Behind the Bastards - Episode 6: Uprising: A Guide From Portland: The Fed War: Part 2

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Throughout the second half of July, Portlanders continued showing up en masse to confront federal agents downtown. As the struggle neared its conclusion, national media attention brought a strange, carnival air to the proceedings.  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. 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. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Professor, we're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm going to 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover.

Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A year before his death, in one of his most revered speeches, Martin Luther King Jr. named three main evils plaguing America, racism, poverty, and war. Decades later, the fight for black lives unfolded into Portland streets in a fashion few could have imagined,

transforming small city blocks into daily battlegrounds. As the fed wars continued, protesters fortified, numbers swelled, and Portland grabbed the nation's attention. Out of state media flew into town, searching for juicy headlines. Likewise, a network of opportunist live streamers traveled to Portland, hoping to capture what many activists dubbed, riot porn. Video of police gassing, snatching, rushing, beating, berating, and arresting Portlanders. And alongside all this, less obvious but much more impressive, an infrastructure of resistance began to grow. Angry chanting, signs, and tearful demands were augmented by mutual aid. More than a month in, Portlanders learned that if they were going to last against the paramilitaries of both the president and the mayor,

they were going to have to take better care of each other. For the cops, things had gotten pretty routine at this point. Stop criminal activity, protect property. But federal escalation begged the question, would Portland back down? Despite grievous bodily harm, unmarked federal snatch fans, and overwhelming use of riot munitions, Portlanders continued to fill the streets past the 50th straight day of protests. In the answer to the question, will Portland back down, became increasingly clear? No.

Here's my colleague in getting exposed to chemical weapons, Elaine Kenshin, to continue the story. The battle against Trump's feds gained Portland nationwide notoriety in the summer of 2020. But many longtime activists on the scene, like Max Smith, considered the whole fight to be, at best, something of a distraction. A fight in the feds. That wasn't what we were here for, you know, fighting the feds was like some shit that kind of, it was like, I used to call it the grand theft auto side mission, like 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, you know? And it was really weird, and 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, you know?

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, you know, to be fighting. But it was, but it's the fight that brings out a lot of people. So a very contrasting and confusing time for sure. Thousands would attend each night, and the atmosphere began to resemble a strange nightly festival, ending in the wee hours of the morning with assaults by federal officers and clouds of poison gas.

A man with a gas mask and hockey stick showed up one night to knock canisters away. Teams of people with lacrosse sticks followed. When lines of federal agents pushed forward launching gas grenades, walls of protesters would now regularly toss the rounds back into and behind the fed lines. As protesters behind them used leaf blowers to direct the gas back at the courthouse and squads of medics in the rear treated people as they rotated in and out of the front lines. The federal courthouse had many of the windows of its facade destroyed by fireworks and projectiles, and the clouds of gas rendered the bottom seven stories of the building uninhabitable. Assaults on the fence were an integral part of nightly protests.

Orected at a cost of $200,000 and later reinforced with concrete barriers, it was repeatedly dismantled by protesters and piled in front of courthouse doors. The city, too, wanted the fence gone. It was blocking a bike lane without permits. City attorneys sent a cease and desist letter to the federal government. Portland City Commissioner Chloe U Daily stated, The fence is an abuse of public space and a threat to the traveling public, and that this illegal action will not be tolerated in our community.

U Daily leveled a fine of $500 against the federal government for every 15 minutes that the fence remained on city property, or $48,000 a day. By August, the fines topped $500,000. Protest regular Kremberle describes the new turn in the protest as resembling a festival. I think, like, Fez Night is what made it go from, like, this is interesting to, like, this is a full blown night. Theatrical, spectacled, the actual spectacle. But it was huge, and I don't know, it was huge. I feel like I'm talking about all this stuff, I'm having so much fun,

but I was so much fun, honestly. It was, you know, there was some scary, traumatic shit that happened. I was genuinely scared for my whole ass life a couple of times. But, like, I don't know. I felt like everybody felt like I'm in this festival, where you also thought cops. If that makes sense, because if you were just, like, at the J.C., you could be at the J.C. You could be at the back of the J.C. You could be at the courthouse, you could be at the hell, you could be at the riot ribs, you know, something like that.

You know what I mean? You walk by, you see the same people. Oh, shit! I was drugged. So it really felt like a music festival, and it was a lot of fun. You know, I get to all the scary energy and the tension, you know, super high as a fence. The fence period is like early fence days where, like, we're shaving the fence. That's specifically my favorite period, just because everyone, it's just so irate at that point.

Like, why did they put up a fence? We came back with, like, lawn mower, not lawn mower, sweep blowers. They came back with leaf blowers, you know, it was one night. I saw, like, multiple people with circular saws working on the fence, and I just really loved the ingenuity of, oh, great type of shield walls. It was a great time. Someone threw a tear gas canister back over the fence, what crossed there? It's going to be me talking to my kids in like 50 years.

One of the things that became clear early into the protest, even before the feds came, is that if you didn't have a gas mask, you were going to need one. COVID had already given the world a bit of a post-apocalyptic feel between the looming danger of the virus and everyone being behind masks, but the growing number of respirators at actions accentuated that. The immense quantity of gas that the federal forces used made respirators and gas masks a necessary piece of equipment. And as the summer dragged on, protesters began mobilizing to get respirators into the hands of all that needed them. 16-year-old Ariana Moorhead says that she's got her first gas mask over the summer. I just go through mutual aid, the community, bringing everybody together.

We, probably from Freedom, actually had a couple gas masks donated to them. So that's where I got mine from. The helmet I got from another group I organized with, which is our streets PDX. And then I forgot where I got those from, but yeah, just the community. After a few bouts with police and right-ring militiamen, her uniform had graduated. Now every night she went out, she was ready from head to toe in an outfit she never expected she would need. The first couple nights was really bad. I had to tear gas and I'm like, okay, my immune system can't do this.

I just had milk to save my eyes from tear gas, but no. I had goggles, a helmet, a gas mask. And a lot of people have been wanting to give me a bulletproof vest, but I haven't gotten one yet. You know, just in case, because I'm pretty known by a lot of white supremacists. So it's kind of triggering for me. Like I said, I've gotten death threats, not sent to my house, thank God. I'm not like not thank God, but like still like I haven't gotten me sent to my house, but I've gotten sent through my GoFundMe. I've had some sent to my number. I had to change my number and everything.

I've had to understand over email, social media, it's crazy. So I just need to be, you know, safe at all times. But yeah, right. Like helmet, goggles, face mask. Max Smith describes needing to get better gear as the violence from federal forces grew more intense. The first thing was like, oh shit, I need equipment. I got a helmet and a face shield and got shot in the face like a day later. So, you know, I saw on video, I was watching a Dray's feed when he got hit in the head with a gas canister. And last Friday to skull.

So I started seeing like, oh, people are getting hurt out here. I had actually saw, I was his name, Chris, the taser face. I had seen him the day before he got beat. And I was with a buddy of mine. That guy is huge. Who is this guy over here? We were like just talking about how big this guy was. And the next day I see him on the news getting his ass beat, you know, and I'm like, wow, like they're really beaten everybody up out here. And there were thousands of people out there.

And people were like just being massive, like just beat in mass. And that's the thing. And people didn't have masks or anything. We were just getting tear gas and going to the corner and walking to 6th Avenue and getting our faces flushed out of walking back down again. So I remember the solidarity being crazy. But I also remember thinking this is not what the hell we're here for. Another activist also describes the process of gearing up. The first night that I went out to the Justice Center at, you know, the original fence, I had on a pair of jeans, boots, a sweatshirt and a hat. And, you know, that went from that night when it was raining and then on my birthday, actually, which is June 30th,

my dad texted me and said that he spotted me on a live stream because I was wearing like a plaid shirt and a pair of like light colored jeans. And then that was kind of when it clicked for me. They're like, oh, okay, this is why people are consistently wearing black down here. Like, you don't want to be recognizable, even though I've never, you know, thrown anything or lit anything on fire or tagged anything. Like, you know, just not being able to spot someone is, you know, it has its values. And it went from, you know, jeans and a sweatshirt to needing a respirator and goggles and then to needing a vest, a bulletproof vest, a helmet. You know, all the different gear that we've needed to make sure that we just protect ourselves. It's not about us weaponizing.

It's not about us buying a bunch of guns when we're, you know, to carry around when we're down at the protests. It's not about that. It's about making sure that we don't die and that we don't get hurt. And I was there the night that Donovan was shot. Like, I was the person that ran across the park to go get the medics. And that was a huge awakening moment. Like, I saw a brain fluid come out of his nose, you know? Like, that's a big moment to know, like, okay, we should probably make sure that that doesn't happen to a bunch more of us.

Keeping people breathing became integral to the protest. And at the end of July, as the gas intensified, Team Raccoon worked to get filters to the protesters that needed them. We got a little bit of money from mutual aid donations. And we were wondering what, because park cleans are pretty low cost, you know, trash bags, trash grabbers. It doesn't cost a lot of money to maintain that. So we were wondering, like, what do we do with this money that will really help our community? And we were noticing the air quality in Lowndesdale and Chapman getting worse and worse and worse because of the tear gas and the chemical munitions every night. Even just walking through there during the day, you wanted to put your respirator on at the end of July.

So we were connected to some researchers who wanted to keep a certain level of anonymity. And we decided the best way to do that was through us, we could accept filters from the protest community and we could give them to the researchers. The researchers could conduct their studies in the privacy that they want. And we could use mutual aid money to facilitate that. So that's how it started. We were able to locally source respirators through a local company. And to start, I think we got about four cases of filters and then started getting respirators after the fact to kind of, like, both keep people safe and promote, like, the filter exchange if you don't have a respirator, now you do. Now you can participate in the filter exchange later on and then there's another data point for our scientists.

So we were already set up doing the respirators, doing the filter exchange program. We had a lot sitting around and on the hundred days in Ventura Park, it was a big event. And I was not there that night, but I did watch it from the livestreams and it was horrifying. As Trump's troops catapulted Portland into the national spotlight, cameras descended on the city. For more than a month, the protests had been covered by a small group of local reporters. Suddenly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every major news network were crowding around the federal courthouse on a nightly basis. Right around the time the Fed War started, a federal judge passed a temporary restraining order banning federal agents from attacking marked press. Whether this stopped any brutality is up for debate. The Press Freedom Tracker statistics suggest the Portland press were assaulted more often than press in any other city in 2020.

What the restraining order did was explode the number of people who went out with cameras to livestream and film. The sheer number of people with cameras became an issue for many activists. At times it was physically challenging just to maneuver around the courthouse, so much space was being taken up by people marked press. All this documentation also caused a problem for protesters taking illegal direct action against federal agents and property. The flood of cameras amounted to constant live surveillance from every conceivable angle. Black block and umbrellas helped to shield people, but there was no perfect solution. Direct action. 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 on the gun badass 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. I was hampered. Midway through the Fed War, the Argonian, a local paper, was able to get a journalist inside the federal courthouse. They took a picture inside the command center, which featured a large computer monitor showing numerous live stream feeds of the protests. This convinced many committed activists that streamers were their enemy. And the fact that live stream footage was used in federal charging documents seemed to support that.

However, the matter was not that simple. Early live streams of police violence had played a major role in getting thousands of Portlanders out into the streets. Over and over again, we heard stories from activists who first learned how to handle tear gas or who were radicalized to start coming out because they watched streams. Federal law enforcement clearly used live streams for intelligence as well, but it's also very possible they made certain the Argonian took a picture of their wall of live streams because they saw the streams as a major avenue by which protesters recruited more numbers and built public sympathy. Whatever the truth, that Argonian article convinced several members of the press to stop live streaming and to move to more carefully posting short videos of the action. As a result, live streaming was increasingly done by newbies who had flooded into Portland seeking easy cash.

The streamer apocalypse would continue as people brought gimbals and started plugging their cash app every five minutes on stream. It should be noted, there were also a number of Portlanders who slapped press onto their helmet in the hope that they wouldn't get beat up as much, which some might call a damning indictment of the state's use of force. We CROCK IT! Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure in pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide is this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council.

From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. We always wanted to know when it felt like to kill somebody. We started laughing. The prosecutors described him as a serial killer savant. Picking up these girls, getting them in a position of vulnerability. When he got over their neck, that was it. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River, and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to the river? One time. Just one time. He started fantasizing about having sex with his mother, and he fantasized about killing her.

This podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods, do it to all of us, kind of crazy. Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeart radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Fit. On the podcast 90210MG, join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a re-watch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind-the-scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera.

Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As 90210 Superfan and radio host, Sisani, sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting, Donna Martin graduates! You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show. And you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As the Fed War raged on, one local critic was especially vocal about the optics of the protests. NAACP Portland Chapter President Pastor E.D. Mondane described the protests as devolving into white spectacle in a widely circulated Washington Post op-ed.

What are ANTIFA and other leftist agitators achieving for the cause of black equality? The Mall of Moms, while perhaps well-intentioned, ends up redirecting attention away from the urgent issue of murdered black bodies, he stated, before asking Portlanders to vacate the streets and instead to begin fighting at schools, city councils, and other governments. While he also called for the feds to leave, Pastor Mondane's call for Portlanders to pull out of the streets drew the ire of many organizers on the ground. It also earned Mondane airtime on national news outlets, which only ended when a lengthy expose later that fall revealed that he had been alleged of engaging in sexual, mental, and emotional abuse by nearly a dozen members of his church. Now, since the 4th of July, one of the regular and most revered sites at the protests was Riot Ribs, a free pop-up barbecue food cart. Riot Ribs was so beloved in Portland that even local politicians who had been negative about the protests were hard pressed to say a single bad word about them. The restaurant had started operations the night of July 4th, thanks to a former black panther named Lorenzo.

Riot Ribs quickly became a large-scale operation, feeding protesters and helping the local homeless population. After a couple of weeks, the operation expanded into clothing donations, a large medical tent, resume help, and haircuts. The Ribs made the local dining news, and protesters would often wait in line through clouds of tear gas to get them. They were pretty darn good. Volunteers cleaned the park and supplied equipment to protesters and again to the local homeless population. Morgan, currently with Team Raccoon, who volunteered at Riot Ribs, describes some of the work that they would do. Well, so the park clean itself for volunteers was basically just show up. We have trash grabbers. You get to keep a pair of gardening gloves, so you have something to protect your hands. We have sanitizer, masks, anything that anybody would need, and that would just focus on picking up litter around the park.

But myself and a couple of people that were with Riot Ribs every day, we took the biggest hits on the bathrooms. Even at one point, like during park cleans, I would have volunteers picking up litter and picking up trash, but one thing I would go and do is I would get cat litter and put cat litter down behind the bathrooms, which is where people were peeing usually. It was getting to be a sanitation issue, so what we were doing was we were putting cat litter down and then scooping it away when it got used and then putting fresh litter down. So myself and a couple of people from Riot Ribs were really doing the majority of that dirty work and volunteers were doing basically litter cleanup and just general maintenance. Feds, however, had a different view of the operation. While the rain of tear gas and munitions seemed largely indiscriminate, volunteers at Riot Ribs were regularly pelted with rubber bullets and even arrested. An early morning sweep at Chapman and Lowndesdale squares even saw police booting houseless people from the respective parks, seizing all of Riot Ribs' equipment and arresting nine people, some of whom had helped run the cart.

During the raids, federal forces would pepper spray the grills and ruin donated equipment. In response, volunteers would dutifully take the ruined lit grills and dump them over the fence around the federal courthouse. One night, during a federal rush, all of the donated medical supplies were sprayed with mace. This, of course, ruined them. Every time Riot Ribs was targeted and its crew arrested, its equipment destroyed, more donations would come in, new people would come over to volunteer, and new equipment would be, you know, provided. In just a couple of weeks, the effort, which had started as just a one-man operation, had raised more than $300,000 to keep going. But just as quickly as the love came, there were new questions about the group's operations. In fact, both Wall of Moms and Riot Ribs soon faced sharp growing pains as new money and spotlights of attentions bred creeping suspicion among some in the activist community and even doubts about safety.

Courtney, who had started out protesting with Wall of Moms, described the night out with them that convinced her to quit. Yes, so that night in particular, I know that that was the first night that actually Moms got arrested. There was one mom in particular that, like, she got arrested, but then she also got her head. Like, I don't know if they shot her directly in the head, but that's when she, like, had her head busted open. So throughout that night, I was like, this is just not right. Like, I don't understand. They have, like, these Facebook pages and these Twitter and all this kind of stuff to, like, communicate things with people, and nothing was communicated in a way for, like, to mentally prepare these women when they show up. And so that just throughout the night, I was just so annoyed with all of that. And I was like, you know what, like, I'm not going to wear, oh, towards the end of the night, my friends and I actually had black shirts on underneath. And we, like, literally took our shirts off, our yellow shirts off, and we're like, we're not doing that anymore. Most Fed War nights followed a similar pattern. Huge crowds would gather. They would yell and throw things over the fence or damage the fence until the feds came out in force and pushed the crowd back.

Then the feds would go back inside, the crowd would reform, and the cycle would repeat itself until there was no one left. Midway through all of this, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler went out and stood in the tear gas with protesters. On national media, his tear gassing was portrayed as bravely standing with his city against federal overreach. The people actually protesting in downtown Portland felt very different. Ted was heckled constantly. His bodyguard had to keep people away from him. And as he was leaving horribly tear gassed, activists dumped bags of spent riot munitions that Wheeler's cops had fired at them onto the ground in front of him. More than anything, most protesters seemed to enjoy watching Ted suffer after he had caused such pain for all of them. Courtney continues on about that night. So the next night was the night that Ted came out. And we ended up deciding like we weren't going to come with all of moms anymore because there had been already like some infighting on their pages or whatever.

And so we just wanted nothing to do with it anymore at that point because of the miscommunication or I mean lack of communication that there was. And so when Ted came out, that's when like definitely the numbers had multiplied multiplied from all of moms. And again, I don't think that they prepared anyone for what was going on. I mean, I can't, you can't like, that's not probably as, I don't know how accurate I am with that. But I had still remained on like the Facebook pages and have been like looking at things and checking to see if anybody was like communicating what to expect. So then when they showed up, there was like so many of them and then Ted was there. And then throughout like their, the speeches that were going on and things like that, they, I guess, somebody that was speaking on the mic had told them to tell the moms to go home. Because they didn't want to have a photo opportunity or opportunity with Ted. So it wasn't communicated enough to the hundreds of moms that were there.

And then while Ted was out, that's when they started gassing everybody. Well, apparently they had told the moms to leave, but there were like hundreds of moms left behind that had like no nothing. They had like things from like hydration station and the medics and like, you know, some swimming goggles and, you know, paper masks and things like that. And they didn't have like, they weren't prepared obviously for like with full face like gas masks or respirators and things like that. And so she basically had abandoned all of these moms and had posted a video on the Facebook thing saying, while of mom, do you need to leave? Like we're not giving Ted Wheeler the opportunity to take a photo of us immediately after that's when they started gassing. And then there were hundreds of moms screening of running around Chapman Square.

And they're like leader that just left them. And so the rest of the protesters were there like taking care of these women that were front lining it while like that had dipped out and had gone. And so that's when it kind of like started the downfall of wall of moms. And that's because later on people didn't realize because nobody's like checking their Facebook while they're out there like waiting to get gas by the feds. And like the next when they get home, they see that like that had told everyone to leave. Demetria Hester started taking to the streets during the Fed War. She explains her perspective on what happened with the mall of moms. It was beautiful.

But the wall of moms, but the person who created a wall of mom, she was the white privileged mom. And she tried to use black women to to put right on our backs about promoting herself and for it to be some kind of promotion and not for black lives matter. Or photo shoots and to be popular. And the moms were so disgusted by how she was trying to parade them instead of being down there to fight for black lives matter. And the mom saw that. 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 on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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. When they saw that she was trying to capitalize on Black Lives Matter also, they were disgusted. So me being a part of who I am, I took all the moms that were not white supremacy moms trying to be the saviors and made moms united for Black Lives. Because of the fact that the person, Bev Bidem, she was trying to capitalize on Black Lives.

She didn't care about Black Lives as a mom. She just wanted to do it for a photo op. She thought she was going to come down there and save the day. So it was beautiful for me to see so many people out for Black Lives Matter, but it was so disgusting to see that what we've been fighting for, that Bev Bidem came in and tried to capitalize on that. But we had to quickly turn that around. The Wall of Moms founder Bev Barnum claimed to have the blessings of a seasoned activist group, Don't Shoot Portland, her early fumblings led Don't Shoot to step in and help guide both Wall of Moms and Riot Ribs in mid-July. Almost immediately what had been purely positive stories nosedived into something more muddled. Riot Ribs disbanded before a full transfer of leadership could even happen, and the story of this is very complicated. There were allegations of abuse from a former member of Riot Ribs, one of the people who helped cook there. The whole situation left a lot of people scratching their heads.

The center of the rift seems to have focused around an imposter who started claiming to represent Riot Ribs in order to draw donations to himself. This person reportedly threatened several members of Riot Ribs and several other protesters with a firearm on multiple occasions. The situation grew so messy and so violent that the old Riot Ribs staff departed, using the money that they had raised to buy several vans and go deliver Ribs to protest around the country. The imposter Riot Ribs continued to operate and continued to threaten people with deadly weapons on occasion. The situation with Wall of Moms was, if not a little more normal than at least involved less of an armed coup. After Don't Shoot was given control of the group, they gave Demetria Hester admin control of the organization's now massive Facebook page. And Don't Shoot Portland and Wall of Moms even entered into a joint lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for their use of excessive force, their violations of free speech, all of the terrible stuff that they'd been doing. Shortly after this suit was announced, what had seemed to be a strong, united front fell apart.

Wall of Moms founder Bev Barnum began filing paperwork to register the group as a non-profit. This move set up a series of alarms leading Don't Shoot to question if the move was to profit off of the Black Lives Matter movement. Bev pushed back. Her goal, she said, was to protect protesters from federal agents, not the BLM movement. For her, Wall of Moms was something of a business. A line was drawn. Don't Shoot split from the two-week-old Wall of Moms and founded a new Black-led group called Moms United for Black Lives. This one led by Demetria Hester. We know the whole situation is very confusing and trust us, no one who was there at the time had a super great understanding of what was actually happening with either the Wall of Moms or with riot ribs. It was a confusing time and everything that happened there was very muddled, not just by all of the different people involved but by the constant clouds of tear gas and trauma that enveloped everything.

As the city tried to present a united front against Trump's agents and the Portland Police Bureau, the growing rifts internally among protesters threatened to derail resistance altogether. A question began to loom above the clouds of gas. Had the fight become more about Donald Trump and his agents than the movement for Black Lives? The answer would become critical in the unfolding days of the protest. She made mistakes too. That's true, she did kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real, we're all trapped here and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to the Doctor's Sex Re-Show every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activists on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Adityna 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 iHeart Podcast and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American Sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye.

So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com. The Fed War reached its conclusion in the closing days of July. Oregon Governor Kate Brown entered talks with the White House to negotiate reducing the presence of federal troops. On the ground, things had fallen into yet another pattern. In the afternoon, a crowd would gather around the justice center and courthouse to sing and listen to speeches. As night fell, thousands would surround the courthouse, waiting for the feds to inevitably begin shooting people. One of the last really big fed nights was July 25th.

Over a thousand people marched all the way from North Portland to the courthouse, where there were already thousands of people gathered. The site upon arrival was a familiar one. Moms and yellows standing behind people with shields deflecting canisters and pepper balls, leaf blowers pushing gas back behind the fence, and people with heat-resistant gloves tossing canisters over the barrier like a sport. At this point, Portland was getting very good at counteracting tear gas. In fact, they'd almost perfected the art. Some feds got dumped with pink paint early in the night, and they retreated back into the courthouse. And with the absence of the feds, people were more free to tamper with the fence.

Occasionally, there would be sparks from an angle grinder, slowly removing supports on the steel barricade. While the feds were inside, they'd shoot tear gas from the roof and pepper balls out of murder holes. As people shook the fence back and forth, fireworks were launched up at the roof. But the feds would not stay on the roof for the rest of the night. With a mix of vigorous shaking, rope ties, and liberal use of angle grinders, Portlanders finally toppled over the concrete reinforced steel fence. The feds were not happy. As they continued to shower the streets with tear gas fired from the roof,

squads of federal agents busted out of the courthouse door, launching stun grenades, and taking aim with M4 rifles. Protesters' shield walls quickly surrounded a large portion of the fence that had been knocked over. Feds shot more and more munitions into the crowd, and protesters tossed back canisters of tear gas and fireworks into the federal lines. All the while, the red laser sight on an automatic rifle burned through the clouds of smoke and gas, swiveling across the chests of people in the crowd. Eventually, the gas was too much, even for more than a dozen leaf blowers. Some in the crowd of protesters around the fallen fence had to pull back or suffocate. At this point, our old friends, the Portland Police Bureau, arrived to declare a riot

and warn everyone that tear gas was about to be used, which had been used for hours at that point. As thousands of people started to retreat west under heavy grenade fire, the feds and the Portland Police took to the streets to inflict violence. On the sidewalk, medics treated people with giant gashes on their face from metal canisters and foam-tipped riot rounds. Multiple people were shot in the face, just like Donovan LaBella had been all those weeks prior. On July 29th, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced that the White House, DHS, and her office had come to a deal. The next day, July 30th, the feds were leaving Portland. Of course, that was something of a lie. The same day that Kate made her announcement, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf contradicted her claim,

saying on Twitter, Now, Trump also challenged Brown's announcement, tweeting that she must clear out the anarchists and agitators, and that if she doesn't, the federal government will do it for her. We will not be leaving until there is safety. Kate Brown then clarified that the federal removal would be instead a phased withdrawal of federal agents from the Portland downtown area. Their presence would be replaced by Oregon State Police. Brown tweeted that, Our local Oregon State police officers will be downtown to protect Oregonians' right to free speech and to keep the peace.

The number of feds were reduced, but they never actually left Portland. Into August, there were still hundreds of additional federal agents from Customs and Borders Patrol, the Federal Protective Service, and the U.S. Marshals. One law enforcement official told OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting, There has been a small army in Portland, and multiple law enforcement sources told OPB that they expected additional federal forces to remain in the city up and through the general election. With the DHS official saying to OPB, My guess is that the protest climate isn't going to change much between now and the election. The department is reluctant to draw down drastically in a way that would leave us vulnerable. All the feds really did was become less visible.

They did temporarily stop responding to protesters, leaving that job to the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police. But they were still in town, and smaller groups of Portland protesters would occasionally meet these feds whenever a protest was held at the local ICE facility. The night of July 30th was the first night without tear gas in weeks, with both feds and Oregon State Police just watching from inside the courthouse. This convinced many exhausted Portlanders that the feds had actually left. In the following days, numbers started to dwindle. The mass of liberals that assembled to fight off Trump's feds called the effort of victory, putting their newly acquired gas masks in the closet and moving on. This turn of events was predictable for some of the more seasoned activists.

Here's Koska. I saw so many patterns I saw in Standing Rock half being repeated, not just here, but in other pipeline movements and other movements. And I saw the exact same thing happening in Portland. And so I kept saying that it's going to turn into Burning Man in like 10 more days, and then it kind of was a little bit circusy for a while. But it sucks that all the mainstream Americans or mainstream people in the United States thought it was just the feds doing that to us. And if we just get rid of the feds, everything will be fine. But they didn't get rid of the feds. They only got rid of that unit, the rest of the feds stayed, and we're still suffering the same amount of violence.

It's just not covered. And it was also disgusting to me because there were all these hearings about it and press about it, about this extreme violence from these federal officers. But Portland Police were using the exact same tactics and violence for years. They've been doing the same thing. The disappearance of the liberal majority suggested that many who showed up for the Fed War were more interested in standing up against Trump than four black lives. Olivia Baccott B. Smith, co-chair of the Portland DSA, gives her feelings on the subject. I mean, it's like how we see a lot of other struggles, that because Trump is the face of it, liberals will turn out to protest these things in ways that they wouldn't before. You know, keeping kids in cages at the border.

Obama did that. I think that it's actually beneficial to our movement that Trump is now so visibly violent and hateful because it takes the mask off. And it radicalizes a lot of people. I think that, yeah, we saw an incredible amount of people, moms, dad, labor, an amazing labor contingent showed up to protest against the federal officers being here because Trump sent them. I mean, Obama sent federal officers to Baltimore, to Ferguson, to Standing Rock. We did not see the same sort of mobilization from liberals that we are now seeing because it was Trump. The Red War was a tremendous story of tragedy and hope. Thousands of liberal moderates took to the streets in a semi-militant way for the first time.

Huge numbers of people were directly exposed to the concept of mutual aid and got a glimpse of the power that thousands of assembled human beings can hold. But most of that power and potential disappeared when the feds did. The spectacle of federal violence, the military body armor and the tear gas clouds the size of buildings, that all overshadowed the original purpose of the 2020 BLM movement. But it was not all as hopeless as it might seem. For every protester who stopped going out because the feds left, there was another person who had grown more committed to the cause than ever before. Many of them were only halted and continuing to show up due to physical injury or emotional trauma. The end of the fed war would bring the last of Portland's truly massive 2020 protests. But it did not mark the end of the uprising.

For Portland's committed activists, the fight was far from over. Some heroes unsung and some monsters get monuments built for them, but ain't be all a little bit of monster we crooked. I'm Colleen Witt. 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 A.J. Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kiddink and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke and today I'm going to 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 Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and the fascinating. In our inaugural season, we'll give you a backstage tour of the complex and unusual artifact that is the American Sight Show. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say? Hum... Dog... Cat...

Giraffe... Giraffe really? Giraffe? Uh, giraffe. You're not going to get it all right. Just make sure you know the big stuff, like making sure your kids are buckled correctly in the right seat for their age and size. Get it right. Visit nhtsa.gov Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. 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 podcast. 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 in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. As 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.