Remember 2020, when the narrative about the George Floyd/BLM protests became so much Silly Putty in the hands of the media, don’t believe your lyin’ eyes and all that?

Chelly Boufferache, known on social media as Hunnybadgermom, remembers it well, both as a longtime Portland resident distressed by what was happening to a city she loved, and as a photographer/videographer watching the chaos night after night after night. (NB: I shot the three videos below; any crappy quality is mine!)

Chelly and I reported together many of those nights. We were tear-gassed, had our equipment swiped, were surrounded by people in black bloc hissing, “We know who you are.” We watched the federal building be molested over and over and over.

We saw an untold number dumpsters on fire, marched with young men toting rifles, kicked through a metric ton of broken glass.

We chronicled the LARPing as it turned to murder, and saw people celebrate that murder. It was an electric time to be reporting, the friction partially due to the pushback both Chelly and I received for telling the story as we found it, which was that nearly all the violence at that time was coming from the left, which, with a heavy assist from the media, was constructing and controlling the narrative.

As I state in the intro, Chelly is a conservative. She is pro law-and-order and a Trump supporter, and could easily go all-in on the new narrative the president desires and kindles: that the 2025 protests in front of Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility - and the city itself - is “a war zone” in need of heavy federal incursion. Has the Trump administration had a difficult time finding useful idiots to spread that narrative? It has not. Readers here know my position on some of the self-described “investigative reporters” shining their star with clumps of manure…

But you may be surprised to hear Chelly — who’s embedded with some of the more-favored pro-ICE reporters as well as ICE itself — call these people out:

I hope you’ll stick around and listen to the audio, where Chelly and I get to tell some war stories, including the time the guy yelling at me here swung the metal rod at my head, just after Chelly shot this clip.

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