It was 100% political performance art.
In and among, elbow-to-elbow with, some of the finest citizens in the U.S., thereby deliberately causing them, unwittingly on their part, and entirely unjustly of course, to be tarred, slandered, calumniated, as violent anarchists, insurrectionists and domestic terrorists.
If he’s making it up, then Pezzola is not among the “finest citizens in the US,” but a cheap fraud saying inflammatory things that he can’t back up.