It appears that agitators are trying to incite confrontations with federal law enforcement that could result in protesters being harmed or even killed, in order to generate outrage and support for their cause.
It’s a sick story. It sounds outrageous. But it’s true, and everything old is new again.
I saw it forty years ago and testified about it to Congress. Today we see again: the flashpointing of American citizens as part of a political strategy to have people shot and killed in order to incite the public against a president and his policies.
The recent deaths of two Minneapolis protesters reminded me of what I learned as a 24-year-old in the mid-1980s infiltrating radical groups—just as people in their 20s do today.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., speaks as fellow members of the House Homeland Security Committee look on during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington, DC, to discuss the murder of Renee Nicole Good. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Revolutionaries and insurgents create or exploit flashpoints in the expectation that some of their followers will be killed. Journalist Cam Higby reported on this in Minneapolis. They need martyrs to stoke or stoke public anger.
Faced with professionally organized provocations and stressors, it was inevitable that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents would throw themselves into circumstances that domestic extremists had created to provoke media outrage.
Revolutionaries call it ‘armed propaganda’.
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After activist Benjamin Linder was murdered in Portland, Oregon, Nicaragua by U.S.-backed resistance fighters, or contras, against the Soviet Union-backed Sandinista regime in 1987, the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs held a hearing.
Linder was armed with an AK-47 at the time of his death. Sympathizers portrayed him as a peaceful humanitarian. I was called as a witness.
“For two years,” I testified, a group called Witness for Peace (WfP) “had anticipated the assassination of an American citizen by the contras so that they could use his death for political propaganda.” They wanted someone like Benjamin Linder to die.”
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That was hard to say, not only because it sounded so outrageous, but because I was sitting in the congressional hearing room with Linder’s parents.
The Linders were lifelong radicals from Portland. They supported North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against American forces. The mother was the local leader of a group that collaborated with active Soviet measures against the United States. They raised their son Benjamin to put themselves in mortal danger.
Faced with professionally organized provocations and stressors, it was inevitable that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents would throw themselves into circumstances that domestic extremists had created to provoke media outrage.
My impression was that they looked less like grieving parents and more like mourners for a fallen comrade.
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As students and afterwards, my friends and I had infiltrated and exposed groups supporting the Central American communists across the country. I also worked with the Nicaraguan resistance fighters against the Sandinistas.
At the hearing, I gave my eyewitness account, plus secondary reports, of how American militant leaders wanted US-backed forces to kill some of their benefactor allies.
Revolutionary uprisings require martyrs who outrage and inspire.
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“It is clear that the leaders of Witness for Peace are aware of the military role they play in Central America,” I testified.
“During one of my trips with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) resistance in 1985, I asked several commanders and fighters whether the presence of Americans had any effect on their ability to fight the Sandinista army,” I said in my testimony. “The response was positive: the FDN fighters were afraid to hurt Americans who worked with the Sandinistas for fear of a backlash from public opinion in the United States.”
At a 1995 Witness for Peace meeting in Boulder, Colorado, I learned that the group planned to expand its activities to El Salvador, only to end it three days later when its guerrilla friends murdered four off-duty U.S. Marines and two other Americans.
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I testified that at a later meeting in New York we heard “that some of the group’s leaders privately expressed the hope that some of their activists in Nicaragua would be shot by the resistance. If a Witness for Peace activist were killed, they reasoned, American public opinion would turn against the contras.”
Alex Pretti was seen on video days before he was shot in a separate incident. (The News Movement and Michael Pretti/AP)
The Boston Globe quoted another WfP activist, a lawyer from Bangor, Maine, as saying, “Some of us must die” at the hands of US-backed forces. “When some of us die, we bring the matter to the attention of our fellow countrymen in a very personal way,” he said. “If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.”
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With Linder’s death, I told Congress, American radicals “finally had a martyr.” They got their interviews on television. They had their hearing in Congress. They got their wish.”
That brings us back to Minneapolis today. America must face the fact that organizers are there to enrage, demoralize, and manipulate us all. They don’t care about the human consequences.
