By Hannah Saunders

For months, TtS has been working to identify agitators who show up to protests in the Pacific Northwest to instigate violence and otherwise bad actors. Falling into the latter category is 46-year-old Mason Lake, who’s trying to reintegrate himself with leftists on the ground and on social media following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, where he allegedly snitched on protesters to cops. Lake, an Oregon native, describes himself as a photographer, camera operator, video journalist, and aspiring filmmaker. 

Lake fell on TtS’s radar when he stole our footage about propagandists for an Instagram post with 50501 and 50501 Portland and neglected to credit us. A source told TtS that Lake had been pushing these larger accounts to collaborate with him on posts, even though they were allegedly hesitant. Further research into Lake led to the opening of a can of worms. Here’s what we know: 

Lake attended arts school in 2001 and moved to the Big Island in Hawai’i in 2014 for work. By 2018, he moved back to Portland and began videographing the 2020 BLM protests. Following those protests, where Lake allegedly snitched on protesters and got one arrested, he rebranded himself through new social media channels like Channel Heed, which he claims to be a civil-rights-focused source of news, and Lake Vide, which is a production company sponsored in part by the Human Rights Campaign. Anarchist News and other sources told TtS that Lake is profiting from ICE protest coverage this year, which Lake has refuted. 

A Portlander documenting ICE protests on the ground connected with Lake in July and early August, and told TtS that Lake was trying to recruit them for an allegedly paid position at Channel Heed. 

“I’m pretty sure he was just using me to get footage and to [get] good information from on the ground. I didn’t realize [it], but he wasn’t going on the ground and I thought that was super weird,” the videographer source told TtS. 

By mid-August, self-incriminating text messages from 2020 resurfaced and he stated he was turning over footage of protesters to police:

“I asked him about it, and his response was so fricking wild. It was super obvious to tell that he was genuinely lying,” the source said. “At first, it was kind of just a normal response where he was explaining everything, and then he started turning it into this big story, saying that this person was an undercover CIA.” 

The source added how Lake left them a ten-minute-long voice message where he was “going off the hinges.”  Before completely cutting all communication with Lake, he told the source that the text messages from 2020 were from him, and added how he spoke negatively about black bloc this year. 

TtS made a post shortly after he stole our footage to call him out, as he was not responding to comments or messages. Portlanders took to his comment section to call him out for the text message incident, and he blocked users, thus scrubbing their comments. 

“He’s also bragged about snitching numerous times, has a history of condemning black bloc, and uses identity politics to justify it: lots of ‘black bloc is all white dudes and they’re harming the movement’ type stuff…He has also threatened a Black woman with rolling up on her house after she was warning people about it,” the source said. 

4-hour-long TikTok live addressing allegations

Lake held a four-hour-long TikTok Live session in late October to address the 2020 text message allegations after TtS made the call-out post, where he leaned heavily into his medical history and upbringing to deflect from the issues. He said he’s autistic, has had reading comprehension issues since childhood, and experienced verbal abuse as a child. He said he had an abusive and narcissistic father, his mom died of cancer in 2011, and he has no friends. 

Lake claimed he had attended about eight protests in Portland this year, where he checked in on protesters and dropped off supplies. He said he’s getting older and doesn’t have as much energy as young people—that 2020 was his time and that “if this turns to war, I’m the old guy who dies in the first act.” 

Gavaughn Streeter-Hillerich was arrested on June 25, 2020, for allegedly starting a fire on a wall complex that included the PPB North Precinct. An affidavit stated that on June 27, 2020, a man approached PPB and offered to submit video evidence of the alleged arson, with a detective meeting with the man on July 1, according to Rose City Counterinfo. Lake was on the ground during that incident and took footage, and the article claims the text messages announcing his plans to snitch were from the following day. 

During his TikTok Live, Lake said there had been instances of him on video appearing like a bad guy, and noted how everyone’s emotions were high in 2020, and there was infighting amongst protesters. He said these allegations of him being a snitch have fractured his ability to become part of the community. 

“The bad guys, they’re paying people like me and with my skills to flip and be rats,” Lake said, adding how people are “very suspicious” of him and that the allegations are “so ancient that they’re old news.” 

Lake said the accusation that he provided footage to Portland police that led to the arrest of Streeter-Hillerich was false, and that he would never endanger or incriminate a community member engaged in protest and would never provide cops with footage at his own will. Lake both claimed the text messages from 2020 were fabricated and real. He addressed the allegations numerous times publicly, including in a now-deleted Instagram post where he said in those texts, he meant that he would offer recordings for public record after censoring them, rather than with the police. In his TikTok Live, Lake said the screenshots of the texts were fabricated and the deleted Instagram post was authentic, but privately told multiple people that they were real. 

Similarly to what a source told TtS, Lake said the deep state was targeting him in an attempt to divide the left’s movement in 2020 and now. In his TikTok Live, Lake said the Oregon Cyber Task Force “are totally out there messing with us,” alongside MAGA, COINTELPRO, and propagandist Andy Ngo.

 Moving forward with caution

Lake name-dropped Ngo, who is a MAGA propagandist with a massive following on social media. But in 2020, after Lake was assaulted by protesters wearing bloc, Ngo wrote an article about it on The Post Millennial, which Lake retweeted. 

When Portland protesters have called Lake out on social media this year, he has taken to immediately blocking them or deleting comments after claiming they are undercover agents. Several think he’s colluding with right-wing propagandists this year while trying to keep a relatively low profile after 2020. One source told TtS that they believe Lake faked an assault with Katie Daviscourt and Chelly Bouferrache at the Portland ICE facility this year to give the MAGA propagandists the footage they needed for Trump to declare the city a warzone. 

“The attack Mason did on Chelly was so vanilla. And Chelly and Katie’s reaction was also vanilla. They went to DHS first before calling [the] police,” the source said. 

Portland protesters have been avoiding fights with right-wing instigators to avoid giving them the footage they want—violence. Several days following this allegedly fake fight, Daviscourt, Bouferrache, and other propagandists followed protesters to Eugene, where they got some arrested. 

Be on the lookout for Lake when protesting at ICE, and avoid connecting with Lake on his social media pages, including Channel Heed.

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