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This is an iHeart podcast. Graduate student at Portland State, studying political science. I was an editor at the student paper there, a very progressive paper, and I was assigned to cover the election night demonstrations. Well, the elections night protests turned to riots. Three days of violent rioting in Portland and it was the first time that I saw groups dressed in black with their faces covered. This is four years before coming Covid. Some of them were waving the black flag of anarchism, some the red flag of Marxism. And within seconds they would ravage one street to another, to another, to another. And the next day I would read the Legacy media, which I still read at that time and looked forward to who. And I looked up to those journalists and I was really shocked to see that the narrative was that these, in my view, anti democratic political violence was legitimate acts of protests because people were. They were concerned about racism or all these other lies. And so for the next four years, I just continued going out with my video camera. I thought, look, people can ignore what I write because of spin, but videos can quite speak for themselves. And in 2019, it led to me nearly losing my life. I was covering another antifa protest turned right at that point had been routine in Portland. And then I was ambushed in a. In a mob meeting. And I had never been in a fight. I didn't even realize that I was being assaulted until seconds in. And the punches came from everywhere on my head and my face, and I was bleeding out of my eyes and ears. And then they threw all the drinks in my eyes to humiliate me further and to laugh at me. And I was rushed to the hospital in a ambulance and CT scan, and I had subarachnoid hemorrhage which is bleeding the brain, and nearly died. And after surviving that, the reporting that I saw in liberal media was, it seemed to suggest that I had deserved it because they branded me far right. And some even went so far as to suggest that I may maybe faked my injuries. A BuzzFeed reporter asked for my medical records, which I did provide, but this felt so it's like, because I didn't die in that attack, there was another round of people who wanted to finish me off, but I continued. And then 2020, Portland was really the epicenter of the longest political violence, those months of riots. I was on the ground undercover, and there was an assassination there. There was a supporter of Donald Trump named Aaron Danielson who was shot dead by a self described antifa member who then fled out of state and died in a shootout with U.S. marshals in 2021, I returned undercover, naively thinking that enough time had passed and was chased through the streets of downtown and beaten, nearly choked out. The person who was trying to choke me out helped me so tightly that I had the blood, the vessels in my eyes burn after that and I was hospitalized. So thank you so much for acknowledging Antifa and for directing your administration to treat the them as domestic terrorists. It's going to be really challenging because how they organize is that they are decentralized, autonomous, and they operate on deception. And we're still to this day told that they don't exist, that it's a figment of our imagination. I think the DOJ could look at federal conspiracy charges. The state of California in San Diego county last year broke up an antifa cell in San Diego. And I think maybe perhaps the State department should designate Antifa, its international arm, as a foreign terrorist organization. FTO so thank you so much for this invitation, Mr. President.
