The Red Scare never went away, it just briefly turned green
An FBI door knock at WPI has us yet again asking: what's the end goal
A rare midweek treat today: an essay from regular contributor Greg Opperman looking at animal rights activism and state repression. Greg hit me up with this pitch after a post on the Worcester Subreddit showed a student at WPI filming the two FBI agents at his door “just asking questions.” As Greg explains, the Trump Administration’s current crackdown on student activists follows a playbook largely built on the persecution of animal rights activists.
In crackdown news: Khalil denied leave, misses the birth of his child; Ozturk’s visa revocation was “silent” on purpose, a new precedent carved out for her that has now impacted 16 Worcester students and hundreds of others around the country; Department of Education to begin garnishing wages of those who’ve defaulted on student loans; Harvard student detained by ICE was on the verge of a singular breakthrough in cancer research; major outlet obituaries of Pope Francis scrub from the record his support for the Palestinian people.
Careening down a certain set of tracks here!
My last piece, from Sunday, gets into the more emotional side of living through this careening. It has been described as “beautiful rant”: “Words written on water: Is the dread heavy on you like it is on me?”
Do you feel it? Is the dread heavy on you like it is on me?
To feel a sense of action: thunderclaps break the muggy day. I yearn for it. Do you? Hope for the inciting incident. The spring we can’t hold back.
The blushing rose will climb
Spring ahead or fall behind
Winter dreams the same dream every timeInstead, stuck in the doldrums, down where we get so bored it’s downright cannibalistic.
Thanks for all the kind words about it to those who wrote in.
Greg and I worked on this one “together” but if we’re being honest Greg did 90 percent of it. A real first byline / second byline situation. Great stuff!
This is the sort of work by the way that paying subscribers make possible! It’s the sort of story you’d certainly never see in any other local outlet!
Merch Store / Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip
Ok now to Greg.
The Red Scare never went away, it just briefly turned green
By Greg Opperman and Bill Shaner
Most Americans learn about the Red Scare in high school. Usually, you’ll learn that the Red Scare was a brief period where communist panic was so crazy that a few Disney animators lost their jobs, then some time later we collectively came to our senses and knocked it off. Fewer Americans learn it was actually the second Red Scare—a repeat of the crackdown on activists in the 1910s that led to mass deportations, including Worcester’s own Emma Goldman. We then learn about the civil rights movement. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI deployed a sweeping program, called COINTELPRO, that involved infiltrating activist movements in the 1950’s and 60’s, including civil rights leaders and anti-Vietnam activists. Famously, Hoover’s FBI illegally wiretapped and surveilled the likes of Mr. Rogers, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, and hundreds more. We’re told that despite government overreach, the moral arc of history, ever-bending towards justice, led to the many reforms of the civil-rights era. As a country, we adopted a more humanist social contract, wound down our witchunts, and collectively closed the book on a dark chapter in our history. From there, the FBI moved on to solving real crimes.
In reality, the Red Scare and COINTELPRO never ended—instead, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies shifted their targets from anti-war and civil rights organizations to other groups. The animal rights movement was an early focus, and remains so to this day.
Just last week, for instance, a student at WPI who last week received a door knock from FBI agents, posting it to their podcast’s YouTube page. The video is filmed by the student, who identified himself to us as Ricky, host of the Green Scare Podcast. A man in plain clothes tells Ricky “we got an online complaint just regarding some of your, um, online exposure.” The man is with a Worcester police officer, also in plain clothes, and a woman from the FBI. Rather than answer the questions, which one of the officers calls a “courtesy,” Ricky tells them to “fuck off.” It has almost 10,000 views as of writing. Ricky’s lawyer, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said the tactic of selectively “following up” on called-in complaints is a common one, and more likely to be deployed on leftists.
“They approach people to see if they'll do voluntary interviews precisely because they don't have any basis on which to seek a search warrant or an arrest warrant,” Meltzer-Cohen said. The hope is you’ll agree to speak and “you'll say something that they can spin in an absolutely sinister way, and that's what gives them the basis to seek a search warrant.”
(Relatedly: The National Lawyers Guild Federal Defense Hotline is a good number to have saved should you ever find yourself in such a situation: 212-679-2811.)
These strategies and legal frameworks designed to silence civil rights and animal rights activists are now being deployed against an expanding roster of “enemies of the state,” including immigrants, students, and journalists.
The animal rights movement grew up around other civil rights movements in the 1960s, but ramped up significantly in the 1970s and 80s. Francis Moore Lappe is largely credited with popularizing environmental vegetarianism with her 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet. In 1975, Philosopher Peter Singer published his seminal argument for animal rights, Animal Liberation, largely considered to be the founding document of the animal rights movement. Veganism was a central focus in the nascent years of punk, with bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Crass, and Earth Crisis all promoting animal liberation as a core tenant of the counterculture.
Across the US and UK, groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) took direct action, rescuing animals from laboratories, fur farms, slaughterhouses, and other brutal and shocking conditions. Heading into the 1980s the ALF, a decentralized movement without leaders or structure, gained national attention with a series of spectacular actions that exposed horrifying conditions for animals. On April 20th, 1985, members of the ALF broke into a University of California laboratory and rescued Britches, an infant macaque “who was born into a breeding colony at UCR. He was removed from his mother at birth, had his eyelids sewn shut, and had an electronic sonar device attached to his head...as part of a three-year sensory-deprivation study involving 24 infant monkeys.”
For a time, these activists were a cause célèbre for the mainstream media. As journalist and animal rights expert Will Potter describes:
“Major media outlets reported favorably on these protest tactics, calling the activists ‘heroes.’ One Los Angeles Times article in 1986, for example, was headlined, Environmental 'Warriors' Use Radical Tactics to Make Point. It praised environmentalists locking their bodies to bulldozers, spiking trees to sabotage timber sales, and employing other Edward Abbey-style monkeywrenching. The press and the public loved these radicals.
For the corporations targeted, though, the activists were a serious problem. These protest tactics were changing the public discussion. A unified social movement with broad popular support and a willingness to act represented an immediate threat to profits. To protect their business, corporations needed to displace these activists from their moral high ground and demonize them in the eyes of the public.”
This is the moment in time when the term “ecoterrorism” was coined, the first time the definition of terrorism was expanded to include threats to corporate profits. A pro-fur advertisement portrayed a masked boogeyman with the headline, “Meet the world’s newest terrorist” and implores the reader: “Don’t tolerate terrorism in America. Fur is for life.” In 1991, Clorox hired a PR to deploy a “Stop Environmental Terrorism” media campaign as part of a crisis management strategy. This rhetoric quickly developed into a right-wing culture war. When Charlotte’s Web was adapted into a film in 2006, the Center for Consumer Freedom warned “images prodding your kids toward the multiplex might be more about animal rights than E.B. White." James Cameron’s Avatar was dubbed “a recruiting film for eco-terrorists,” which, to be fair, it totally is.
“Vegans did 9/11,” says Congressman from Alaska
To complement the private sector’s ongoing PR campaign against animal rights activists, Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992. The AEPA carried enhanced punishment for anyone who “intentionally physically disrupts the functioning of an animal enterprise by intentionally stealing, damaging, or causing the loss of enterprise property, including animals and records (or conspiring to do so)”. The act was largely unused by prosecutors, despite high-profile direct actions like the 1998 firebombing of a Vail Ski resort that encroached on endangered lynx habitat. The bombing caused an estimated $40 million in property damage. A sweeping federal investigation led to the capture of 6 out of the 7 perpetrators, tagging them with over 40 charges, but none under the AEPA.
It wasn’t until the War on Terror™ that the government, lacking in real domestic terror targets, became serious about bringing terror charges for animal rights activists. The day after 9/11, Representative Greg Walden warned congress that “eco-terrorists” posed a threat “no less heinous than what we saw occur yesterday here in Washington and in New York.” Not to be outdone, Rep. Don Young made the absolutely wild speculation that eco-terrorists might have been behind 9/11 all along.
As the War on Terror ramped up, so did the War on Animal Activists. In 2006, a bipartisan team including Democrat Diane Feinstein, sponsored the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, an amendment to the AEPA that expanded the scope of the original law. The law was passed under suspension, a procedural mechanism to pass laws without a vote. The law expanded the definition of economic damage to include “loss of profits, or increased costs, including losses and increased costs resulting from threats, acts or vandalism, property damage, trespass, harassment, or intimidation.” The law also expanded the scope of the AEPA to include secondary and tertiary targets (i.e. CEOs, Board members, or businesses that do business with animal enterprises), a move lauded by pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. While the law explicitly states that lawful boycotts and peaceful demonstration are constitutionally protected, it has been almost exclusively used to prosecute First Amendment activity.
Rather than round up ALF bomb-throwers, or fur farm liberationists, the first prosecutions under the AETA centered around a group of people who became known as the SHAC-7. The Center for Constitutional Rights describes Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, or SHAC:
“(SHAC) was an international, grassroots animal rights campaign to close Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe's largest contract animal-testing laboratory. Huntingdon tests products like household cleaners, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and food additives on around 75,000 animals every year, from rats to wild-caught baboons. By targeting the pillars of support for the lab (e.g. its investors, customers, stockbrokers, etc.), pressuring these companies to cut their tie with HLS, and holding residential pickets in the neighborhoods of executives of these companies and of HLS, the SHAC campaign pushed Huntingdon to the brink of bankruptcy multiple times.”
SHAC was notable in that it focused on the secondary and tertiary targets that the AETA expanded to include: investors, customers, and stockholders. The campaign included a diversity of tactics. Some activists partook in legal actions, like protests outside of executives homes, while others undertook legally-ambiguous actions, like infiltrating HLS labs to shoot undercover videos that exposed staff members shaking and punching beagles.
Did the US government prosecute the lab infiltrators? No. The peaceful protestors? Thankfully, no. The SHAC-7, prosecuted under the AETA, ran a website that reported on the campaign, including coverage of the protests and direct action. None of the defendants were accused of participating in illegal acts themselves. In upholding the ruling, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals “acknowledged that much of Appellants’ speech and advocacy was protected by the First Amendment, but impermissibly allowed the mere presence of unlawful activity committed by anonymous individuals in the course of the campaign, coupled with defendants' ideological support for unlawful protest, to constitute a criminal conspiracy.” Let me repeat that: The mere presence of “unlawful activity,” coupled with ideological support, constitutes a criminal conspiracy.
Later, in 2008, four activists later known as the AETA 4 were charged “with conduct including protesting, chalking the sidewalk, chanting and leafleting, and the alleged use of ‘the Internet to find information on biomedical researchers.’” The charges were eventually dismissed.
These cases together represent the true intent of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act: To give legal cover to prosecute and suppress legal (and effective) means of protest. When a tactic works, the government responds by criminalizing it. After Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for placing fake bids in an oil and gas lease auction, Utah Rep Mike Noel introduced eco-terrorism legislation targeted against anyone who opposes development on state or federal lands. Many states have passed so-called “Ag-Gag” laws that criminalize whistleblowing, such as exposing animal cruelty, in agricultural or animal-related businesses. While 12 states have passed such laws, they have been struck down as unconstitutional in all but four. Still, that hasn’t prevented the expansion of these chilling laws into other areas.
These laws, passed under both Democratic and Republican administrations, have provided a template for criminalizing other kinds of activism and protected behavior. A whopping 38 states have passed laws, executive orders, or resolutions designed to discourage or undermine BDS campaigns against Israel. BDS campaigns seek to boycott, divest, or sanction businesses and entities that support the state of Israel (i.e. secondary and tertiary targets). As Ag-Gag laws criminalized filming inside of slaughterhouses, a recent proposal in the Massachusetts legislature would criminalize the filming of a different kind of pig.
While other administrations have mostly kept their anti-left crackdowns quiet, the Trump administration is going all-in. Somerville-resident Rümeysa Öztürk was kidnapped by ICE and is currently suffering in a Louisiana detention facility for writing an op-ed (the most polite form of speech possible). She was denied bail and has suffered multiple asthma attacks due to lack of medication. Öztürk, and countless others, were part of a list of activists compiled by far-right hate groups Betar and Canary Mission and passed directly to the Trump administration to be specifically targeted for deportation without due process. Not content with demonizing immigrants and students, the Trump administration is now laying the groundwork to include everything from Tesla vandalism to the non-violent Hands Off protests as domestic terrorism. Every day, there are new and increasingly harsh crackdowns on the right’s ideological enemies.
Left-wing causes have always faced intense government scrutiny under both liberal and conservative purview. Trump’s strongarm tactics didn’t arise out of nowhere, nor are they isolated to right-wing fascists. The FBI intimidating podcasters and bloggers, as was the case at WPI recently, is part of a long obsession with animal rights over very real and very urgent threats.
As early as 2003, the Justice Department, in a routine audit, warned that the “FBI’s obsessive focus on animal rights and environmental activists, the ‘number one domestic terrorism threat,’ would leave more dangerous threats unchecked.” The FBI doubled down, responding that environmental activists “caused considerable damage to the U.S. economy,” and that the Joint Terrorism Task Forces were the best way to investigate them. Less than a year later, Deputy Assistant Director John Lewis testified to the Senate Judiciary committee, stating that “Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front have become the most active criminal extremist elements in the United States,” despite acknowledging their “stated operational philosophy discourages acts that harm any animal, human and nonhuman.” He boasted that more than 34 field offices had approximately 190 active investigations associated with ALF and ELF activities. Since then, the FBI has dumped uncountable resources into investigating and infiltrating various animal rights groups, including surveilling a “Vegan Community Project” in Indianapolis, and trying to recruit spies to infiltrate vegan potlucks during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
While the FBI stayed hot on the potluck infiltration ops, right-wing extremism continued to ramp up. Over the last decade, there have been 450 killings committed by “political extremists”. Only 4 percent were attributable to left-wing extremism, while right-wing extremism accounted for a whopping 75 percent. In one notable example, the FBI failed to act on a credible tip that could have prevented the Parkland school shooting. They will, however, follow up any time a lead involves an animal rights podcast.
When the FBI spends its time going after student podcasters, we are reminded of how we got to where we are today. Bipartisan lawmakers quietly pass pro-corporate laws that conflate nonviolence with terror. Those laws quietly sit on the books, deployed against small test cases, until they can be copied and deployed against a broader set of political enemies. The FBI’s inability to dismantle right-wing extremism under previous administrations helped create the current political moment. It’s important to recognize these tactics have been criminalized because they work. Huntingdon Life Sciences was delisted from the NYSE and scrapped for parts. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was shut down. Bans of fur farming and other inhumane practices have been passed around the world. Outside of animal rights, American’s support for the Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestine is at an all-time low. Just as the animal rights movement has created a framework for government crackdown, it can also serve as a roadmap for progressive success.
Such a road starts, perhaps, with an awakening to the reality that the struggles for Palestinian liberation and the environment are the same struggle, inseparably bound—in a way you’re unlikely to learn in an American school or read in an American newspaper. In The Destruction of Palestine Is The Destruction of The Earth (2025) Swedish environmentalist Andreas Malm lays the case: Palestine was the site of the very first use of steam-powered ships in an act of warfare, in 1840, when British ships laid siege to a coastal city there. Since, the war machine and fossil fuel extraction have taken on a cyclical relationship. Gas needs war, war needs gas. Massive amounts of fossil fuels are now required for the US to transport and the Israeli military to drop the bombs that continue to flatten Gaza. The twin simultaneous destructions, of the Earth and Palestine, “play out in broad daylight,” Malm writes:
There is a surfeit of documentation for both. Knowledge of the two processes and how they unfold in real time is superabundant: we know everything we need to know about the catastrophes, and yet the capitalist core keeps rushing fuel to the fireplaces and bombs to Gaza.
The construction of racial colonies and the destruction of the planet, a hand-in-hand partnership. To save Palestine, then, is to also save the planet. In it the enemies are the settler colonial logic of occupation, and the reliance on fossil fuels which makes it logistically possible. Both must be confronted at once.
It’s for this reason, perhaps, that the crackdowns on both environmental/animal rights activists and Palestinian rights activists has been so especially virulent in the United States. As the planet continues to warm, the genocide of Palestine serves as a sickly useful precedent for the mass global paupericide of climate catastrophes past, present and, most importantly, future.
The genocide then curves back on the warming world and reconfirms the expendability and valuelessness of non-white lives: another sine qua non for the continuation of business as usual. It is very good for ExxonMobil and BP that the US and the UK have decided that death of this kind is de rigueur. The advanced late capitalist genocide reproduces ammunition for the paupericide.
It’s the direct threat to this “business as usual” that prompts such outsized crackdowns on these two seemingly disparate types of political engagement. In that way the crackdowns are a confirmation that both are the right buttons to be pressing, ideally at the same exact time.
Greg Opperman is a regular Worcester Sucks contributor. His past writing for Worcester Sucks includes pieces on pedestrian deaths, Candy Mero-Carlson’s workplace harassment, the Mill Street redesign and the 2023 municipal election results. Follow him on Twitter @gopperman or on Bluesky @gopperman.bsky.social
Ok folks that’s it for today! It’s been a light news week locally (knock on wood), and there was no council last night... but all will be covered in the regularly scheduled Worcester Sucks on Sunday.
If you appreciated the above piece there are a number of ways you can show it!
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And if you’re motivated by it, this might be a good event for you to go to on Thursday...
From the description on The Village’s page:
Stop Cop City — Imaginary Crimes Tour!
April 24th, 5PM, 4 King St, Worcester, MA, Outdoor space, wheel chair accessible
The Imaginary Crimes tour is kicking off this month! A nation wide tour discussing state repression of the Stop Cop City fight in Atlanta, GA. 41 people are facing domestic terror charges and 61 face RICO charges, including several locals from Worcester. Come hear about the struggle, anti-repression efforts, and how to keep building the movement in the face of state violence and fear mongering! There will be a short presentation, talks from movement participants and locals facing repression.
The benefit show for Isaac Pineau is on Thursday. See you there if you plan on going. It will be nuts.
Ok talk soon!
Loved this!
Great article! Thanks for the coverage.