It was this past May Day in beautiful Portland Oregon, when a group of agitators led by Thomas “Tommy Boi” Allan, a far-right streamer and white supremacist, attempted to interrupt the festivities with megaphones chanting “immigrants go home”. My first interaction with Tommy was during a candlelight vigil for Renee Nicole Good where along with his cronies, he disrupted a powerful moment of silence with his megaphone, playing loud music and screaming hate. I ran into him again a few weeks later at an anti-ICE demonstration in front of city hall. There he was accompanied by two other men, Brian Veach, and one that I didn’t know. Brian wielded a can of pepper spray, the other had a semi-automatic pistol on his vest. The trio proceeded to kick, push, and pepper spray protesters as the police looked on.

This is how Tommy likes to operate. He surrounds himself with violent and armed individuals that will lash out against protestors while he films it for his livestream. It is a performance and he is the director. It is not uncommon for him to break character in the middle of an altercation to say things like “like and follow guys” or “thanks for the superchat” to his audience of perhaps hundreds of people salivating at the prospect of getting to watch the chaos of “Portland Antifa”. This is not a hobby for him. It is his job. Watching it makes me feel almost sorry for the people that he ropes in. The parasitic relationship that they have allow him to generate a constant stream of content, while he stays largely safe from litigation.

All of this is to say, that on that May Day, I am ready for Tommy. I walk directly up to him and begin blowing my Migra Whistle while flashing him in the face with my camera. I don’t try to talk to him or even make eye contact. I know that any engagement would just embolden him. The ear splitting sound is enough to get him moving, and along with a small group of antifascists that had formed, we run him off and away from the event. At a certain point, one or two of the antifascists start throwing punches at Tommy. I hold back to see how things are going down. From the right hand side, one of Tommy’s goons unleashes a cloud of bear spray, enough to fill a large section of the city block. Pandemonium ensues, and people run every which way. When the cloud of noxious gas clears, I see a man wielding some sort of hand carved indigenous musical instrument. I don’t recognize him as any of the people that started the fight. Bear spray drips from his face onto the pavement as he staggers towards me. I grab a discarded water bottle off the pavement and begin to try to rinse his eyes. He coughs and spits, and as he does a sinus-load of bear spray hits me directly in the eyes. Through blurred vision and searing pain, we stumble away together blindly.

This scene is what I’ve come to expect from living under the Trump administration. On a monthly basis I seem to go toe to toe with the police, ICE, or a far-right agitator dead set on causing conflict. For my part, I have become unafraid to stand up to these people. Washing tear gas out of my clothes has become a part of my routine. Pepper balls¹ don’t sting like they used to, and although I still wince when I think of the stinger round² that hit me last summer, I know that I can take the hit and keep going. Despite my lengthy experience being brutalized by various state and federal organizations, I think that the civilians are the most concerning to me. Hate, entitlement and rage have all been whipped into a volatile mixture set to ignite at any moment, and the steady stream of cash that streamers like Tommy have tapped into has accelerated it to a conflagration.

It’s no secret that the US and Israel share notes, and this strategy does not seem unlike the movement of illegal settlers occupying Gaza, who are motivated mainly by profits and not by any ideological conviction. In that circumstance, the government has incentivized the behavior through the tacit cooperation of the IDF. Their actions might be illegal, but who’s to say when there’s no video evidence and the reporters invariably seem to go missing? At the same time, if a settler were to turn up hurt or dead, there would be hell to pay. Similarly, Tommy has been given the support of the PPD and ICE officers who refuse to intervene in his escapades until one of his gang is in danger. I will always remember walking over to Sergeant Chapman of the PPD during an anti-ICE protest, my clothes soaked in pepper spray, and him telling me to my face that what they were doing was a “constitutional display”. These acts of violence are not an accident, they are orchestrated by the state.

After I recovered from getting bear spray spit in my eyes, I continued to follow Tommy. I didn’t want him to circle back to the main event and cause problems. A small group of us kept him and his cronies moving, and eventually they took refuge in a convenience store. I went in behind them to warn the small Asian proprietor about them and make sure they didn’t cause any issues. One of them held the door for me as he went in. I almost wondered if it was a trick. Maybe he would slam it in my face, or hit me when I got close. Not five minutes before the same man was threatening to “3.0 punch” me (whatever that means). Instead he waited for me to pass through and then kept walking like I was an old friend. In that moment he forgot that I was an enemy.

We seem to talk a lot about performative actions these days. It seems like you can’t walk across the street without being called performative or “virtue signaling”. Protest is performative, banners are performative. It’s performative to post about genocide on social media, and it’s performative to ask for change. It’s performative to grieve, to cry and to feel. The men that I was with were performing too. They performed hate and outrage to justify violence. That moment of common decency broke the character they were playing and exposed to me a person who did not hate me, who didn’t really wish me any harm; just a parasite feeding off of conflict and their own rage.

I feel no sympathy for people like Tommy. He is an expert at provoking people into violence, and he almost always gets away without a scratch while innocent people suffer the consequences. That being said, he is very clearly a product of our society and administration. The ecological niche that he inhabits has been engineered by those at the very top that want nothing more than to see the world descend into violence and hatred while they sell the tickets. They are, in a very real sense, in the same profession as Tommy: orchestrators of chaos for the purpose of spectacle, while they quietly profit off of the mess they’ve created. Can we be surprised at this when we have elected a reality TV star as president? Donald Trump is a man with a singular skill, which is to draw the attention of cameras. He ran on a promise to run this country like a business, and he has followed through. The only problem is that the business is a circus and we are the freak show.