It Could Happen Here - The Humboldt State Occupation and Portland State University Library Occupations

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Robert and the crew interview activists in Arcata, California and Portland, Oregon about two university occupations in solidarity with Gaza that have both attracted press, and police, attention.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

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in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. I'm writing this after flying back from Texas, where my dad died, to Portland, waking up and basically immediately interviewing a group of protesters in Arcata, California at the Cal Poly occupation in Humboldt, and then driving to Portland State

University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also been a campus occupation. And both of these occupations have some stuff in common, and I wanted to talk about what was happening with both of them because I think it's relevant, and obviously it's relevant to what is currently one of the larger stories going on in the country right now, which is that a series of occupations on campuses protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza have spread to more than 100 schools in the United States. You will have heard of this. Now, we have covered some of this in recent episodes, particularly what was going on in Colombia, at least at the initial stages of that. And today, again, I'm here to talk about two occupations. One of them is at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California, and another is at Portland State University in, you know, Portland, Oregon.

As an odd aside, I have lived in both of these cities, which is peculiar. It doesn't really mean anything, but I thought it was weird, and obviously, I still live in Portland. Protest started in Arcata first. On October 22, 2024, students on the Cal Poly Humboldt, also called CPH, campus occupied Siemens Hall. These students were not members of any specific group, but were all acting in solidarity with Gaza and were inspired at least partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. It started with a small number of people, about 45 or so. These are a mix of students, some alumni, and a few random Arcadans. Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You might call it hippie. That's generally the reputation that it has. Campus police showed up. There was a series of negotiations, which here means they told everybody to leave.

And at that point, the police began escalating things. Because the Arcata police force is pretty small, cops were called in from the surrounding area. Quite a few of them. There were helicopters. It's much more of a to-do than this fairly sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to having. Community members started to show up as well because, hey, something was happening. A write-up from CrimeThink's website describes what happened next. Quote, Police from every department in the county showed up, including a helicopter, canine units, and off-duty police. Students responded by swarming them. The cops' initial

plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building. The occupiers beat back police advances despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle in Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There were two arrests and a number of injuries. The arrests were apparently quite ugly, but police were unable to clear out the occupation. Barricades were thrown into place as the fighting continued off and on until a crowd of people from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed up outside and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours, the police retreated. The university declared a lockdown,

and the students were able to spend the next few days extending their defenses as well as setting up infrastructure, including a kitchen. Early on the morning of the 29th, a team from It Could Happen Here sat down with two of these students to discuss the occupation. I go by Stinger online, and I have been part of the occupation since i think

the morning of day two i think it was the night after the cops tried to uh enter the barricaded building and got pushed back i think i've been here since the morning after that. Yeah, Blue, and what's been your history with this? I came here on Tuesday morning. I just attended a meeting with everyone, and I've just been here helping at the MAC mainly because I feel like that's where I'm the most useful. What's the MAC?

The MAC is the Mut aid kitchen where we've been handing out food and I've just been helping prepare food for people and trying to let other people involved do more things because I know I'm the most useful in the Mac personally, rather than being anywhere else, doing anything else. By the time we talked to them, the rumor mill widely expected the police to carry out a major attempt to clear the occupation that night. As I write this, 10.13 p.m. PST on the 29th of April,

local police have just given Siemens Hall a dispersal order. So we'll see how that goes. Hey everyone, Robert here. We saw how it goes. Police cracked down, arrested a bunch of people, and ended the occupation. We will talk more about that a little at the end of the episode. But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed, police have had to spend nearly a week watching and waiting as students dig in yeah police have not tried to like actively push us out like we've seen on other campuses where like they've totally like raided and like torn down tents and everything and i think uh we also i think a big part of it is like logistically we're in a small like city and we don't really have the police force necessary yeah which is why

they've been trying to call you know unfortunately they've been trying to call officers from other places because uh especially like i feel like in the evenings especially we have a lot of people both from the community and students on campus who have been occupying the quad but what's so funny is that our main intention was not like the original intention was not to barricade that building it was just going to be occupied not barricaded but because of police actions i feel like we've actually stepped up more. So they kind of shot themselves in the foot with that one. This is a pattern we've seen a few times in recent years. In late 2020, Garrison and I reported from an eviction defense at the famous Red House in Portland. The basic idea is that local protesters were trying to stop police from serving an eviction during the pandemic.

There was a clash outside the house and some arrests, but police pulled back when protesters were still on the ground and in numbers. Said protesters began to fortify the area around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the time the police realized what was going on, they had a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have been impossible to clear without significant violence. The end result of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated an end to what was happening rather than just sending the police back in to evict residents. There is much more to the whole situation than that. This is something people still get angry about because the patriarch of the family at Red House was a weirdo sovereign

citizen type, but the goal at the time was to stop evictions during the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The cops backed off, the city came to the negotiating table. It was a successful action, whatever you think about the individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison, Mia, and myself had with those Humboldt students, and we will hear more from them later, I got a message from a source that an occupation was also brewing on the Portland State University campus. Or rather, that it was going on and folks were worried things were about to escalate. But don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads?

Anyway, here they are. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

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podcasts. We're back. Actions at Portland State University started on Thursday the 25th, and it was initially pretty simple. One tent and one banner strung between trees in front of the Branford Price Miller Library steps. Social media did its thing once this first tent was up, and the encampment slowly grew to maybe half a dozen tents by midnight. At around 1.20 a.m., the police swept the encampment. Only a few people were awake and less than 20 people were present, against maybe 40 riot officers. The police pushed people out of the encampment.

They went straight for the supply tent and took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc., into City of Portland trucks and hauling it away. It was a bad night for a lot of people. But what I gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they had learned one crucial lesson, which was that Portland police weren't willing to fuck with people or property that was sitting on the PSU steps. This is probably a jurisdictional thing. School property is the responsibility of the PSU campus police. PPB could police the park outside, but either couldn't or just didn't want to be arsed in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into school property themselves. So the school had to deal with the unenviable complication of the fact that these were their students protesting at a famously progressive school, and having their cops clear them out, especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt, would be a real PR headache.

The administration at Humboldt University and famously progressive Arcata ran into a similar problem. In the days after the police backed away from their initial confrontation, students developed a list of demands by consensus. Here's one of our sources from the Humboldt occupation again, and their description of the demands have been cut together from a longer interview. Some crosstalk has been edited out to make things flow a bit more clearly. Anyway, here's those demands. Okay, so students with the mediation faculty have

reached out to administration in hopes of re-engaging negotiations. So we would like administration to agree to the following three demands. One, de-escalate. We demand the immediate removal of police from university campus. We also demand the immediate re-enrollment of students who have been suspended and a promise to not suspend, re-suspend, or expel any student protesters as a result of these accusations because they were claiming, you know, that we had committed property damage and trespassing and things like that. And that was a lot of the reasons that they gave for suspending us, like in the email we received about interim suspension.

Two was divest. We demand that the Cal Poly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel, Israeli products or Israeli companies. And this includes those that own factories on stolen Palestinian land in Israel. There are four specific funds that at the minimum, we demand the divestment from within the next six months. These were TILCX, DFSTX, STX, FEUPX, and DODFX. And we did research into these holdings that these funds have and how the companies that they may have holdings in are connected to Israel. So for example, TILCX, their top three holdings are in Qualcomm, Wells Fargo, and Chubb.

Qualcomm is an information technology company that does the majority of its technology development in Israel. So they have like factories there. And that's kind of where they develop their smartphone chips and tracking intelligence, which is kind of like two of the main things that they work on and sell and and uh wells fargo was part of a 500 million dollar loan deal with multiple other lenders that support that was supporting elbit systems which is an israeli military weapons manufacturer so those are like two of the big ones just from the first fund that we had looked into. And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities across

the globe and for all Palestinian people, including their martyrs and refugees, we demand a ceasefire statement from Cal Poly Humboldt calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine. And we encourage all other California state universities and universities of California to do the same. As we were writing this, we found out that the faculty administration had released a ceasefire statement i believe but the actual like university like admin had it like the whole university admin but like the faculty had released a ceasefire statement faculty specifically i know there's there's definitely faculty that have there's some faculty who have been with us since day one like camping out with everyone since day one and it's like

a lot of the faculty we like we are totally comfortable putting our trust in like some of these faculty like if there was an emergency like I would call them you know like if there was an emergency on campus where like I was about to be arrested I'm like yeah I'm gonna call up this like professor like they have. And they have been like trying to, you know, update us with whatever they hear from admin. But just in like the past few days, we've actually kind of discerned that upper admin has sort of cut off contact with lower admin and faculty. And this is something that we talked about with faculty members as well. Because of the significant faculty support that we've been receiving, administration is literally just not telling faculty anything anymore. Yeah, it really seems like it's turned into just this pure conflict between everyone who is part of the process of an education fighting against the admin who are not part of that process, who are trying to stop everyone with cops?

Back in Portland, that first failed encampment brought more people out the next day, Friday the 26th, and by noon, more tents and a few banners had been set up. Student organizations had put together lists of demands. Now, these demands have varied and have been edited a few times after long Democratic consensus sessions by people present. The list I was presented with when I showed up on Monday included three demands. Number one, PSU should release a statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by the U.S. Number two, the university should end the sale of Israeli products on campus and any programs that would involve sending students, employees, or faculty to Israel. And number three, the Board of Trustees

should terminate all relationships with Boeing and other companies complicit in the ongoing genocide. Their list included Leopold, an Oregon-based company who makes rifle scopes, but also companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Boeing was the company I heard referenced most by protesters. The aerospace company, which is involved in the manufacture and design of just so many weapons, has a partnership with Portland State University. Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of demands started coming together, the school president, Ann Cudd, announced a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address these protester demands. Precisely what pausing this relationship means is unclear, and a lot of the people I talked to felt like it essentially meant nothing.

But Cudd wrote, quote, PSU will host a forum at which these concerns can be carefully framed and debated. We will organize a two-hour moderated debate in May to include faculty and student voices. So, you know, whatever that means. By late in the day Friday, media had started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation, which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening all over the country, and if you're local news, you want to do anything you can to tie your area into whatever the big story is nationwide. So, you know, good excuse to show up. There was also some conflict between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated

groups of activists, some of whom were also students, over whether or not to keep occupying over the weekend and keep attempting to, you know, keep an occupation in place despite police crackdowns or to save their strength for a new concerted push on Monday. At any rate, some people stayed, and by 7 p.m. that night, Friday night, the Portland Police Bureau showed back up in full riot gear. Park rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a standoff ensued. While some protesters confronted police head-on, a smaller group of activists used this as a distraction to move a number of tents onto the library steps, having noticed that PPB didn't seem to be willing to go directly onto campus property. Once this was done, the folks confronting

the riot line gradually pulled back to the steps. The police seemed confused or at least put out by this. They left for a while, then returned briefly to cut down the banners hung on the trees. I was told a number of people mentioned this kind of laughingly when I was around, that the way in which the police justified this was that a recent anti-camping, public camping measure meant to target the homeless, specified that the kind of thing that a banner hung against, like basically the fact that the banner touched trees in two different areas, or like touched two different trees, meant that it would count it as a tent,

and so they were allowed to take it down. It all sounded pretty silly to me. But students and others on campus property in the library were left to barricade the area around the library at will. They started with pallets brought by an anonymous benefactor. Both sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked. This only lasted until Saturday morning, when Ann Cudd, president of the university since August of 2023, visited the encampment. Different protesters I have talked to related this event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill. Others described Anne as

quite angry and even threatening them. I was not there. The end result was an agreement, though. If protesters allowed students to continue to have access to the doorway into the library, so students could still use the library, PSU wouldn't send in their cops or call in the city cops to clear out the occupation. After what one source described as much-heated discussion, protesters agreed to this arrangement. Now, variations of stuff like this are common in occupations at schools that get this far. School faculty are often sympathetic to student actions, or at least to the students taking part in them,

and supporting crackdowns is dicey for the administration. At Humboldt State University, the administration attempted to de-escalate and eventually euthanize the movement by trying to provide a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough to leave, along with the suggestion, but not the actual legally binding promise, that they wouldn't be punished if they did. And here's another clip from that interview. I understand that the school even set up basically a booth where you could come and officially

like deregister yourself from the protests in order to not get expelled or something like that is that uh like i i think you're it was unclear to me from what i read like exactly how that system was supposed to function but it seemed kind of shady so they wanted us to so they set up a table by one of the exits and they wanted us to like give them like our information and they were like if you do this you won't get immediately arrested but keep in mind they said not immediately arrested and they were and they even clarified like in their alert about this they were like by the way this doesn't protect you from any future consequences so it was like why would we do that then What is that doing for any of us? I don't think a single person took that opportunity.

Back in Portland, after the detente with the school administration, things continued awkwardly but smoothly for the next day or so. Protesters continued to fortify the library defenses while students entered and exited and used it at will, although the school did shut it down early on Monday. In the meantime, protesters used the small space available to them to set up minimal infrastructure. As in Humboldt, a small kitchen tent was put up along with a larger medical tent, a designated smoking area tent, and an art station for people to make signs to hang from the barricades. Donations began coming in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, the point that by Monday, protesters had stopped accepting donations of a lot of stuff like food and water,

but also things like batteries and generators, because they just didn't have room to take any more of them. During these weekend days and nights, those at the encampment discussed demands, their plans, and strategy for the future. One topic of discussion involved the houseless. their plans, and strategy for the future. One topic of discussion involved the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the encampment, and would they be welcome to some of the donated resources? The ultimate decision, and I hear that this was not a particularly controversial one, was yes. Now, I should also note here that the Humboldt students we talked with claimed that their school's treatment of houseless residents earlier, like a couple of years ago, was one of the inciting incidents of this occupation. we talked with, claimed that their school's treatment of houseless residents earlier,

like a couple of years ago, was one of the inciting incidents of this occupation. Obviously, the genocide in Gaza was the spark and purpose for why the occupation at Humboldt happened and why this occupation at PSU happened, but nothing happens in a vacuum. And I wanted to include this bit from the interview because I think it's interesting we're joking that this is like the third strike for administration because in 2022 the la times released an article about how administration was kicking homeless students off campus for living in their vehicles jesus and i believe our university out of all the Cal States has the highest rate of homeless students. Yeah. And so this kind of this outraged a lot of people, including people on campus.

We actually had a few days encampment on campus for that, too, I believe. And I feel like that never really got it got partially resolved. But admin was like really fighting against all the possible options because there was like a couple of people arguing that like keep in mind i don't even think these people were from campus but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how the people are living in their cars were like messy or something and so one of our requests was like okay maybe like we could get a few more dumpsters or trash cans in the area where people are living yeah and admin just totally fought back against that

and so that was like what what we're jokingly calling like oh that was like strike one and then strike two we were saying is the faculty strike that happened earlier I think this semester that was I think all over the state but it really only lasted like one day despite the momentum for possibly lasting longer than that and admin want like sent out an email saying like if your faculty isn't holding classes put their names here jeez and obviously all of us were like what are you talking like you want us to like you're asking us to snitch on our like professors and faculty right now so that's what we're joking is like strike two because we're like uh we're not doing that and then this is what we're calling strike three. And I was like joking earlier to everyone, I was like, strike three and we're out? Strike three and they're out? And everyone was like, yeah, I freaking hope so.

just in the different motivating factors that come together to make situations like this possible, but in the ways in which extant student groups and organizations that arrive spontaneously, due to the pressures of the moment, interface and interact. When I arrived at the encampment at about 1 p.m., I was introduced to several media liaisons for the occupation. They were extremely careful with what they said. A lot of it was just kind of repeating the list of agreed-upon demands that the protesters had come up with. I did ask about a few other things. I wanted to know how protests in 2020 and protests on other campuses had impacted the tactics being seen here.

The most common response I got to my questions were variations of, that's not something we'd like to talk about. But they did go into detail on a couple of things, and one of those was what it would take to actually conclude this occupation. They noted that if representatives of the campus administration, including the president, were to come to them and make concrete steps to divest from Boeing and other military contractors that the school currently has a direct financial relationship with, that that could be the basis for moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent of the

encampment, possibly. So that seemed to be kind of their line. If we actually see some real evidence that the school is divesting from these military investments that they have, you know, we'll be willing to negotiate further. But what the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a pause and saying, we'll meet about the Boeing thing later, that's not enough. The liaisons I talked to also made it clear that they found the wide wave of campus actions around the country inspiring and that that had had an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU. I was pretty impressed by their message discipline, to be honest. As a journalist, you want people to talk to you, but actions like this are dangerous,

and cops aren't the only danger. Anytime your movement gets press, the attention that it attracts will also attract grifters, particularly of the right-wing variety. People who want to find someone they can catch saying something aggressive or dumb or that just sounds bad out of context. You, as organizers and activists, want to keep attention on your goals and message and away from that kind of bullshit. I should also note that there were some mentions of their desire that the campus essentially carry out an amnesty policy for people who had already been involved in the occupation

so that nobody would get kicked out of the school as a result of their participation in this movement. I've heard similar things from the protesters in Humboldt. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation. And what's also interesting are these ads. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

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So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. 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. 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. 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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's 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.

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betteroffline.com. And we're back. As my time at the protest on Monday wore on, individuals from the occupation would occasionally march through the crowd and around the encampment, which grew at its height of the day to around 500 or so people in the late afternoon. This was a mix of protesters, including people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended up at PSU,

and some bystanders, a lot of whom were students at nearby dorms. People who were members of the occupation would ask passersby and media not to film protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help with the occupation. Pamphlets on their goals were handed out, and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around.

There were also some people tabling for different causes. There was one group of people who were taking down folks' information in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would increase the tax on corporations worth more than $25 million that were based in the city of Portland, which sounded nice to me. And in addition to that, there were people who were working to organize a, you know, one of those, sorry, it is very late, but essentially how people are, a lot of people are attempting to get people to organize to like register as unaffiliated in the primaries, especially in order to like, you order to make a statement to the Biden administration about their support of Israel. There were folks who were trying to

raise and get people involved in that as well. So again, it was like many protests of this size involved a lot of people. Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland, I have seen kind of more extreme and, yeah, let's say extreme activists get angry at stuff like this, particularly when it's asking folks to like fill out or sign petitions. There's some concern, obviously, that like that could effectively dox people who were there. there. I've always found that concern a little silly. I think people can be trusted to kind of measure their own threat matrix and decide, am I going to be doing anything at this protest that means I shouldn't put down on a piece of paper that I was around here? That issue, I didn't notice at this protest. Everyone seemed pretty copacetic. And as a general rule, it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or less on the same page. The mostly masked protesters that I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included a number of Muslim students, at least one of whom

I watched pray before taking their place on the barricade. I also noticed numbers of students in hijabs watching from nearby windows, and eventually from the park out in front of the occupation. From conversations I had on the ground, I became aware of the fact that several student organizations were hesitant to support particularly the weakened occupations, as they had had concerns for the safety of their Palestinian members. One particularly salient fear was that Ford and students who participated and were arrested might risk not just their academic status, but their ability to stay in country. And I know that a number of the protesters I met there, who were particularly white folks, felt like one reason they needed to participate was that they could participate without taking

that kind of risk on. For the largest portion of the day Monday, I watched as activists reinforced the barricades on one side of the library library and the crowd grew quite large in the park. Some signs I saw among the crowd and on the barricade included, mass college protests are always on the right side of history, and fuck your homework, people are dying. There were speeches, but not much in the way of action until very late in the day when all but maybe 150 or so of the crowd had filtered away. My notes at the time say the big change happened at around 6.55 p.m. By this point in the early evening, I had seen very little of the police. Every now and then a few PSU cruisers would come by circling the area,

Now and then a few PSU cruisers would come by, circling the area, and small groups of four or five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them would run beside the squad cars, basically trying to tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts. This seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they mostly stayed away. I believe that at this point, the city's plan and the administration's plan was to avoid doing anything fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd because that would be to risk restarting the whole 2020 Portland protest cycle again. Remember, it's not just as simple as can we crush this protest, but if we go kick all these people out now and a bunch of them get seen in

broad daylight getting beaten and gassed, does that mean we have to deal with thousands of people in the street tomorrow? Honestly, staying away was the smart play on behalf of the police, and as a result of them making the smart play, protesters in the encampment were themselves confronted with a choice. The space that they had been allowed by the school to occupy in this sort of weird detente situation had been filled, both with donations occupy in this sort of weird detente situation, had been filled, both with donations and just the number of people who were inside the occupation. There was no room to make it any bigger. So their next options were either, number one, expand the occupation to the park, and the Portland Police Bureau has the ability, the legal ability, and obviously the gear,

to clear out the park. In addition, just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend an encampment in that park, the way that it's set up. You really don't have, you know, you're kind of surrounded on all sides. The police can really mess with you. I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm quite aware. The other option they had was take the entire library building and force a response from both PSU and the city government. This would obviously give them more room to maneuver, give them more room to take in more people, and it would force an escalation with the city government and with the school, which is, you know, what they were looking for. Again, this is overall about particularly their school not divesting from companies that they see as complicit in the

genocide in Gaza and about, you know, wanting to force a response from that school's leadership. You know, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's what they were trying to do and that's what they chose to do. A little before 7 p.m., someone on a bullhorn came out and began asking all of the people who were still there who was willing to engage in real militant action, and for those people to come help occupy the library. Those who were less willing to risk charges, but still down for the cause, should form ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, etc. They looked like little bitty phalanxes. You know, people had a mix of umbrellas and shields and, you know, usually two lines thick or so of people linking arms. And I thought at first they were just kind of getting ready for

the police to come in to sort of resist the charge if they occupied more of the library. But that's not what happened. For a few minutes, different organizers kind of put these groups of people together and drilled them, walked them through basic tactics, talked about what they should expect. And not long after this, two different PSU police cruisers began to approach from two different streets. split up and one would confront each vehicle. The officers were badly outnumbered in both cases, and they pulled back, you know, and essentially left the library without anyone really watching over it. The activists who were inside the library used this as an excuse to occupy the rest of the building. Once the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from these platoons started grabbing heavy objects that were just around them on the campus and dragging them back to fortify the entrances and exits to

the structure. Much of this took the form of black-clad activists swarming onto a sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football training, sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using them to wall off exits and entrances to the ground floor of the building. I watched one group of protesters cut through locks to liberate a pair of dumpsters, which quickly found their way into the barricades in the front of the structure. I did not enter the library. I'm fairly certain that would have been illegal. But I did see numerous people running around on floors above ground level,

setting up the space for a proper occupation. I was told by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping the interior space accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there were a number of folks with wheelchairs who I saw outside at the occupation. I did not see any specific people inside. I left after 9 p.m., having been on the ground and wearing my armor for about eight hours the day after landing back in Portland. That was all I had in me, but quite a few people were still present both outside and inside the library when I left. Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing this episode, at about 11 p.m. PST, a series of frantic late-night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU, Portland Mayor

Ted Wheeler, the chief of police for Portland, and the city DA Mike Schmidt holding an emergency press conference. Local KTU reporter Tanvi Varma summarized the conference message this way on Twitter. Quote, PSU president said the protesters have damaged property and have broken into the library. She says she cannot entertain property damage or breaking and entering. She asked them to choose to engage civilly. She says they'll be asking PPB to remove the trespassers from the library. PPB police chief says he'd like to resolve this with no force or arrests. He has asked those who are breaking the law in the protest to stop. It's unclear to me at present how any of this is going to shake out. As I type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack, and it sounds like it's going to be quite ugly. Hey, everyone. So, you know, again, this is a little messy because I wrote this late last night.

I woke up in the morning to listen to the edit of it and some things that happened. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, about 25 people were arrested after more than 100 riot officers arrived at the Cal Poly Humboldt campus and cracked down on the Gaza protest occupation. Riot police arrived around 2.30 a.m. Legal observers say no injuries. It's kind of really unclear to me how bad it was, what actually happened. But, you know, quite a few people have been arrested. And at this point, it looks like they're being charged with some pretty gnarly crimes, conspiracy, I think assault on a police officer. So this is one of those things that's going to be an ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing more than a million dollars worth of damage to university property. just read a quote here from an MSN article. Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers, and others. In addition, students could face discipline for

conduct violations while any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action. That's them quoting a university news release. So that's kind of where we are with Cal Poly Humboldt. I wanted to note that the folks that we talked to, who I hope are doing well, had requested that we send people to donate to a bail fund, if at all possible. If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters, you can go to rally.org slash ARC bail fund. That's rally.org slash ARC bail fund. So that would help out with those folks who currently need it. There has also been a request to call the university and request the release of Humboldt protesters for Palestine. The CPH University Police phone number is 707-826-5555. University Police. Phone number is 707-826-5555. There is a suggested script, which I'm going to read here. Hi, my name is Blank, and I demand the immediate release of the arrested Humboldt

student and faculty protesters for Palestine. They should not be charged, let alone raided and attacked, for being on the right side of history. They include but are not only Fern McBride, Olivia Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhala Agasella, Lana Word, Allison Merton, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi Ruiz. So that's where things are with Humboldt University. My thoughts are with the people who are arrested, the people who were forced out of the occupation. As of the recording and airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library is still in progress, and what will happen there is less clear. Throughout today, Tuesday, the police and city government have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out the occupation, about criminal behavior there being unacceptable, about their suspicion that there's been significant damage done to university property. For their part, protesters have promised they will not damage any books. You know, we're going to see what's going to actually happen. What is clear

to me at this point is that in the last day or so, the situation has gone from managed, something where the police were every now and then clearing out tents, and it was relatively under control, to something so out of control that it necessitated a late night press conference by the whole city government. So we will see where everything concludes with the PSU occupation, if the police come in and carry out a raid as was done in Humboldt, or if the university administration is willing to actually come to the table and make some of these solid steps towards divesting the university from companies like Boeing, which is what the protesters are demanding.

All really unclear. But yeah, we will continue to cover this. And you all continue to, you know, be angry about bad things. And yeah, I don't know. I'm still very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to give an update on Wednesday night. I'm recording this around 4.40 p.m. on Wednesday, but a day after I recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff has happened. The occupation has continued.

You know, on Monday night, only a small number of people stayed behind. I think there may be something like a dozen, I was told, who actually slept in the library that night. There was kind of an anticipation that the cops could come at any minute. The next day, word spread about the occupation, and there were a lot more people in the library on Tuesday night. And as a result, it seems as if plans that had initially been down for the police to raid on Tuesday night were canceled. The government of Portland published an article today, and I'm going to quote from it here. The Portland Police Bureau places an emphasis on de-escalation, and time is a key de-escalation tactic that we use whenever possible. That has not been my experience with them.

If police action can be delayed to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so. An example of this occurred Tuesday evening. A plan was in place to resolve the library incident. However, conditions changed, and the incident commander made the decision to delay for the well-being of all concerned. decision to delay for the well-being of all concerned. My guess is that the conditions that changed largely were how many people were on the ground, as well as the fact that they didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how much access students had gotten. You know, they didn't have a full operational plan involved. The police publication notes that there was a rumor circulated that the planned operation was scuttled due to a decision made by the DA's office.

This is because the current district attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive. He made a decision not to prosecute all of the acts that he could have prosecuted in 2020 and has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and by conservatives in the city for this decision ever since. Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in 2020 and beyond, and has, from the beginning of all of this, said that his office will prosecute students involved and anyone else involved with the occupation. I think this is just election year messaging by the police going after Schmidt because they want more of a hardliner in. In either case, nothing was done. Tuesday,

the occupation continued to spread. On Tuesday night, students had a movie night. On Wednesday night, as I basically as I record this, there's a barbecue. And a lot of this is occurring kind of outside of the library and like the lawn area around it. The idea basically being to keep numbers up in and around the library occupation to make it more politically costly and just harder for the police to actually force everyone out. While all this has been going on, faculty and student organizers have been meeting with the president of the university. Students refused initially to come to a negotiating table unless their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed for students and non-students who were taking part in the occupation.

This is something when I talked to folks on Monday night, the focus was on, there was some talk of amnesty, but a lot of the primary thing I was told about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing and other arms manufacturers. The demand for amnesty has grown as the occupation has become more of a real thing, which it had started to be by the end of my time there on Monday. There was some initial talk from the university president that she was willing to not press charges if, you know, the students who were involved agreed not to violate the student code of conduct for the rest of their time at the university, and basically handed all of their names over to the university. That was not an agreement that wound up coming through. Very similar to what we saw at Humboldt, right? Where you've got this school being like, well, we'll offer some sort of amnesty,

even though we can't really promise full amnesty because the DA can choose to prosecute people still. But if you sign your name up on this list that you were here and committing crimes, we'll kind of try to do something. That did not wind up de-escalating the situation. And as I record this, the library at PSU is still occupied by students. We'll see how all of this goes. You know, I've heard a number of things from inside the occupation. It's kind of one of those things where the full details of what's happening will shake out. It's been, as these things always are, a little bit messy.

The first night I was there and up through a sizable chunk of Tuesday, you can find articles from media who showed up saying that protesters wouldn't let them in. And then at some point, the people at the gates, so to speak, changed and a number of press got in and took some pictures of the occupation. You can find those online. a number of press got in and took some pictures of the occupation. You can find those online. There's a lot of local reporters, KYN and whatnot, who have published different things about the occupation. It's been interesting to see like the reactions of different reporters because they change based on like the reporter who's there and kind of I think how personable they are with people and the folks that they wind up meeting. So you'll find some local reporters being like, everyone was really nice. And some local reporters being like, everybody was really mean and they wouldn't let me in.

These are not uncommon things to encounter when you're seeing press interact with a protest like this. One of the things I do find interesting that has been emphasized to me by some of the older protesters who have been taking part in aspects of this occupation is that the student protesters who are organizing and leading this, who are of course younger and were too young to have generally been involved in like 2020 stuff are really open-minded, you know, despite kind of political disagreements that may exist between people, there's this understanding that like folks are a lot less ossified in their beliefs about what constitutes valid action and what constitutes, you know, how people should proceed with things. Like, generally, that has been impressed upon me by some of the older activists is that these younger student organizers seem much

more open-minded and optimistic about accomplishing things and trying new things. And this is definitely a different kind of occupation Portland has seen. I noticed some of that on the first night. Earlier in the recording, I made that comment about how I noticed that people were out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills, taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd who had gathered for the protest, and that in the past, I had seen folks like that have issue with members of the crowd. And I didn't really notice that this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to some of what some of these older activists have told me, which is that a lot of the student organizers here are kind of less set in some of their ways.

You know, we'll see as this all continues to develop, there's a very good chance that by the time you hear this episode, by Thursday morning, the police will have raided. That's definitely been happening all around the country. You know, as we have researched and recorded these episodes, there have been police crackdowns at Columbia University, at UC San Diego, at UCLA. We've seen, you know, a lot of pretty hideous things on the news in regards to these student occupations. And there's a very good chance that Portland will have joined that parade of ugly videos by the time this comes up. But as I record this, there's a barbecue going on. And I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well. Bye. I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well.

Bye. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. destruction of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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.

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