Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I am very pleased to welcome Nancy

Rahmelman, 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 2018.

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 are coming out to the 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. I think the sort of protest gene

is built into Portland. It's been there I guess since the 60s or 70s. Whether it was, you know,

earthbites or don't eat animals or whatever it is. There are a city that likes to protest.

They've sort of been building up ahead 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,

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, you know, grief and frustration to begin with.

And I think now we're seeing it morph into other things in game steam, which includes

Trump sending the feds in, which includes let's abolish all police. So we've got a bit of a

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