When he started listening to a voicemail and realized it was from an officer in the Portland Police Department, the Oregon Democratic Party field organizer and prolific tweeter first thought he was caught illegally streaming movies from his laptop.
Miles Larson never expected to be accused of threatening Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker of the United States House of Representatives who traveled to Portland on September 6 to raise money for congressional candidates.
The reason police called Larson, who posts under the @MalcolmFLeX or “Biracial Angel” account on Twitter, was over a tweet he sent 42 minutes before he received the voicemail, which read:
“Nancy Pelosi in Portland it’s time to shoot my shot.”
‘It’s stupid now, but when I got the voicemail,’ which he says was from a private number, ‘I really thought it was because I hacked into Jordan Peele’s account . Nope last week,” Larson said in an interview with Weekly Eugene. “I recently got an email from Comcast telling me to fuck off and I expected it to be about it.”
What Larson thought was a relatively innocent tweet espousing his intent to ask the visiting dignitary on a date, proved disturbing enough to warrant a phone call from the PPB, becoming a reminder of how law enforcement use social media and how easily it can get their attention, even if you think you’re anonymous.
Larson, through his non-work related Twitter account @MalcoImFLeX, is a shitposter and troll in the classic sense. His tweets range from the absurd to the surreal and often aim to anger those whom Larson believes takes the internet and his ensuing speeches far too seriously. His tweets traffic in the kind of post-tongue-in-cheek humor that might leave those who aren’t terminally ill online scratching their heads — and that’s partly the point.
“Even after he said I tweeted about Nancy Pelosi, I still don’t understand how I screwed up,” Larson said. “And then he said the tweet mentioned ‘shoot your shot’. I quickly realized I sounded like I was threatening a politician.
PPB Public Information Officer, Sgt. Kevin Allen, confirmed EO in an email that a Sgt. Matt Jacobs reached out to Larson with concern over the meaning of the tweet, but said he couldn’t provide details on how the police department investigates potential threats.
“When there is a specific event, such as a visit from a dignitary, officers assigned to our intelligence unit typically perform limited analysis of messages that could indicate a threat and may conduct a follow-up investigation depending on the circumstances,” Allen said. . “But I want to say that PPB does not ‘scour social media for threats’.”
According to Larson, Jacobs asked how he knew Pelosi was going to be in Portland.
Larson replied that he knew because of his work as a field organizer for the Democratic Party’s 1st Congressional District in Oregon. Jacobs then told Larson that he had been at the event and that the police had shown Larson’s DMV photo to event organizers, including his boss at the DPO.
“Luckily my boss is pretty young,” Larson said. “He saw the tweet and said to me ‘This is obviously a joke and not even a joke about hurting anyone’ so luckily they were both very, very cool with it and got along. just making fun of me, which is just because it’s actually pretty funny.”
larson said EO that Portland police never asked him to delete the tweet in question, but that his boss recommended it.
“And I wasn’t about to argue,” Larson said.
Pelosi’s rep didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether or not she would go on a date with “Bi-Racial Angel.”