“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent,” journalist Trevor Aaronson told theGrio. The podcast Alphabet Boys claims that the FBI paid a felon, Michael Adam Windecker II, to infiltrate Denver’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) action in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Aaronson purports to show how the FBI targeted Black activists and sought to manipulate them into joining a plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
Michael Adam Windecker II, FBI Informant
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon haas publicly condemned the FBI’s actions against BLM activists if Aaronson’s claims are true. Has Wyden condemned the FBI’s actions directed against those Wyden would surely characterize as white nationalist groups? This is not an exercise in whataboutism. The FBI runs COINTELPRO-like operations against rightwing groups all the time. We saw this recently in Michigan, and there are indications January 6 was in part organized and instigated by FBI and other deep state actors. (See The Michigan Kidnapping Plot and January 6—Is There a Connection?; Smearing the National Proletariat with White Nationalism; Antifa and the Boogaloos: Condemning Political Violence Left and Right; The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?; Rittenhouse’s Real Crime and Corporate State Promotion of Extremism.)
In statements provided to The Guardian by Wyden’s office, the Senator said, “If the allegations in Mr. Aaronson’s podcast are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on First Amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority.” Also, “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
I agree, but Wyden is misrepresenting BLM. BLM is not a racial justice activist organization but a corporate-funded disinformation group with an operating logic rooted in anti-white bigotry, openly hostile towards traditional family systems, and a clear penchant for violent action. The purpose of BLM is to racially divide the proletariat (see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it). However, whatever one thinks about BLM, the comparison the Denver ordeal to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program is appropriate. During that time, FBI agents infiltrated black organizations like the Black Panther Party (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left).
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black [sic] political activism as violent,” Aaronson told theGrio, “even though on its face the overwhelming majority of racial justice demonstrations that summer were peaceful.” This is a misrepresentation of what occurred over the summer of 2020. There was widespread violence, including homicide, and extraordinary levels of property destruction and theft. While there is no federal domestic terrorism statute, based on common definition, BLM (and Antifa) actions come pretty close conceptually. For sure BLM is not representative of racial justice movements. So when Aaronson says things like the following, he is engaged in propaganda: “While COINTELPRO no longer exists, you can see very clearly in this case and in the summer of 2020 that many of these methods that were used to a devastating effect against the civil rights movement in the 1960s were used against the racial justice movement in 2020.”
One more thing. Be wary of this claim that the FBI technique of “snitch-jacketing,” where an informant accuses activists of being FBI informants to sow confusion. To be sure, this happens. But I wouldn’t rule out a priori that a significant number of BLM activists were FBI agents and paid informants. The chaos of summer and fall of 2020 carries indications of a color revolution (see “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs). Given what we know now about the extensive collaboration between the FBI and other deep state actors and social media platforms in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s re-election, identification of FBI agents and informants in BLM action cannot be dismissed out of hand.
freedom and reason 