Portland’s Reality Fractured by Influencers

The legal battle over deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, hinges on a fundamental conflict between documented reality and the curated digital narratives promoted by social media influencers. This case demonstrates how online content creation has directly influenced federal policy and judicial reasoning, creating a distorted version of events that threatens to upend constitutional safeguards.

Even before the lawsuit was formally initiated, the situation was complicated by a misinformation campaign amplified by influencers with direct connections to federal officials. These content creators have played a crucial, though often unseen, role in the National Guard case. They broadcast material directly to administration figures, helped shape national policy regarding so-called domestic terrorism, and even managed to insert their narratives into the official legal record.

Several weeks after President Donald Trump first suggested sending the National Guard to the midsize city, a Portland police sergeant expressed frustration in an email about three individuals at the local ICE building. The officer described them as a “chronic source of police and medical calls” who repeatedly returned to “antagonize the protesters until they are assaulted or peppersprayed.” He noted they engaged in the “same trespassing behavior on federal and trolley property as the main protesters.”

These three counter-protesters maintained extremely active social media presences, treating the ongoing conflict as their primary content source. A visiting journalist observed the ritualized nature of these encounters, where both protesters and counter-protesters immediately reached for their phones to record each other. By late September, it became evident their content was fueling the White House’s broader campaign against anti-fascist movements. On September 28, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued the memo authorizing National Guard deployment to Portland, prompting immediate legal action from the city and state.

From its inception, the lawsuit has grappled with distinguishing actual events from online dramatizations. During oral arguments in State of Oregon v. Trump, District Court Judge Karin Immergut appeared to side with observable reality. She expressed confusion when Justice Department attorneys justified deployment by citing the “doxing” of ICE officers and clashes between protesters and counter-protesters. Judge Immergut pointed out that counter-protesters weren’t federal employees and questioned what exactly the National Guard could do about internet posts.

The Ninth Circuit panel that later reviewed the case seemed more influenced by online narratives. Their ruling reintroduced extensive evidence the lower court had considered irrelevant, incidents from June, internet doxing of ICE agents, and an altercation involving a “journalist” described in police records as a counter-protester whose main activity involved posting content for his social media followers.

More concerningly, the appeals court focused heavily on a June-to-July timeframe that aligned with the earliest No Kings protests, despite the lower court finding this period too distant from Trump’s mobilization order to be relevant. The Ninth Circuit published its decision on October 20, shortly after nationwide protests that organizers estimated drew seven million participants. Portland itself saw turnout several times larger than the June demonstrations, with crowds featuring people in inflatable costumes.

The timing meant the world saw Portland appearing whimsical right before the court ruled presidential troop deployment was permissible, effectively rewriting the reality of what may have been the largest political mobilization in American history. The court’s revised version bore striking resemblance to content produced by right-wing influencers.

During oral arguments, the leaning of the Trump-appointed judges became painfully evident. One judge repeatedly referenced the 1792 Whiskey Rebellion and general rebellion concepts, despite the administration not actually invoking rebellion as legal justification. They also mentioned the Dallas ICE shooting, over 2,000 miles from Portland and outside Ninth Circuit jurisdiction.

Most tellingly, the conservative judges concentrated on June events rather than the relatively calm conditions in Portland during the weeks preceding Trump’s declaration. This June focus was remarkable not only because the court was reviewing an emergency order in mid-October, but because the supposed “anarchy” period coincided with the first round of nationwide No Kings protests.

The first No Kings demonstration on June 14 drew approximately 10,000 people across Portland. Unsurprisingly, the separate ongoing protest at the ICE facility swelled that day. Although the building was reportedly “shut down,” a federal agent managed to shoot an ER nurse in the eye during the events.

Documented incidents decreased dramatically after July, with protest numbers dwindling throughout the summer. One police report cited by the dissent noted officers “saw 8 people out front and couldn’t even get one of them to flip me the bird”, dated the same day Trump publicly compared Portland to “living in hell.” Portland police considered the protests so “low energy” that federal justifications appeared to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Ninth Circuit’s majority opinion indeed reflected this barrel-scraping approach. It described a woman arrested because federal agents believed she had a gun (without mentioning if one was found), protesters unloading “a large quantity of sticks and bats” (without indicating if they were used), and emphasized ICE agents being “doxed” (without explaining what the National Guard could do about it). The opinion also referenced a “guillotine” constructed in early September, though no court ever questioned whether any ICE agents had actually been guillotined, since everyone understood it was theatrical prop for content creation.

If this represents a bad-faith search for justification, that’s concerning enough, but if the judges genuinely take clashes between protesters and counter-protesters seriously as deployment rationale, the situation becomes arguably worse. The National Guard is supposedly being deployed to protect federal employees, implying the administration now considers counter-protesters and right-wing influencers a paramilitary extension of the federal government deserving military protection.

That these individuals might be social media figures with modest followings becomes irrelevant when they gain direct access to the Justice Department, weapons, and military deployment.

On October 28, the full Ninth Circuit agreed to hear the case en banc before an eleven-judge panel. Meanwhile, the National Guard has been restrained from deploying to Portland as litigation continues in lower courts.

During a three-day trial, it emerged that the Guard had been briefly deployed on October 4 in violation of the restraining order. A Portland police commander described federal use of force against protesters as “startling,” noting the reality on the ground didn’t seem to justify such measures. Justice Department attorneys disagreed, but federal witnesses on the stand couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump’s apocalyptic portrayal of Portland. One federal law enforcement official testified, “I do not agree with the statement that Portland is burning down.” He presumably lives in reality, unlike his boss.

Several days after the trial concluded, Judge Immergut granted a preliminary injunction against National Guard deployment.

From the Truth Social post that sparked the deployment order to the content factory producing much of the “violence” described by the Ninth Circuit, the Portland case has become dangerously disconnected from factual reality. The law should ideally be grounded in and govern actual life, but Portland has transformed into a recursive loop of social media posting, manufacturing national policy according to the visions of clout-chasers.

The area surrounding the ICE building now teems with influencers. Katie Daviscourt’s followers increased by nearly 70,000 after the Guard order. Chelly Bouferrache, known as “Hunnybadgermom,” doubled her followers to over 62,000. Then there’s Rhein Amacher, whose following grew from 3,000 to 11,000. Amacher hasn’t achieved the same success as the others, leaving fewer archives of his social media activity. Federal authorities also bypassed him when granting Daviscourt and Bouferrache special ICE facility access in October.

Yet it was Amacher, with his 1,900 TikTok followers, who ultimately helped justify deploying the National Guard, though anonymously. In late September, federal law enforcement complained to local police about a clash between Amacher and a protester, sharing video while identifying Amacher as a “journalist” in their report. Portland police repeatedly classified him as a “counter-protester” in their records. While the journalistic profession isn’t sacrosanct, the semantic distinction carries weight: a protester fighting a journalist sounds concerning, while a protester fighting a counter-protester seems like an unfortunate inevitability. Despite his consistent classification as a counter-protester in police reports, the “journalist” label appeared in both the lower court decision restraining the Guard and the Ninth Circuit ruling that overturned it.

The appeals court didn’t merely quote the lower court, it extracted a fresh description from the record characterizing the clash as “a ‘black blocker’ assaulting a journalist with a large sword or stick.” The alleged September 19 incident is curiously absent from the influencer’s TikTok, which primarily features poorly edited videos of protesters being confronted by federal agents, often to Amacher’s apparent amusement. His profile states “Donald J. Trump for President 2024 🇺🇲,” and many posts identify protesters by name, labeling them “antifa” or mocking their gender identity. One post calls a protester a “skirt-wearing fraud”; another zooms in on people in a parking lot, describing them as “a herd of wild they/thems.”

Even a generous definition of “journalist” would struggle to apply to Amacher. At best, he’s a content creator, and a minor league one at that. While his following expanded after Trump promised troops for “War Ravaged” Portland, other influencers like Daviscourt gained more substantial traction in subsequent weeks.

Daviscourt, who writes for the far-right website The Post Millennial, claimed “antifa” assaulted her on September 30, just days after the mobilization memo. She appeared on Fox News with visible facial bruising and was later invited to a White House “roundtable” on “antifa.”

Portland police offered a different perspective, identifying her as one of the three counter-protesters who remained a “chronic source of police and medical calls” in internal communications. Bouferrache and Amacher were the other two.

The situation intensified when out-of-state influencers arrived to capitalize on Portland’s content opportunities. On October 2, local police arrested Nick Sortor from Washington, DC, for disorderly conduct. After his release, he told his 1.2 million followers he had spoken with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who later opened an investigation into Portland police. Sortor, also invited to Trump’s “antifa” roundtable, publicly accused the Portland Police Bureau of being “Antifa-infiltrated”, an allegation the administration appears to take seriously, valuing an influencer’s word over law enforcement credibility.

An Oregonian editorial dryly noted that “claims of the bureau’s alleged allegiance to antifa may come as a surprise to Portlanders,” reminding readers that during 2020 the police department had “filed 6,000 use of force reports” and “arrested nearly 1,000 left-wing protesters.”

Local residents like District Court Judge Karin Immergut or Ninth Circuit Judge Susan P. Graber understand how ridiculous such assertions are. These local jurists have expressed particular dismay at Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard. “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” Immergut wrote when issuing her temporary restraining order. Though appointed by Trump in 2019, she has lived in Portland since at least the 1990s, making it difficult to convince her she resides in a “War Ravaged” apocalypse when her daily commute shows nothing of the sort.

Judge Graber, in her dissent from the Ninth Circuit decision, wrote that “given Portland protesters’ well-known penchant for wearing chicken suits, inflatable frog costumes, or nothing at all when expressing their disagreement with the methods employed by ICE, observers may be tempted to view the majority’s ruling, which accepts the government’s characterization of Portland as a war zone, as merely absurd.” Having previously served on the Oregon Supreme Court, the naked bike ride protesting Guard deployment wouldn’t be the first such demonstration she’d witnessed.

The White House’s elevation of clout-chasing by figures like Daviscourt and Sortor appears to be both a post hoc justification for deployment and part of its ongoing anti-anti-fascist campaign. While an antifa roundtable in Washington can remain insulated from reality, an appeals court decision, even written by a judge far from Portland, begins to sound peculiar when it joins the administration’s assault on factual truth.

Aside from the brief illegal deployment in early October, the Trump administration has largely respected judicial rulings on the matter. The Ninth Circuit vacated the original panel’s ruling when it voted to rehear the case, offering hope for Portland. But the appeals court represents just one front in the war on reality, ultimately subordinate to the Trump-influenced Supreme Court.

Amacher’s transformation into a “journalist” within the Ninth Circuit record occurred simply because federal authorities used that term when sharing video with Portland police. Content appears to possess a transmutative power, and the real conflict isn’t fought with rocks, prop guillotines, less-lethal munitions, or tear gas, but with smartphones recording smartphones recording smartphones. As more content manufactures itself at the ICE building, diligently captured by actors highly motivated to attract attention from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Pam Bondi, the legal record in lawsuits surrounding the administration’s war on antifa will continue to distort and deteriorate. If internet personalities can successfully portray the Portland Police Bureau as antifa domestic terrorists, then seven million Americans in frog costumes become equally vulnerable.

(Source: The Verge)