Portland, OR – Multnomah County issued an arrest warrant on September 22 for right-wing extremist Thomas Allen for the assault of immigrant rights protester Holly Brown.

The warrant came after a campaign demanding Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez press charges.

Allen is a right-wing influencer known for showing up at anti-Trump and anti-ICE protests in Portland to harass and assault progressive activists. Despite many instances of assault and using chemical weapons on protesters in front of police, he was only arrested once, in October 2025, for punching an anti-ICE protester at the Portland ICE facility. He pled guilty then to a charge of disorderly conduct.

On September 1, during a press conference at Multnomah County Courthouse to demand the closure of the Portland ICE facility, Allen violently shoved Brown into a concrete pillar, causing a head injury and whiplash. Police were on site, witnessed the assault, and did not arrest Allen. They formed a line to protect Allen from the immigrant rights protestors who had just been assaulted.

Brown filed a police report for the assault stating, “The police allow Allen to do their dirty work of silencing and repressing immigrant rights protests. We must put pressure on the police and district attorney to arrest and charge these violent MAGA extremists so we can continue our important work of fighting ICE terror.”

A video by PDXCD describing the assault and asking viewers to call and email the DA amassed almost 1 million views on different social media platforms, with thousands of comments stating they contacted the DA.

Allen then held hate rallies two weeks in a row at a local queer-friendly bar, the Sports Bra, for its support of trans rights. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) held counter-protests and ran Allen and his transphobic group away from the bar. This garnered a large amount of media attention and trans rights activists pointed out the lack of police action when Allen and his group assaulted more protesters and used large amounts of chemical weapons in a residential neighborhood.

After the second hate rally, PDXCD called a press conference at Multnomah County Courthouse for September 21 to highlight the lack of action by the police and DA on September 1 and how it allowed Allen to continue to enact more violence in the following weeks.

The morning before the press conference, the district attorney notified the media they were moving forward with charges on Allen for his assault of Brown and that a warrant for his arrest was in process.

PDXCD continued with the press conference. Allen showed up to the event and harassed attendees as they spoke with three news stations. The immigrant rights protesters then marched to the police station with the media to demand answers as to why the police are allowing right-wing extremists to attack progressive activists with no consequences. Allen followed the group into the police station, yelling insults regarding people’s identities.

While inside the police station, KOIN news reporter Ariel Salk approached Allen on camera and told him there was a warrant for his arrest. Allen, shocked and confused, stated he was unaware and that it was “bullshit.” He immediately left the police station rather than risk arrest, ended his livestream and rode away on a Lime scooter.

There is now an active warrant for Allen’s arrest. PDXCD is urging anyone who sees him to contact the non-emergency hotline at 503-823-3333 to report his location and demand police arrest him.

Allen is facing four misdemeanor charges: class four assault, two counts of harassment and one count of disorderly conduct. As a condition of his charges, Allen is not allowed within a two-block radius of Brown. He is also barred from the Multnomah County Courthouse, outside of his court appearances. He was on probation for his arrest last October and will potentially face consequences for probation violation.

“It is about time Allen faced consequences for his attempts to stifle anti-ICE and anti-Trump protests,” said immigrant rights activist Omar Gill. “The issue remains that it took thousands of phone calls and media attention to get the police and district attorney to do the right thing. Many others who’ve been assaulted by Allen are still without justice. It is clear we must continue to place demands on the city and county to take action against these MAGA extremists.”

#PortlandOR #OR #ImmigrantRights #PeoplesStruggles #MAGA #ThomasAllen #PDXCD #Featured

Portland, OR – On September 21, transphobic right-wing extremists led by Thomas Allen returned to a queer-friendly establishment, the Sports Bra, to harass patrons. This was their second protest there in two weeks. Trans rights activists also returned to counter-protest and pushed the anti-trans agitators out of the area for the second week in a row.

The Sports Bra has been the target of attacks by the right after a video went viral of their employees’ asking patrons with transphobic t-shirts to cover up their shirts or leave the bar. The people wearing the t-shirts are anti-trans activists with large followings on social media. They purposely went to the bar to get a reaction to post online.

Allen planned his first protest of the bar on September 11, calling for a rally to “protect women and girls.” He and around five other anti-trans agitators brought signs demeaning trans people and tried to start fights with passersby. Over 30 people showed up to counter the hate rally. Allen and his group were chased away from the Sports Bra. They went to a nearby Fred Meyer grocery store and called the police, who witnessed one of the right-wingers use bear mace on someone. The police did not arrest the person who used bear mace, despite its use being illegal. They provided Allen with an escort away from the store.

For his second protest, Allen brought out around ten right-wing extremists, carrying American flags, wearing face coverings with skulls, and transphobic t-shirts. Over 100 pro-trans activists came out to counter-protest the transphobes after a call was put out by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Seeing how greatly outnumbered they were, Allen’s group quickly left the area. As they left, one right-wing extremist unleashed bear spray indiscriminately into a large crowd of people.

Trans rights activists continued to follow the agitators, pushing them further and further away from the bar. They yelled chants such as “Hey hey, ho ho, transphobia has got to go.”

Allen’s group went into residential streets and threw tear gas canisters at the trans-rights activists, a crime in Portland. Portland police drove by and made no arrests.

Once Allen’s group was far away from the bar, many of the pro-trans activists made their way back to the bar to continue the protest with more chants and messages of resistance. Unprecedented, a local brass band that appears at anti-Trump protests, played music for the trans rights activists.

At the bar, many reported feeling empowered by the community defense action.

“Allen and his goons have been attacking anti-Trump and pro-immigrant protests for over a year now, with police doing nothing to stop it,” said activist Evelyn Thomson with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, “today we showed that if the police won’t do anything we will protect ourselves.”

One person was arrested during the protest; rather than arrest the MAGA protesters for their illegal use of chemical weapons, Portland Police arrested a trans rights activist. Police told media the arrest was for a separate incident and there was a warrant on the arrestee. What they left out was the warrant was from when the same right-wing extremists protested outside a Hasan Piker show on August 23. The person arrested defended the community from multiple assaults the right-wingers carried out on those in attendance and was charged with crimes as a result.

Allen and his group have counter-protested many of the anti-Trump protests over the last year. They are known for using physical violence and chemical weapons to attack those they disagree with. Emboldened by the Trump presidency, they typically wear MAGA attire and focus their attacks on immigrants.

Immigrant rights organization Portland Contra Las Deportaciones is calling for Allen’s arrest, following his assault of immigrant rights activist Holly Brown on September 1. At a press conference calling for the closure of the Portland ICE facility, Allen shoved Brown into a concrete pillar in front of Multnomah County Courthouse. Police witnessed the attacks and made no arrests. PDXCD is holding a press conference to demand District Attorney Nathan Vasquez press charges.

#PortlandOR #OR #LGBTQ #PeoplesStruggles #MAGA #PDXCD #ThomasAllen

On November 19, Donald Trump selected multi-millionaire Linda McMahon as Secretary of the Department of Education. The former CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), she unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut and lost twice. She served on Trump’s cabinet once before as the head of the Small Business Administration and then resigned in 2019 to become the director of America First Action, a Trump super-PAC that kept promoting the agenda of “Make America Great Again” after he lost the 2020 election. She has received praise from bigot and Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

In 2010, McMahon was caught lying to the press about possessing a bachelor’s degree in education, when instead she had one in French. Incapable of being elected to office, McMahon hitched her wagon to Trump’s racist, right-wing political career and became a key part of his campaign. Together, they worked to advance the agenda of billionaires and are poised to resume that mission now that he has returned to the White House.

Her elevation to Secretary of Education is not about strengthening the Department of Education by any means. It is the opposite. Trump and McMahon are hardcore advocates of the abolition of the department. With the erasure of the Department of Education, the following would be gone: standards for education; any enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to investigate racist discrimination and sexual violence; the basis for need-based federal Pell Grants and student loans; funding for all public schools grades K-12; support of English for Speakers of Other Languages programs; special education programs; programs for students with disabilities, and more.

According to the website of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a pro-Trump right-wing Christian think tank chaired by McMahon herself, public funds would be redirected from public schools to vouchers, money that parents would have to use to pay for private schools. These schools are owned in part by the likes of McMahon, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s last Secretary of Education, and their billionaire friends. McMahon’s vision is to ruin the quality of public education, close public schools as enrollment declines, and then direct public funds to private schools, charter schools and religious schools that promote “Make America Great Again” ideals.

McMahan and her billionaire friends advocate the privatization of education because they, along with the billionaires of the U.S., will profit if families suddenly have to pay for basic education. They dream of a world where education from kindergarten through 12th grade is no longer free, and the tuition dollars go straight into their pockets.

Tuition for private schools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, meaning students from working-class homes, undocumented immigrant students, and Black, Chicano and Latino students may no longer be able to afford an education, and only rich, white students will. The resulting inequality is part of McMahon and Trump’s vision.

McMahon’s racism extends beyond education policy. Her thinktanks demand obedience to and increased funding for law enforcement, despite the fact that racist cops continue killing Black people, including Black kids, without losing their jobs or facing any jail time. The AFPI calls the “defund the police” movement “dangerous.” Moreover, McMahon actively spreads lies about Central American immigrants, Chinese immigrants, and communists in order to justify Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, such as his termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals which can leave over 800,000 immigrant youth vulnerable to deportation.

Aside from immediate financial profit, the AFPI and McMahon seek to reshape what is taught. Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other Trump-endorsed politicians, the AFPI characterizes the teaching of the histories of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, gender and sexuality struggles and any social movements in the U.S. as “identity politics” and calls for them to be eradicated from the education system.

The MAGA movement doesn’t limit their hatred of social justice movements to just words. McMahon has come out in the press calling Palestinians who resist illegal settlements terrorists and stands firmly in the camp of criminalizing free speech on campus if it is used to speak out against genocide.

In the state of Florida, DeSantis banned funding for campus cultural organizations, activist groups, any LGBTQ groups, and pro-Palestine student organizations, also calling them terrorists and effectively banning groups like Students for a Democratic Society and Students for Justice in Palestine. This semester, students have faced criminal charges just for promoting events that say no to the genocide in Gaza, and experienced expulsion and even deportation.

McMahon, MAGA, and Moms for Liberty have worked hard to paint a target on the backs of LGBTQ people, particularly trans youth, and parents who love and support their queer kids. America First Action and the AFPI, her two think tanks, use the slogan “Give parents more control over the education of their children” in reaction to the growing support for open expression of gender and sexuality among students and youth. To the sound of this drumbeat, Moms for Liberty has campaigned to ban books that depict LGBTQ people or women’s rights positively in any way, and they have advocated for bills that ban trans people from using the right bathroom, ban teachers from using the right pronouns for trans students, and green-light legal action against parents who support their children’s gender expression.

Ironically, despite America First’s hardline campaigning around LGBTQ people as predators, McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, face multiple ongoing lawsuits for sexual abuse and trafficking of World Wrestling Entertainment employees and the sexual abuse of children. This October, a lawsuit was filed against the McMahons for covering up the sexual abuse of young boys committed by WWE announcer, Melvin Phillips, with allegations going back to the mid-1980s. Last summer, Vince McMahon was subpoenaed by federal law enforcement for million-dollar payoffs to silence five women, including former WWE employee Janel Grant, who he is said to have not only sexually assaulted, but also trafficked to business partners. The McMahons and their lawyers have denied all allegations, but these cases are not yet closed.

It is into these dirty hands that the care of students and youth in the U.S. would be going. Public schools that need to be strengthened and expanded will be ransacked. An office that should come to the defense of women, LGBTQ youth, and Black, Chicano and Latino students will be put in the hands of a former CEO who has built a career on defending rapists and racists. Instead of becoming sites for learning and political engagement, college campuses will be reduced to nothing more than storefronts for stakeholders and a recruitment ground for war criminals.

Despite their high offices, Trump and McMahon’s positions are unpopular. In April 2019, unionized public school teachers, workers, students, parents and community members in East Los Angeles, most of whom are Chicano, successfully defeated a major privatization initiative. After months of protests, including a week-long strike of over 30,000 teachers, they ended the construction of a corporate mega-charter school called KIPP Promesa Charter in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. KIPP is the largest charter school corporation in the United States and builds in working-class neighborhoods, often Black, Chicano or Latino-majority ones. Not only do public schools close in their wake, but other impoverishing policies often follow, such as rent hikes, evictions and displacements. The people of East Los Angeles went up against an effort led by billionaires Eli Broad, the Waltons of Wal-Mart, and the Gates Foundation, and they won.

Trump has installed incompetent, failed politicians like McMahon to carry out his racist, reactionary agenda without question. Together, they will dance to the tune of greedy billionaires who are waiting to put education up completely for sale. At the same time, their views represent the few. Millions of students, teachers, workers, parents and community members will not sit idly by as this valuable institution is destroyed.

Anyone who wants to see public education expanded, and not condemned, needs to make their demands heard, using protests and every tool at their disposal. Just like the Chicano teachers’ unions, families, and activists of Boyle Heights, if we fight, we can win.

#Feature #PeoplesStruggles #Trump #LindaMcMahon #SecretaryofEducation #EducationDepartment #Education #WWE #MAGA