“They killed a fascist in Seattle.” The message alert from an activist group chat on an encrypted messaging app was the first thing I saw when I woke up late, on the afternoon of June 29th, 2020. Later, on a Zoom meeting with friends, an activist whose name I was unsure of celebrated the shooting –“We’re not scared to defend ourselves anymore. He got what was coming…” – until another comrade cut in, “It’s bull – he was just a kid, not a fascist. We screwed up.”
In the days that followed, the picture became clearer: two teenagers, one dead, the other injured. They had stolen a car and gone for a joyride. When it came time to ditch the vehicle, they took it to the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where, a month earlier, demonstrators had pushed out the police and barricaded the streets, occupying the area as part of the nationwide protests against the murder of George Floyd on May 25th. Fearing an attack from right-wing militias, demonstrators had armed themselves. When they saw a white Jeep speeding towards a barricade, they scrambled into defensive positions, and someone opened fire. By July 1st, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) dismantled, and police reentered the area.[1]
Though it was soon obvious that the killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. was a tragic mistake, the paranoia which ultimately led to the shooting was understandable. As millions of Americans took to the streets to protest George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis Police Department, some faced threats from far-right militias and violent police repression.[2] In fact, in the weeks leading up to Mays’s death, several confrontations between demonstrators at CHOP and far-right militias, like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, had escalated to violence.[3] In addition to cracking down on peaceful demonstrations, law enforcement all over the country were working to infiltrate activist groups, harass organizers and journalists, and disrupt organizing efforts.[4]
Rumors of police infiltration, fascist attacks, and attempts to agitate or misinform activists were a natural result of the atmosphere of chaos which defined the summer of 2020. Further fueling rumors and anxiety is the United States government’s history of infiltrating, misinforming, and disenfranchising radical organizing efforts. From the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO to the post-9/11 surveillance state, the government, often with reactionary public support, has consistently targeted those who hope to upset the status quo.
The goal of this essay is to dissect the state’s efforts to break radical opposition, and how those efforts have impacted opposition endeavors. Furthermore, I will explore how the rumors and paranoia that spread among radicals, like what led to the death of Antonio Mays Jr., are unique and benefit the state.
Radical Seeds and Poisonous Theories: The Origins of State Repression[5]
In late 1919, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer initiated a series of mass arrests targeting left-wing radicals, particularly those originating from Eastern and Southern Europe, where revolutionary ideology flourished in the late 19th century. The arrested radicals were often deported either to their home countries or to Russia, where the communist Bolsheviks had recently toppled the Russian Provisional Government. Among those arrested was the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, who described her deportation in later memoirs, “Russia of the past rose before me and I saw the revolutionary martyrs being driven into exile. But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! … It was America, indeed, America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up — the Statue of Liberty!”[6] The Palmer Raids, as they became known, was one of the earliest large-scale campaigns by the US government targeting political activists who they felt posed a threat to the status quo.
Prior to the First World War, the government often collaborated with big business to end labor unrest, sending in military or police to crack down on striking workers. By the time the US entered the war, the labor movement and the Left were already a primary target of campaigns of state repression. With the onset of war, quelling labor unrest and anti-war rhetoric motivated the rapid expansion of the state’s security and surveillance apparatus. Surveillance, infiltration, and repression programs which had previously been managed by “patriot groups” like the American Legion or corporations attempting to stop union activity were being gradually taken over by the state, which had to balance its commitment to social liberalism with the consequences of that liberalism.[7]
Though the tactics used by the state saw major development during the war, as early as 1901 there were notable cases of repression causing division and paranoia in radical movements. That year, Leon Czolgosz was the subject of a warning printed in the anarchist newspaper, Free Society, “His demeanor is of the usual sort [for spies], pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence.”[8] Czolgosz was defended in another article by Emma Goldman who had met him weeks earlier.[9] As it turned out, Czolgosz was not a government spy – he later shot and killed President William McKinley.
As the role of the security state expanded, the FBI developed extensive informant networks, using money and threats of imprisonment to flip activists, and collected subscriber lists for radical papers around the country.[10] Meanwhile, police departments in major cities established “red squads,” which were tasked with repressing left-wing organizing efforts.[11] Surveillance and infiltration programs often exaggerated the role of ideology over material conditions in labor movements to make the case that communists had infiltrated American labor – in 1921, during violent mine worker strikes in West Virginia, the FBI reported that the Third International in Moscow had instigated the strikers, affiliated with the United Mine Workers, to take insurrectionary action.[12] These strategies became the basis of state repression of radicals, all the way up to the Cold War, and the present day: infiltrate, surveil, and report on supposed widespread, insurrectionary objectives.
In addition to monitoring labor movements and radical groups, the FBI also paid close attention to supposed Black radicals. For example, in 1925 the bureau investigated the American Negro Labor Congress, which met in Chicago that year and advocated the end of segregation in American Federation of Labor unions.[13] Moreover, the FBI, along with local police, often refused to investigate or prosecute crimes against African Americans, including lynchings. However, when African Americans advocated for self-defense in the face of racist violence, they were targeted for surveillance or harassment as “subversives.”[14] Once again, this pattern has continued through the Cold War and the present day.
During World War Two and the early Cold War, the FBI formalized the strategies which were adopted during the First Red Scare. The formalization of such repressive campaigns was justified by the development of the USSR into a competing world power during the 1930s and 1940s, and evidence that Moscow was attempting to infiltrate the US government and left-wing movements. The Bureau also leaned on their growing influence as a professional and non-partisan organization under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, who solidified the agency’s reputation as a powerful and largely independent arm of the state.[15]
Lies with an Official Seal: COINTELPRO and Public Perceptions of the State[16]
In 1956, the FBI began COINTELPRO, a now infamous surveillance, infiltration, and misinformation campaign targeting “subversive” movements – primarily left-wing groups and civil rights organizations, but also some far-right groups like the KKK or the John Birch Society. The program was initiated by J. Edgar Hoover, and was meant to crush, rather than simply contain, radical movements. Tactics and strategies that had been formalized in the aftermath of World War II were put to the test in extensive campaigns meant to disrupt political activities by subversives.
Organizations and individuals targeted by COINTELPRO were subject to smear campaigns, police harassment, misinformation campaigns, and infiltration by informants, who often attempted to instigate violence and division within movements. In a 1968 document from the FBI’s Albany office, it was recommended that derogatory information about Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), should be leaked to the press to discredit the leader. In the same document, an informant reported that meetings by SNCC in Detroit were monitored and had over 200 people in attendance.[17] Another document from the FBI’s Los Angeles office from later that year details an attempt to discredit a local New Left leader with a letter from a “fictitious organization, Black Nationalists for Freedom.”[18] In the latter case, the bureau hoped to exploit divisions between the Black Power movement and the predominantly white New Left.
Similarly, in a 1971 document from the FBI’s Buffalo office, agents discussed a plan to disseminate a fake pamphlet to the Niagara Liberation Front, a New Left Group, meant to discredit three members and paint them as police informants.[19] This takes advantage of the paranoia and fear of infiltration already present in activist movements to isolate key individuals, and limit their organizing ability, a tactic known within activist circles as “cop-jacketing.” Such a tactic is only possible in an environment which has already been subject to state infiltration and misinformation campaigns – in other words, law enforcement (in this case, the FBI), is able to use their reputation for infiltration to hurt organizing efforts without having ever flipped anyone.
In this era, the growing infamy of the state’s security and surveillance apparatus in the American public was becoming an increasingly useful tool in sowing division and fear in activist circles. The extent of government surveillance programs became public knowledge in 1971 when activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania, and leaked documents to the press proving the existence of COINTELPRO.[20] In 1975, these documents were at the center of the Church Commission, which investigated abuses by the alphabet agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA). In addition to FBI overreach during COINTELPRO, it was discovered that the CIA had assisted in assassinations of foreign leaders,[21] had monitored or used foreign and domestic journalists as CIA assets,[22] and that the NSA was receiving traffic from major telecommunications companies to spy on the American public.[23]
These scandals, as well as unanswered questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and the discovery of the Watergate Scandal in 1974, fueled public suspicion of the federal government, and by the late 1980s conspiratorial thinking had gone mainstream as evidenced by the popularity of TV shows like The X-Files (1993-2002) and films like Enemy of the State (1998) or JFK (1991).[24] The militarization of police in the late 1990s, the further expansion of the state’s surveillance capabilities after 9/11, and the advent of the internet, social media, and digital communications in the early 2000s cemented public perceptions of the state’s surveillance apparatus as an all-seeing entity, immune to restrictions which protect civil liberties.[25] At the turn of the century activist circles involved in the anti-globalization, anti-war, and radical environmental movements were targeted by the expanding surveillance apparatus.[26] Lessons learned by activists in this era of surveillance and repression are a key factor in the development of modern “op-sec” (short for operational security, also known as security culture, on the Left refers to guidelines on how to communicate and/or plan actions without potentially incriminating fellow activists), but also in paranoia and fear-mongering within activist circles.
Click Here for Part II
David Wazana is a journalist and photographer based in Los Angeles, California. In 2025 he graduated from Ithaca College with a BA in Documentary Film Production and a BS in Environmental Science. David’s writing and photography interests include radical politics, history, environmental issues, technology, and conflict. His most recent work is as a reporter with the Rochester Beacon, a non-profit newspaper in Rochester, New York, and freelance writing and photography covering the Israel-Hamas War, natural disaster recovery in Appalachia, and the 2024 US Presidential Campaign. See some of his work on Instagram, @davwaz5.
[1] David Gutman and Sydney Brownstone, “’Everybody Down!’: What happened at the shooting that killed a teenager and led to CHOPs shutdown”, The Seattle Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/ and Jake Hanrahan, “The Rise and Fall of the Seattle CHOP”, Popular Front, Aug. 9, 2020, 24 min., 43 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DwZ_s1gSjQ&rco=1.
[2] Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, “Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for the Summer 2020”, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), Sept. 2020, https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/.
[3] Kelly Weill, “The Far Right is Stirring Up Violence at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”, The Daily Beast, June 16, 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/seattle-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-visited-by-violent-proud-boys/?ref=home.
[4] For a broad analysis of police infiltration see Sahil Singhvi, “Police Infiltration of Protests Undermines the First Amendment”, Brennan Center for Justice, Aug. 4, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/police-infiltration-protests-undermines-first-amendment.For a case study looking at the infiltration of protests in Denver, Colorado, see podcast by Trevor Aaronson, host, “Alphabet Boys”, iHeartPodcasts, Feb. 2020, https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-alphabet-boys-107700229/.
[5] Section title from A. Richard Palmer, “The Case Against Reds”, The Forum Magazine, 1920.
[6] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Volume Two (Dover Publications, 1970), pg. 717.
[7] Regin Schmidt, Red Scare, FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), pp. 50-52.
[8] Everett Marshall, Free Society, 1901.
[9] Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1970), pp. 290-291.
[10] Schmidt, Red Scare, pp. 170-171.
[11] Schmidt, Red Scare, pg. 53.
[12] Schmidt, Red Scare, pp. 234-235.
[13] Ivan Greenberg, Surveillance in America, Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present (Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 56-59.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Schmidt, Red Scare, pp. 366-367.
[16] Section title taken from The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 10, “Fallen Angel”, directed by Larry Shaw, Nov. 19, 1993, on Fox.
[17] “COINTELPRO Black Extremist Files 03”, FBI Records: The Vault, pp. 25-27, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists/COINTELPRO%20Black%20Extremist%20Part%2003/view.
[18] “COINTELPRO New Left Los Angeles Part 01”, FBI Records: The Vault, pp. 59-62, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/new-left/COINTELPRO%20New%20Left%20Los%20Angeles%20Part%2001/view.
[19] “COINTELPRO New Left Buffalo Part 01”, FBI Records: The Vault, pp. 6-8, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/new-left/COINTELPRO%20New%20Left%20Buffalo%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/view.
[20] Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies, Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 153-154.
[21] For more information on the CIA’s “Family Jewels” see “The CIA’s Family Jewels”, National Security Archive, June 26, 2007, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm.
[22] Ibid and “Project Mockingbird”, Files at Gerald Ford Presidential Library, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/sites/default/files/pdf_documents/library/document/0180/75573204.pdf.
[23] For more information on the NSA’s “Project Shamrock” see Major Dave Owens, “A Review of Intelligence Oversight Failures”, Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (Dec. 2012), https://irp.fas.org/agency/army/mipb/2012_04-owen.pdf.
[24] Olmsted, Real Enemies, 202-204.
[25] Greenberg, Surveillance in America, 269-271.
[26] Greenberg, Surveillance in America, 271-272.