877: The Making Of 

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And we've been talking here at the radio show recently about a certain genre of movie, which is the "making of" movie. A movie about the making of another film, usually a much more famous one. A classic is Hearts of Darkness, which is a "making of" documentary about the film Apocalypse Now, which has footage that the director Francis Ford Coppola's wife Eleanor shot at the time the movie was being filmed. Plus, incredibly, these recordings that she made of her husband without him knowing it, where he's talking about his self-doubt, his despair.

(SUBJECT) FRANCIS FORD

There are candid moments with the actors, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, who's 14 years old when they were making that film.

[ACTOR'S INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Martin Sheen, who plays the main character, has a heart attack when they're there, at 36. Marlon Brando, the film's most expensive star. At some point, Coppola realizes that Brando has not read the book that the movie is based on, Heart of Darkness. So he does not get who his character is. And he's being paid $1 million a week.

And all throughout, there are hints and glimpses of what's really happening in reality in the place that they're filming this movie. They're in the Philippines, where a US-supported autocrat is fighting a war against a communist insurgency. The movie's helicopters are US-made choppers flown by pilots in the Philippine military who keep getting pulled away to go back to the real war.

(SUBJECT) FRANCIS FORD

The film Apocalypse Now is about Vietnam, but it's a big, mythic version of Vietnam, full of larger-than-life characters. The "making of" film reveals the normal-sized people building this grand cathedral, brick by brick. You see the ridiculous lengths everybody had to go through to create their pretend war and their fake, impossible Vietnam. Which brings me to today's radio show.

Today's show is a "making of" of a different kind. It's people creating a picture of a place and a war that's happening there. And that place is Portland, Oregon. We're going to talk about Portland as a concept, what the city has come to mean in this political moment. Back in September, you may remember, President Trump declared on Truth Social that he was going to send troops into what he called "war-ravaged Portland" to protect ICE facilities there that were, quote, "under siege from attack by Antifa." Portland came to his attention, he said, by chance.

Ira Glass

Protesters had actually been outside the ICE facility since June, but Fox News, the night before, had run a story about Portland. And one thing about Fox's coverage, including that story, is that Fox's coverage includes lots of footage of protesters that is not filmed by professional TV news crews, but by the real auteurs behind the right wing's idea of what Portland is.

These are right-wing citizen journalists who've been there at the protests, covering them more than anybody, especially live streamers who were there. These are people who believe in Trump, believe in ICE, who streamed from the Portland protests, saying that their lefty local government was soft on the protesters, letting Antifa run amok. Live streaming on YouTube and X.

Ira Glass

Some of the citizen journalists became regular guests on Fox, talking about this.

(SUBJECT) FOX NEWS

Ira Glass

And a week and a half after the president declared Portland to be war-ravaged and under siege, he invited these streamers to the White House for a roundtable on Antifa. It was remarkable.

Ira Glass

Trump sat at the center of a U-shaped table with about a dozen of these reporters and streamers for an hour and a half. And flanking Trump at the table on his immediate left and right was the full political and law enforcement firepower of the federal government. Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, head of the FBI, Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

After the president's opening remarks, Kristi Noem, head of DHS, fresh off the plane from Portland herself, talked directly to the streamers.

Ira Glass

When the streamers spoke, it was in apocalyptic terms about Antifa, this supposed global network of anti-government anti-fascists. Streamers talked not just about being personally assaulted by Antifa protesters, but putting their lives on the line every day. One streamer said that she genuinely believed that if the president had not declared war on Antifa, people at this table would have been killed in Portland. Here's one of the best known citizen journalists covering Portland, Nick Sortor. He's been on Fox a bunch.

Ira Glass

Attorney General Pam Bondi pipes in at that point to say she's already started an investigation.

The purpose of all this, the point the administration was making with this event, was that in Portland, these streamers and citizen journalists were proving that the threat to America from Antifa is real and that a massive, nationwide hunt was called for. And this didn't just mean sending troops into American cities like Portland. It also meant treating Antifa as a domestic terror organization.

The president had just named it that, and he ordered the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to create a national strategy to investigate and prosecute them with the FBI, the Justice Department, and other agencies, and to go after left-wing groups that it says are funding political violence. The speaker at this roundtable named some of them, like George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Organizations, who, of course, deny doing any such thing.

Since then, prosecutions are underway. Just this week, the FBI claimed to have disrupted a bomb plot in Southern California by anti-capitalist anarchists leftists with a group called the Turtle Island Liberation Front.

To be clear, there is no question that there are violent leftist groups in our country, just like there are violent groups on the right. But there were already laws in place and law enforcement going after them. That's been one of the FBI's jobs forever.

This is a new kind of crackdown, at a new scale, targeted only at political violence on the left. America is a big country. We all, from the president on down, rely on images and words from other people to understand what's going on elsewhere.

And a vision of Portland, a movie about Portland as a place that's war ravaged, a hub for Antifa, ripe for military intervention, that story, promulgated by these streamers and citizen journalists, amplified on right wing TV and social media, that story is justification for all these law enforcement policies all over the country today, along with another story, of course. The assassination of Charlie Kirk.

We wanted to see Portland for ourselves. We wanted to see the making of this story about what Portland is. The reality, the behind the scenes, turns out not just to be very different, but a lot more interesting than the thing that they're filming and the story that they're telling. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Act One, Living the American Stream.

OK, so some basic facts before we head off to Portland. The way the president has described Portland, it might sound like an entire city under siege. But I think the first thing we need to clarify in this making of is that the entire conflict between protesters and police, the entire war, is happening on exactly one city block outside an ICE facility. Pretty much every day since June, protesters have been there opposing President Trump's immigration policies, like other protests around the country.

The level of violence directed towards ICE is mostly blocking and slowing down their vehicles that are coming in and out, and small scuffles where federal police fire tear gas and pepper balls. There was one day in June when things flared up and were declared a riot. Protesters rammed a stop sign through a glass door, hit an ICE agent in the head with a rock. But that day was kind of a one off.

What it's been since then on any given day is anywhere from a half dozen to 200 people with music, chanting, bullhorns. During the daytime, it can have a kind of carnival performance art vibe, a street salsa class, people in inflatable frog costumes. There's a guy dressed like Bob Ross with an easel and a pallet, doing an oil painting of the ICE officers.

But then at night, it can get more confrontational with ICE. Sometimes protesters have burned American flags, graffitied outside the building, shot fireworks, and it gets confrontational between the protesters and the streamers who mix it up with them. Usually, there are anywhere between just a few streamers to maybe 30 or so. It gets really noisy and disruptive, and people living near the ICE facility complain to police about the noise.

And when the streamers and citizen journalists say that the Portland police let all this happen, there's truth to that. They haven't stopped protesters from blocking sidewalks or surrounding and delaying ICE vehicles. They've allowed them to make noise. And a judge ruled that it was OK. That was the state of things when one of our producers, Zoe Chace, flew to Portland in October with another producer, Suzanne Gaber. Here's their story.

Zoe Chace

When we got there, it had been about two weeks after the White House roundtable about Portland and Antifa. We got there after 10:00 on a Saturday night, late October. It was cold and rainy, but there are a lot of people out here wandering up and down the sidewalk.

[YELLING AND INDISTINCT CHATTER]

And it's not grimy protesters dragging furry tails in the mud, dancing to "I Will Survive," or whatever I was picturing the campy Antifa Portland protest scene to be at this point. What we walk into is more like a Trump rally.

[CROWD CHANTING, USA]

I want you to picture, this is one long block with an ICE facility on one side and a tall apartment building on the other. Two long sidewalks, a big street in the middle that leads to The Old Spaghetti Factory. People are swarming both sides of the street, even late at night like this. There are a bunch of city cops in yellow slickers standing around, and all these people wandering around with their phones on long selfie sticks, talking into the phones and talking to each other.

Some of these people Suz and I recognize from the White House roundtable or from appearances on Fox. But mainly, I have no idea what I'm looking at. So we meet up with this one voluble streamer-- she calls herself an analyst-- Karlyn Borysenko. 128,000 subscribers on YouTube. And she's just pointing people out to us.

Zoe Chace

Normally, Karlyn's streaming from home. She's kind of a commentator about the streamers. She'll have four different live videos up from four different live streamers. And it's like, camera one, no, camera two, while walking you through what or who to watch in the videos. Karlyn's a recovered lefty, now very much on the right. She considers herself an Antifa expert. She knows all these right-wing streamers and influencers, so she's a good person to follow around.

Zoe Chace

I also spot Nick Sortor, 1.3 million followers on X. Cam Higby, 216,000 YouTube subscribers. They were both at the White House.

Zoe Chace

And what do they-- why? Do you know what I mean? Like, why? It's not as though it's not covered.

Zoe Chace

There's a reason so many right-wing streamers are in the same place at the same time the weekend that we're here. Since the White House roundtable, more and more of these streamers have been showing up here. Then recently, the anti-ICE protesters did this thing, which was put up a poster with a bunch of right-wing influencers' faces and handles and real names on it, saying, "don't take the bait." Meaning, don't give these guys content that they'll use as propaganda.

The streamers saw that and were like, OK, well, we're now all going to come at once. And we're going to make a lot of videos of you weirdos. And they're calling it Patriot Weekend.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Some people are just standing around smoking and talking in the rain. And then these big circles form, out of what seems like nowhere, with people pushing and yelling like a playground fight--

Zoe Chace

--with all these other people jostling to film the fight in the middle of the circle, which is a yelling fight, to be clear, usually not a fist fight. And the people inside the circle are filming themselves being filmed and streaming that live to their followers. It's a circle of people and phones in a fight. I walk up to a group like this, try to push my way inside to see what's in the center. It looks like a dude in a bulletproof vest streaming a video of himself yelling at a guy with a Captain America shield.

Zoe Chace

Apparently, thousands of people are watching this online right now. Karlyn and I elbow our way into a different crowd, but at the center nothing's happening. It seems like some fight has just ended and the streamers who were watching the fight start talking to each other about whatever that fight was about.

Zoe Chace

This is another rando chiming in. He's dressed like The Dude from The Big Lebowski, in a full robe with beads.

Lots of handles flying around that I don't know. Karlyn looks around.

Zoe Chace

Now someone comes up and starts scolding Karlyn. An older lady, infamous on X, The MAGA Granny. She went to prison for storming the Capitol on January 6th, but she's flipped. And now she's at every anti-Trump event you can think of. The right wingers call her Pam-tifa.

Zoe Chace

The big streamers can have tens of thousands of people watching them at one time, depending on what's going on. And they make real money from that, from paid subscribers. Fans tip them in real time. One streamer out here tonight, he got into this after streaming Fortnite. This pays more, he told us, being out here.

But most streamers are more like Mike Ross, an out-of-town streamer. I followed him around for hours. He says he made money on crypto. So this is a hobby for him, not a job. Not yet, anyway. He's a very tall white guy in a big brown sweatshirt with a phone on a tripod, so he can film from really high up. He's a mental health advocate and a disabled veteran. He goes by MentallyIdaho on X. He's relatively new here, relatively few followers, 6,000. His vibe is high school football coach.

Zoe Chace

Mike said this thing about the way people talk to each other here, how mean and juvenile and graphic and vulgar it is. It's really like walking around inside social media, like we're in the comments section in real life. Remember, every person streaming here is not alone. They have this invisible mob surrounding them, sometimes animating them like a video game avatar. Mike's chat points him in various directions, saying go here, go there, collaborating and making things happen that turn into content.

While I'm there with Mike, one of the streamers gets arrested, and his wife is really upset. Mike tells her they're going to get help from the chat.

Zoe Chace

Mike sees himself as a helper. He got into activism around mental health issues after a hospital staff, he says, medicated him against his will. He's been diagnosed with PTSD.

Zoe Chace

A lot of people I talked to out here had oddly similar stories. Tough childhood, and then some life-defining, very American trauma that seemed to explain what they were doing down here. The war in Afghanistan, the financial crisis, the COVID lockdowns, January 6th.

And each of these people seemed to find an antidote of sorts to those events via the streaming thing, recording this real-life, live-action, political video game. Being one of the good guys. Finding a community of people not just online, but in real life, but in an online way. A little audience who cares about what you care about and thinks what you're doing is important.

For example, like with Mike, he's not getting along with his wife right now. He talks about that openly with his chat. She doesn't want him here streaming. She thinks he could get himself into some kind of vigilante violence situation. Mike is like, that's not me. And the chat is supportive. They ask questions. They talk about their lives. Mike's reading the comments out loud.

Zoe Chace

Some streamers are very committed to documenting, like Mike. Some people come here to argue with the other side. Some are in it for the thrill of it, like a streamer named Mo told me he used to be addicted to meth, but now he's addicted to streaming. Some people are trolls. They're here to rile the protesters up into doing something that makes them look dumb or violent.

Something fascinating that happens, though, when you're watching those guys, is lots of times, they're trying to prove that the protesters are the cause of the violence, but in fact, when you look at the footage, often what the footage reveals is exactly the opposite. It shows clearly that some of the violence would not be happening at all if the streamers weren't there. Here's an example from the night that we were there.

Before we got there, these guys Rhein and Cam were filming themselves, tried to come into this canopy tent the protesters set up on the sidewalk as a sort of home base. A protester in a black helmet with a red anarchist sticker on it steps in front of them.

Zoe Chace

A protester in a fuzzy skeleton suit glares at them. "I'm getting medical treatment," she says to the phones looming over her.

Zoe Chace

And then in a sort of, "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down" move, Rhein and some streamers just bust through the tent as a group, to make the point that this is a public sidewalk, which it is. They are correct. But a guy in shark pajamas is almost knocked to the ground. As everyone spills out of the tent all together, you hear the protesters cry, "assault!" And Ryan says he got maced and pours water on his face.

Zoe Chace

Later, Rhein took a leaf blower from the protesters' supplies and moved it down the street. I asked him about what he was doing. What's the idea behind what he's even doing?

Rhein's a former Trump campaign guy and a former college football player. He's big and broad. Rhein has a track record here. The Portland police have noted that he reported he'd been attacked by protesters. He was surrounded by more than 15 of them and then pepper sprayed while on the ground one time. And the police have also seen him, quote, "antagonizing the protesters until assaulted," end quote. His X bio reads, "right-wing provocateur."

Zoe Chace

This is precisely, exactly how many of the streamers and right-wing influencers feel. That even if Trump is in office, there's a double standard when it comes to the left and enforcement. The January 6th protesters were cracked down on and these protesters are not. So yeah, they might get in a protester's face and taunt them or film them. If the protester responds with aggression, well, that's just revealing who they are. It's fair game.

I want to pivot for a moment to say something about the cops. The cops are a great focus of the streamers' ire. They think the cops are in league with the protesters. They call them Cop-tifa, say they don't arrest the protesters enough. The protesters would disagree. The night we were there, though, everyone agrees, was a big turning point. It seemed the cops were cracking down.

In fact, hours before Suz and I showed up here, 30 of them had descended on the protesters' tent and demanded its removal. The tent had been cleared before, but not like this. This time, there was less warning than usual and there was just so many police. In general, people said there were a lot more police all of a sudden, patrolling everything and issuing citations. And what made this happen, the streamers will tell you, a lot of it comes down to this one video, of course.

From early October, a video from Rhein, actually, featuring the most known Fox ubiquitous guy down here, Nick Sortor. He got into a scuffle with protesters. He was filming them. One of them started yelling at him, and then pushed him with an umbrella.

Zoe Chace

Then a crowd formed and he got pushed into this hole.

[INDISTINCT YELLING]

[LAUGHTER]

It's more like a huge dip in the ground covered in grass. It's called a bioswale. It's for rain runoff.

Zoe Chace

Two of the protesters and Nick were arrested for disorderly conduct. Nick spent the night in jail. Donald Trump texted him, "We are behind you 100%." Basically, keep your head up, like he was Tupac. Nick ended up released and not charged with anything. Immediately afterward, the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division, opened an investigation into, quote, "viewpoint discrimination" by the Portland police.

Nick himself has started the process to sue the police department for $10 million, alleging systemic bias against conservatives, saying the department was "riddled with Antifa." Six days after the arrest, Nick and the other influencers were at the White House doing that roundtable. Yes-anding the president's promise to send the National Guard into Portland to police this block, because the police were not. And that got a ton of coverage on right-wing media. And that's why the streamers think the cops are acting differently tonight.

Some of them, including Mike, the vet from Idaho, think the cops are scared of all this exposure.

Zoe Chace

But why take Mike's word for it? Guess who showed up for Patriots weekend. It's Nick Sortor, himself. He's right here.

Zoe Chace

Standing here on this block full of streamers, I just want to point out this is the dream, saturation coverage, with footage these guys filmed, stamped with their handles.

Anyway, after all the attention Nick got for his arrest, including the Department of Justice investigation into the Portland police, it seemed to the streamers that the cops were policing the protesters more strictly, like clearing the tent and everything.

So we asked the police, were the streamers right? Were they policing differently after Nick Sortor? And they responded, they were doing more enforcement, but for a different reason. Quote, "If there was any change, it was in the crowd's behavior. We began to see an influx of streamers, the people who want to monetize the situation."

Still quoting the police here, they went on, "The increase in the number of live streamers and personalities in the area contributed to an environment where tension and confrontation escalated. Many of these individuals were creating content for audiences that reward intensity and conflict, which can sometimes amplify volatile situations." In other words, the live streamers made the protesters act up, and the police cracked down on both of them.

That is definitely not how the streamers interpreted things. On this night, certainly, they just thought they were winning.

It's after midnight now. The streamers seem to be on a high. They've seen the cops clear the protesters' tent. The cops seem to be listening to them. They're filled with this "we're winning" adrenaline. They want to do something. So they start this march down the street towards this apartment. Something like 30-odd people marching, with their phones aloft, yelling someone's name. Chandler, Chandler.

[CROWD YELLING CHANDLER]

They opened the door to this guy's apartment. It just opens, which is shocking to see and feels a little scary. Like, is someone going to get dragged out and beat up in some soccer hooligany way?

Zoe Chace

I find myself next to Chad Caton, the guy in a bulletproof vest who was yelling about stolen valor before. We're just a few feet back from the apartment door. He's streaming as we're talking, which is always how it is.

Zoe Chace

A lot of this stuff turns out not to be actual fact, but more like Chad's interpretation of things, which others would strongly disagree with. But he is speaking the way most streamers and influencers would about Chandler's apartment-- that is, Antifa headquarters. Another streamer, Nick Shirley, runs up to Chad.

Zoe Chace

Chad catches him and his viewers up with the not exactly true things that he told me.

Zoe Chace

I'll just clarify, this is not a storefront. It's not the headquarters of Rose City Antifa. Chandler isn't a trust fund baby, and there don't seem to be any furry parties here, actually. But anyway--

Zoe Chace

At this point, Nick takes over from Chad, narrating for his live stream. He knows Chandler. A lot of the people watching his stream know Chandler. Any regulars who tune into the Portland scene down here know who he is.

Zoe Chace

Chandler pokes his head out the door. He looks like a sleepy, tousled, blond, college kid who just rolled out of bed. He seems completely unfazed by the mass of shouting people and phones just outside his house. A few of his friends-- the protester in the fuzzy skeleton suit, another in a keffiyeh and goggles, a couple in all black-- are hovering around him.

Chandler stands in the middle of the open door and starts addressing the group of chanting, angry, excited, victorious people.

Zoe Chace

It is also very surprising to me to hear this Orson Welles-type voice come out of this young person's mouth.

Zoe Chace

He's ringed by streamers and phones, some of whom are just filming without comment, but a lot of whom are yelling at each other and teasing him. Because of the way Chandler talks, the whole thing feels just of another era, as though he's on a literal soapbox and people in bowler hats are on a cobblestone street, booing and throwing tomatoes at him. But it's just phones bobbing everywhere, and people narrating and arguing while he's talking.

Zoe Chace

People are starting to get restless, unsure what to do next since this Chandler catharsis seems to be getting old.

Zoe Chace

Eventually, people do start wandering away from Chandler's house. Karlyn is giddy.

Zoe Chace

I give my business card to the guy who's famous for dressing as a frog at these protests. He was acting as a bouncer.

The scene at Chandler's ends with a bunch of streamers taking group photos of themselves simultaneously with their phones.

Zoe Chace

It's like 30 people. Then some of them bring their phones close and bid fond farewells to their viewers online.

Zoe Chace

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. You can't help feeling like this is so performative and absurd, that even the menacing moments are just part of a drama they invented to keep whoever's watching on social media entertained. It's cartoonish. It's over the top. And the search for red Antifa on this block can mean a random ICE protester in a frog costume. It could mean that person who hit a right-wing influencer with a flagpole and then ran away.

But here's what else the word Antifa now means in America, partly because of the story the streamers are telling about Portland. There's a great smooshing that's happening now. Protest means Antifa. Antifa means violence. And Antifa is rampant, organized, networked, well-funded, and belongs in the sizzle reel with the much more famous foreign terrorist groups that Americans all know. Remember DHS head Kristi Noem at the White House roundtable with the streamers.

Zoe Chace

So let's go inside the Antifa safe house, see for ourselves, and talk to the head of Antifa, so-called. After the break, the frog guy gets us in.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace. Coming up, Chandler's apartment. Could you be any more excited? That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, The Making Of. We're taking a look behind the scenes at the people who are creating a story about Portland that's fueling a national crackdown by the FBI, the Justice Department, Treasury, the IRS, DHS. We've arrived at Act Two of our program.

Act two, Inside the Safe House. OK, so where we left off, our producers Zoe Chace and Suzanne Gaber were trying to actually meet the so-called leader of Antifa. We pick up our story a couple nights later, outside his door.

Zoe Chace

We're welcomed in, and the first thing we see is this sign that's posted right in front of the door.

Zoe Chace

Just a prop. No real guns, like so much else around here. So Chandler's apartment, it both looks like a safe house for a socialist and a dude living alone in his 20s. Two chairs, one desk, kitchenette. He offered us tea in measuring cups. Two bookshelves. Science fiction. Dune, Hitchhiker's Guide, Fahrenheit 451, Orwell, Vonnegut. But also, the complete works of Rosa Luxemburg, The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy. Psychology books. Chandler said he'd been planning to do cognitive behavioral science before he dropped out of college.

Zoe Chace

I think it's important to be as clear as I can about this question, what is Antifa? There are organizations with the word Antifa in their name. Steel City Antifascist League, Atlanta Antifascists. One is famously from Portland, Rose City Antifa. It has a website. It has a flag. But the idea that all these different Antifa groups or anarchist groups are connected with a funding stream and a leadership, there's no public evidence that's true.

That was the conclusion of the FBI during the first Trump administration. Trump's former FBI director famously said there are violent, anarchist extremists who identify as Antifa in this country. But he said it was an ideology, not an organization that the FBI could target. Self-radicalized lone actors, he called them.

The current Trump administration, the second one, has obviously gone in a very different direction. So in this environment, you probably wouldn't want to be publicly identified as Antifa or the leader of Antifa, right now.

Zoe Chace

I asked Velly about this. And he said he's been filming Chandler for six and a half months, and he stands by his claim about him 100%.

I'd say Velly Ray is like Chandler's Moriarty, his Lex Luthor, his Joker. Except Chandler has so many nemeses, it's sort of hard to pick. Anyway, here's Velly Ray's stream from a few weeks ago.

Zoe Chace

Someone in Velly Ray's chat posted, "You're like Brando in Streetcar Named Desire right now."

Zoe Chace

Initially, when Velly Ray came around, Chandler would do the thing that he does. He talked to him, speechifying about political corruption and capitalism, unbidden. And Chandler says, at some point, Velly just started calling him the leader of Antifa.

Zoe Chace

The other reason to get mad at this joke, of course, is that it seems it'd be dangerous to be called the leader of Antifa by people who have a direct line to the White House and the director of the FBI.

Zoe Chace

This next piece of economic analysis from Chandler is going to play differently to you once I tell you what his father did for a living. So just listen a little closer than you maybe were going to, OK?

Zoe Chace

Now, Chandler was a kid during the financial crisis of 2008, and he saw a very particular side of it in his own house.

Zoe Chace

That "oh" is the sound of someone thinking, oh, your dad was in the business of mortgage-backed securities that crashed the economy 17 years ago, when you were at a young and impressionable adolescent age. And now you're a committed socialist. Oh.

Zoe Chace

Just to say, Chandler denies his economic analysis comes from his personal experience. He says it comes from observations about history. Fair enough, nonetheless. Chandler does not like to talk about his family much. He says he doesn't really keep in touch with them. He grew up Mormon, just outside Portland. His dad died earlier this year. He has found a family of sorts here at the ICE facility. Sorry if that's corny to say.

While we were there for a few hours, people stopped by and changed their clothes, used the bathroom. Someone gave him $10 for the water bill. A big wagon of medical supplies was sitting in the middle of the furniture-less living room. People had dragged it here after the camp was taken down by the cops. Some helped themselves to beef soup Chandler had on the stove. Not the vegan, of course, who called it flesh soup.

Chandler found a partner, a romantic partner down here at the protest. His first significant romantic partner ever, he says. They came by for a second. In any case, Chandler has a sign up on his bedroom door that says, "Don't go in my room. That's fucking weird." Implying that enough people came by and tried to go in his room that he had to put a sign up. Also, Chandler is autistic. He calls himself very, very autistic.

And something that he attributes to his autism is his ability to talk and talk and talk very calmly to whomever is talking to him, however they're talking to him, even if, in my opinion, it very much makes him look like the leader of Antifa. Like our night with the streamers, when he gave that press conference of sorts, standing in his doorway.

Zoe Chace

Chandler isn't always so above it all. He admits he takes the bait sometimes and gets aggressive, physically aggressive, which of course gives the streamers exactly what they're looking for, which is footage of the violent Antifa. He pulled up a video of a fight he definitely participated in with that provocateur guy Rhein we talked about earlier, and someone else called Right Side Rebel, who has long, swishy, blonde hair.

Zoe Chace

The point is, these people know each other. They're in the same cast. They perform the same play, night after night on the same small set. They're like the dancers in West Side Story, coming out, dancing together on a city block, then going home to their respective neighborhoods until the next night, when they're dancing, fighting in front of an audience again.

These conflicts, these pint-sized scraps on a street corner, are not the sort of thing that, in the past, our government has sent the most powerful military in the history of the world to resolve. They're not the sort of fights that have led to anyone being labeled a domestic terror group, a top national security priority. Maybe there is evidence out there that Antifa deserves that sort of treatment. But it's not in Portland. Though I love the smell of napalm in the morning, there's no war here.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is a producer on our show. Suzanne Gaber helped her report this story. In the weeks since they were in Portland in October, things have actually quieted down in front of the ICE facility. Fewer people out on the street. Some of the streamers have moved on to other cities, and other issues.

Ira Glass

Well, the program was produced today by Nadia Reiman and Suzanne Garber, was edited by Laura Starecheski, Nancy Updike, and me.

The people who put our show together include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Ruthie Pettito, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Ryan Rumery, Ike Sriskandarajah, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor's David Kestenbaum, our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Nick Podany, Conrad Wilson, Troy Brynelson, Lillian Mongeau Hughes, Faiza Patel and Phil Richard at KCRW.

I've said this before, and I'm saying it again right now. If you sign up as This American Life partner, you help us continue making the show. Plus, you get bonus episodes. The one that we just sent out a couple weeks ago and the one that we are about to send out I am so proud of. These are such good episodes. You also get to listen ad free, and you get an archive of greatest hits episodes conveniently right in your podcast feed. Join at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. The link is also in the show notes. Thanks this week to Life Partner Mike Seaton.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. Hanging around with family for the holidays, he's been reading children's books to his nephews and nieces, and he realized something reading Curious George.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.