It Could Happen Here - Oregon's Terrible No Good Very Bad Midterms

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Robert sits down with journalist and author Sarah Jeong to discuss Oregon's war on the homeless and looming mid terms.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or whenever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives.

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now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Ah, It Could Happen Here is a podcast that you're listening to right now. If this is a surprise to you, if you thought this was the Joe Rogan experience, let me assure you, everyone here does eat a diet of nothing but elk meat. And to talk to me about the health value of elk meat is... No. So about, I don't know, a week or so ago, we're talking with Sarah Yong. Sarah, how are you doing? Good. How are you? I'm pretty good. Sarah, you're a deputy features editor at The Verge. You are a lawyer and a journalist, so you have embraced the two most cursed vocations in 2022.

in 2022. And you've, number one, most recently written an incredible piece about the Portland van abductions, which is like brutal and very important for The Verge. People ought to check it out. It is a, I don't know, I've had trouble getting through all of it because it is very good and because I was there. But everyone needs to read it. It's an important piece. We're not talking about that today. We're talking about a post that you made on the Twitter.com about a week or so ago that I messaged you about wanting to chat about. Do you want to kind of talk about what that post was and what you were trying to get across to the audience? was uh and what you were trying to get across yeah the audience so if you live in portland right now it's um it's absolutely fucking rancid like i think and i think the discourse not the

city well sometimes the sometimes the city but uh the discourse is rancid uh it's like this in a lot of other cities as well um But you know how Portland is. Like it lags. The discourse around homeless people, right? Yeah. Yeah. Every conversation you have with any random person, it like eventually goes to, oh, it's gotten so bad here lately. And it's always about homeless people. And it always goes to this place where they're like, oh, we should start rounding people up into camps and getting rid of them.

And it's like people are a little too excited to literally murder homeless people. You get just people saying the most insane things like, oh, I'm not going to break my car if I see one of those homeless people. It's awful. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really awful. And then you get people going like, oh, well, you know how things are. And pulling out murders that have happened in New York of Asian women at me to justify why it is that I need to start supporting the cops and so on and so forth.

need to start supporting the cops and so on and so forth um and it it's just there's this thing where i i think that they're like well-meaning leftists really want to sort of pull out like let's humanize homeless people which like yes but the people you're talking to they don't deal with empathy actually right they already don't see most of the population as people so what you're doing is you're not even speaking the language that they speak the issue for me is that what they're what people are doing when they dehumanize the homeless or like turn them into like a problem that you can just sweep away, or kill, or put in danger, or drop into a camp where they're more likely to die, or get sick, or be harmed. It's that you're making a vast class of people based on superficial characteristics.

They might be dirty, they're intense, whatever. You felt threatened by one of them once, so now everyone who's ever been homeless deserves to have a worse off life because you didn't feel great about it this one time and or two times. And it's it's really absurd to me because like yeah i i've had many instances in my life where i haven't felt very safe um because of someone who is homeless because of someone who is an addict um i mean i'm a small asian woman i take public transit uh it is the vibes are off in every fucking city right now for people who look like me um but that doesn't mean that everyone who looks like the person who's making me uncomfortable deserves to be swept up

into a fucking camp and in fact like if i like roll the tape back and look at sort of oh let's look at people who've made me feel threatened afraid whatever i've like gone through big old sprints in my life where i'm getting a lot of death threats from white supremacists i mean i'm sure you've yeah life too i mean i can see it i see it but like you i don't know because you're a woman writing on the internet like you'll get more in a couple of months than i do in an average like year i mean uh it depends right like it depends i mean i was just looking at your midgets yeah i don't know i don't really look too carefully so i don't even know what the numbers are like these days i did have an incredible like six month period where it was really intense um because tucker carlson was like

putting me on his show looking my picture for a while so it was it was really bad like people like some guy called into my office and and uh threatened to firebomb it and people who got the phone call like were stressed out enough that they called the cops and there's like a police report and like um there was a bunch of stuff that happened during this period that was pretty scary and uh and it was always like guys who all sort of looked the same right it's like all the you know the oakley sunglasses like taking a selfie of themselves in the car like that sort of stereotype yeah right and you know gotta say for a while i'd see that like that little profile picture i'd see someone in person and like my like heart would start beating faster right took a while for me to like be able to dial that back um during that six

month period i'd hear someone yell a racial slur and I would almost have a panic attack because I, I'd be like, oh no, like, like someone's going to come and, and make good on these threats. And, um, I don't like, I don't want to round people up into camps or looking like a shitty racist suburbanite white guy yeah it's like that's because i'm not a fucking nazi like it's like it it doesn't matter what you've experienced or like what legitimate harm you faced from people who look a certain way like and you you don't round them up into camps or like talk about like how you're not going to break on this

on the street in your car i i'm glad i was happy for kind of your perspective on the matter because i i do try like whenever people talk about how scary portland is or how scary the homeless camps are like the thing i want to say is like like i i have like five or six different running routes in the city and most of them have homeless encampments on them. And I run through them at night. I run through them at the day. Never had a problem. You know, sometimes there's like trash and I would like it if it were cleaner.

But also primarily the people cleaning up are usually like autonomously organized groups of formerly houseless folks, which is the thing that happens in a couple of the neighborhoods that I go to. which is the thing that happens in a couple of the neighborhoods that I go to. And like, but at the same time, I don't want to bring that in when there's an argument about it, because like I'm a six foot three, 200 pound white guy, right? Like, of course, I'm as a general rule in a lot of situations, I don't feel worried when other people do because I'm a big white dude. And that's, but what I will say, I had an experience a couple of months back, a person that I live near, like a neighbor of mine is a young woman with a, uh, like a six month old infant. And she was out jogging on one of the trails near our house and two guys, uh, in new Kawasaki, like motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever you want to call them.

New Kawasaki, like motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever you want to call them. I assume rich kids, because these were very new bikes, drove up and shot at her and her baby with BB guns. Hit her in the face, nearly hit her baby. And it was like homeless folks and people at an illegal skate park who came to her aid and like made sure she was okay. And when I got out there, cause I rolled out there with a fucking beat stick and a handgun just to be like, if I see these motherfuckers, we're going to have words. And I started talking to homeless folks that I knew on the route who were all like, yeah, those people, like they come by to shoot at us. And it's, and I have heard this in multiple encampments.

I've heard this at Laurelhurst, a number of places that like kids from the suburbs will come in to shoot homeless people with BB guns and mace them. And I have I'm not going to say again, I've also been in a situation where like an agitated houseless woman was like swinging a machete at some folks. And yeah, everything was deescalated. But like, I get it. The fact that there are people out there who are having like mental health difficulty means that people are going to have encounters that can be frightening. But by and large, the people that I find myself most threatened by are like kids, people like those assholes rolling by and shooting people with BB guns. And of course, folks driving gigantic trucks in tiny streets like assholes often while wasted. Like those are the things that scare me in portland not the encampments yeah and honestly like there there are some increasing safety issues in portland but like a lot of it is also just like from cars right like it is a it it's more there's more of a car culture than there used to be. Um, and people get hit and,

uh, they go to the hospital or they die. Like it's, it, it, there's like, there, there are big changes in the city for sure. But like, it's, there's so much focus on homelessness as being like the root of all of that. And like, I don't know, they'll say, Oh, Portland has gotten so bad in the same breath as like talking about how high rents are or like how expensive houses have gotten just not even connecting those two things right like why is it that housing is so expensive now like clearly people are placing bets on real estate either that or just we haven't built out enough could that be something um or maybe things aren't as bad as you think and it's it's a desirable place to live um it it's really like it is it's extremely frustrating um i i also think that there's this weird thing where you just don't really think about the fact that you might have one or two encounters where

it's upsetting you you feel scared and then like the vast majority of people who are unhoused are just trying to stay the fuck out of your way right and like they're you're not going to see them you're not going to talk to them unless you go out of your way to talk to them and reach out yeah and like they're probably scared of you because they don't know who you are like you're a stranger you might be one of those assholes on kawasaki's like out to yeah to shoot you uh out to shoot them and like it's it's really frustrating like it's halfway i don't know some some of the people who buy into this kind of discourse are just out outright terrible human beings right yeah they're just

fascists they're just they're just and this is useful but then there's like it's really frustrating how many people in the city right now are just useful idiots for the fascists have just like gone down that gone down that rabbit hole and aren't thinking past like what it means to quote unquote take care of the homeless problem uh like what do you what do you want to do here what do you actually want to do um where are these people gonna go like what's going to happen to them? And it's super frustrating. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're focusing on Portland because it's where we live, but all of these things are evidence of like broader trends. You can see a lot of the same tactics being used in Los Angeles and Austin and Minneapolis. And one of the things is kind of this conflation of like disorder, drug use, homelessness with

like deadly violence and a number of things like we've talked about kind of jailing and putting into camps the homeless is one thing people suggest. There's also a lot of like suggestions around massively increasing the number of police. And this all also goes into, you know, you've got this kind of series of right wing coups against elected leaders who have any kind of other suggestions. We saw this in San Francisco with the DHS abode and the police, like just refusing to enforce like the, the law when they were,

when Chessa was attempting to carry things out in a different way. And like what we're seeing in Portland right now, we've got, um, a city commissioner, Joanne, uh, Hardesty,

who, uh, number one is a, the only black woman in the city council. Um, the only person on the city council who rents, and the only person in the city council who is in debt and who has endured. And I'm not going to say she's a perfect counselor, a perfect politician. There's plenty of things to criticize Hardesty over. But there has been, like, number one, this kind of unhinged campaign of attacking her because of the fact that like her financial situation isn't great, which I see actually as a plus.

Because a lot of people in Portland are in rough financial condition. Maybe it's nice if they're represented on the fucking city council. But also she's instituted as people keep fetching about, you know, violence and gun violence, which are problems that have gotten worse in Portland, although it is important to note Portland is one of the safest cities in the entire United States, even after the quote unquote surge in violent crime. I don't think that mitigates that. I just think it's important to keep like things in perspective. But Hardesty has instituted the only effective program that has reduced gun violence in the city of Portland in the recent past, which was essentially a series of traffic calming measures, right? Like, I think that's probably a fair way to say it. It was sort of altering the way in which traffic worked in a neighborhood to kind of try and reduce some of the

situations that were like leading to violence. And she's undergoing this massive attack right now by a candidate, a right wing candidate. I mean, like everyone who runs in Portland, he claims to be a Democrat. He's donated to Republicans. He's named Rene Gonzalez, who's being backed by a lot of the same business interests that are pushing this anti homeless agenda, pushing the mayor's proposal to put homeless people in encampments. anti-homeless agenda, pushing the mayor's proposal to put homeless people in encampments. And I don't know, it's just, I feel like I can see it all coming together. And I hate how many people are, as you said, kind of useful idiots about it, where they're like, you know, look, clearly these people who are talking about rehabilitation or who are trying to like, actually, who are not suggesting a carceral

solution to the fact that it's unpleasant to see people suffering on the street um are wrong because look at what the news tells me about how much worse violence has gotten and stuff like i it's very frustrating it's don't vote for renee gonzalez yeah but yeah please don't vote for Rene Gonzalez. Yeah. But yeah, please, please don't vote for a man who donated to a Republican PAC. Yeah. Six months after January 6th. Well, please, please let's not do that.

Uh, but, uh, God, it's, it's, I think like really sad that, I mean like people,

I think really just don't want to think about how damaged all of society is right now. Like we like we lived through, you know, our country had one of the worst responses to covid. Millions of people are dead. Our mental health is fucking shot through. our mental health is fucking shot through uh even people who didn't experience sort of federal jackboots on the ground um it we're not well right like it it's any number of housed perfectly like financially stable people turn to substance abuse during this period and are still recovering. People who are unhoused also turn to substance abuse if they weren't already there and their mental health is also shot through. And sort of the upshot of this is everyone is fucking sick and taking it out on each other. And, um,

it really sucks to see. It really sucks to see people be their worst selves. Just increasingly and increasingly. Yeah. And I, first off, I want to try to provide people with some objective numbers. And this is just on the city of Portland. So Portland,

number one, never defunded its police. Our police currently get the most money they've ever gotten. But we do have one thing that is accurate to say is we have fewer police per capita than any major city in the United States. And we have the fewest number of police on the force in living memory. I'm fairly certain right now. There's like 700 Portland police officers, which is significantly down from 2020 because it's not a pleasant job because people hate the cops here in Portland. So they keep quitting and moving to other cities. And it is true that when the pandemic hit, violent crime in Portland raised by about 207 percent from January 2019 through June of 2021, which is the largest increase compared to five comparable cities.

This is from an article in the Oregon Capital Chronicle, Minneapolis, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, and Nashville. However, it's also worth noting that over the course of the last year, we're at seven fewer homicides than we were the year before. Overall, the number of homicides in 2022 has fallen 2% from 2021, even as we continue to have fewer and fewer police, almost as if the surge in violent crime was not a result in policing, but as you said, the result of a lot of other factors around the pandemic and around the economic situation and the rate of violence has been continuing to decrease. It's also worth noting that while we're talking about homicides here and Portland did see a surge in homicides during the

pandemic, that's not the only kind of crime or the only kind of violent crime. And I want to quote here from Travel Oregon. In February 2021, the Major Cities Chiefs Association issued a report noting that 63 of 66 major cities saw at least one violent crime category grow in 2020. Among cities of comparable size, Portland generally experiences violent crime at somewhat lower rates. Like the a lot of this is media driven. And it's specifically the thing that you highlighted in the post that made me reach out to you was was talking about how particularly white suburbanite homeowners are driving this panic and are driving these kind of surge and very like fascist

solutions to the fears that they have about homelessness and about crime. And one of the reasons why this shit works is these people don't go into the city. They live in the suburbs. They see the scary news. And that's the thing I don't know how to actually combat because it is a nationwide problem. Shootings and deaths due to shootings, they have increased since the pandemic. But if you look at them on like a 20-year graph, fairly flat nationwide. But what has surged- Portland doesn't even keep very good stats, right? Like they only started keeping statistics of gun crimes like what in like the last couple years.

And then now they're saying that gun violence has increased. Like it's it's. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, what happened? What we what is increased vastly more than gun crime is reporting on gun crime, which has surged it like and that's because, you know, if it bleeds, it leads and whatever. But it is this thing of like, that's the stuff that gets people to pay attention. And it's the stuff that spreads on social media, just like pictures of like poop on the streets of San Francisco can spread on social media. And it all exists to keep these kind of suburban voters at a constant state of agitation, which makes them easy to manipulate. And like, that's the thing that scares me the most. Yeah. to manipulate and like that's the thing that scares me the most yeah i mean things are almost shittier with portland because well like okay the the san francisco poop situation so i used to live in the bay area that was a real situation uh there's poop in san francisco yeah no there's just human there's just human shit everywhere um it's you know you you live with it it's it just is what it is and and you know someone's from new york when they start complaining about it right like it's uh and it i think new york which smells like pee

everywhere by the way i mean it smells like hot garbage because they don't they don't take their garbage they like just put their garbage out on the curb and when it's summertime it just smells fucking terrible um but uh so everyone's got their problems but uh it's it's this like weird thing where just because of the way that we're drawn up geographically we've got all of these people like like you said like out in the burbs uh who vote who have control over the way the wind blows um who just never come out here ever yeah they never come out here and uh in san francisco like yeah they've got outlying areas as well but it's it's not drawn up exactly the way that we are quite right like like the people who are going to be the most alarmist about san francisco

are like not going to be in the area where they're voting about the things that happened to San Francisco the way the Chezza stuff went down like I mean that's complicated right like I mean it was a witch hunt and it made me really

Chezza Boone the DA former DA in San Francisco it made me really want to never move back but it was like we've just got a different sort of set up here where the people who are the most upset about all of the crime

in Portland like they don't come out to where they think the crime is happening at all like they just don't really out to where they think the crime is happening at all. No. Like they, like they just don't really interact with the city. They're off somewhere else. And it's, it is truly strange,

really annoying. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, this is like, I don't know. This is part of why, this is part of why politically I tend to align myself with libertarian municipalism.

I think one of the problems we have is that places that have very little to do with each other get to pass laws that impact how people live in those places, which is a problem. As we all just got over seeing with fucking Donald Trump, right? Like that's a, that's a version of the problem and a version of another version of the problem is that like people in Los Angeles can pass a gas tax that makes total sense for cities in California, but fucks over people who live in the middle of nowhere. And all of these things are like,

I don't know. It's the, you, you get the, you, it's two simultaneous issues. Like one of them is you've got these liberals in Portland to the rest of the state resents for dominating politics in the entire state, even in areas that have very little to do with like Western Oregon. And then you have these, these outlying, like you have these folks who don't live in Portland who, you know, are pushing for like, you know, who are responsible for the fact that we might get a Republican governor in the state, right. Um, who are reacting to like what they hear about Portland, even though it's not accurate. And I don't know, I, I, I, this is, we're getting past like what people can do in terms of like voting on local elections.

But I wish we had a system in which like folks weren't constantly pitted against each other in this way, because I don't think it's very productive. Well, we're chopped up in a really. By the way, I vote for charter reform, et cetera. in Portland. We've got some other things going on with our city government that makes things additionally weird and suboptimal. Welcome. I'm

Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura

podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting

or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. there's a bunch of things that I'm kind of dreading in the near future or from the midterm elections, including, you know, Renee Gonzalez. You know, I have strong feelings on the proposed gun control measure, but I'm broadly optimistic about charter reform. That actually seems like something good that we're likely to do. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit, because Portland would be the first city in

the United States to reform its city council along these lines, if I'm not mistaken. Along which lines? Like the way the charter reform is set up. So basically, Portland currently has a commission form of government in which we have a very powerful mayor and four city council people who are handed portfolios by the mayor, and they basically run the city government, which is it's a pretty dysfunctional system. It leads to a small number of people running very large bureaucracies that they usually don't know how to handle, which is one of the reasons why the city is so dysfunctional, in addition to the fact

that our mayor, Ted Wheeler, is, politely speaking, dog shit. Under the new form of government that's being voted on right now, the charter, the commission structure will be jettisoned. City council members will not directly manage bureaus. Instead, they'll pass laws and meet with constituents. The mayor will no longer be part of the city council. Instead, he'll lead the executive branch. I'm not wild about the amount of power that the mayor will still have. But I think broadly speaking, it's a much better system and there will be like a larger group of people involved in actually like managing the city's affairs. I don't know. What we have currently certainly is not particularly effective.

And I would like to see a more democratic system put into place. Yeah. I mean, what we had was like obscenely outdated, right? Like, I don't know who else does things like Portland currently does, but the charter reform is greatly needed. Yeah. And it's going to bring in rank choice voting as well when people vote on their city, which is one of the issues that we've had here is that – or that we're having right now with the gubernatorial race is that you've got three candidates running, one of whom is kind of positioning themselves as an independent, Betsy Johnson, who does not really have a chance to win and seems to be being funded by people like the Nike guy in order to take votes away from Tina Kotek,

who's the Democratic candidate, so that Christine Drazen, who's the Republican candidate, will be more likely to win. I don't know. I still don't know how much I believe Drazen actually has a shot, but the polls show them neck and neck. So it certainly seems like it's possible. The polls are pretty terrifying.

Yeah, we're kind of hovering on the cusp of the governor's seat going red. Yeah, it's... Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, that's the election that scares me. I really don't want to see Rene Gonzalez win.

No. But if charter reform passes, the harm that he can inflict on the city becomes limited. Just because right now, city council seats just have outsized power in a very dysfunctional way. Yeah. And that changes with charter reform. We just get a little bit more of a normal city. But the state election, though, that's pretty scary stuff. Yeah.

Especially since if the Democrats stay in power at the state level, then there's a good chance that, I mean, as far as what people are talking about, then we're going to actually see Portland become or Oregon become a sanctuary for reproductive health, right? Like that's one of the things that's on the ballot. So if you like, if you care about that, that's kind of the whole game, right? Like regardless of the fact that Kotech has a history with our current governor, that's not entirely positive. Our current democratic governor has been a shit governor and handled the pandemic terribly like at the end of the day it's

it kind of has to be all about um uh all about reproductive health right because like the the the republicans would not have handled the pandemic any better um but they will also support a crackdown against people having access to abortion. We also have the craziest Republicans out here. Like, and I mean, part of that is the areas they're representing or whatever. But part of it is also just we've been under Democratic control for so long that like the minority party gets weirder and weirder and weirder. Like we'veder like we've got we've got the guys who like what ran away from the legislative session rather than vote on a climate

change bill right like it's not it's not good it's really bad like handing handing them the keys to the kingdom is is a terrible move yeah i don't know what else to say uh you got anything else to say as we as we head into the midterm elections here in oregon i felt like I don't know what else to say. You got anything else to say as we head into the midterm elections here in Oregon? I felt like, I don't know, this is broadly speaking. I kind of want to hear about your feelings on that gun control measure. 14 coming up, which is gun control. So for people who don't know, and this may surprise folks, given how blue it is, Oregon basically does not have any kind of like gun control laws. This is a state in which any kind of gun that's legal to own in the United States and any kind of magazine you can own in the state of Oregon.

We are a shall issue state, which means if you are a law abiding citizen and you apply for a concealed carry permit, they have to give it to you. Gun owners have quite a few protections at present. The first major, there was a gun control law passed in 2015. Most reasonable gun owners had no issue with it because all it did was say, you have to get a background check. So there's this thing called face-to-face sales whereby in a lot of states like Texas, you can just hand somebody a gun for cash. As long as you're not a professional gun dealer, that's legal. And that's bad generally. It's how a lot of guns get across the border. That was removed as a legal possibility in Oregon back in 2015. But other than that, we haven't had a whole lot of gun control. In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, an organization, I think Lift Every Voice is what they're called, led by some

church leaders, pushed for a ballot measure. So this is not something where, and I do think this is interesting, this is not a situation where Democratic politicians in the state of Oregon are trying to pass gun control. This is a situation in which a ballot measure was proposed and enough people voted that the entire state is voting on whether or not to have gun control, which regardless of my opinions on the measure itself, I think is a better way for stuff like this to work than a bunch of legislators just making a law. But anyway, the measure itself is, in my opinion, deeply flawed in the way that it's written. It does a couple of things. For one thing,

it requires that every person who buy a gun pass a background check, which is already the law that's in the bill. And it shouldn't be because it's already the law. I think one of the things that reasons I think that's dishonest is because it always gets summarized and like, this is what the bill will do. It will require that everybody pass a background check. Well, they're already required. It does not actually do anything there. It adds in a magazine capacity restriction, as in you won't be able to buy or take out in public magazines that have a higher capacity than 10 rounds. We can talk about that in a second. And then the primary thing it does is it requires people pass a series of tests in order to purchase firearms. And the people who will be administering those tests and running the whole program are the police. So the police essentially get control over who gets to own

firearms. I do consider that. That is particularly the thing that I find problematic. Um, for one thing, regardless of your opinions on gun control, the right to bear arms is similar to the right to freedom of speech and guaranteed in the same way. And so the fact that the police are being made the arbiters of who gets to exercise that right is deeply problematic to me. I think given what we know about how often police in Oregon work with far right groups, work with organizations like the Proud Boys, it is very likely that we will see uneven enforcement and uneven, like the police granting the ability to bear arms very unevenly, which concerns me greatly. We had a mass shooting earlier this year at a protest in which a right winger killed a woman, a 61 year old woman and injured five other people. That person was stopped by a left wing demonstrator with an AR-15 style rifle. Well, it was actually technically a handgun, but that's anyway, whatever. It was an AR-15 style weapon. I'm concerned that under this new law, the right winger would have still had the ability to acquire firearms, but the

person who stopped him would not. So that's why I have an issue with it. I also think if you're going to, I don't personally advocate magazine capacity restrictions, but also I don't speak out against them. Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity., but also I don't speak out against them. Washington recently passed a law restricting magazine capacity. I didn't say anything about that. I think if it works, I will be happy. I think the way the Washington law was written was a lot more sensible than the Oregon law because it was written in such a way that it stops the additional sale of standard capacity magazines, of 30-round magazines and higher, without giving the police an opportunity to harass and arrest people over what they own, which I think is important.

The way the law is written, if you had whatever you had prior to the ban taking effect, you can keep and continue to use as normal. Just no more can be sold. And so the thing you're trying to stop with a magazine capacity ban at this point is someone doing what the Uvalde shooter did, right? Where a kid goes out and buys a weapon and a bunch of 30-round magazines and then goes on a mass shooting, right? You want them to not be able to go and immediately acquire those magazines. them to not be able to go and immediately acquire those magazines. It is, I think, by making it illegal to take them out in the world if you already own them. What you're doing is giving police pretext to stop and search people, to search people going out and shooting in the woods

like folks do in Oregon without having an impact on mass shooters because they're not going to care about violating that particular law. If you want to stop more of those things from being sold, I think a law written the way the Washington law is written does the maximum in order to restrict people from purchasing the thing you don't want them to purchase without giving police the ability to harass and arrest people. Anyway, that's my thinking on one 14. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's like an important, as an important series of distinctions to like get out there.

Yeah. Anyway, I, I, I voted against it. I, I try really, I actually do try despite my opinions, not to talk about gun control too much on this show, but that's my thinking on the matter. Folks can do whatever they want. We'll know on January or November 8th how they voted. Yeah.

I mean, it's hardly the most disturbing thing on the ballot right now. Yeah. No, no, no. And I am like, there's so much going on right now yeah no no no and i i am like like i i there's there's so much going on right now and it's one of those things i guess we'll all learn in the near future like we're going to learn a lot from this election in oregon like if hardesty stays on if we get charter reform and if kotech wins then kind of regardless of what happens with 114 i will be broadly optimistic heading into 2024 because it'll show that the campaign of fear didn't work entirely

yeah um and if gonzalez and and drazen win and charter reform gets defeated i will be really pessimistic heading in yeah yeah yeah if if drazen wins like that's yeah it's uh yeah it's it's bad it's really bad uh it's bad news for a lot of fucking reasons um yeah i mean row that's huge um yeah but yeah like it's the sky's the limit for a a state that has been under democratic control for this long right like it's it's yeah they've just gotten so complacent is all i can think um oh i mean the spoiler candidate, obviously, that did change a lot. Yeah. But the complacency is alarming.

Yeah. Well, is there anything else you wanted to say about what we're heading into? Well, I mean, don't let your fear control you. Don't be a useful idiot for Nazis are the most powerless people in your community, you might want to assume that the person doing that is trying to take advantage of you. That's kind of where I land on this sort of stuff. Yeah, don't put people into camps. We really shouldn't have to say that anymore, but avoid it. Yeah, we shouldn't have to tell people to not be patrick bateman from fucking america right like it's like we should be like but no it's yeah we've we should not be

regressing this hard in terms of uh our moral compasses but that's where we are that's where we are well do you want to plug your pluggable sar Sarah? Yeah. So Robert mentioned that I just put out a big feature about the Portland van abductions published on The Verge. It's a longer series that we did this year about the Department of Homeland Security, which is 20 years old this year. So we did a bunch of features, some about Puerto Rico and FEMA, some about the TSA, of course. I did a short little thing about how Chad Wolf was illegally head of the DHS for a hot minute. And so there's some fun stuff in there. We've still got another feature that'll

go up by the end of this year. I think your listeners would enjoy going through some of those. Excellent. All right. Well, that has been the episode. This has been It Could Happen Here. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

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