FELLOW PEASANTS, it’s a perfect time for another historical refresher . . .

Remember when we pretended the government spying on its own citizens was a conspiracy theory? Ahh, thems were the days — back when we thought the FBI might actually be out there catching criminals instead of creating them.

How adorable we were with our misplaced trust. Fast forward to today, and the recent arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Kalil isn’t an accident or oversight. It’s the blood-stained blueprint of American power, and it’s been running in the background of U.S. policy since before most of us were born.

In 1967, the FBI quietly launched a covert operation with a mission statement that could’ve been written by a comic book villain: “To expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black and Muslim activists and civil rights organizations.

Not to catch criminals or protect Americans — to “neutralize” people who dared question the racist status quo.

They called it COINTELPRO, and nothing says government fuckery quite like an ominous acronym. While it started as an FBI program, make no mistake — this was the U.S. government’s playbook, executed through its agencies, with full knowledge at the highest levels.

The tactics were as shocking as they were effective: Fabricating evidence, spreading false rumors, planting provocateurs, and even assassination. And these weren’t rogue agents — this was official policy, signed off by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, who (as I keep mentioning) actually called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Not the KKK.
Not actual violent extremists.
Black and Muslim people organizing for their rights.

When Martin Luther King Jr. became too influential, the FBI didn’t just surveil him — they sent him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.

Let the bureaucratic sadism of that sink in for a moment.

When the Panthers and another group called U.S. Organization had tensions, the FBI, according to their own declassified memos, directed field offices to “exploit all avenues of creating further dissension” and submit regular reports on “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” They even sent fake letters between groups to incite violence.

And it worked.

Fred Hampton, the charismatic 21-year-old Black Panther leader in Chicago, was assassinated in his bed during an FBI-coordinated raid. The Bureau had an informant drug Hampton’s dinner before police fired 99 shots into his apartment.

Malcolm X? His murderers were finally exonerated in 2021, more than 55 years after the assassination, when it became clear the FBI and NYPD had withheld evidence that would have proven their innocence. We shouldn’t just be asking “who killed Malcolm X?” but “what did the FBI know about it, and for how long?”

After 9/11, the playbook got a glossy rebrand as *counterterrorism*, but the tactics remained painfully familiar. The FBI created a network of more than 15,000 informants, many targeting mosques and Muslim communities with no evidence of wrongdoing. They manufactured plots by targeting vulnerable individuals — often those with mental illness or financial problems — and then claiming heroic prevention of attacks they themselves orchestrated.

The NYPD’s infamous “Demographics Unit” mapped entire Muslim neighborhoods, infiltrated community spaces, and monitored the daily activities of thousands of innocent Americans. Countless Muslim Americans found themselves on no-fly lists, subjected to *voluntary* interviews, or pressured to become informants against their own communities — with refusal often resulting in immigration consequences or trumped-up charges.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s called fascism, white supremacy, and COINTELPRO with better technology and a bigger budget.

And this is the United States.

Teleport to 2025, and we’re watching the same movie with updated special effects, just with different U.S. government agencies taking turns in the spotlight.

Mahmoud Khalil’s case follows the script to the letter. A Palestinian refugee turned activist, who earned his master’s degree from Columbia University, suddenly arrested and detained by ICE agents with his Green Card revoked. Why? For being a vocal spokesperson for Palestinian rights during campus protests.

And now the President of the United States is bragging about it on social media, like a fucking eight-year-old bully: “Following my previously signed executive orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a radical foreign pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.”

The message isn’t subtle: Speak up and we’ll crush you. The only difference is that COINTELPRO operated in secret, while today’s version plays out in broad daylight, with the President himself cheerleading the suppression.

Remember 2017, when the FBI invented a new category of threat called “Black Identity Extremists”? It was COINTELPRO’s “Black Extremists” label with a fresh coat of paint. The U.S. government claimed that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” might spur violence against law enforcement. Not actual police brutality — perceptions of it. As if Black Americans were just imagining being killed by police. And just like their targeting of Muslim communities after 9/11, they created a problem to solve that wasn’t there.

The U.S. government’s own leaked documents from a few years back exposed an FBI operation called IRON FIST (I swear I’m not making this up), designed to “proactively address this priority domestic terrorism target by focusing FBI operations via enhanced intelligence collection efforts.”

Translation: We’re going to spy on Black activists and try to trap them into doing something illegal, just like we’ve been doing to Muslim communities for decades.

The million-dollar question: Why is the government no longer hiding what it’s doing? Why arrest Khalil so publicly when they could have used their historically more subtle methods?

It’s simple. They’re proud of it.

This isn’t about security or protecting Americans. It’s about sending a message: “This is what happens when you challenge us.” The public nature of these actions isn’t a mistake — it’s the point. Fear works best when everyone can see the consequences of stepping out of line. Don’t speak against American foreign policy if you’re a Brown man with an accent, even if you’re a legal resident with an American wife who’s eight months pregnant.

As William C. Sullivan, an assistant FBI director, once testified: “No holds were barred. We have used these techniques against Soviet agents. They have used them against us. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.”

That attitude never went away. Instead it got promotions and medals.

But here’s where today differs from the COINTELPRO era: We know their playbook now. Today’s movements have learned from history. They’ve evolved. Adapted. Become smarter and more resilient precisely because they studied how the U.S. government destroyed earlier movements by targeting individual leaders. You can’t cut off the head of a movement that has no single head.

This doesn’t mean the government’s tactics don’t work — Khalil’s case demonstrates they still can silence individuals effectively — but movements have become harder to crush entirely.

Khalil told CNN last year, “Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.” And for that, he’s being held in a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, awaiting a hearing that will determine whether he’ll be deported. His crime wasn’t violence or lawbreaking — it was advocacy. It was using his voice.

The FBI’s tactics require shadows to be truly effective. When we drag them into the light, they lose some of their power. In fact, the fact that we’re openly discussing these tactics is itself a form of resistance. Awareness is the first step toward accountability.

So what can we do?

Our collective resistance is always stronger than their individual targeting.

The patterns are clear: From Malcolm X to Fred Hampton, to Muslim communities after 9/11 to Mahmoud Khalil today, the U.S. government has perfected its targeting of those who speak truth to power, who defy its fascism and white supremacy.

They can arrest Khalil, but they cannot arrest our revolution. And the most powerful weapon against their machinery of oppression is our solidarity.

They want us isolated.
Disconnected.
Silenced.
Afraid.

But we don’t have to be.

Never forget that today is not a spectator sport. It’s tomorrow’s warm-up.

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