Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests: Indicators of White Supremacists
All too predictable:
Before the rioting started in Washington DC, Brooklyn, Denver, Atlanta, and other cities, allegations emerged that undercover police officers might be to blame for some of the worst commercial destruction in Minneapolis. Experts on political violence (and not just Qanon conspiracy theorists) shared stories on social media that the May 27 looting and arson at AutoZone by an unidentified man in a gas mask carrying an open umbrella (dubbed #umbrellaman) was not necessarily a protester but could be an agent provocateur or member of the police. In video posted to YouTube, while this man smashed windows with a hammer, protesters at the scene accused him of being an outsider and began to film him.
According to reporting in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The man’s actions were so odd that other rioters in the area paused their own protests to call him out and began filming. “Are you a f—ing cop?” someone else can be heard yelling to the man as he disappeared from view.”
People in St Paul (including someone saying they are a former fiancé) claimed to have identified #umbrellaman as Jacob Pederson, a member of the St. Paul police whose goal would appear to be to exacerbate racial tensions and instigate more property damage in order to undermine the legitimacy of the protests against police brutality. However, the Saint Paul Police Department issued an unequivocal statement saying the individual was not Pederson, and told reporters that Pederson had a complete alibi. “We spoke with his supervisor, who was with him. We spoke to his colleagues, who were with him,” said Steve Linders, public information officer for the St. Paul Police Department. “We were able to verify where the officer was and who he was with. In fact, he was working, as a Saint Paul police officer, protecting people and property.”
https://www.justsecurity.org/70497/far-right-infiltrators-and-agitators-in-george-floyd-protests-indicators-of-white-supremacists/
The history of agent provocateurs of how cops and informants cause the most protest violence gives us a litany of examples. It is all too common for conservative or corporatist agents (sometimes employed by Federal, state or local goverments; sometimes working for conservative or corporatist groups) to infiltrate movements they don’t like for the specific purpose of trying to figure out ways to make them look bad via acts of violence. We saw it in the civil rights movement; we saw it in the antiwar protests of the late 1960s (when a common saying among genuine members of protest movements was “The guy who brings up explosives is the FBI plant”); we saw it in the War on Terror, where most of the bomb plots “foiled” by the FBI wouldn’t have existed were it not for FBI informants egging on and inciting the other group members every step of the way, right until the handcuffs appear.
And, as it turns out, we saw it in the Battle for Seattle WTO protests in 1999, the RNC protests of 2008, and the G-20 protests of 2009. According to a 2010 report from the National Lawyers Guild that examined those three events, most if not all of the violence therein was committed by either the cops or people working against or otherwise hostile to the goals of the protesters.
We also saw it with self-confessed agent-provocateur Patrick Howley, editor of the far-right-wing magazine the American Spectator who infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street protests.
We're seeing it again now. share