Reminder: feds infiltrate activist groups at great expense, proceed to bad-jacket effective social leaders, become leaders themselves, encourage illegal activity, arrest members for following through on that activity, and then use the busts as a PR win. These are counterterrorism measures perfected by the most prolific terrorist state in the history of our species.
If you are doing any kind of organizing, keep your social maps up to date and have social norms or formal rules in place to prevent these tactics from being effective. Inoculation is your friend. So is theory. And it’s all meaningless without praxis. If you don’t know how to do all of this already, ask.
He was also, perhaps even more suspiciously, much older — this guy pushing 50 years old — where in these demonstrations where people are mostly in their teens and 20-somethings. But what Windecker did that was particularly sophisticated — or perhaps accidental, but it came off as sophisticated — was that he initially allied himself with a couple of very naive demonstrators who were with the YDSA, the Young Democratic Socialists of America And because he had befriended them, he would start going to these demonstrations along with them.
Like, he doesn’t look like someone who should be able to infiltrate these groups. What they would say was like, yeah, when he first showed up, he looks suspicious, and we were concerned about him. But what we saw was that he kept showing up with these YDSA activists, and we got to the point where we like: OK, well, if he’s with these young allies, then he must be OK.
And what Windecker and the FBI did was basically use the YDSA to create kind of a shield against that suspicion, by allying himself so closely with them, and that’s really what allowed him to have the opening to go in and come across as credible within the racial justice activist community in Denver.
Yeah so basically in addition to being a Democratic party sheepherding org, DSA is also fed-adjacent now… Oh and also the Intercept is kinda sus too, plenty has been written about that.
I think the only sane take is that any leftist org in America, even ones with like a dozen members, should be treated as though there are fed informants in them. Because there usually are. Doesn’t mean nobody should get involved, but like… be wary.