DarkHorse Podcast with Nancy Rommelmann and Bret Weinstein
Nancy Rommelmann is an author, and reporter for Reason magazine. She discusses with Bret the current situation in Portland Oregon.Find Nancy on her website: https://NancyRomm.com Find Nancy on Twitter: @NancyRomm Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music. Support the Show.
I am very pleased to welcome Nancy Rommelman, author of the book To the Bridge, A True Story of Motherhood and Murder, and a reporter for Reason Magazine who has recently spent a great deal of time in my home city of Portland reporting on the protests and riots and other phenomena.
Welcome, Nancy.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thanks.
So I should probably alert our audience that you lived in Portland for how many years?
15 years.
I lived there from 2004 until late 2019.
So you and I barely overlapped.
You saw the Portland that existed before and I am now watching it turn into something new and you're coming out to Report for Reason and tell their audience what's going on.
So what is going on in Portland from your perspective?
What's going on in Portland is something that's been building.
Well, I think the sort of protest gene is built into Portland.
It's been there, I guess, since the 60s or 70s.
You know, whether it was, you know, Earth Rights or Don't Eat Animals or whatever it is, they're a city that likes to protest.
They've sort of been building up a head of steam, progressive values kind of steam for the past, I'd say since about 2015.
You and I, I think, have seen some of that in action.
Then we had a little bit of a weird depression in Portland.
I noticed when I was there in December, a lot of downtown was closed.
I was like, well, it's kind of interesting.
Like, it doesn't make people feel good when the neighborhood's kind of insecure, right?
Then you had COVID.
What happens?
You know, the city closes down.
Kids are home.
People can't do anything.
George Floyd was killed and the city exploded.
And it had been primed to explode.
And the reasons were grief and frustration to begin with.
And I think now we're seeing it morph into other things and gain steam, which includes Trump sending the feds in, which includes let's abolish all police.
So we've got a bit of a movement rolling right now and gathering adherents as it rolls.
Yeah, I agree with that, although I am increasingly reluctant to take any of the things that we are simply supposed to assume about this and apply them.
In other words, I've seen so many things slid in under the radar by virtue of, you know, redefinition of words and things that I'm very careful about things like Grief.
I'm not saying nobody was motivated by grief, but I have the sense that I was not actually watching anything that literally lines up with what we understand grief to be.
What it was was some kind of an outpouring of emotion that surrounded a death, and so grief was like the next nearest concept.
I would agree with that.
I would agree not just in Portland, but in general.
People with various degrees of cognizance will appropriate the pain of others to animate whatever it is that they want to do, whether it's a personal thing, like someone wants to You know, pretend that they're in terrible pain so you give them sympathy or you're part of a movement and you feel more part of that movement when you've got that, what are they called, collective effervescence, right?
We're all here experiencing this thing at one time.
And I think that is something that's popular in Portland.
You know, whether it's, you know, the Pussyhats or they're marching for something else.
Portlanders tend to want to form a group and be Well, there's actually a biological facet to this, which is very well covered in the book Behave by Robert Sapolsky, and it has to do with oxytocin, which many people take to be the love hormone, but it turns out it's a great deal more complex than that, because
It is really the in-group, out-group hormone.
And so it does accompany, for example, the birth of a child.
A mother will be flooded with oxytocin and feel this incredible bond to her child initially.
But it is also a hormone that accompanies the out-grouping of people.
That is to say, the demonization of people before you go to war with them, for example.
And so one of the things that is so troubling about The phenomenon in Portland and all of the other places that are mirrored by it is that there is this very intense sense of camaraderie clearly among the protesters and rioters, but it is accompanied by a fervor and a willingness to demonize anybody who doesn't say the right things or behave in, you know, exact alignment.
And so that very same phenomenon that has Portland rioters burning down buildings, demonizing police, demonizing anybody who is not in agreement with them, could be a force for our collective alignment around problems that confront all of us, like COVID, for example, or the corruption of our political apparatus.
Right, but wouldn't that take a certain amount of consideration and less sloganeering?
Wouldn't it take a little more being thoughtful?
I know one thing that we've seen in the past couple of weeks in Portland, which I find extremely disturbing, are the groups, and I've been with them when they've done this, when they've sort of funneled into the streets at midnight.
You've got 400 young people in Black militia wearing helmets and they funnel into a street very quietly, an unlit residential street, and start shouting at the people inside, you know, to wake up, you know, literally and metaphorically.
And, you know, when I first was with them, I thought, oh, do they really, you know, expect people to get up and start marching with them?
And then I realized that was incredibly naive of me.
Um, it is a bit, I, I know they're, they're not going to claim it's a, it's a terror tactic, but you know, I think it is.
Um, but the, I, I've had two people, one I saw on video and one I, I heard myself say, you know, I'd like to be asleep too, but I'm out here every night fighting for justice while you, you know, sleep with your comfortable lives.
It's like, well, Yeah, well, you don't have to be out here doing this, and you certainly don't have to be out here doing this, and thinking that this is the way you're going to create a better society.
Yeah, I saw a clip, I don't know if it was part of the same incident, but one of the protesters was, it seemed to me, rationalizing to herself.
She just happened to have a megaphone in her hand, so we got to hear her thought process, and She was, you know, basically convincing herself that she clearly deserved to be paid for protesting, you know, this even as she's waking up her fellow, you know, citizens of Portland, you know, in what is absolutely a very thinly veiled threat.
Right.
It's a threat.
We need you to join our movement to add fuel to it or else, you know, and at the same time not only are they confronting citizens as they sleep, but they are making it impossible for the police to do normal policing because the idea is Everything will be scrutinized and the least generous interpretation will be put on any action By the police, therefore the police are hamstrung.
Well, I have quite a lot to say about this.
I mean, first of all, you know, Black Block, which is sort of the, a good number of the people that, you know, meet in parks at night at eight o'clock, you don't know what park it's going to be if you're a citizen, unless you're like watching, you know, the certain groups that announce it earlier in the day, and they have their little, they get together, they do a little shield practice, and then they go out and they attack whatever they're going to attack, whether it's, you know, the Portland Police Union, or the ICE headquarters, or a police station.
And they have, and I think you've probably seen this, they have dozens and dozens of people running around that says press, right?
A little on their hat or on their shirt.
Now obviously as a real press person I've never done that in my entire life, but they do this for several reasons.
One is because in Portland you're not allowed to interfere with the press.
The press must be allowed to observe.
But they also Film incessantly.
First of all, they're of the filming generation, right?
Everything is filmed and then they edit it very carefully so that you see that they are always sort of victimized by the police or, you know, by a citizen that's yelling at them.
Meanwhile, if you are just trying to film because that's your job, they will just shout in your face over and over and over.
You're not allowed to film.
You're not allowed to film.
It's like, excuse me?
Who?
Who in the world said this?
You could tell me that, but it's not true.
I had my phone stolen.
I luckily got it back because I was filming.
But they are creating the narrative that seeps out into the media.
One thing I noticed too that they do, they have these shields, right, that they build and has the anarchist system where it doesn't and they go out and they Kind of like, set up, they're gonna defend themselves from the police.
But I don't think that's what it's about at all.
It's all about getting the picture of the police that cuts through these shields like a hot knife through butter because these kids are, they are sort of ungainly for the most part.
And it's basically to get another shot of them being victimized by the brutal Gestapo that are the police that they are out to get rid of.
They're not doing a terribly bad job of making the police look bad, if you want to believe their narrative.
Yeah, I agree.
And it's absolutely terrifying to watch how the press handles what's going on.
It doesn't make the least effort to report what's actually taking place.
In essence, what happens is... You know, actually, there's a... Have you seen a film?
I think it's called a film unfinished.
What it is is the Nazis set out to make a propaganda film in the Warsaw ghetto and they never finished it and a modern director took the footage and Reassembled it so you could see what the Nazis were up to right and it was like take after take Of some situation that made the Jews in the ghetto look awful, but it was like they would do the same scene, you know, 20 times.
Right.
With the intent to get the one that looked worst and that the only thing you needed to see in order to understand what was really going on was the, you know, the 20 takes, you know, where it was like action, you know.
And so this is...
It has the same flavor where it's like, okay, you're going to have hour after hour of interaction between the police and the rioters.
And they're going to cut to the 15 seconds that if you just don't see what happened right before and right after, you'll take this to be the police aggressing against the rioters.
And the fact is the other story is right there, ready to be reported.
But what I don't see is the national press anywhere.
No, well, you know, that's interesting.
I didn't see much national press when I was in the ground, either in front of the federal building or when I was going out last week with them on the ground.
You know, there's a lot of news going on in the country, obviously.
Portland is a story.
But a lot of people, I think, are, you know, just relying on, you know, grabbing these clips from online.
And most of it will grab the narrative that it's like, you know, the evil feds and the evil police.
And then of course, unfortunately, you have on the other side, which they just grabbed the absolutely worst thing that some protester or demonstrator, I'm calling them demonstrators now, because if you call them protesters, people are like, are you kidding?
You're going to still run with that line?
If you call them rioters, then you get, they're just out there peaceful protesting, so I'm settling on demonstrators right now.
I want to come back to that, but finish your riff, and I want to come back to it.
Okay, I'm just saying you've got the other side of the press that goes too far, I think sometimes, which is like, SAVAGE IS COMING TO YOUR CITY!
And it's like, okay, guys, you know, the story, you have this on his head, like, the story's in the middle.
To the, for the most part.
So that's, that's been the story I've been trying to tell it.
Anyway, demonstrators, go for it.
Well, first of all, I'm not so sure the story is in the middle.
Okay.
The story is not the version that either of the two now discontinuous elements of the press are reporting.
So I guess maybe technically it's between them, but Well, maybe the best way in here is the question of what we call this phenomenon.
And my feeling is, and frankly I faced this all the way back in 2017, right?
I find the world is now catching up to the question of whether you call them protesters or rioters is essential.
And what I've been saying very clumsily for all of these years is I call the thing that showed up at my classroom, you know at 10 in the morning on May 23rd That was a protest and I say it quickly devolved into riots, which it did they were barricading buildings.
They were kidnapping members of the administration They assaulted people, they had the police stood down, and then they wandered the campus with weapons.
So, the point is, protest and riot both have a relevance, but it's actually a temporal shift is what happened.
And the same thing happens here in Portland with a twist.
Which is, there is a protest that happens every night, and it predictably turns into a riot.
And so, in a sense, this isn't even the situation that happened at Evergreen, where things plausibly escalated.
This is actually a plan, and in some sense, the...
Protest is there to be captured for those who are reporting to an audience that wants to hear that Portland is finally standing up against police brutality and that the feds are coming in to you know to Institute some kind of fascist thing and they've been repelled by the protesters who valiantly Confronted them or something like that if you're you know MSNBC then the point is you know what time to show up to see a protest that's a protest but if you
are engaged in a protest that you know for sure is going to become a riot later in the evening, you're actually signing up for responsibility for that riot.
That's my opinion.
So I'm going to walk back a little bit of what I said in terms of the stories in the middle.
I think the story's all over.
I think that all of these things can be true at the same time.
And I'm going to agree with you that say, yes, you know, because there were people that are sort of in the middle.
I mean, there really were people that are like, I'm really want to do something to try to make it better.
So, you know, black men are not killed.
I mean, they really are trying, but they're not the people really around anymore.
And I actually don't think, I mean, not from what I've seen, I was in Portland all last week for about a week and a half.
The sort of more peaceful protests, they've really died down.
You really don't see those anymore.
Those people are not marching anymore in front of the building.
I did see a nice cavalcade of cars one night going through Northeast Portland that was super peaceful.
You know, they're kind of with flags and tooting and, you know, they're part of the community too.
But all of that is sort of now receded.
What we have consistently every now, every day now, except not last night weirdly, and there's some questions about why that was, is we have the Black Bloc, which is the sort of, you know, Antifa-esque arm that believes in, you know, You know, by any method, including violence.
And we've got some Black Lives Matter protesters.
We've got some randos.
We've got some hotheads.
We've got some people that are confused.
And they do have a plan.
And I know that because I have been speaking with several of them.
They're not supposed to talk to you, but they do sometimes because people need to tell you their story.
And they definitely do have a plan.
And their plan is basically to Get the populace of Portland to mistrust the police enough that it's not just a matter maybe of defunding, it's a matter of The police are not going to be people that you're going to call because you don't trust them anymore, and also because they can't respond.
Right?
Yeah.
Portland is already down, I think it's about 500 officers than they should be.
And then they've got people that are retiring early, because who the heck wants to be a Portland police officer in Portland right now?
Or they're just resigning and getting the hell out of there and doing something else.
So you're down 500 officers, right?
And then you can't replace them.
You can't replace them fast enough.
Especially if you're defunding, because the obvious way to replace police officers who are fleeing in droves is to make it a more attractive job, effectively pay them for hazard pay.
So you're cutting the police at the same point you're demonizing them, which is going to result in fewer, worse police, and it's going to increase the brutality because the point is the brutality is a substitute for resources.
services.
So now we had that horrible incident about a week and a half ago when that guy was pulled out of his car and you know beaten downtown And I was out, I think it was the following night or two nights later, and I was hanging out with some Black Block kids.
It was an interesting piece, it's up on Reason.
And this one kid who, I don't know if he mistook me for one of his, like, press people or if he just wanted to talk, but he did.
And I said to him, so, listen, I know that, you know, Antifa doesn't, you know, rein in anybody else.
Everybody do their own thing.
Different groups.
You might not be in charge of this.
What do they think about what happened downtown?
That guy getting beaten.
And he said to me, you know what?
The cops know who those kids are.
Those are the 7-Eleven kids and they should have been there.
And I was like, yeah, but they're chasing you all around town.
Right?
And he kind of looked at his shoes and with a not very anarchistic sensibility said, yeah, but they should have been there.
But how can they be there?
I mean, someone told me the other day their car got stolen and they called the cops.
The cops are like, sorry, nothing we could do about it.
And if they had been there, there is no question in my mind that it would have been filmed and portrayed as an abuse of power.
Right, it's an opportunity.
It's an opportunity to make the police Look bad.
At every turn.
And this is very deliberate.
This is, you know, being built right now narratively with people's iPhones.
That's what's happening.
It is the construction of a false narrative over things that kind of happened, sort of happened, right?
You can piece together a very false story out of things, you know, out of edits, basically.
The editor is, you know, the editor rules the narrative in the video age.
And the problem is, I mean, first of all, this black block thing goes on all the time in the Pacific Northwest.
It's a feature of the landscape, right?
And it is LARPing, I believe, but the idea that a confused general outpouring of anger and support after George Floyd's death Has now largely dried up and something else has taken up the mantle But it was doing its thing before this, right?
It wasn't absolutely it was about tearing down civilization from the beginning It's been demonizing cops since you know occupy and before yep, right and the point is it's just continuing to do its thing but now it has the attention of the world and it has this cloak that it is using which has to do with Protecting black people and improving the quality of their lives.
And it's unassailable, right?
Because if you complain about it, if you say, guys, like, why don't we sit at the table and talk about this?
Then it's like, well, you're a racist.
It's like, well, I, no, actually not.
Like that's, that, you know, they feel that whatever they're doing now, they have exact, cloak is exactly right.
Whatever they're going to say is, is unassailable.
I'll tell you one more just thing, just to get back to the editing and then we'll, we'll, we'll move on.
The first night I was in Portland last month, uh, they were, the federal building stuff was really in high gear.
And, um, They attacked the building for about three hours, setting fires, trash, burning barbecues, this and that, knocking down fences, and they actually then they, you know, got in and and We're tearing off the plywood and smashing it down with a fire extinguisher.
Something I filmed, by the way, and to show you what people want to see, when I put it online, somebody commented, oh, I can tell Nancy Rommelman staged that in a studio because, you know, you can see the shininess on it.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
But anyway, it was about three hours into that.
Before the Fed shot out their first tear gas.
And everybody, you know, kind of ran away at once.
And they're pretty organized.
Walked on run, walked on run, so people don't get, you know, stampeded.
And then you get into the park and the girl's like, can I wash your eyes?
Like, they've got a little pattern going.
But everybody was saying, I can't believe they tear gassed us!
I'm like, Guys!
You're setting fire to the building for three hours.
Like, do you?
You know you want provocation.
You know you want it so bad you want them to respond to you.
So they did.
So stop complaining.
Right, no, the whole point is to provoke the response and film the response in isolation.
Absolutely!
Start it at the best moment to create the false story.
That's right.
Now, the other thing that you just said here in passing is so important.
I've seen this a hundred times now where, okay, You have a really inconvenient video for their narrative, right?
Right.
Now, it's not hard to catch an inconvenient video of their narrative because they're constantly doing things to provoke and if you catch the provocation then the whole thing is over.
So, what happens?
Well...
They will demonize you, they will demonize your publication, and if all else fails, they will just flat out lie about the nature of whatever it is you have produced.
And the point is, It is not going to... I call it implausible deniability.
And the idea is it's constructed for people who want something to say.
And the point is it doesn't matter how low grade it is.
They'll give you the best thing they can give you to dismiss anything you want to dismiss right up, you know, through a lie if they have to.
And the point is if you're MSNBC and you're trying to construct a story of peaceful protesters
who are being attacked by Trump's feds yada yada yada then you just go through the thing and basically the point is you have an excuse for everything you don't want to report and then you have a list of things that you want to amplify and you've created total fiction out of a kind of pre-rationalized editable content and we can't live this way the fact is to be
An entity of the press, to be journalistic, you have to report things that are not consistent with the overarching story you're telling when they happen.
And in this case, if you don't do that, what you get is a totally phony story, right?
A totally phony story that's very compelling because it's made of video.
You can't walk in with your end, like knowing, oh, I know how this story's gonna end.
You gotta let the story tell itself to you.
I think two things.
I think it's, I, I, I not only think it's extremely irresponsible for any news organization or any entity at all to not report what they see to, you know, to trim the facts, to fit the theory.
I think it's extremely dangerous.
I, I, I know it's extremely dangerous and it's equally dangerous to, to pacify the story, to play down what's happening.
It's like, and I, You know, you get this has sort of been a little like an insider baseball thing lately.
It's like, what's the journalist's responsibility?
Is it to, you know, fight power?
Is it to speak truth to power?
The journalist's responsibility is to report what you see.
Okay?
Yeah, we're all gonna have our little blinders.
I get it.
I get it.
You know, but you should.
And that is something that I think has been in short supply in Portland, in my experience.
Oh, it's been, it's been absent.
The danger couldn't be greater.
I mean, and I say this as somebody who's now living in Portland.
I'm watching the police dwindle.
I'm watching them hamstrung.
I am watching them fatigue.
I mean, they are literally being attacked up in Seattle.
You know, it's a different version of the same phenomenon.
We had an incident where Quick-drying cement of some kind was used to attempt to lock police into a building that was being set on fire.
That's... I mean, that's attempted murder, right?
Now, I don't know if this was symbolic or if they really thought the door was going to seal, but I want people to think about what it is like to have a group of people Demonizing the police as all cops are bastards as they are actually contemplating simulating hinting at Suggesting murder of police.
Mm-hmm, right and Demonstrating that actually you know what they were in the commercial district.
They were attacking government buildings.
They're now in neighborhoods they are now revealing that they view the populace of Portland as the enemy and the fact is There's no way out based on courageous leadership.
Our leadership, our civilian leadership in Portland is absolutely out to lunch.
It has been coddling this.
It has created the phenomenon.
And there's no alternative of people who are just even sensible.
So where does this go?
So a couple of things in terms of what they're doing to the police.
I know they're throwing these sort of um you know balloons now or paint balloons that have um grit in it so it'll actually like damage the helmet or damage a windshield so you can't even like uh you can't even clean yourself off to see what you need to do.
They also do things that are so, I mean you realize sometimes how young these people are.
They now throw like feces.
I was there one night and the cop was airing out the lobby of the police station because they came in through a bucket of feces and diarrhea.
I'm like, so they actually did that.
Like, they all shit in a bucket.
Like, this is, like, incredible.
You know, that this is what you would think is the way we're going to change the world is we're all going to poop in a bucket.
It's mental patient stuff.
And to do it in the middle of a pandemic.
Yes.
Right?
Wow.
Well, you know, they're invincible because they're 20.
But one thing I did want to mention, I was speaking with someone who knew a lot about Black Bok and she was saying that because the optics are so important, they actually don't want to kill anyone.
Like, they set the cop shop, the Justice Center on fire May 29th.
They wrote a story about a woman that works there trapped in the basement.
You talk about rubber cementing someone in.
They actually know that killing someone is going to be bad optics.
So they're going to keep that.
But here's my contention.
And I've written about this.
This movement has a glow, right?
And it glows and it glows and it glows.
What people are attracted to glow.
It's not always going to be someone that's in your little black block affinity group.
It's going to be Mr. Bonehead over here that is going to be a hero or going to like just take it to the next level.
You have no control over that.
Right.
Oh, so I don't accept this they know for exactly the reason you just pointed out.
Some of them know, right?
But the very nature of this thing, the cellular nature of BlackBlock and their central dogma involves this euphemistically named diversity of tactics thing.
And the point is diversity of tactics means essentially, look, We're gonna have some timid people, they're gonna do some protest stuff, that'll be good for the optics.
We're gonna have some violent people, they're gonna do some thuggery, right?
And, you know, innovate something.
And the point is, look, you're telling people that it's a diversity of tactics.
You're spray-painting the wall with the suggestion that police deserve to be murdered, right?
If somebody takes your goddamn suggestion, right, that's on you.
You set this up, and the fact that you didn't really mean it is nothing, right?
But they'll never ever accept that, right?
So, okay, Joe Bonehead goes and he kills two cops.
Right.
Who's gonna take responsibility for that?
Why do we care what they accept?
They are in violation of the law.
They are proposing things that are inconsistent with the continuing of society.
We have every right to shut this down.
And you know what it's going to look like when it gets shut down?
It's going to be ugly.
So be it.
That's the nature of it.
Well, I've talked about this before.
You and I, I think, even talked about this.
It's like, how elastic is the term peaceful protest?
Because, you know, I saw Ari Velcher standing in front of a raging fire in, I think it was Kenosha two days ago.
I mean, it was not just like a little fire.
It was a raging fire.
And the words that came out, and I like this guy, came out of his mouth was, well, you know, it's mostly been a peaceful protest.
I'm like, Wow!
So, so what?
Okay?
You, you, the people in Portland are now across the country in cities.
Peaceful protest now also means the destruction of property.
It means waking up citizens.
It means throwing feces in the police station.
All of this in Portland now because of what our, or the DA there has done, not prosecuting a lot of these crimes against the, these are now considered That's peaceful protest!
It's not!
Well, but the thing is, on the one hand, I watched, you know, the intelligentsia of Twitter finally get its act together on this point, the way it finally got its act together on the difference between a protest and a riot a couple weeks ago.
Yesterday, or the day before, suddenly I started seeing the right discussion about peaceful protest, but Wow, are we late to this party, right?
This is not a peaceful protest.
This is the uninvention of the distinction between assault and battery, right?
If you have a bunch of people marching, you know, raising their fists in the air, who know that there's going to be an attack, there's going to be, you know, arson, an attack on a federal building, there's going to be projectiles launched at officers, they are involved in the equivalent of assault.
The battery begins at the point that it becomes physical, but the protest is a threat of that thing that comes later.
And so, I don't want to pat us on the back for finally discovering that peaceful protest is an insane concept, because we shouldn't have taken so long to articulate this.
This was obvious from the get-go.
As soon as we had a pattern where every night you had a march and then violence, the point is, okay, everybody who's marching knows the violence comes later.
Well, I think we started out talking about why this can happen in Portland, and you've got a lot of people in Portland who, again, they're just sort of, you know, they want to identify with these progressive values, Maybe they dreamt of being a little more radical when they were in college 20 years ago or something.
The last night, or the last trip I was there, I was down at the federal building.
The feds were still inside.
And it had grown from 150 like kind of ratty kids smacking stuff around to 2,000 people with vendors and a really, really nice laser light show against the building.
As I've said before, not built by your kid in her bedroom.
Okay.
This was, I'm not saying it was Nike, but it's like my mind, it was like, Oh, you know who did that?
It was someone who's not going to actually come out at night and protest, but it's someone like going, Hey, I support these kids.
I support, like, you know, changing our society.
So I'm going to do what I can.
They've got, I know in June there was a $500,000 bail fund set up for kids who got arrested.
I covered the fire in Kenton when these protesters got, like, you know, they were setting the police building on fire.
The police kettled them away.
They ran through Kenton, which two days before had just built this lovely plaza to help businesses because of COVID.
They set it all on fire.
The next day, they had a check for $2,500 from the protesters.
I said to the head of the business association, I'm like, he's like, yeah, I don't think it was the same kids that set fire.
You know, there are people looking out for this and supporting it behind the scenes, whether it's just emotionally, financially, creatively.
Or defensively.
Oh definitely, because also they, you know, they don't want to ever have anybody else be right about their city, you know, and the Trump hatred is so thick and so deep.
But I have a question for you.
Now that we see nightly, and it has been nightly, the last night apparently was quiet in Portland, which is the first time in 93 nights.
If neighborhood blocks are being walked down and the kids are shouting, get up, get up, get up, motherfucker, get up, and shouting in people's faces, I mean, it doesn't matter.
You could be in there with your husband dying of cancer or your four kids or your mother with Alzheimer's.
It doesn't matter.
They don't care.
Do you think there's a point where people are gonna like go from just being either actively supportive to quietly supportive to afraid to then maybe getting over their fear and saying no more?
Absolutely.
Now, it's not going to be everybody.
Some people will bend over backwards in order to, you know, be more supportive because of their fear, right?
That's the problem is that the game theory actually does result in a certain number of people becoming monsters themselves in order not to be the target of this thing.
That's why they do it this way.
And then a lot of people are going to be Quietly willing to do Something to oppose this or at least rooting for something to oppose it.
Now the problem is Apparently our mayor is so dumb that he doesn't understand that there are a great many people who do not feel safe saying they would support an aggressive hand in doing away with the nightly violence, but Quietly, that's what they want, right?
If every neighborhood is on the map of places that the Black Bloc is going to come and harass people, then you can imagine there are an awful lot of people living in those neighborhoods rooting for something to stop it.
But Mayor Wheeler only sees that which is said out loud.
And in a culture of fear like this, you know what's said out loud?
You know, this.
That's what's said out loud.
Yeah, exactly, and even though people may feel that way, and I have some people sort of feeding me that, like, I'm asking my neighbors, do you feel this way yet?
Last week they're like, no, no, no, no, go kids, go!
And this week it's kind of like, no, but who's going to actuate it?
Who's going to actuate this change?
It's not going to be the City Council.
The city council, who are so completely pro-pro this sort of progressivism, whether they admit it or not, they are supporting this and have been supporting this by all of the laws that they keep passing to, you know, give the police less power, to make sure the feds don't come back, to make sure things aren't prosecutable anymore.
So who's going to actuate it?
Uh, no, it's gonna be a catastrophe.
And you know what?
The fact is that catastrophe is going to result, in my opinion, very likely, in a landslide for Bush.
I mean, Bush.
What am I talking about?
We'd be happy with a landslide for Bush, right?
It's going to be a landslide for Trump because, silently, all the people who know that this goes nowhere are going to end up holding their nose and voting for him and, you know, then what?
Then you've got a guy who doesn't have to be reelected, who has nothing to gain by treating this movement with kid gloves and will be a hero to his base for, I mean, it's just going to be a disaster.
It's very interesting because I find it so shocking the idea that just about any Portlander would vote for Trump.
I do think, you know, we've got an openly Antifa mayoral candidate, a woman named Sarah Iannarone.
And she's the only one that has any kind of chance against Wheeler, who I don't know that people can hate him any more than they do.
However, I wonder if people will just secretly vote for him anyway, just because they're so terrified of going with an Antifa candidate.
Though there is the possibility, and I'm toying with writing about this, that Antifa actually goes Main Street in Portland.
Like, this is the place where it happens.
What would that look like?
Well, that would be enough of success if you actually had, I mean, Antifa is apparently, I'm not an expert on it, but it's pretty decentralized.
But there are things that they want to get done, including defunding the police.
And if you can get the police weak enough, I don't think you'll defund it All the way, but it will be sort of like only for people that are willing to be law-abiding, then you vote in this Sarah Iannarone, who is openly pro-Antifa, right?
Now, Antifa doesn't have a figurehead.
Deliberately.
You still haven't told me.
Hold on, hold on.
Okay, go for it.
So, you now have a figurehead in Iannarone, right?
But is she the one that's like pulling the levers?
I don't know.
I don't know, but if she's in power and she's pro-Antifa, what happens to the sort of systems and the structures of policing and stuff we have in the city?
It collapses.
Right.
So I've been told, though they would never call themselves this, that Antifa's ready to step in and police.
Well, but we've seen this.
I lived it, okay?
I was hunted in my own neighborhood at Evergreen when the president of the college stood the police down, right?
So, I lived it.
We don't have to do that in Portland in order to figure out how it works.
If you had any doubt that what happened in Olympia Was representative we know from Seattle's autonomous zone that the same thing happened there We know that it's happened here in Portland with the undeclared autonomous zone in front of the federal building So it's not a secret what happens when you allow this euphemistically called community policing to step in for regular policing what it turns into is
is thuggery that is wielded against people that the community police view as their antagonists, and anybody who sees things differently.
And, you know, it's gonna result in murder and mayhem and warlordism.
Well, this is one thing, you know, I've written several times, is that right now in Portland, And in other places, I think across the country, they're very, very good at tearing things down.
Young, lots of energy, it's easy to set a fire, it's easy to do all of these things.
I have no, no evidence yet, zero, that they know how to build anything.
We know they don't because they keep telling us what they think is true and it's wrong for such obvious reasons, right?
The idea that you are going to help black people by reducing the level of policing is insane on its face.
Right?
You can't do this.
The idea that a colorblind society is not something we should desire, we should be interested in race first?
No, that's nonsense.
That is going to result in a breakdown in civil order that is going to fall most heavily on the people who are claimed to be helped by that perspective.
This can't work.
They're telling us they don't know the first thing about how things actually function.
If they, frankly, They can't run a rib shop, right?
Yeah.
You think they're gonna run a city?
I don't think they're gonna run a city.
So someone asked me the other day, they're like, because I was mostly in the city part of Portland, and they said, well, where is this happening?
I was like, it's mostly like middle class sections of Portland.
But our friend Matt Welch, who has, his family's originally from Portland.
He's like, Nancy, what the hell is going on in Gresham?
Okay, Gresham is right outside of Portland.
I don't know if you'd call it a bedroom community, a little bit of a suburb.
Now they're having their own issues there, but what do you have there?
You have more of a sort of Proud Boys-esque contingent willing to come out and mix it up.
So what have you seen about Gresham?
That was two days ago.
I've seen very little.
It's possible I've been preoccupied by events over in Unity 2020 land, but in any case, what do you know about what's going on in Gresham?
Well, they were basically shouting in each other's faces in Gresham.
Apparently there's also sort of People building funds out there to protect the sort of progressive element, it's moving a little bit into the suburbs, and that's a little bit surprising.
You know, someone also asked me, like, well, Nancy, why do all these things happen in, like, Portland and Seattle?
Like, why not, you know, I don't know, Pocatello?
It's like, well, Because the kids that wanted to live these ideals and these dreams were drawn to other people like them.
Right?
Gresham is not exactly where you'd think you'd have black block cells.
But you do.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is not a very heartening conversation, unfortunately, because, you know, you're telling me very much what it seems like when I do the calculations myself, which is that we are involved in a slow-motion train wreck, and that slow-motion train wreck is the result of a very obvious story that would be very easy to report if only there were a journalistic outfit interested in doing so.
Unfortunately, the only journalistic outfit interested in doing so is Reason Magazine.
I'm trying.
No.
Look, I appreciate what you're doing.
And frankly, you know, you're taking a risk on all of our behalf because you're recognizable.
That actually is getting to be a little bit of a problem.
It really wasn't before, but my last story there, I had someone very directly... I mean, I had been at the rally 90 seconds, and I was told I was gonna get my ass kicked, quite loudly, and saw the guy banging around with a stick later.
He was arrested two days later.
I had a guy come up to me, and he's like, we know who you are, you know.
And I was like, OK, I'm still writing about you.
But here's the thing.
This is actually.
I don't want to say it's the key because there are many keys, but you can't have a society that functions if certain people are unsafe.
If you could go to the protest because you weren't recognizable two months ago, but you can't now because of who you are, because you did go, because you reported, because you did so honestly.
If I can't go because I'm not having any of this, you know, the world belongs to the editor bullshit, then what does that tell you?
Some citizens of Portland could go to this mostly peaceful protest and other citizens of Portland can't?
What the hell's that?
I think you, I feel very comfortable in just telling them, no, I'm not leaving.
And I will tell you, and it's in one of the stories on Reason, I was out one night and this young girl, I don't know, late 20s, all black blocked.
went up to a woman who was standing on the sidewalk, about a 50-year-old woman, and said, you're not allowed to film!
And the woman said, excuse me?
I live on this block!
I can do anything I want!
And the girl's like, you're not allowed to film!
And that woman got right in her face and she said, you are not gonna tell me what to do!
And by the way, your mother did not raise you this way!
And this girl She crumpled.
I watched her crumple.
And, but hold on.
So she goes back to her little, you know, her little magic outfit didn't protect her.
And the woman came up to me and said, she's Latina like me.
And I'm telling you, her parents and grandparents did not raise her this way.
Now, this is one little lady in Kenton.
Well, what if most of the population says that?
You know, there are more people in Portland than there are black blockers.
By far.
By far.
I mean, a hundred to one?
A thousand to one?
People just have to say no!
I get to do whatever the hell I want to do on my block.
Sorry!
Problem is, the people of Portland are having their empathy weaponized against them.
Their desire to do the right thing with respect to the situation that Black Americans find themselves in.
And I believe that there is a situation and that it does require redress.
But that desire to be on the right side of that issue is being cynically used by the Black Bloc Antifa contingent.
And it is going to result in people not standing up.
But nonetheless, I agree that you and I could go anywhere in Portland and 95% of the people we interacted with, no matter how troubled they are by either one of us, would leave us alone.
That does not mean, it's the same problem as the crazy person who doesn't understand That the graffiti invitations to murder that are spray-painted all over the walls of downtown are not to be taken literally.
I don't think either one of us would be safe down there because of the 5% that isn't in on that part or the 5% that says that the people who think that that's symbolic are wrong.
And the important thing that we do is commit violence against people who are describing the other narrative.
And they want to be a hero.
I mean, there was a kid, there was a kid that was arrested, I guess, about a week and a half ago.
He was the one that went
to a rally with a gun and he put out he fired off a couple of shots and he was arrested and I threw the grapevine I heard he's um he was I guess he'd been in the military and he's like a deeply troubled really swayable kid who you know found a place to be whether I don't know what particular anti-black bloc group it was but he decided he was going to be like the good guy and go out and do this and uh yeah he's the person that you have to be
It's sort of the quiet one you wouldn't suspect that you have to be a little bit worried about.
Maybe not the kid that's just screaming in your face.
Right, but we can't very well have a city in which People's political understanding of the world.
I don't even want to say it's a political perspective.
My feeling is I'm interested in the real story as you are.
The interest in the real story makes us, I believe, demonstrably less safe in Portland and you can't have a city that functions that way.
The fact is A city has to be indifferent to what you think is true.
That's one of the foundational principles of this nation and we are descending into a situation where not only is race going from something
Where we aspired to a society in which it didn't matter, we're headed the other direction where it matters more than anything else, but we are moving from a society in which you're free to think and say anything, to one in which what you think and say dictates your quality of life and your safety.
To say that that is unsustainable is just, you know, it is the very beginning of what it is.
It's the beginning of madness.
Do people start leaving?
Because I've heard some people are.
Of course.
Yeah.
They came, you know, they came to Portland about a little before I got there.
People started coming to, to live their achievable dreams, right?
Um, justice, uh, you know, gay marriage, things that they really just really meant a lot to them, a clean place to raise their kids.
It was affordable.
Um, it's becoming a place that's not, that's not like that.
It's an, it's becoming an unsafe place, and I don't really know many people that want to live with physical insecurity.
I mean, to not know whether it will be my block tonight, that they're, I mean, it's just the idea that it could be.
You're never comfortable in your own city, on your own street, in your own home.
That's a problem.
The thing is, it escalates.
So it escalated from the commercial and government district to neighborhoods.
It escalates from burning a trash can in the street to trying to burn down buildings associated with the police.
Will it escalate from shining incredibly bright lights and shouting harassing things into the windows of neighborhoods to attempting to burn down houses in neighborhoods?
If they can justify it, yeah, sure.
We are allowing something to escalate that clearly does not agree that citizens are entitled to be safe.
It is trying to create a level of unsafety for everyone.
And why it would do something so dumb we can talk about, but whether that is dumb, there's no argument.
Are you there?
Can you hear me?
Hi.
I can hear you just fine.
I hear you now.
Okay, yeah, we had a little glitch there.
Oh, my internet connection is unstable?
I don't know why.
I think people have to become a little less afraid of being accused of being a racist because that's become something that everybody is so terrified of that they, you know, put the sign in the window, put it in the window, quick!
You know?
But they don't need you to actually be a racist.
They don't need you to have done anything.
If they decide that you're the person based on a lie, based on a whim, based on, you know, which way the wind is blowing, sure, maybe they'll burn down your house.
Again, that's the definition of peaceful protest.
It has just grown.
The band grows a little wider, a little wider, a little wider, and they justify it in their mind.
Why?
You were a racist.
Well, no, I wasn't.
Well, too bad.
Done now.
We're at that next level.
Yeah, you know...
I don't know what to even make of that because the thing that brought me to public attention was obviously the fact that I said nope I'm not a racist and all hell broke loose and I certainly survived it and the world looked into my background.
I'm sure if it had found the slightest hint of racism, it would have, you know, with delight marched me into the public square and, you know, humiliated me.
It didn't find it.
And so the point is actually It is survivable if you say nope, and especially if people do it in numbers, right?
Doing it alone means you're going to be heavily scrutinized.
But if a bunch of people say, no, that formulation is nonsense, lots of people aren't racist, and we are among them, then we would begin to turn the tide.
But for some reason, you're right, the terror of being accused is so great that people just simply won't do it.
There's also something else happening in Portland that someone wrote me a really interesting email about, which was, you know, you had a lot of new newcomers to Portland in the past 20 years or so, and they came here with similar ideals, but from, you know, different parts of the country.
They settle on a block.
They don't really know their neighbors that well.
Maybe you might know them, but you don't have that, like, history you might have had.
They're obviously very, you know, anti-gun for the most part in Portland proper.
Uh, and so when these people come on their block and start, you know, terrorizing them in the middle of the night, um, though I was told today, oh Nancy, come on!
That's not terror!
That's free speech!
I'm like, yeah, okay, so I'd like you to go and look at the early struggle sessions in the Cultural Revolution, just like, surprise yourself a little bit.
But okay, so you're on the block now, and you've got, I don't know, a hundred kids that come in here and they're screaming.
Well, If everybody came out onto their front porches and said, hey guys, get off my block, but they're not going to because they don't have the confidence and the connection to their neighbors.
So we don't have, there's not that cohesion yet where I think Portlanders can stand up, you know, besides the fear, besides the silence support, whatever, just even if you want to do it, who's going to do it with me?
Yep, I agree, and I hope we will see that.
Maybe it's already happening and we don't know about it because it wouldn't be public.
But I agree, people need to talk to their neighbors.
They need to meet them now.
As for people being anti-gun, I think that ship has sailed.
Do you think so?
I've heard that gun sales are up everywhere.
Up doesn't begin to describe it.
Up does not begin to describe it.
And apparently this is not gun enthusiasts buying more guns.
This is people who have not had guns buying them for the first time.
Which is dangerous in and of itself, right?
Yes, it is.
People don't know what the hell they're doing.
And also, when people are scared, they make terrible decisions, okay?
I mean, this is just a disaster.
This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Oh, it's gonna happen.
I interviewed someone the other day and he said it is a testament to the passivity of Portlanders that no one has been shot yet in like on these streets because you know if you were in like upstate New York where my mother lives her neighbors they're both prison guards be over in one night.
I'm exaggerating.
No, you're exaggerating, but there is something interesting.
There is a restraint that has been shown nationwide so far, and the problem is we are all depending on that restraint holding and something restoring reason before it breaks, because it will break at some point.
But, but, Gret, nationwide in the cities, besides Kenosha, which is a bit of an outlier, where it's happening, you have, it's the same sort of populace as Portland in some respects, and it's the same sort of news reporting, okay?
They're not doing this again in Pocatello, right?
If they were, I don't think we'd seen, and I, I'm sorry, I don't even know anything about Pocatello, I'm just using it because it's alliterative with Portland, right?
It's in Idaho, but, but I don't think we would have seen 93 Nights.
In Pocatello, right?
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
Unfortunately.
The restraint, I believe, has a lot to do with an analogous kind of game theory to the one that creates looting and rioting.
Right?
So basically we hire collectively.
We don't want to spend more money on policing than is necessary.
So we spend enough money to keep things more or less lawful during normal circumstances.
And then every so often Something will call the attention of a great many police so that the right number of police is suddenly too low and You get looting because people realize the law is not being enforced and this is their opportunity.
So my point would be Until mayhem has broken out, the risk to people for taking the law into their own hands is sufficient to keep them from doing it.
At the point it becomes commonplace, then it's going to skyrocket.
My plea to our fellow countrymen is we have to get a handle on this before that happens.
All hell is going to break loose.
It's not going to be a slow ratcheting up.
It's going to become suddenly much more common and at that point it becomes much harder to address.
It's going to be very hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
That's right, it's like bankruptcy, it happens slowly and then all at once.
Or pain, like when you've had an operation, they're like, stay ahead of the pain, take that painkiller now.
Because once you're in pain, then you gotta like, just suffer.
So yeah, I would say, and I would agree with you, like, get to know your neighbors.
Decide, like, do you want this happening on your block?
And if you don't, then talk back to these kids.
But I have seen these kids crumple so many times when it's one-on-one and I'll tell you another thing which people don't want to hear but it is my responsibility as a journalist to report this.
Most of these kids that I have talked to one-on-one are extremely polite.
Do you want some water?
Can I get you a donut?
How are you?
This and that.
It's like and this is not that they're like oh I'm gonna put on the nice little act or the journalist like they're kids but you get them together And they are gonna get that collective effervescence, and they're gonna get the sloganeering, and it's a horror show.
But one-on-one, if you talk to these kids, I don't know, just to be friendly, to be nice, to whatever, you want some roast beef?
Or just to say, no.
They crumple.
I agree with you, and, you know, Lord of the Flies was one of the analogies that kept cropping up when Evergreen happened, and it was the same damn thing, which is that this, you know, good kids hanging out with the wrong crowd turn into bad kids.
That's what's going on.
So somehow, you know, on the right I see a lot of demonizing of the individuals involved in this, but it's not the individuals.
It's the de-individuation that is so dangerous.
Yes.
You know, it's not unsolvable, but you do have to say no.
And you know, you have the same thing, uh, you know, you demonize like the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer.
And, and, you know, I certainly get it in the media.
These are not people that are, are very popular, but I've also met a lot of these guys one-on-one and they are, you know, one rinsed my eyes the other day.
Right.
And he was a, can I help you?
He was like super gentlemanly.
Now that's going to be super unpopular to say, but hello, all those people ready to, you know, say I'm a Proud Boys supporter.
I just said the same thing about the black pockets because we all put on our pants one leg at a time.
Okay?
Yes, there are bad apples.
Yes, when they get together things can be terrible.
But, individually, they're mostly just young people.
Yep, I agree.
And they're responding to the situation they find themselves in.
So, alright, you've said something unpopular about the Proud Boys containing human beings.
Now it's my turn.
Sure.
So, when I first moved to Portland, there was one of these announced rallies by the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and Antifa announced they were going to have a counter-demonstration.
And Andy Ngo suggested that I go and check it out, which I thought was a good idea.
So I did.
And I spent some time on the Antifa Black Block side, and I spent some time on the Proud Boys Patriot Prayer side.
I wanted to see the difference.
The cultural difference was spectacular.
Yes, I've done exactly the same thing as you.
First of all, Antifa demonized me because, you know, they could edit it to, oh, he was over hanging out with the Proud Boys, when the fact is I actually spent more time on the Antifa side, where things were much nastier.
And on the Proud Boys' Patriot Prayer side, things were more welcoming, weirdly.
And including, there was a couple of trans people who were absolutely part of the milieu, you know, A surprising number, actually.
I've noticed that, too, in the Proud Boys.
A surprising number of trans people.
I noticed that the other day.
I was like, wow, that's interesting.
And they're not being tolerated for show.
They seem to be fully integrated into the culture.
Just people.
Just people, exactly.
But here was the weird story.
So I was standing there observing the speeches on the Proud Boys side, and a guy approaches me.
I didn't know if he was Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer or something else.
And he says, are you Brett Weinstein?
And I said, yeah.
And he introduced himself.
And anyway, we got to talking and I was trying to, you know, he was curious about my perspective on things and I was telling him where I was coming from and all.
And he said, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't always, you know, so far to the right.
In fact, I voted for Obama twice.
And I looked at him and I said, you know, I only could vote for him once.
I was so troubled by what happened in the first one.
And we burst into laughter.
He's like, I'm more liberal than Brett Weinstein, right?
So anyway, we had this moment where, A, I realized something, which is he even saw in himself that there had been, he had been on board with a much different view of the nation And had lost confidence in it and has now now finds himself over with the Proud Boys.
But, you know, there was a recognition that we're sort of all in, you know, I haven't moved at all politically.
I'm still very much on the left, but there was no animosity, doubt.
There was no concern.
It was just, it was very much more the expectation that we differ in our perspectives and that it doesn't mean we can't talk.
So anyway, it was a, an odd discovery.
Let's put it that way.
That's my exact experience too.
I went to a rally.
I don't know if it was the same one.
It was last, not this past, not this month, August, August, 2019.
And I did the exact same thing.
I spent time on the Antifa side.
I spent time in like the Keep Portland Weird side, which was hilarious.
I talked to some John Brown gun people.
I spent time with the Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys.
And the only place that I felt unsafe was with a line of black kids that were all sort of really identically dressed with, uh, not with shields, but with umbrellas.
And one kid had black, uh, brass knuckles and he, he did that to me.
And I, and it wasn't that that made me feel unsafe, but we were underneath the bridge and there were about 600 of them screaming at the same time.
And I was like, okay, that's about enough of this.
Um, but otherwise you talk to them again, one-on-one when they're willing, you know, they want to stay masked a lot of the time.
And I, You know, it gives them their secret superpower, strength to not be tender, right?
Yeah, to not be human.
It frees them from the normal stuff that would otherwise overtake them.
The problem is at Evergreen, I saw this close up and the fact is it was possible to reach people individually.
This is before masks, of course, but you could reach people individually.
But what happened every time was that anybody you reached was then targeted by the mob and recaptured.
And so it's this de-individuation thing where anybody who discovers, hey, maybe the world isn't what I was thinking it was yesterday.
Maybe the people on the other side have a point.
Well, you called it out-group, in-group, out-group.
ephemeral.
Whatever recognition they had gets punished and they go right back into behaving as a mob.
Well, you called it out group, in group, out group.
I mean, we both know that when someone comes to your defense, they are then the next ones that are attacked.
And that's why people don't do it, you know, because they're afraid.
And we both get that.
Like, it's not fun to be, you know, the person that's, you know, under attack by hundreds or thousands of people.
But yeah, or I remember Heather, your lovely wife, saying to me one time that, you know, some people support you.
A few people will support you privately.
No.
Publicly, a few more privately, most people sit on a fence and wait to see which way the wind blows.
Yes, and then there are the ones who turn on you.
Yeah, they turn on you, and wow, really vociferously, too.
It's like, whoa, look at her go!
Well, you know, they have to live with themselves, that's what I think.
I don't know how they do it.
I don't either!
But you can't live in fear of the weakest people turning on you in order to solve some problem of theirs.
No, that would be a sad place to live, yeah.
All right, well this has been very eye-opening.
Is there anything else you think we should say with respect to Portland or the larger context?
I would be interested only because it was... I'm here in New York City right now where I live.
I'll probably be coming back because this story is evolving.
It was a quiet night last night and that is unusual.
Some people suggested it was because maybe, you know, some of them went to DC for the RNC and I think some did.
I just think people really need to keep an eye on where this is going and I think they really do have to say, I don't want to live this way, I don't think it's not going to do anything good for our city.
I still call it our city.
I live in New York now, but, you know, for Portland.
You know what?
We're Americans.
It's your city, too.
And frankly, I am very grateful that you have taken the time and put yourself in jeopardy to report on the story, because as much as it would be tremendously important to have a much larger news organization do the job in the absence of any major news organization properly reporting the Portland story, having you do it has been a godsend.
I am super, super grateful to Reason.
I emailed my editor, texted my editor one morning and just said, I want to go.
She said, go.
And they've just been super great to report for and I will keep reporting for them.
Yep, you are doing the work of the nation.
Well, I mean, you are.
The fact is, Portland is an important story, and everybody's getting it wrong, and I appreciate your absolute and evident commitment not to fall into either of the pre-packaged narratives, because they're both wrong.
Thank you, Brent.
So, Nancy, people can find you on Twitter.
N-A-N-C-Y-R-O-M-M, Nancy Rom.
They can go to NancyRom.com and see all kinds of stuff that I've done, and go to Reason.com.
If you put in my name, you'll get all the stories, and there will be more coming.
And they should check out your book, which is about a murder here in Portland.
In Portland, a woman who threw two young children off a bridge, and one died, one lived, and it was a story, again, the narrative was told one way by the media, and I was like, nah, I don't think so.
I don't think that's the story.
So yeah, that's called To the Bridge, A True Story of Motherhood and Murder.
Wonderful.
Well, thanks so much for for joining us, Nancy.
It's been a great conversation and I look forward to the next one.