The FBI is spying on a Chicago bookstore because it’s hosting “extremists.”
In FBI documents recently acquired by Unicorn Riot, a left-leaning independent media outlet, Chicago’s worker-owned Pilsen Community Books was said to be a meeting place for “anarchist violent extremists, or ‘AVEs,’ environmental violent extremists, or ‘EVEs’ and pro-abortion extremists.”
As worker-owner Mandy Medley told Unicorn Riot, though:
We’re open to the public, open to the community. Everything is very much out there in terms of what we believe and what we do. I was shocked that the FBI would be interested in us this way.
As ridiculous as it all sounds, the 30-page FBI document goes on to cite leftist “planning and networking” and mentions a May 2022 incident in which a “Mexican American female state trooper was told to leave the store.”
The report is also concerned about Chicago-area anti-cop protests related to the Atlanta resistance movement against “Cop City”
A group in Atlanta, Georgia Defend the Atlanta Forests (DTAF) is a very violent group that used IIDs, IEDs, arson, personal injury devices, and sabotage to construction equipment to stop construction on public park land in Atlanta. Chicago has very similar construction projects and DTAF members came to Chicago to provide training to like-minded individuals. A spinoff group of DTAF was formed in Chicago called Chicago Against Cop City.
As for those terrifying “pro-abortion extremists”? As Medley points out:
It’s really creepy that they call a bunch of socialist feminists who are painting signs and banners for a rally that [Governor] Pritzker spoke at “anti-abortion extremists.”
Don’t hold your breath for the Republican outcry about needless government spending on the frivolous surveillance of American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
