Listen to the full episode on Patreon After attending the No Kings rally in Portland on Saturday, Derek shares some thoughts about the week leading up to the nationwide protests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| There was a guy with a Trump flag standing on the promenade. | |
| It was a black flag where the stars and stripes were faded. | |
| It says Trump MAGA 45 and 47. | |
| And around the 1776 where the 50 stars should be, there were 13 stars. | |
| It's a whole jumble of symbolism. | |
| In fact, made even funnier by the fact that he was carrying a Captain America shield, the kind the little kids carry around on Halloween. | |
| And I'm not gonna ding that because this was the Portland No Kings rally. | |
| I mean, the number of adults wearing inflatable costumes and their children was pretty impressive. | |
| But they at least usually tended to get the symbolism right. | |
| If you're gonna carry a Captain America shield, you should know that he was an anti-fascist. | |
| So that contradicts what's going on in your right hand. | |
| He was joined by an older lady who I believe was his mother. | |
| She was seated the whole time. | |
| She had a sign. | |
| And no one really engaged with them as I stood there for a little while off in the distance, just watching, because I was interested. | |
| Because of the who knows how many thousands of people, I don't know if an official count is at when I'm recording this yet. | |
| The last No Kings rally said to get 10,000 people. | |
| I would imagine there were more this time, especially given what's going on in Portland right now. | |
| But a couple people said remarks as they walked by, and I did catch his replies. | |
| He was always saying, You're the fascist. | |
| You won't stop and have a conversation with me. | |
| So I don't think he was a paid agitator. | |
| He just seemed like a lonely young boy in his 20s and his mother who just wanted to start some shit. | |
| They didn't seem paid, but they seemed like they wanted to fight some people. | |
| Not physically. | |
| Neither of these people were in that sort of shape. | |
| They weren't decked out in all the military gear as the actual agitators like to do when they come around the ice facility. | |
| This was a couple miles from ice, and overall it was a joyous day. | |
| It was a day where everyone was saying hello to each other, and when you're walking and streaming through, you say excuse me, and people were stopping for photos all over the place. | |
| And the speakers, for the most part, really had some good messages. | |
| I'm gonna play one in a few moments. | |
| You know, at one point before the march started, uh, one of the speakers said, Portland is the number one music city in the in the country. | |
| I had to laugh at that. | |
| I mean, there's there's fantastic music here, but I think being honest with what you can offer, like if she were to say Portland is the number one food city in the country, there's an argument for that. | |
| Like you can stop and have an actual credible debate with people. | |
| But the music that followed just proved as much as I love this city, you know, tone it down a notch. | |
| But what wasn't toned down is the responses, which is what I want to talk about today. | |
| There are two questions I'm gonna handle on the other side of the break here, and one of them has to do with many of the much of the chatter that I saw online leading up to the No Kings protest, the concept of it, what it functions as, and what place it has in our society. | |
| And this isn't limited to Portland by any means. | |
| I'm gonna talk about being in Portland because that's where I was, but not gonna, it's not only limited to there. | |
| And then I want to entertain a question on one of the comments that I saw about Nazism. | |
| Because why not? | |
| We're here, right? | |
| I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a conspirituality bonus episode. | |
| Portland has not fallen for it. | |
| You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample to continue listening. | |
| Please head over to Patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing. | |
| You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. |