last couple of years is kind of really build up a social media presence

and have, you know, had a lot of, but I'm lucky enough, doesn't really talented people within our groups that do a lot of great media work. And so we had basically just wanted to use our platform to boost the organizing that other groups were doing on the ground. Don't shoot what organized rallies throughout the summer. Marches called by the Direct Action Alliance would repeatedly target police infrastructure.

But as new groups sprung up and led marches of thousands, Portland also had a robust support network of activist groups looking for ways to help. Longtime Portland activist Gregory McKelvie describes the transition to new leadership in groups springing up. In 2020, there were people who were new, brand new, that were called to the moment because of the murder of George Floyd. And I think that it is really imperative that those people become the leaders.

I also think it's imperative that the people who were previous leaders take a step back and allow those people to be the new leaders, right? But I think that we cannot keep reinventing the wheel every time that a protest movement comes up. So what needs to happen is the previous leaders of every protest movement that happens need to mentor and try and teach the lessons that they learned to the new generation that is called to a current moment.

The stabbing would put all eyes on Portland, though no outlets reporting on the incident knew about Demetria's encounter the day before. Months later, she would link with activist group Don't Shoot Portland and other organizations to tell her story. Thank you so much for giving me hope in being restored. I was praying every night. Thank God we prevail over evil.

For three years, we, our community, the victims have been waking up hoping to see us some closer to the end of their senseless travesty. Today it's finally here. With the 12 unanimous votes from the people of our community. Let's give them an applause! For our community, thank you for the beautiful, amazing, resilient support.

Through this, we have changed the narrative and came hard and strong to represent our community. Reiki Intelligence, our heroes, will forever be looked at as heroes. We will continue to fight until everyone, like Jeremy Christian, is off the street and they are not welcome here. We will not stop until we are treated equal.

She'd continue to work with Don't Shoot, which had grown to become the largest Black Lives Matter organization in the state throughout the litigation of her case. In June 2020, well into the Portland Uprisings, Jeremy Christian was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without parole. At the sentencing hearing,

Demetria offered her own indictment of not only Christian, but the entire law enforcement system for facilitating people like him, before offering some searing last words for her attacker. We need people of color that store our community and office. We need our community and office to do what is best for our community, not people that are looking out for popularity and resources.

We're going to stop you from using our debts to capitalize and make a profit out of. We will not let you keep these people in office. You are now welcome here, and to Mr. Jeremy Christian, your mom should have swallowed you. You are a waste of breath. And when you die, you go to hell. I hope you rot.

See you there, bitch. Now, hey. Go back to Tennessee, too. What do I tell you? Go back to Tennessee, too. We don't want you here. All your race, race and whole shit. We don't want you here, bitch.

The exchange would become fuel for Demetrius' chance in the streets. Next is my colleague Beatrix. Beatrix is a reporter who worked with me on the ground in Portland. One time I watched her get shot in the head with a grenade by a federal agent. She's fine. She had a good helmet. She's going to take you through what happened next,

starting with the story of Portland's largest new activist group. As thousands of newly activated Portlanders looked for meaningful ways to latch on to the movement budding in their own backyard, one organization quickly sprung up as one of the loudest in the crowd, Rose City Justice. Almost overnight, Rose City Justice, or RCJ, was leading marches throughout the city

educating about Portland's past, its black community, gentrification and police brutality. Led by a black truck and enthusiastic chants, these marches amassed upwards of 10,000 people at times. Jedai was part of another organization that formed in the wake of Floyd's death. His group, Portland Civil Rights Collective, began informally through a chance meetup

on the first night of the Portland Uprising. Their goal at first? Making cops hate their jobs. Every night, he and the PCRC team would take to the streets, warring with cops downtown in an attempt to drain police resources. Their fight would unknowingly lead them to RCJ. So the first me and Kenzie, you know, Kenzie Smith,

I met her that night, and we had just linked up and just so happened to just find ourselves leading. I mean, like 80 random people that were downtown, just around battling the cops all night. We just kind of fell into that role, because, I mean, there's very few black people to begin with, even downtown anyway.

So we were like the only ones that we could really see in our vicinity that were able to like, I hate the word leader, but just like lead the allies around and trying to keep them safe. And so that night, we exchanged numbers with like 80 different people that we had in that group. Well, really, I took everybody's number

and put it all in a signal group chat. And we just kept going out every single night, and then eventually, maybe like five or six days, maybe a week passes, and Kenzie had came up with a name, and she named it Portland Civil Rights Collective. And so we did our thing for like a week or two, and then we linked up with Roe City Justice. Once the merge happened,

they began taking to the streets in a very different way. No longer were they standing toe-to-toe with cops every night. Now they were marching in the streets. Sometimes, Jedi said, it felt like they were going nowhere. Man, it's interesting because it's not how I would have probably imagined it, because Roe City Justice at the time was not, they weren't really going out at night, I feel like. They were doing like the early date or late evening,

but still daytime marches because it was still light out. And then things were like calm down, like, you know, once it got dark. PCRC, we were like out on the ground every night, all night, just battling the police, basically. And so when we linked up with RCJ, because they had like a much larger following at the time, and they also had a larger social media presence that was like twice the size of ours.

In a way, it seems like we defaulted to their style of resistance, basically, which was just like doing these... Now when I think about it, people called them the long marches to nowhere, which is pretty true in retrospect. That's kind of what was happening. I'd like to think that we still made an impact on a lot of the community that we would roll around. A lot of the neighborhoods that we'd roll around,

it was nice to see families come out of their houses and actually join the marches sometimes, or just seeing their kids on the porch holding up their signs and stuff, and that kind of stuff. But when I think about how I literally never ever saw the police at any of these marches, it makes me wonder just the effectiveness of it all. If the police didn't give a fuck about what we were doing, then was it really helping?

But I don't think that's a fair assessment of exactly how we impacted the community. Nonetheless, it kind of just evolved into basically us doing marches every day. Basically trying to activate people to come out is kind of how I would look at it. But that's kind of what it turned into. It went from us going out every night battling the police to gathering hundreds and thousands of people actually to going on these long marches. While R.C.J. led massive actions, the so-called peaceful protests favored by the likes of Wheeler, events at the Sacred Fence continued to draw the ire of City Hall and the police.

Some protesters even started to wonder if there was really any point in getting tear-gassed at the same location every night. Divisions began to mount between R.C.J.'s education-leaning resistance during the day and the more lively and more volatile standoffs with cops at the fence at night. Rifts formed between the peaceful crowd and what you might call the direct action crowd. The activist and live streamer Max Smith said he's purposefully not tied to any one organization. But as the so-called fence wars raged on, he too found himself questioning how this was furthering the cause for Black lives.

A fight in the fence. That wasn't what we were here for. A fight in the fence was like some shit that kind of... It was like I used to call it the grand theft auto side mission. This has nothing to do with what we're supposed to be doing right now, but we have to complete this to get back in the game. It was really weird. I think at that moment I really realized that the distraction was intentional and that this was all getting just diverted to become like a Trump campaign ad.

He's going to come through and support these police unions and this is his big commercial for it. So it was a very... I felt like it was a frustrating part of the protest because A, it was really a dangerous and people were really getting hurt and kidnapped and all that kind of weird stuff. And then on top of that, it wasn't the fight that I wanted to be fighting, but it's the fight that brings out a lot of people. So a very contrasting and confusing time for sure. Gregory also found frustration with some of the unclear goals of the protests as they developed.

I think this is a big part of the story that I think is not being told or that the heart or further left has failed to really reckon with in an effective way. So one, I'm still unsure if any of the protests have an incredibly coherent goal. For some, it's abolish the police. For some, it's defund the police. For some, those things mean the same thing. And then I also think there are a ton of Portlanders, actually most Portlanders, after working in politics for so long, who don't support either of those things.

I mean, we've polled all of those things. They're not popular. They're incredibly popular on the left. And if you were at the protest, you would think that these are unanimous things. They're not. So I think there was an incredible opportunity for us when those massive protests were happening to get a lot of change, not just the common sense reforms that I think would make people on the heart left just call me a liberal. As divisions grew, trouble loomed for RCJ. In addition to the sometimes fierce arguments over tactics,

many Portlanders criticized RCJ leadership for including a former military police officer. There were also claims of financial mismanagement, particularly once leaders from RCJ posted about attending a luxurious three-day retreat. As tensions rose, activists drew lines in the sand and began retreating to their respective corners. I guess people weren't really moving on principle and people weren't moving slow enough. Because a lot of people were really new to organizing and protesting. People just wanted to get their way. They wanted things to go their way, basically. And when you have too many cooks in the kitchen, the recipe is going to get fucked up eventually.

Especially when everybody wants their recipe to work. I mean, I personally left because I was with PCRC. And the split was basically all the original RCJ members and all the original PCRC members are splitting down the middle and we're going our separate ways. Because we had initially combined forces. RCJ didn't formally disband after the falling out, but things got noticeably quieter for the group after June. During the height of the RCJ days, their marches had drawn thousands multiple times a week.

But by late June, they were mostly boosting other group's actions via Instagram. Many of the organizers involved with the group went on to form their own organizations that continue to play key roles in the movement today. Youth led orgs like Fridays for Freedom and Black Youth Movement immediately began staging community focused neighborhood events throughout the city. Another group calling itself Justice Unity Integrity Community Equality or Juice PDX would go on to host several rallies later in the summer. Despite the split, organizers remember parts of the RCJ days fondly.

Jedai says the mass marches of June helped feed an undeniable sense of momentum. The amount of people that will come out and also like just some of the education that we're giving to the crowd was I think really amazing, man, and it's missed. Because during those marches, like, I would create like little speeches to give to the crowd and so would Chrissy and so would CB, like some of the other organizers we get on the mic and like have like, oh, we'd also... During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Give the crowd homework sometimes. So raise your hand if you read that. Those were really nice moments because you'd see some people literally raise their hand. And obviously some people probably capped them, but some people literally did their homework. So it was nice to see that. And also just like I'd say like a high point is just we've never seen mass mobilization like that ever happened. I will I've never seen that before for for an extended period of time. Like seeing thousands of people come out every single day to basically wake up their neighborhoods.

That seemed like that was really powerful for all of us to to feel like we were kind of shifting the you know the we were causing like a paradigm shift in our community. With Rose City Justice no longer organizing large scale marches on a regular basis. And the nightly crowd at the Justice Center getting smaller each night. Some activists decided a change was needed. On June 25th, people again attempted a temporary autonomous zone, this time in North Portland in front of the Portland Police Bureau's north precinct. Barricades were put up along the streets. The precinct's doors facing the occupied area were boarded shut. And the main exit and entrance facing the other direction were left open so that police could vacate the premises.

Police responded to this occupation faster than the one at Wheeler's apartment. For one, it was at a police precinct, so there was a police presence. And two, it had the same problem as the first attempted autonomous zone. Not enough people were present to hold down the area. After only a few hours, police came charging from around the corner, ripping apart barricades and firing off stun grenades and pepper balls. The crowd moved to block north, and then quickly started a dumpster fire in the middle of the road. This is the Portland Police. You are to disperse now. Ryan control agents and impact munitions will be used against you if you fail to comply.

There was also a second much smaller trash can fire beside a building adjacent to the police precinct. The flames from inside the trash can caught on fire some of the plywood boards covering a window. Protesters noticed and people began yelling, this is a black-owned business, put the fire out. People scrambled to put out the small flames on the plywood. And at the same time, police started shooting off tear gas and flashbangs. The next day, the police, mayor and local news companies spread the narrative that protesters locked and barricaded officers inside their precinct and then lit the precinct on fire. But what happened here last night with doors being nailed shut, barred shut,

with fires being set to the outside of the building with people inside, that is not transformation. What happened here isn't helping to bring about any meaningful change, reform or an end to the historic racism. All of us are joined together in seeking to eliminate. Last night was plainly and simply about arson. It was about destruction. It was about endangering lives. It's blatant criminal violence, violence that is totally unacceptable. That, of course, is not what happened. But once a narrative gets spread enough through mainstream outlets, it's very difficult to correct.

Throughout the next few months, Portland police would put out misleading statements and flat out lies regarding the protests, which news outlets would signal boost and treat as absolute fact. We croak it. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know. They don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake.

Um... Listen to Art Fraud starting February 1st on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast How Men Think. And that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. Get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves.

It's real talk, straight from the source. The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative and probably a bit scary at times. Because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugarcoating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining.

Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. After the protest at the North Precinct, people still wanted to get away from the nightly dread at the Justice Center in Fence. Direct Action Alliance, the Youth Liberation Front, and some of the BIPOC activists who started the initial Justice Center protest, organized another protest in North Portland, this time at the Police Union Building. For a month, we were just targeting downtown. We were just straight downtown every single day. We figured that we needed to diversify a little bit and start hitting other targets around town, going and protesting in areas like that in neighborhoods, letting people participate, come out into the streets with us.

That's when we decided to start marching through neighborhoods. We did another event in Peninsula Park on June 30th, and this time we wanted to make it a lot more community oriented. So we invited a lot of artists to come perform. Mike Crenshaw was there, Emeliana Disapato was there, C-3 the Guru. All these people, it was like a concert slash rally, and it was great. That was the first night we targeted the Portland Police Association Building. So we went out there, and that's when they gassed us and they gassed the whole neighborhood. That was the first night that they gassed an entire fucking neighborhood. When hundreds of Portlanders arrived at the Police Union Building to protest,

the building was already surrounded by Portland Police and Oregon State Troopers in riot gear. Within minutes, an unlawful assembly was declared, and soon after, cops began pushing people east away from the PPA building. Move east, move east, continue east on one part, do not stop, move east, now! Turn around! Get moving! You've been talking to the force! Now lay! Get out of here! You've been talking to the force! Now move! If you get pushed, it's your own fault! Cops shoved and hit people with their batons while walking east for a few blocks, and then began to bull rush the crowd. In a bull rush, a line of officers sprints towards the mass of people, knocking over as many as possible,

and then officers in the back typically come to tackle and arrest anyone on the ground. That night, officers initially used smoke grenades, flashbangs, pepper balls, and rubber bullets as well. This event has been deemed an unlawful assembly. You need to disperse to the east in order to comply with this law. After multiple bull rushes and constant volleys of munitions, protesters began throwing munitions back at the armored police, along with plastic water bottles. Police responded by declaring a riot and blanketing the neighborhood in Tiergas. Disperse the area now, a CS gas is being used. Disperse from the area. Tiergas had been banned in Portland since June 9. On the 8th, in Chapman Square, Mayor Wheeler had addressed an unfriendly crowd of activists

who'd spent the last two weeks getting repeatedly Tiergassed by Portland police. He promised to ban the use of Tiergas the next day. Soon after he left, officers gassed the crowd. The next day, Wheeler kept his word. Sort of. The ban came with a lot of holes. Gas was allowed in situations where, quote, lives or safety of the public or the police are at risk, which was too vague to mean much. But Portland police did take longer than usual to use Tiergas on the night of June 30. The reason why was that earlier that day, Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed into law a bill that banned the use of Tiergas. The exception was if Portland police declared a riot and announced out loud that Tiergas was about to be used. So, of course, the police switched tactics and made sure to declare a riot when they wanted to use Tiergas.

On the 30th, the main justification seemed to be that protesters were near the Union building and some of them had hooked plastic water bottles at riot lines of armored cups. The Portland police declared a riot and started gassing. In the end, neither the state nor local bans on Tiergas helped the Portlanders who lived in houses and apartments along North Lombard Street. It was a balmy summer night and many of them had their windows open in the fresh air when that air turned to poison gas. Multiple residents were assaulted and even arrested while trying to flee their gas-filled homes. Outside of Oregon, on the federal level, other events in late June would contribute to Portland becoming the most heavily Tiergas city in the United States. On June 26, President Trump had signed Executive Order 13933, protecting American monuments, memorials, and statues, and federal property. As we've already explained, toppling statues had become a viral sensation at the time.

But the toppling of a George Washington statue by teenage Portlanders seemed to have been the most direct inspiration for this Executive Order. President even referenced Portland in his press release on the matter. The Order also presents its own timeline of the nationwide protests of June 2020, saying, quote, Over the last five weeks, there have been sustained assaults on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies such as Marxism that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. The Order describes a massive, overwhelmingly peaceful nationwide protest movement throughout May and June as five nightmarish weeks of rampant violence and murder. But its solutions focus, confusingly, on the prevention of vandalism to statues.

It states that, quote, United States law authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment for the willful injury of federal property, end quote. And goes on to say, state and local law enforcement agencies that fail to protect monuments, memorials, and statues will be subject to withholding of federal support and the federal government will ensure personnel are available across the nation to assist with the protection of federal monuments, memorials, statues, and property. The Order is unclear on how broadly federal jurisdiction extends in the protection of statues. All in all, dozens of statues were vandalized and destroyed throughout the country in the first five weeks of the George Floyd uprisings. The vast majority of these statues were Confederate monuments in the American South. As of June 26th, only two statues had been targeted by Portland's protests, one on the steps of a high school and the other on the private property of the Portland German American Society. Both of these were miles from any federal property. However, under the president's new executive order, Portland would become the first city to see the large scale deployment of federal troops.

The Multnomah County Justice Center, the epicenter of Portland's ongoing protests, is flanked on both sides by federal buildings, the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, and the Edith Greenwindle Wyatt Federal Building. A few blocks away, the federal landmark of Pioneer Courthouse overlooks Courthouse Square, the site of many of June's large daytime rallies, as well as many tear gas choked showdowns between nighttime protesters and PPB riot lines. When feds were sent in, they would be deploying into the center of Portland's ongoing protests. On July 1st, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, put out a statement answering the president's call, referring to the executive order he had made. The end of that statement read, As we approach the July 4th holiday, I have directed the deployment and prepositioning of rapid response teams across the country to respond to potential threats to facilities and property. While the department respects every American's right to protest peacefully, violence and civil unrest will not be tolerated. In the next episode, we'll hear how Portland protesters and those rapid deployment teams met in Portland for the very first time.

On July 4th. When's the last time you took a time out? I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adidina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're peeling back the layers around why society makes it so easy to guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time like it's infinite, like sand. And so whether you're partnered with or without children or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you, for people of all family structures.

So take this time out with us to learn, get inspired and most importantly, reclaim your time. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Look through your children's eyes and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest near you and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. What grows in the forest? Our imagination and our family bonds. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.