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Dozens of American dissidents were detained at gunpoint in the dead of night. At least 42 held for weeks, some for months, in often subhuman conditions, on charges of "domestic terrorism." A civilly disobedient forest defender fatally shot 57 times with their hands in the air. Hundreds, if not thousands, of low-level offenders profiled as "violent extremists" for their political beliefs.
Far from being a far-right fever dream, or some dystopian vision of the radical left, this is a faithful representation of recent events in the Weelaunee Forest, outside Atlanta, Ga., where a cast of characters including local police, state prosecutors, and federal intelligence have waged a campaign of counterinsurgency, for the past two years, to make way for "Cop City"—a $90 million training facility and testing ground for the future of urban warfare.
You wouldn't know it from the prosecutions of leading far-right figures in recent days— whether the seditious conspiracy convictions of four Proud Boys, the sentencing of six Oath Keepers, or the 37 counts unsealed against Donald Trump. But it turns out Jan. 6 was a statistical outlier. J6 aside, the data shows that, in the three years since the George Floyd protests, the preponderance of politically charged arrests and prosecutions have been directed at the left, and not the right.
To date, at least 326 federal cases have been brought against Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists who participated in the racial justice protests during the summer and fall of 2020. According to a 2021 study, Black Americans have been dramatically overrepresented among the defendants. Ultimately, 1 in 5 of all cases have been dismissed out of hand. Of the remainder, 9 out of 10involved damage to property—not injuries to people. Yet even in such cases, federal prosecutors from both parties have aggressively pursued "terrorism"-based sentencing enhancements.
At the same time, state authorities have weaponized local statutes, like Georgia's 2017 domestic terrorism law—originally intended to deter killers like Dylann Roof—to prosecute anti-racist, anti-fascist, and environmentalist protesters who stand in the way of their expansionist agenda. They have received support in this from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which, in a May 24 National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin, explicitly targeted those harboring "anti-law enforcement sentiment."
Recently declassified documents have begun to reveal the scale and scope of federal snooping on left-leaning dissidents. For instance, a recent redacted report from the director of National Intelligence showed that the FBI had abused its authority, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans, running "batch queries" on at least 133 individuals arrested amid the BLM protests of 2020. DHS' National Network of Fusion Centers has been beset by similar allegations of domestic espionage.
Federal intelligence professionals have even come up with novel terminology that explicitly profiles Americans by their ideology—yet it is not right-wing "patriots" who are in the crosshairs, but "Anarchist Violent Extremists," "Black Identity Extremists" (recently rebranded "Racially Motivated Violent Extremists"), and other creatures of the conservative imagination. In this, we can see shades of the Red Scares of old, from the Palmer Raids to the McCarthy hearings to the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign against the Black freedom movement.
Where is this profiling coming from, and why does it keep happening? Recent history suggests some plausible explanations. First, selection bias on the part of state and federal prosecutors; second, selective enforcement by police and intelligence agencies; third, the tendency to treat left-wing dissidents like foreign insurgents, the left like an enemy within; fourth, the equation of minor offenses against property with deadly attacks against people; and fifth, the failure to recognize the magnitude of the real threat to our security—right-wing terror.
It is the far right, after all, that has claimed responsibility for the overwhelming majority of terrorist acts over the past 10 to 20 years—including the one that almost took my life in the streets of Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017—not to mention every single one of the extremism-related murders recorded over the last year. Yet untold resources have been directed awayfrom investigations into right-wing terror networks, and expended instead in pursuit of BLM, "Antifa," and environmentalist activists—with little evidence to show for it.
In the three years since the George Floyd protests, America has made considerable advances along the road to a 21st-century police state. Still, there are limits—for now—to how far the government can go. Unlike the crime of international terrorism, the charge of domestic terrorism is one with little foundation in federal law.
Yet lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem determined to change that. Some are dead set on creating a whole new category of federal offenses. Others are seeking broad new powers for federal law enforcement. Still others—including House Republicans who helped to plan the Capitol riot—are pushing legislation that would designate "Antifa and any other affiliated group" a "domestic terrorist organization."
There is still time to take the off-ramp before it is too late. This will require immediate steps and concrete demands, like the decriminalization of protest offenses, a prohibition on political profiling, a renewed ban on warrantless surveillance, and a general amnesty for protesters of all stripes. It will also require a national reckoning with the roots of domestic terrorism, and a reimagining of what life after terror—and a post-fascist future—might look like.
Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and the author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99 Percent Movement. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @mgouldwartofsky.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
