The Humboldt State Occupation and Portland State University Library Occupations

back together. I'm writing this after flying back from Texas where my Ted died, to Portland, waking up and basically immediately interviewing a group of protesters in Arcada, California, at the cal Poly occupation in Humboldt, and then driving to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also been a campus occupation, And both of these occupations have some stuff in common, and I wanted to talk about what was happening with both of them because I think

it's relevant, and obviously it's relevant to what is currently one of the larger stories going on in the country right now, which is that a series of occupations on campuses protesting the Israeli genocide and Gaza have spread to more than one hundred schools in the United States. You

will have heard of this now. We have covered some of this in recent episodes, particularly what was going on in Colombia at least at the initial stages of that, and today again I'm here to talk about two occupations. One of them is at cal Poly Humboldt in Arcada, California, and another is at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. As an out of side, I have lived in both of these cities, which is peculiar. It doesn't really mean anything, but I thought it was weird, and obviously I still

live in Portland. Protests started in Arcada first. On October twenty second, twenty twenty four, students on the cal Poly Humboldt also called CPH campus occupied Seamen's Hall. These students were not members of any specific group, but we're all acting in solidarity with GAZA, and we're inspired at least partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. It started with a small number of people, about forty five or so. These are a mix of students, some alumni, and a

few random Arcade Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You might call it Hippi. That's generally the reputation that it has. Campus police showed up. There was a series of negotiations, which here means they told everybody to leave, and at that point the police began escalating things. Because the Arcada police force is pretty small, cops were called in from the surrounding area, quite a few of them. There were helicopters. It's much more of it to do than this fairly

sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to having. Community members started to show up as well because hey, something was happening. A ride up from Crime Thinks website describes what happened next quote, Police from every department in the county showed up, including a helicopter, canine units, and off duty police. Students responded by swarming them. The cops initial plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building.

The occupiers beat back police advances despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last day of struggle in Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There were two arrests and a number of injuries. The arrests were apparently quite ugly, but police were unable to clear out the occupation. Barricades were thrown into place as the fighting continued off and on, until a crowd of people from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed

up outside and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours, the police retreated. The university declared a lockdown, and the students were able to spend the next few days extending their defenses as well upset, as well as setting up infrastructure, including a kitchen. Early on the morning of the twenty ninth, a team from It Could Happen Here sat down with two of these students to discuss the occupation.

But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed, police have had to spend nearly a week watching and waiting as students dig in.

which is why they've been trying to call you know. Unfortunately, then tried to call officers from other places because especially like I feel like in the evenings especially, we have a lot of people both from the community and students on campus who have been occupying the quad. But what's so funny is that our main intention was not like the original intention was not to barricade that building. It

was just going to be occupied, not barricaded. But because of police actions, I feel like we've actually stepped up more so. They kind of shot themselves on the foot with that one.

around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the time the police realized what was going on on, they had a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have been impossible to clear without significant violence. The end result of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated an end to what was happening rather than just sending the police back into evict residence. There is much

more to the whole situation than that. This is something people still get angry about because the patriarch of the family at Red House was a weirdo sovereign citizen type. But the goal at the time was to stop evictions during the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The cops backed off, the city came to the negotiating table. It was a successful action, whatever you think about the

individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison Mia and myself had with those Humboldt students and we will hear more from them later, I got a message from a source that an occupation was also brewing on the Portland State University campus, or rather that it was going on, and folks were worried things were about to escalate. But don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads. Anyway,

here they are, We're back. Actions at Portland State University started on Thursday the twenty fifth, and it was initially pretty simple. One tent and one banner strung between trees in front of the Branford Price Miller Library steps social media did its thing. Once this first tent was up, and the encampment slowly grew to maybe half a dozen tents by midnight. At around one twenty am, the police

swept the encampment. Only a few people were awake and less than twenty people were present against maybe forty riot officers. The police pushed people out of the encampment. They went straight for the supply tent and took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc. Into City of Portland trucks and hauling it away. It

was a bad night for a lot of people. But what I gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they had learned one crucial lesson, which was that Portland police weren't willing to fuck with people or property that was sitting on the PSU steps. This is probably

a jurisdictional thing. School properties the responsibility of the PSU Campus Police PPB could police the park outside, but either couldn't or just didn't want to be arced in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into

school property themselves. So the school had to deal with the unenviable complication of the fact that these were their students protesting at a famously progressive school and having their cops cleared them out, especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt, would be a real pr headache. The administration at Humboldt University and famously progressive ARCATA ran

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

of students who have been suspended. And it probably is to not suspend, resuspend, or expel any student protesters as a result of these accusations, because they were claiming you know that we had committed property damage and trespassing it and things like that, and that was a lot of the reasons that they gave for suspending us, like in the email we received about interim suspension. Two was diabest.

We demand that the Kalipoly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel, Israeli products, or Israeli companies, and this includes those that own factories on stolen Palestinian land in Israel. There are four specific funds that at the minimum, we demand the divestment from within the next six months. These were TILCX, DFSTX, fe UPX, and DOODFX. And we did research into these holdings that these funds have and how the companies that

they may have holdings in are connected to Israel. So, for example, TILCX, their top three holdings are in Qualcomm,

Wells Fargo, and Chubb. Qualcom is an information technology company that does the majority of its technology development in Israel, so they have like factories there and that's kind of where they develop their smartphone chips and tracking intelligence, which is kind of like two of the main things that they work on and sell, and then Wells Fargo was part of a five hundred million dollar loan deal with multiple other lenders that support that was supporting Elbet Systems,

which is an Israeli military weapons manufacturer. So those are like two of the big ones just from the first fund that we had looked into. And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities across the globe and for all Palestinian people, including their martyers and refugees. We demand a ceasefire statement from KLi Pally Humble calling for an immediate and permanent ceasepire in Palestine, and we encourage all other California State universities and universities of California to

do the same. As we were writing this, it was we found out that the faculty administration had released a ce spire statement, I believe, but the actual like university like admin had it like the whole university admin, but like the faculty had released a c spire statement. Faculty specifically, I know there's there's definitely faculty that have There's some faculty who have been with us since day one, like camping out with everyone since day one, and it's like

a lot of the faculty. We like, we are totally comfortable putting our trust in like some of these faculty, Like if there was an emergency, like I would call them, you know, like if there was an emergency on campus where like I was about to be arrested, I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna call up this like professor. Like they have been and they have been like trying to you know,

update us with whatever they hear from Admin. But just in like the past few days, we've actually kind of discerned that upper admin has sort of cut off contact with lower admin and faculty. And this is something that we talked about with faculty members as well. Because of the significant faculty support that we've been receiving, Administration is literally just not telling faculty anything anymore.

included three demands. Number one, p you should release a statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by the US. Number two, the university should end the sale of Israeli products on campus and any programs that involves inding students, employees, or faculty to Israel. And number three, the board of trustees should terminate all relationships with Boeing

and other companies complicit in the ongoing genocide. Their list included Leopold, an Oregon based company who makes rifle scopes, but also companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard. Boeing was the company I heard reference most by protesters. The aerospace company, which is involved in the manufacture and design of just so many weapons, has a partnership with Portland State University.

Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of demands started coming together, the school president and cut announced a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address these protester demands. Precisely. What pausing this relationship means is unclear, and a lot of the people I talked to felt like it essentially meant nothing, but cut wrote quote, PSU will host a forum at which these concerns can be

carefully framed and debated. We will organize a two hour moderated debate in May to include faculty and student voices, so you know whatever that means. By late in the day Friday, media had started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation, which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening all over the country, and if your local news you want to do anything you can to tie your area into whatever the big story is nationwide,

so you know, good excuse to show up. There was also some conflict between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated groups of activists, some of whom were also students, over whether or not to keep occupying over the weekend and keep attempting to you know, keep an occupation in place despite police crackdowns, or to save their strength for

a new concerted push on Monday. At any rate, some people stayed, and by seven pm that night Friday night, the Portland Police Bureau showed back up in full riot gear. Park rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a stand off ensued. While some protesters confronted police head on. A smaller group of activists used this as a distraction to move a number of tents onto the library steps, having noticed that PPB didn't seem to be willing to

go directly onto campus property. Once this was done, the folks confronting the riot line gradually pulled back to the steps. The police seemed confused or at least put out by this. They left for a while, then returned briefly to cut

down the banners hung on the trees. I was told a number of people mentioned this kind of laughingly when I was around that the way in which the police justified this was that a recent anti camping public camping measure meant to target the homeless specified that the kind of thing that a banner hung again like Basically, the fact that the banner touched trees in two different areas, or like touched two different trees meant that it would count it as a tent, and so they were allowed

to take it down. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but students and others on campus property in the library were left to barricade the area around the library at will. They started with palettes brought by an anonymous benefactor. Both sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked. This only lasted until Saturday morning, when Anne cud, president of the university since August of twenty twenty three, visited the encampment. Different protesters I have talked to related this

event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill. Others described Anne as quite angry and even threatening them. I was not there. The end result was an agreement, though, If protesters allowed students to continue to have access to the doorway into the library so students could still use the library, PSU wouldn't send in their cops or call in the city cops to clear out the occupation. After what one source described as much heated discussion, protesters agreed

to this arrangement. Now, variations of stuff like this are common in occupations in schools that get this far. School faculty are often sympathetic to student actions, or at least to the students taking part in them, and supporting crackdowns

is dicey for the administration at Humboldt State University. The administration attempted to de escalate and eventually euthanize the movement by trying to provide a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough to leave, along with the suggestion but not the actual legally binding promise that they wouldn't be punished if they did. And here's another clip from

that interview. I understand that the school even set up basically a booth where you could come and officially like de register yourself from the protests in order to not get expelled or something like that. Is that a like I think you're It was unclear to me from what I read like exactly how that system was supposed to function, but it seemed kind of shait.

did shut it down early on Monday. In the meantime, protesters use the small space available to them to set up minimal infrastructure as an humble, small kitchen tent was put up, along with a large dra medical tent, a designated smoking area tent, and an art station for people

to make signs to hang from the barricades. Donations began coming in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, the point that by Monday protesters had stopped accepting donations of a lot of stuff like food and water, but also things like batteries and generators because they just didn't have room to take any more of them. During these weekend days and nights, those of the encampment discussed demands, their plans, and strategy for the future. One topic of

discussion involved the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the encampment and would they be welcomed to some of the donated resources. The ultimate decision, and I hear that this was not a particularly controversial one, was yes.

outrage a lot of people, including people on campus. We actually had a few days encampment on campus for that too, I believe, and I feel like that never really got the It got partially resolved, but Admin was like really fighting against all the possible options because there was like a couple of people arguing that, like we keep in mind, I don't even think these people were from campus, but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how the

people are living in their cars were like messy or something, and so one of our requests was like, Okay, maybe like we could get a few more gumpsters or trash cans in the area where people are living. Yeah, And I'm just totally fought back against that, and so that was like what we're jokingly calling, like, oh, that was like strike one and then strike two.

snitch on our professors of faculty right now. So that's what we're joking his life strike too, because we're like, oh, we're not doing that. And then this is what we're calling strike three. And I was like joking earlier to everyone. I was like, strike three and we're out. Strike three and they're out, and everyone was like, yeah, I freaking hope.

were extremely careful with what they said. A lot of it was just kind of repeating the list of agreed upon demands that the protesters had come up with. I did ask about a few other things. I wanted to know how protests in twenty twenty in protests on other campus had impacted the tactics being seen here. The most common response, I got to my questions where variations of

that's not something we'd like to talk about. But they did go into detail in a couple of things, and one of those was what it would take to actually

conclude this occupation. They noted that if representatives of the campus administration, including the president, were to come to them and make concrete steps to divest from Boeing and other military contractors that the school currently has a direct financial relationship with, that that could be the basis for moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent of

the encampment. Possibly, so that seemed to be kind of their line, if we actually see some real evidence that the school is divesting from these military investments that they have, will be willing to negotiate further. But what the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a pause and saying we'll meet about the Boeing thing later, that's not enough.

The liaise I talked to also made it clear that they found the wide wave of campus actions around the country inspiring and that that had had an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU. I was pretty impressed by their message. Disciplined to be honest, As a journalist, you want people to talk to you, but actions like this are dangerous, and cops aren't the only danger.

Anytime your movement gets pressed, the attention that it attracts will also attract grifters, particularly of the right wing variety, people who want to find someone they can catch saying something aggressive or dumb, or that just sounds bad out of context. You, as organizers and activists, want to keep attention on your goals and message and away from that

kind of bullshit. I should also note that there were some mentions of their desire that the campus essentially carry out an amnesty policy for people who had already been involved in the occupation, so that nobody would get kicked out of the school as a result of their participation in this movement. I've heard similar things from the protesters

and Humboldt. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation. And what's also interesting are these ads and we're back as my time at the protest on Monday, war On Individuals from the occupation would occasionally march through the crowd and around the encampment, which grew at its height of the day to around five hundred or so people. In the late afternoon.

This was a mix of protesters, including people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended up at PSU, and some bystanders, a lot of whom were students sitting nearby dorms. People who were members of the occupation would ask passers by and media not to film protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help with the occupation. Pamphlets on their goals were handed out, and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around. There were also some

people tabling for different causes. There was one group of people who were taking down folks information in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would increase the tax on corporations worth more than twenty five million dollars that were based in the city of Portland, which sounded nice

to me. And in addition to that, there were people who were working to organize a you know, you know, one of those Sorry is very late, but essentially how people are a lot of people are attempting to get people to organize to like register is unaffiliated and the primaries especially in order to like, you know, make a statement to the Biden administration about their support of Israel. There were folks who were trying to raise and get

people involved in that as well. So again, you know, it was like many protests of this size involved a lot of people. Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland, I have seen kind of more extreme and yeah, let's say extreme activists get angry at stuff like this, particularly when it's asking for folks to fill out or sign petitions. There's some concern obviously that that could effectively dos people who were there. I've always found that concern a little silly.

I think people can be trusted to kind of measure their own threat matrix and decide am I going to be doing anything at this protest? That means I shouldn't put down on a piece of paper that I was around here that issue I didn't notice at this protest. Everyone seemed pretty copasetic and as a general rule, it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or less on the

same page. The mostly masked protesters that I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included a number of Muslim students, at least one of whom I watched prey before taking their place on the barricade. I also noticed numbers of students in his jobs watching from nearby windows and eventually from the park out in front of the occupation.

From conversations I had on the ground, I became aware of the fact that several student organizations were hesitant to support, particularly the weekend occupations, as they had had concerns for the safety of their Palestinian members. One particularly salient fear was that foreign students who participated and were arrested might risk not just their academic status but their ability to

stay in country. And I know that a number of the protesters I met there who were particularly you know, white folks, felt like one reason they needed to participate was that they could participate without taking that kind of risk. On for the largest portion of the day Monday, I watched as activists reinforce the barricades on one side of the library, and the crowd grew quite large in the park.

Some signs I saw among the crowd and on the barricade included mass college protests are always on the right side of history, and fuck your homework. People are dying. There were speeches, but not much in the way of action until very late in the day, when all but maybe one hundred and fifty or so of the crowd had filtered away. My notes at the time say the big change happened around fifty five pm. By this point in the early evening, I had seen very little of

the police. Every now and then, a few PSU cruisers would come by circling the area, and small groups of four or five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them would run beside the squad cars, basically trying to like tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts. This seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they

mostly stayed away. I believe that at this point the city's plan and the administration's plan was to avoid doing anything fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd, because that would be to risk restarting the whole twenty twenty Portland protest cycle. Again. Remember, it's not just as simple as can we crush this protest? But if we go kick all these people out now and a bunch of them get seen in broad daylight getting beaten and gassed, does that mean we have to deal

with thousands of people in the street tomorrow. Honestly, staying away was the smart play on behalf of the police, and as a result of them making the smart play, protesters in the encampment were themselves confronted with a choice. The space that they had been allowed by the school to occupy in the sort of weird Dayton situation had been filled both with donations and just the number of people who were inside the occupation. There was no room

to make it any bigger. So their next options were either number one, expand the occupation to the park and the Portland Police Bureau has the ability to legal ability and obviously the gear to clear out the park. In addition, just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend an encampment in that park the way that it's set up. You really don't have. You know, you're kind of surrounded on all sides. The police can really mess with you. I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm

quite aware. The other option they had was take the entire library building and force a response from both PSU and the city government. This would obviously give them warm boom to mendover, give them more room to take in more people, and it would force an escalation with the city government and with the school, which is you know

what they were looking for. Again, this is overall about particularly their school, not divesting from companies that they see is complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and about you know, wanting to force a response from that school's leadership. You know, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's what they were trying to do, and that's what they

chose to do. A little before seven pm, someone on a bullhorn came out and began asking all of the people who were still there who was willing to engage in real militant action, and for those people to come help occupy the library. Those who were less willing to risk charges but still down for the cause should form ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, etc. They were looked like little bitty phealanxes.

You know, people had a mix of umbrellas and shields and you know, usually two lines thick or so of people linking on arms. And I thought at first they were just kind of getting ready for the police to come in to sort of resist the charge if they occupied more of the library, But that's not what happened.

For a few minutes, different organizers kind of put these groups of people together and drilled them, walk them through basic tactics, talked about what they should expect, and not long after this, two different PSU police cruisers began to approach from two different streets both of these different groups of people. These little platoons split up and one would confront each vehicle. The officers were badly outnumbered in both cases, and they pulled back and essentially left the library without

anyone really watching over it. The activists who were inside the library used this as an excuse to occupy the rest of the building. Once the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from these platoons started grabbing heavy objects that were just around them on the campus and dragging them back to fortify the entrances and exits to

the structure. Much of this took the form of bl black clad activists swarming onto a sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football training sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using them to wall off exits and entrances to the ground floor of the building. I watched one group of protesters cut through locks to liberate a pair of dumpsters, which quickly found their way

into the barricades in the front of the structure. I did not enter the library, fairly certain that would have been illegal, but I did see numerous people running around on floors above ground level setting up the space for a proper occupation. I was told by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping the interior space accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there were a number of folks with wheelchairs who I saw outside at the occupation.

I did not see any specific people inside. I left after nine pm, having been on the ground and wearing my armor for about eight hours the day after landing back in Portland. That was all I had in me, but quite a few people were still present, both outside

and inside the library when I left. Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing this episode at about eleven pm PST, a series of frantic late night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, the Chief of Police for Portland and the City DA Mike Schmidt, holding an emergency press conference. Local KTU reporter tan vy Varma summarized the conference message this way on Twitter. Quote. PSU president said the protesters have

damaged property and have broken into the library. She says she cannot entertain property damage or breaking an entering. She asked them to choose to engage civilly. She says they'll be asking PPB to remove the trespassers from the library. PPB Police chief says he'd like to resolve this with no force or arrests. He has asked those who are breaking the law in the protest to stop. It's unclear to me at present how many of this is going

to shake out. As I type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack and it sounds like it's going to be quite ugly. Hey everyone, so you know again this is a little messy because I wrote this late last night. I woke up in the morning to listen to the edit of it and some things that happened in the early hours of Tuesday morning. About twenty five people were arrested after more than a hundred riot officers arrived at the cal Poly Humboldt campus and cracked

down on the Gaza protest occupation. Riot police arrived around two thirty am. Legal observers say, no injuries. It's kind of really unclear to me how bad it was. What actually happened. But you know, quite a few people have been arrested, and at this point it looks like they're being charged with some pretty narly crimes conspiracy, I think, assault on a police officer. So this is one of

those things that's going to be an ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing more than a million dollars worth of damage to university property. I'll actually just read a quote here from an MSN article. Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers, and others. In addition, students could face discipline for conduct violations, while

any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action. That's them quoting a university news release. So that's kind of where we are with cal Poly Humboldt. I wanted to note that the folks that we talk to, who I hope are doing well, had requested that we send people to donate to a bail fund if at all possible. If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters, you can go to rally dot org slash arc bailfund.

That's rally dot org slash AARC bail fund, so that would help out with those folks who currently need it. There has also been a request to call the university and request the release of Humboldt protesters for Palestine. The CPH University police phone number is seven oh seven eight two six five five five five. There is a suggested script which I'm going to read here. Hi, my name is blank, and I demand the immediate release of the

arrested Humble student and faculty protesters for Palestine. They should not be charged, let alone rated an attack for being on the right side of history. They include, but are not only, Fern McBride, Olivia Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhala Agacella, Lana Word, Alison Merton, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi Ruiz. So that's where things are with Humboldt University. My thoughts are with the people who are arrested, the people who were

forced out of the occupation. As of the recording and airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library is still in progress, and what will happen there is less clear. Throughout today Tuesday, the police and city government have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out the occupation about you know, criminal behavior there being unacceptable about their suspicion that there's been significant damage done to university property.

For their part, protesters have promised they will not damage any books. You know, We're going to see what's going to actually happen. What is clear to me at this point is that in the last day or so, the situation has gone from managed something where the police were every now and then clearing out tents and it was relatively under control, to something so out of control that it necessitated a late night press conference by the whole

city government. So we will see where everything concludes with the PSU occupation, if the police come in and carry out a raid as was done an Humboldt, or if the university administration is willing to actually come to the table and make some of these solid steps towards divesting the university from companies like Boeing, which is what the

protesters are demanding. All really unclear, but yeah, we will continue to cover this and you all continue to be angry about bad things, and yeah, I don't know, I'm still very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets. Robert Evan, and I wanted to give an update on Wednesday night. I'm recording this around four point forty pm on Wednesday, but a day after I recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff

has happened. The occupation has continued. You know, on Monday night, only a small number of people stayed behind. I think there may be something like a dozen I was told who actually slept in the library that night. There was kind of an anticipation that the cops could come at any minute. The next day, word spread about the occupation and there were a lot more people in the library on Tuesday night, and as a result, it seems as if plans that had initially been down for the police

to rate on Tuesday night were canceled. The Government of Portland published an article today and I'm going to quote from it here. The Portland Police Bureau places an emphasis on de escalation and time is a key de escalation tactic that we use whenever possible. That has not been my experience with them. If police action can be delayed to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so. An example of this occurred Tuesday evening. A plan was

in place to resolve the library incident. However, conditions changed and the incident commander made the decision to delay for the well being of all concerned. My guess is that the conditions that changed largely were how many people were on the ground, as well as the fact that they didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how much access students had gotten. You know, they didn't have a full

operational plan involved. The police publication notes that there was a rumor circulated that the planned operation was scuttled due to a decision made by the DA's office. This is because the current District Attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive. He made a decision not to prosecute all of the acts that he could have prosecuted in twenty twenty and has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and by conservatives in the city for this decision ever since.

Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in twenty twenty and beyond, and his from the beginning of all of this said that his office will prosecute students and anyone else involved with the occupation. I think this is just election you're messaging by the police going after Schmidt because they want more of a hardliner in. In either case, nothing was done Tuesday. The occupation continued to spread on Tuesday night. Students had a movie night. On Wednesday night.

As I basically, as I record this, there's a barbecue and a lot of this is occurring kind of outside of the library and like the law and area around it. The idea basically being to keep numbers up in and around the library occupation to make it more politically costly and just harder for the police to actually force everyone out. While all this has been going on, faculty and student organizers have been meeting with the president of the university.

Students refused initially to come to a negotiating table unless the demand their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed for students and non students who were taking part in the occupation. This is something when I talked to folks on Monday night, the focus was on There was some time talk of amnesty, but a lot of the primary thing I was told about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing

and other arms manufacturers. The demand for amnesty has grown as the occupation has become more of a real thing, which it had started to be by the end of my time there. On Monday, there was some initial talk from the university president that she was willing to not press charges if the students who were involved agreed not to violate the student Code of Conduct for the rest of their time at the university and basically handed all

of their names over to the university. That was not an agreement that wound up coming through, very similar to what we saw at Humboldt right where you've got this the school being like, well, we'll offer some sort of amnesty, even though we can't really promise full amnesty because the DA can choose to prosecute people still, but if you sign your name up on this list that you were here in committing crimes, will kind of try to do something that did not wind up de escalating the situation.

And as I record this, the library at PSU is still occupied by students. We'll see how all of this goes. You know, I've heard a number of things from inside the occupation. It's kind of one of those things where the full details of what's happening will shake out. It's been, as these things always are a little bit messy. The first night I was there, and up through you know, a sizable chunk of Tuesday. You can find articles from media who showed up saying that protesters wouldn't let them in.

And then at some point the people at the gates so to speak, changed and a number of press got in and took some pictures of the occupation. You can find those online. There's a lot of local reporters koyn and whatnot who have published different things about the occupation. It's been interesting to see like the reactions of different reporters because they change based on like the kind of the reporter who's there, and kind of I think, how personable they are with people and the folks that they

wind up meeting. So you'll you'll find some local reporters being like everyone was really nice, and some local reporters being like everybody was really mean. They wouldn't let me in, And it's you know, these are not uncommon things to encounter when you're seeing press interact with a protest like this.

One of the things I do find interesting that has been emphasized to me by some of the older protesters who have been taking part in aspects of this occupation is that the student protesters who are organizing and leading this, who are of course younger and we're too young to have generally been involved in like twenty twenty stuff, are really open minded, you know, despite kind of political disagreements that may exist between people, there's this understanding that like

folks are a lot less ossified and their beliefs about what constitutes valid action and what constitutes, you know, how people should proceed with things like generally. That has been impressed upon me by some of the older activists is that these younger student organizers seem much more open minded and optimistic about accomplishing things and trying new things. And this is definitely a different kind of occupation Portland has seen.

I noticed some of that on the first night earlier in their core I made that comment about how I noticed that people were out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills, taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd who had gathered for the protest, and that in the past I had seen folks like that have issue with members of the crowd and I

didn't really notice that this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to some of what some of these older activists have told me, which is that a lot of the student organizers here are kind of less set in some of their ways.

And there's a very good chance that Lynd will have joined that parade of ugly videos by the time this comes up. But as I record this, there's a barbecue going on, and I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well. Bye.