Behind the Bastards - Part One: Oregon is a Bastard: The History of a White Supremacist State

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

In episode 35, Portland activist Marielle Eaton sits down with Robert Evans to talk about Oregon's exceedingly Bastardful history as a white nationalist paradise. 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. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, of course, I'm in Portland, Oregon, on the 17th, which is to us tomorrow. But to you in the past, there will be a rally from a group called Patriot Prayer, who you will be hearing a lot about in the next episode of this podcast with some members of Rose City Antifa as guests. And today, of course, my guest is...

My name is Marielle Eaton, and I've lived in Portland for 14 years, and I do many different things here. Including quite a bit of activism. Quite a bit of activism. My main effort is with sexual and relationship violence prevention and victim advocacy. And I've done activism around that for about a decade now, and I am a victim advocate both in the university setting, as well as independent organization settings. And you've also done quite a bit of anti-fascist action in the street,

during which you were photographed and have become sort of a figurehead of Antifa for CNN's reports on the matter. We're officially in an interview with Antifa. The Fox News Chiron that would go across. So we're going to be talking about Oregon, your lovely home state, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and also way more racist, historically at least, than most people would give it credit for based on Portlandia.

And currently. It's not just macrobiotic burritos and... I'm trying to think of something else hippie-ish. Cars that run on... Garbage. Garbage cars. It's a little bit deeper than that. So that's what we're going to be getting into the day. Today, the bastard is the state of Oregon.

Which, you know, sorry, Oregon, I do love you, but let's get into it. So Peter Hardiman Burnett was born in 1807. He started out as a self-educated, which I think in 1807 just means uneducated, owner of a general store in Clear Creek, Tennessee. As a young man, Peter Burnett came to suspect that an enslaved black person was drinking from his store's whiskey barrel at night. So he set up a booby trap, a rifle that was rigged to fire when the window shatter was opened.

His trap wound up killing the poor man when the guy tried to break into his house. Burnett expressed remorse but was not charged with any crime because it was 1807. And that sort of thing wasn't really a crime in Tennessee back then. In 1843, Burnett helped organize and lead the first great wagon train to Oregon. So he was one of the pioneers who first discovered this territory. Oregon Trail, you could say is a game about Peter Burnett, a murderer and soon-to-be politician because he was quickly elected to the provisional legislature of Oregon. Now this is before Oregon was a state, so it was still a territory.

And he served as the territory of Oregon's first Supreme Court Justice, Chief Supreme Court Justice. So I'm guessing his qualifications were let a wagon train and was a murderer. So in 1843, they were like, you're our judge, you're in charge of this state right now. So 1844, Peter Burnett was instrumental in passing what came to be known as the Burnett Lash Law. You heard of the Burnett Lash Law? From you. Okay, right.

Am I allowed to disclose that? Yeah, we've talked prior to setting up this... I had not heard that. That's the secret. I had not remembered that. I'm sure I've heard it, but I have not remembered that until you brought it up. It's a little bit famous. It's essentially stated that all black people were required to leave Oregon County under penalty of being whipped,

quote, not less than 20 or more than 39 stripes. This punishment was to be repeated every six months until they left the state. So one of the interesting things about Peter Burnett is that he's a classic example of someone winding up on the right side of a historical issue for tremendously wrong reasons, because Peter Burnett was an outspoken abolitionist. Not because he believed slavery was wrong, but because he was just that racist. He thought that if there was slavery, there would be people who weren't white in the country. That was his whole issue, which is there's a whole chunk of the abolitionist movement,

which were just people who were too racist to own slaves. It's kind of a little historical angle that gets left out a lot of the time, but bizarre. So Burnett's law did include a grace period, three years for black women and two years for black men. So he gave them some time to get out of the state. Burnett also pushed against Chinese migration to Oregon. He tried to ban it. He later went on to become the first governor of the state of California. So he's my state's first governor as well.

And of course his first action and governor of the state of California was pretty sure you can guess. He tried to ban all black people from California. Yeah, what do you know? And then he tried to ban all Chinese people from California. Peter Burnett was a consistent man, if nothing else. And I got a picture of him and he looks like, we'll put it up on the site behind the bastards.com, but he looks like the guy you would cast to play a generic old Tony Ray. Oh, yeah.

That's that forehead. That is, that's a five head, six head. Yeah, that is maybe even a seven. I mean, it just keeps going. And those little curls on the side. The curls, I'm not going to go against them for the curls. No. I mean, that's, it seems like he might have had a little bit of a head ahead.

No, that's the only redeeming quality. And I mean, it's a weird cravat. He looks like someone in a story who would like take off his cravat and his head would fall off in an old fable. Yeah, he doesn't look like a very happy person. No, no, he does not. He looks a little bit like the painting of the guy Vigo and Ghostbusters too. The bad guy who's trying to steal that baby's body. Yeah, he's got that.

He's got his eyes are doing that sort of thing. So you really owe it to yourself to look at a picture of Peter Burnett, a guy who looks like his goal in life was to ban people who aren't white from multiple states. Yes. Yeah. So Burnett's lash law did not last long, which is kind of hard to say 10 times fast. The lash law did not last long. I'm not even going to attempt it.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Now, the good news is that no black people are recorded to have been lashed under it. It apparently was not used even in the 1840s in Oregon. Enough people were like, this seems a little bit too racist. Yeah. That said, we're talking Oregon in the 1840s. Who knows what happened, especially rural areas where the rural law was even less than it was in Portland.

Yeah. Whether or not it was used, the law reflected the values of the first white people who settled in the territory of Oregon. They wanted their state to be slave free, but because that was the only way to ensure the state had no black people at all. In 1848, the Oregon territorial government passed a law that banned any, quote, Negro or mulatto from living in Oregon. In 1850, the Oregon Land Donation Act gave, quote, whites and half-breed Indians 650 acres of land from the government. All other people of color were banned from receiving land grants. So Oregon was founded as a whites-only state. It was seen as this is going to be just white people in this chunk. So that was the Pacific Northwest from the get-go almost 200 years ago.

Absolutely. Yeah. And we'll be talking about there's some people who still think that ought to be the way things work. Yes. So from the beginning, Oregon was a very rough place to be anything but a very, very white person. There were some extraordinarily brave black pioneers who did try to make a life out here. In 1851, one of them was Jacob Vanderpool. He was a former sailor. I think he came from the Caribbean Islands, but I don't think we know exactly.

But he came to own a saloon restaurant and boarding house in Oregon City. And a white guy named Theophilius Magruder, which is... Quite a name. Quite a name. In the name you would expect of a guy who's about to do or who did what we're about to talk about him doing, reported him for the crime of being black in Oregon. And he was given 30 days to leave the state. Magruder also owned a hotel and a bar in the same town,

so it's entirely possible that his motive was as financial as it was racist, if not more so, but Jacob Vanderpool was forced to leave and forced to give up his business. In 1857, Oregon wrote a state constitution that enshrined its exclusion of black people into law. Quote, No free Negro or mulatto not residing in the state at the time of the adoption of this constitution shall ever come, reside, or be within the state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein. And the legislative assembly shall provide bipenal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free Negroes and mulattos, and for their effectual exclusion from the state and from the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ them, or harbor them therein. Yeah, so that's the initial law that Oregon is founded under, 1857.

In 1859, Oregon Territory finally becomes a state. It was the only state in the Union that was officially whites only. So this is the only time that this happened. As much racism as there is in the history of the United States, Oregon's the only state to try to do this. So that's a claim to fame, I guess. Texas has the Alamo. There you go. Which is also pretty racist.

I grew up in Texas, and they always kind of smoothed over why the Texans were rebelling against Mexico. Yeah, a lot to do with the fact that they wanted to own people, and Mexico didn't like people owning people. Yeah, they really hide that fact. Always. So while Oregon initially ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, including former slaves, this is why we have birthright citizenship. They were trying to figure out a legal solution to, we've got all these people that we forced to be here, and now they've got to be citizens. So Oregon initially ratified the 14th Amendment, but then it almost immediately rescinded the ratification of the amendment.

I guess people got angry. Oregon is also one of only six states that refused to ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote. So fortunately, Oregon eventually got its shit together enough to finally ratify the 15th Amendment. You want to guess when that happened? I've known this before, but I can't think of it. It was 1959. Yes. They were like, alright, we'll ratify the amendment that lets black guys vote.

Just black guys. It did not ratify the 14th Amendment until 1973. I definitely remember that date. I think it's important when we talk about why this stuff still lingers, because we're not talking about 1865 really isn't that long. No. When you talk about generations, because the last Civil War widows pension just stopped getting paid like three years ago. Absolutely. Okay, we'll say that all the time.

They're like, oh, racism's done, slavery's over. Oh, okay, interesting. Let's talk about redlining. Oh, well that was a long time ago too. We will be talking about it. Yeah, I'm sure we will. But yeah, Oregon ratified the amendment that gave birthright citizenship to people 15 years before I was born. Just not that long.

Disco might have been a thing. I think that may have been a thing. Yeah, it's about as old as disco. It's about as old as disco. Although that does feel old now. That does feel old now. Disco actually feels older than white supremacy in Oregon. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So it's probably not hard to see why the state of Oregon has stayed so white, even though after 1868 there was nothing legally the state authorities could do to keep black people out of Oregon. So again, it's not whites only after that point. By 1890, there were only around a thousand black people in the entire state. By 1920, there were just 2000. Now, the 1920s would have been a rough time to be a black person in Oregon because Oregon was the highest per capita membership of the Ku Klux Klan of any state in the union. They marched in, yeah. They gathered in Portland proper all the time.

Thousands of them. Thousands of them. Thousands. They're clavrons, I think. Yeah, that's the name. Yeah. They're grand wizards. Yeah.

Cross burnings. Cross burnings in the center of the city. Yeah, I prefer to... It's easier to focus on the ridiculous names, but yeah, it was cross burnings and murders and... Yes. Yeah, yeah. Oh man, we have to talk about that now. No, I mean we can...

That's what we're here for. Yeah, that is what we're here for. So Democrat Walter Pierce was elected governor in 1922 after receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of the Oregon Ku Klux Klan. In fact, that may have been why he won. According to an article in The Guardian, quote, photos in the local paper show the Portland chief of police, sheriff, district attorney, US attorney, and mayor posing with Klansmen, accompanied by an article saying the men were taking advice from the Klan. So again, really not weird that it took until the 70s to ratify the 14th and 1590 ratify the...

Yeah. So World War II is when things really started to change demographically in Oregon. This was the first time that a large number of black people began to move to the state, and it was because America was in this whole war thing and we needed to build a shitload of boats. And if there's one thing Portland's great at, it's being a place to build a shitload of boats. You guys... We got our boats. If I ever need to build a navy, this is the city I'm going to build that navy in.

Go for it. Yeah. We're here. I'm going to crowd fund it like a go fund me, but instead of for medical bills for like a battleship or three. What are you going to use it for? I don't know. You sail around. Like what Elron Hubbard did, just sail around for eight or nine years.

Podcasting. Yeah, podcasting. Just podcast boat. Yeah, a podcast boat, a podcast cult boat. Maybe. U.S.S. podcast boat. I was going to say U.S.S. Bastard. Oh, U.S.S.

More catchy than mine. Yeah, exactly. More catchy than mine. I'm not the name or in this. Well, in fairness, I'm not the name or either. Somebody else figured that out. Okay, there you go. No, I feel your pain.

So by the end of World War II, more than 20,000 black people had moved to Oregon. Many of them resided in Vanport, a small city between Portland and Vancouver, Washington, calling it a city at first, at least. Yeah. Yeah. Small town. Small town. It was, most of it was temporary housing that was built because they had so many workers

coming in and they needed the ability to host them. And Portland was a very tiny city at this point still. Here's how the Smithsonian described the creation of Vanport. Quote, completed in just 110 days, the town comprised of 10,414 apartments and homes was mostly a slip-shod combination of wooden blocks and fiberboard walls. Built on marshland between the Columbia Slough and the Columbia River, Vanport was physically segregated from Portland and kept dry only by a system of dykes that held back the flow of the Columbia River. So, a little bit of foreshadowing there.

This is built in basically the worst location you could build a town to keep it dry. Yep. This later, Manly Maven, who grew up in Vanport, would describe it this way. Quote, the psychological effect of living on the bottom of a relatively small area, dyked on all sides to a height of 15 to 25 feet, was vaguely disturbing. It was almost impossible to get a view of the horizon from anywhere in Vanport, at least on the ground or in the lower level apartments. And it was even difficult from upper levels, which I can't really imagine this.

It sounds like almost something you'd see in like a dystopian movie, where these people just have these dykes rising like they're walled in on all sides. And this is the hub of, you know, the black community in Portland, you know, for the first time that it really has any size at all. So, yeah, the idea was that once folks had settled into Vanport and, you know, worked at their jobs long enough and earned some cash, they would be able to rent or buy homes elsewhere. It was not intended to be a permanent development.

But discriminatory housing policy made it nearly impossible for black people to, you know, live anywhere else in the city. So once the war ended, the mayor of Portland wrote a newspaper article telling the black people of Vanport that they were no longer welcome in the state. This is the mayor of Portland, who's basically put up a letter saying like, okay, thank you for building the boats. You can go now. Yeah, the Housing Authority discussed tearing the town down.

A 1947 Oregon Journal article described local attitudes to Vanport this way. To many Oregonians, Vanport has been undesirable because it is supposed to have a large colored population of the sum 23,000 inhabitants only slightly over 4,000, or colored residents. True, this is a high percentage per capita compared to other Northwestern cities. But as one resident puts it, the colored people have to live somewhere and whether the Northwesterners like it or not, they're here to stay. I think there's a lot to dig into in terms of the phrasing there, both that this journalist rather than being like kind of confronting the racism is like,

well, they're not entirely accurate. It's only a quarter of color. Also, yeah, whether the Northwesterners like it or not, they're here to stay. So that's the attitude in 1947. So today you know Vanport as Delta Park. That's sort of the land that's on now because very little of Vanport City still remains. In 1948, it started raining very hard. On Memorial Day, 1948, residents of Vanport woke up to driving rain in this letter

from the Housing Authority of Portland, the HAP. Remember, dykes are safe at present. You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don't get excited. I do feel like if the government's sending you all caps notes that say don't get excited, you should probably get excited. You should get pretty excited.

You should get pretty excited. What happened next is... Horrendous. Yeah, horrendous and very predictable. The dykes did not hold. A hole opened up shortly after 4 p.m. and roughly one day Vanport, Oregon's second largest city at the time, was completely wiped out by floodwaters.

18,500 people, 6,300 of whom were black, were displaced. Hundreds died. But we don't know how many because it really seems like the HAP may have secretly disposed of hundreds of corpses. And even with the predictability that you were mentioning, people often will trust authority figures. And even if it seems predictable in hindsight, at the time it probably didn't. They probably really trusted that, that they were safe. Oh yeah, I was not trying to say the people of Vanport should have predicted it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The city should have known something was wrong. They didn't give a shit. With this place that was basically built underwater with the water held in by walls and then the walls start getting flooded with water. Absolutely. There's a rumor that 457 dead people were shipped to Japan for some reason. There's a bunch of weird rumors around what was done to the people who died.

It's kind of hard to dig into. I heard there were cover-ups. I hadn't heard that. It seems like a reasonable guess would be somewhere between 400 and 600 dead. But it's very hard to say. Yeah, and we see that cycle repeating itself with Puerto Rico. Yeah, yeah. Whereas it's weird how things rhyme all of the time in history.

Yep, all the time. Speaking of rhyming, it's time for an ad break. That was a bad plug. But do you have any products and or services you'd like to plug before we get to the ones that paid us? So it gets to just kind of be anything? Anything you want. I usually pick random objects on the table because I just love advertising.

All right. I'm going to say that everyone should read Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. Ooh, that is much more meaningful than the plug I was going to go with. So yeah, read Man's Search for Meaning. Oh, I was going to plug Avino Daily Moisturizing Lotion, the only Daily Moisturizing Lotion currently on this table. Love it. Let's move over to the products and or services that actually paid us for our time.

Excellent. 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 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 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 offending 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 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.

We're back! We're back! And we're talking about racism in Oregon! Not for something completely different. Well, I mean, compared to your sponsors. Oh, yes. Very different. Because none of our sponsors support racism in Oregon. You sure?

Yeah, pretty sure. Okay, good. I mean, like, they make belts, like Crip Six. I don't see how a belt could be racist. Depends on where they're made. Should I be saying this? Should I be talking about consumerism under capitalism? Well, yes.

I mean, we do. It's one of those things. This is the ocean that we live in, so you can't do anything but swim. But you can try to pick products that you feel don't add to the problems. Yeah, as long as you're not sponsored by Amazon. We're not sponsored by Amazon. And I do believe that it's a general good that keeps people's pants up. Yes.

Yeah. Let's get back into it. Let's continue. Let's pack into it. So, there's a lot more to say in terms of Portland's history of being terrible to the black people who live there. There was the time when voters in 1956 approved the construction of an arena that necessitated the destruction of 476 homes, half of which were black people's homes. And of course, black people made up like less than 2% of the city at this point,

so we're not talking about a proportional sort of, yeah. And the expressway as well. Yeah, that's exactly what it's about to say. Well, actually, no, I was about to go into a completely different time that they did that a second time. And then there's even more. Yeah, there was the time also in 1956 when the city of Portland used federal funds to expand a local hospital by bulldozing 76 acres of black

on homes and businesses at the junction of North Williams Avenue and Russell Street, which at that point was considered Portland's black main street, which if I'm keeping track is at least the third black main street in a city in the United States that was destroyed, although since Portland didn't bomb theirs, which is what happened in a couple of other states, I guess it's, yeah, better than the Air Force. I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, it's not great. It's hard to tell better from worse. Yeah. Slow deprivation is not always... No. Yeah. I was reaching for a little bit of levity in a situation that doesn't deserve it. So tell us about this expressway, which I did not include in here.

Yeah. So anyone who's in Portland knows exactly what I'm talking about. But for people outside, there is this very long freeway project that goes past and around the Memorial Coliseum, which you just mentioned that was built the arena. And this expressway was initially going to be in the west portion of Portland. Anyone who knows Portland knows that the Willamette River bisects east from west. And so it was initially going to be on the other side of the river. But then people over there were saying, oh, no, like we don't want that over here.

And it was, you know, predominantly white people who were saying that. And so they decided... On my backyard. Yeah. Front yard. Exactly. NIMBY NIMBY. And so it instead got placed right, wrapped around right next to the Memorial Coliseum

and resulted in the destruction of many, many, many, many more homes in display. And displaced people there. So it just goes straight around northeast Portland and up north. Cool. But I'm going to guess most of those homes were upper middle class, you know, Caucasian. Right? Oh.

Because that's most of that part of Portland. Right? Let me check. Hold on a second. No. Really? Yeah. Are you surprised?

Racist... Racist policies in Portland? Oh my gosh. That doesn't sound like what we're about to continue talking about for the next 30 minutes. Oh, wait. I thought we were back to the sponsors. No. We're back to belts.

No. No. We're not talking belts. We're not talking belts. No. So, yeah, really kicking off in the 1970s and 80s was a process called redlining. This is basically banks colluding to refuse mortgage loans to qualify black applicants would be the quick way to sort of sum up the bulk of that process.

An investigation published by the Oregonian in 1990, yay, journalism, found that Portland banks were granting loans to black Oregonians at roughly one-tenth the rate they were granting them to white people and one-tenth the rate that they were supposed to be granting them. And for those who don't know, it's literal red lines drawn on a map, very specifically placed. And that's something that I think a lot of people are not aware of, that it really refers to red lines that were written on maps. Yeah.

And they're usually saying, we want to keep black people out of these neighborhoods. We don't want to allow them to buy houses here. And it's not like that we're really granting a lot of loans to the black neighborhoods. Either. But like, yeah, they were specifically trying to hymn them in. It was kind of like the zoning version of Kettling a little bit. Yeah. Absolutely.

So there were also a series of police shootings of black men in the 1970s in Portland. And in the 1980s, an investigation revealed that the local Portland police had been running over possums and leaving the corpses in front of black-owned restaurants, which I don't even know what to say. It's a thing that happened. So given all of that, it's probably not much of a surprise to listeners that form much of the 1980s and 1990s, Portland became known in the punk community as a haven for neo-Nazi skinheads.

Racist skins would be, I think, a lot of that kind of punk music. Yeah. But yeah, there's a whole lingo here. I saw the movie Green Room. It's a fine film about Nazi skins in Oregon. That's a scary, scary movie. It is a scary movie. I left feeling all sorts of feels.

That's how you're supposed to feel. That's how you're supposed to feel. I don't know. I don't know. It's a real good racist. Yeah. That was quite close to home. Yeah.

Yeah. But I was going to say the possum imagery stayed. Really? What do you mean? You would still see people refer to possums in coded language even through the 1980s from racist skinheads. They would say, keep the possums out. Really?

Yeah. It was still utilized. I did not have that. I just knew that police were doing this. I had no idea. I thought they were just like being dicks and there were a lot of dead possums in Portland. But there's a racial element to the tape. Yes.

Yeah. It was still used as a symbol of terror and racism. Wow. So from the cops to the punks? Yep. That's not usually how that goes. Especially if I know one thing about punks, they're not supposed to talk to fucking cops. Yeah.

Yeah. But these are the. Yeah. These are the Nazi punks. Nazi skinhead punks. Nazi punks. They liked when the cops were being racist. Yeah.

That's the thing they want cops doing. Yeah. So on May 12, 1988, about a month after I was born, Will Amit weekly published Young Nazis, Portland's New Breed of Racists, about the growing population of young fascists in the city. Reporter Jim Redden interviewed several of these guys in their Southeast Portland apartment and credit words do. This was not like the New York Times profile on the Nazi Next Door thing, like it was an

important subject. He's covering it. He seems to have done it a good job of doing it, at least from what I've read. He asked them about an assault on a guy named Sam Chin, a 27-year-old Portland resident originally from Singapore. These skinheads had confronted Chin's family, beat up and stomped on him, and Redden brought this up to the Nazis. I'm going to read a quote from the article.

Although they denounce the media's focus on violence, they are not unwilling to completely reject it. While they say the assault on Chin was not representative of their beliefs, they repeatedly stress that they are willing to fight for their cause. We wouldn't beat up someone for no reason at all, says Kay, a tall male with a tattoo of a heavily booted skinhead on his left bicep, but we're ready to defend ourselves. I picked that quote because you can put those words in the mouth of Patriot prayers Joey Gibson.

Absolutely. Who's the guy running the rallies that have been held in the fights recently? We'll talk about him in the next episode. That's the same sort of sentiment that comes from oath keepers, three percenters, all of them. Yeah. Next, we're going to talk about what happened on November 13, 1988, when Mulugeta Sera, a 28-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, a student at PSU and a father of one, was dropped off

in the parking lot of his apartment complex by some friends. He was about to head into his apartment when a vehicle holding three racist skinheads and their girlfriends pulled up, and these guys had been drinking and handing out racist flyers from an organization called White Aryan Resistance. Get a little bit more into that in a second. One of the skins who, I was originally going to use names because I usually do, but I do like your attitude of not giving these guys the benefit of their names, so I'm not going to name the skinheads.

Yeah. Anyone who's curious can get the book, A Hundred Little Hitlers. Oh, that's a good title. Yes. That's a real good title. So, I'm all for community education, learning about people, but there is a distinction of putting out the names and repeating them out loud over and over and over again, and forgetting the names of victims and heroes who have stepped in.

Yeah, I agree. That's, yeah. Oh, chips. Sorry. It's written on the thing. One of these skins. You can just bleep it out. Who will bleep out?

Yeah. We'll bleep that out. The bleep you heard was a name that we're not going to say. One of these skins lived in the same block of apartments as Surah, and I think one of the descriptions I heard from a police officer was they could have strung tin cans on strings and talked to each other. They lived that close together. So yeah, the Nazis had been drinking heavily and putting up white supremacist posters around

town. They shouted at Surah and his friends, and then while their girlfriends shouted for them to kill him, the Nazis jumped Mulugeta Surah. One of them hit Mulugeta in the back of the head, I believe, with a baseball bat. And there was no ball or mitt in the car. They did not have that for baseball. No, they had it for Nazi reasons, the reason the Nazis carry baseball bats. And he had the initials of the organization carved into the bat.

Really? So he had war carved in them? I don't think he had war. I think it was their own group because they had their own, yeah. So this was a bat meant for doing exactly what he did with committing violent assault, and in this case, murder, because they continued to hit Mulugeta when he fell to the ground and they also continued to stomp on him with steel-toed boots. He died that night from blood force trauma.

So they went to prison. At the time, a big deal was made about the fact that one of them, the kid with the bat, was the front man of a popular local band and also an actor who'd worked with Gus Van Sant. I had to sort of do a bunch of articles where they were talking about this talented young actor and the terrible thing is like, well, he murdered a guy. It doesn't matter that he was good at acting, don't write about that. Can they still do that too?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I said, it's not hard to... The way that perpetrators of various crimes, depending on their race, makes a big difference in the headline. Yeah. You see it every time. There's a marked difference of what happens when one of these people commits a crime in

the way that they're reported on the media and the pictures used for them. Or even if you are a young black boy, like Tamir Rice, a child and people are saying, oh, he was a big, scary, he was manlike, it's horrifying and yet then we see these white men committing crimes who actually did something and the way that they're painted is absolutely ridiculous. Well, and there's really old history to that. I remember reading, we did an episode where we talked about sort of the US occupation of the Philippines and there was an island, there was a massacre on a US military base

where a bunch of US soldiers got killed and then in response they massacred and the language they used was they killed all of the men over 10 on the island, which, you're not a man at 11, you're not a man at 12, you're not a man at 13, 14, 15, 16, maybe 17, but it doesn't matter. I mean, massacring is wrong, but just the language used, any man over 10 is like- I feel like you're not a man till 20, but that's just my view. I think it usually takes more like 28, 29, 30, maybe four. I'll let you know when I hit that point.

I'm at 30 right now and I don't, I don't feel all the way there. Now Mulegeto Suraz's murder led to a legal case against Tom Metzger, a shriveled little testicle of a man and the founder of white Aryan resistance or war. You can see a documentary of him made after this point with Louis Theroux where he spends several days with him and you get the feeling that he's a ridiculous kind of, and I think this is a problem, this caused a problem because I think that a lot of these people were covered that way as sort of like, look at this ridiculous, he's racist and he's, the things he says are terrible, but he's really just a crazy old crook and he's kind

of cute. Look at this little guy. Yeah. Now what Tom had been doing is sending his son up to Portland and sending a significant amount of written propaganda up there that was not just propaganda on, you know, not national socialism or whatever, but was specifically advocating violence and talking about ways to commit violence. I believe you know a little bit more about this than I do.

Yeah. So war, his white Aryan resistance group, had these newspapers they would give out that were overtly horrifyingly racist and the cartoons that they would have on the covers were just absolutely disgusting and they would send up stacks to Portland for these young groups of men who previously were not organized. They were just going around and they would get drunk and they would talk about being Aryan and racism and all that, not to say they shouldn't have been taken seriously at all, but they weren't organized at that point.

And it wasn't until Tom Medsker and his son stepped in that they began to have tools, they began to have these newspapers, flyers they would pass out, fake welfare applications that they would pass out to women of color and humiliate them and attempt to humiliate them. And it wasn't until that point that they actually had these tools and these means of propaganda to pass out that they began to feel organized. And this is where we get into something that's really interesting to me, it's a little bit difficult to talk about.

Are you familiar with the concept of the Führer principle? I don't think I've heard specifically about it, but I imagine it has to do with having a leader to organize you. That's an aspect of it. Yeah. It was the idea, this was like the central idea behind the original Nazis and individual can embody and electrify a people and bring them up and sort of use them as a tool almost. And that that's desirable and good.

And obviously that's silly when you start talking about like nations, but there's a little to it when you talk about something like you've got these disaffected kids in Portland who have no sort of organizing principle and a guy like Tom Medsker who has just enough charisma, just enough vision to get them united behind a purpose and then they become dangerous. And I think that you're seeing something similar with a guy like Joey Gibson who has, I watched his speech, is a good amount of personal charisma, he's good at speaking, he's good at organizing. And these people, the people who show up at these patriot prayer rallies, just like the people who murdered Mulugeta Sera, we're doing shitty racist things in their personal lives

beforehand, but it took a leader coming in and then they're a cohesive whole. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that's where it's important to understand that concept because I do think it embodies something not that like the Nazis said that this was how everything worked. I don't think it's how everything worked, but I think it's how Nazis work across time and whether or not they call themselves Nazis or patriots or whatever. Yeah.

It's how Nazis work. Yeah. So a little digression. Yeah. Even though Tom Medsker had not specifically ordered the skinheads to commit that particular murder, he was seen as having vicarious liability for indoctrinated kids with racist ideology, publishing information on how to commit violent crimes and sending people up to talk to them. So he was ordered to pay like 12 and a half million dollars in damages.

Yeah. And he wound up losing. We bankrupted him. He had to sell his house. He lost his house? Yeah. Had to pay amounts every single month. Yeah.

Up to today at age like 80 something. And they sold his house to a Hispanic family. Yes, they did. No, the, I think it was, it was Sarah's family, right? No. No, it was not. Was it the ACLU who got it? Southern Poverty Law Center was the one to sue them if that's what you're asking.

Okay. Right, right, right. Yeah. And the neighbors were extremely happy to see the new family move in. They didn't like Tom Medsker. Really? Because gosh, what a likable guy he was. He seemed like he had a lot on the ball.

Uh-huh. I'm sure, he's a bad neighbor you're saying. Yes, I would imagine. A guy, weird how Nazis are bad. Yeah, it's like neighbors don't like when a bunch of skinheads come in and out of somebody's home. Yeah. Hmm.

Okay. Well, I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else I'll keep in mind? Yes. Is these products and services that are about to support our show. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

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And we're back. You didn't hear it because what we just said will not be anything, but we just did a great plug for Microsoft that we're not going to repeat. No, absolutely not. In our hearts. In our hearts. In our hearts. So let's get back into racism in Oregon.

So Mulugeta Surah is murdered. His funeral is obviously a very big deal, a very emotional time. A lot of activists come out for it. And there are rumors that before the funeral that 300 Nazi skinheads might show up to protest. This did not wind up happening. But in spite of the increased visibility of the city's hate problem, Portland's racist skinhead problem only got worse during the 1990s. In a 2017 article for The Guardian, reporter Jason Wilson, quote, Siar and Malloy, a union

organizer and anti-fascist activist who was active during this period in the 1990s, quote, there were multiple gangs and 300 Nazis in a city of 300,000. The anti-racist youth were intimidated and isolated. The Nazis were just openly hanging out on the streets. Yep. Down in a pioneer court house square, they would just gather and sit around and people knew to avoid that entire block. Yeah.

And there's talk, especially talk from racists about, quote, unquote, no-go zones in places like London or Paris, which do not exist. And a lot of reporting on establishing that they're not real. There were no-go zones in Portland for people of color in this period of time. Pioneer Square would have been one of them. Siar and Malloy added, quote, it's not hyperbolic to call it a war. There was intense fighting. So again, the street fighting that we're seeing right now in Oregon that might happen literally

the day after we record this podcast is nothing new. For constant fighting between racist and anti-racist, Skinheads in Portland earned it the nickname Skinhead City during the 1990s, which is a cool nickname. You want to give that to Portland? Beats Portlandia. It does beat Portlandia. Yeah. Yeah.

You guys are going to be carrying that halvachoss around for a while. I'm sorry what people out from LA keep doing to nice cities in the Northwest. They destroyed Bend too. Oh, yeah. What I will say about Skinhead City, it's at least accurate, which is a heavy thing to say, but Portlandia, there's some truth to that show, but that show is for getting a very large portion of our population and culture. Yeah.

Part of what I wondered, depending on how all of this increased political violence goes, is how 20 or 30 years if that show will just make no sense to people? I hope so. Yeah. Well, not in that way. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. If you're going, okay.

Yeah. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying. I was just hoping that we'll win this fight against Joey Gibson and then first culture will actually be celebrated for the first time in Portland. Yeah. That would be nice. Yeah.

That would be nice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you. Yes. So, if you're going to invest in Portland and, to a degree, still invest both Portland and Oregon, we're obsessed with an idea that still holds much traction among the fascist

right, the Northwest Imperative. The basic reasoning behind the Northwest Imperative is that since Oregon is already super white and filled with fascists, why not try and turn it into a white ethno state? From a Nazi point of view, the last 200 years of Oregon history have already done a really good job of laying the groundwork for this. Oregon is currently the whitest state and Portland the whitest big city in the United States. There is today an organization called the Northwest Front dedicated to making the dream

of the Northwest Imperative a reality. The about section of their website sums them up this way, quote, the Northwest Front is a political organization of Aryan men and women in the United States and Canada of all ages and social backgrounds who recognize that an independent and sovereign white nation in the Pacific Northwest is the only possibility for the survival of the white race on this continent. So that's the rhetoric. That's what they're angling for.

The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies 18 different hate groups in the state of Oregon and outside of explicit hate groups, Oregon still has a lot of its old problems with hate. A 2011 audit found that 64% of landlords and leasing agents in the city discriminated against black and Latino renters, giving them higher rents, forcing them to pay larger deposits and levying additional fees against them. Absolutely. 64%.

Absolutely. That's nuts. And with gentrification as well. The neighborhoods that have been most shicken, shakin. Shicken? Shicken. Nice. Nice.

Yeah. Most shicken. They got shicked real good. Yes. Yeah. By gentrification in recent times are the same neighborhoods like the Albina neighborhood that we have seen a lot of the history you've talked about of pushing people of color to that center are now gentrified with huge condos and entirely unrecognizable.

Yeah. And you can trace some of that back to Portlandia, to be honest. So black students in Portland are suspended and expelled at a rate four to five times higher than that of their white peers. And this brings us more or less to the modern era where we are today. Portland is a city with a lot of left-wing political activism now, and a definite reputation is being, quote, woke. It's seen as a hippie-dippy sort of place, but as we've covered, there's a very long

history of discrimination and a very long history of racist organizing. Over the last two years, though, Oregon has entered what may be a different era. The fighting in the streets is bigger and bloodier than it has ever been before. The group behind it, Patriot Prayer, and to a lesser extent, the Proud Boys, is harder to place and harder to get the mainstream to condemn than a man like Tom Metzger and an organization like White Aryan Resistance. Newspapers know what to do when you call yourself White Aryan Resistance. Absolutely.

You're Patriot Prayer. You're covered in an American flag. You say you don't support hate, or if you're the Proud Boys and you're punching each other and naming serials, it's harder for especially casual, yeah, yeah. That's where we are now, and that's what we're going to get to in the next episode, the coming of Patriot Prayer, the story of Joey Gibson and the bloodshed that has gone with it. Before we close out today, I would like to talk with you a little bit about one of what I think is the most promising attempts to fix this problem, this very deep problem in

Oregon, of racism in Oregon, of white supremacy in Oregon, the rural organizing project. Yeah. You want to tell me a little bit about them? Absolutely. Well, first I want to just close out our conversation about how with a lot of the viewpoints that people think that people in Portland have, and Portlanders think that they themselves have, they have let a lot of this just go entirely under the radar. And I think it's because a lot of people in Portland, particularly white people, and

I don't mean just particularly, I'm talking specifically about white people, they are silent about this oppression. They think if they put a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard that they've done racial justice work, and that's just not how it's going to solve all this. And so people need to get involved in organizations, they need to educate themselves, they need to read more about the history of Oregon, listen to podcasts like this, and change things. Yes. Thank you.

I did that just for you. I appreciate it. Rural organizing project. So I haven't personally organized with rural organizing project, and I want to say that up front because I really think that getting a representative from their organization would be wonderful. But basically rural organizing project focuses on underrepresented rural areas in Oregon that have been disenfranchised and ignored because a big reason why we see this current

uprising and problem with these groups like the Oath Keepers, three percenters, even groups like Patriot Prayer will have this kind of sentiment in their mission statements that poor white people, especially poor white men, are not being properly represented. They feel like things are being taken away from them, and they feel like the right wing propaganda that they are getting, radio stations they listen to, podcasts they listen to, and websites that they go on frequently. They feel like they are getting accurate information when they oftentimes are getting very tainted and biased information that is not telling the whole story of why we have gotten to this

point within our hypercapitalistic system. And so rural organizing project really tries to bring representation back to those areas. They try to organize with legislators to ensure that we are focusing energy and resources to make sure that people are not being left out in the cold quite literally, not being left out to just rely on these groups to take them in, but to instead feel like they are part of the Oregon community and that they are valued and that you don't have to be in a city to get those resources. And through that, they are able to educate people on the dangers of these groups like

Oath Keepers, three percenters, et cetera. And so the work that they do is so important because it is very true that we cannot ignore our rural areas in our communities, not just to fight racism, but because they are human beings that deserve resources and deserve care. And rural areas have been hit hard by this hypercapitalistic automation and jobs have been stripped away over the course of history. And so people have been just seeing jobs go away and instead of being given the proper information of, oh, the reason why these jobs have changed is for these reasons, they instead

are told by somebody, oh, you know why it's because of that immigrant. It's because of women wanting to enter the workforce. It's because of this and that. And so then they hold tight to these traditional ideas of what it is to be an American, which we're never accurate to begin with if we really look at our history. But that is how they're able to be radicalized. So rural organizing project takes that on and I am very proud to have them in Oregon. And it's, it's my opinion, just as a journalist that low key and low key because it hasn't

been covered enough. One of the most important stories going on in the country right now is the disintegration of society and rural parts of the United States. For example, cattle wrestling is the highest it's been in more than 100 years. Cattle wrestling, agricultural theft is the highest it's been in quite a long time. You were saying rising rates of poverty and a lot of chunks of rural America, what you're saying is a breakdown of social order in these places and all of these things are number one major contributors to the growth of fascist movements, major contributors to the growth

of racist movements. And on a human level, they're just terrible for the people there. And we, most people listening to this probably live in cities, it is important to pay attention to what happens out there. Well, because they're your fellow citizens and because when their lives get worse, your lives get worse. Absolutely. That's the way it works in a society.

So listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, if you find this compelling, please donate some bucks to the rural organizing project. We can look them up. Yeah. Look them up online. We'll include the link to the website on ours. So yeah, check that out. Check out all of our sources at BehindTheBastards.com and, you know, open up your wallet strings

if you have a couple extra bucks to give. And if you're an Oregon volunteer, volunteer with rural organizing project. Absolutely. And if you're in Oregon, in general, be more active. There's some stuff going on. There's so much going on. The only thing that'll make it get better is the people who aren't, I'll say, charitably on the shitty side of things, getting active or at least supporting the people who are

being active in the streets, because that's real important too. Yeah. Well, I'm working on a project to help make that easier for people to have access to what is needed in the area and I'll send that to you once I have something. Awesome. Well, you got anything else you want to, you want to pitch, plug? Mansearch for meeting. Right.

Yeah. Mansearch for meeting Victor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, right? Yes. Yeah. Check it all out. You can check out this podcast on our website behind the bastards. You can check out all the sources. And of course, tomorrow we will be talking about Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson and the most

dangerous street gang in America that you probably haven't heard of, Patriot Prayer. So all of that coming up next in the week. Have fun with it. Check it out. And you can find us on Instagram and Twitter at BastardsPod. And that's all I got for you. Go do something positive for the world. Goodbye.

And I love statistically about 40% of you. 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 was 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.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.