From Palestine to Atlanta, Outside and Foreign

Other Outside Agitators: Forest Defenders in Atlanta, Georgia

Politicians, elected officials, and law enforcement framing progressive movements and activists as foreign agents or provocateurs is not new. Used since slavery to dismiss, criminalize, and brutalize dissenters,^[10] the “outside agitator” trope became a mainstream fixture in American politics in response to the growing internationalist Third Worldist and U.S. Civil Rights Movements of the 1950 and 1960s.^[11] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was famously accused of being an outside agitator for his work in Birmingham, Alabama. King responded to these allegations in “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

Sixty years later, King’s words remain as relevant as ever. 

In 2023, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) accused Stop Cop City activists of being “outside agitators,” “violent agitators,” and charged them with domestic terrorism^[13] to undermine the grassroots movement’s years-long effort to prevent construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center^[14]—a massive police training center known colloquially as “Cop City”—on protected forest land. Georgia’s Attorney General, Chris Carr, used the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) law—typically used to punish organized crime—to charge 61 people for acts that included organizing mutual aid funds, distributing flyers, and serving as a protest observer.^[15] An APD statement claimed that on March 5, 2023, a “group of violent agitators used the cover of a peaceful protest” to destroy construction equipment and throw stones, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at law enforcement.^[16] Police detained 35 “agitators” (in their words), 23 of whom were charged with domestic terrorism, and subsequently doxxed them by posting the protesters’ mugshots and their states of residence, proof that they were, indeed, “outside agitators.” 

At a June 5, 2023, Atlanta City Council meeting, activists addressed this “outside agitator” accusation while taking on the city’s attempts to delegitimize their movement and push through Cop City’s construction without public accountability. Melina Abdullah, an academic-activist from Los Angeles who co-founded Black Lives Matter’s L.A. chapter, stood before the city council and proclaimed, “I am what you would call an outside agitator.” She continued: 

In reclaiming the “outside agitator” label, Abdullah rooted Stop Cop City in a history of Black struggles for collective liberation while recognizing that what happens in Atlanta—or any city—does not remain there. Abdullah and other activists heard the Forest Defenders’ plights, made personal sacrifices, and traveled across the country to organize against the new police training facility and the dangers it poses for their wider communities.

Despite their attempts to reclaim it, protesters like Abdullah recognize the “outside agitator” label’s deadly implications while continuing to struggle for freedom. After listing examples of the violence that law enforcement had inflicted on Cop City protesters, Abdullah continued, “You have literally stolen lives!” She was referring to the assassination of Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán, a Venezuelan environmental activist who law enforcement framed as an agitator who exchanged fire with police, despite having their hands up when the police shot them with 57 bullets.^[18] Invoking those who were arrested and charged, Abdullah proclaimed, “When you are claiming prisoners of war—war has been declared on us! And we will fight back!” 

Dissent During Volatile Democratic Transitions

While framing activists as outside agitators is not new, what is new is how U.S. liberals and some progressives within the Democratic Party—and not only the openly exclusionary or repressive Far Right—are pushing a new wave of political repression. Pelosi’s call for the FBI to investigate protesters and their funding can be understood as part of this effort to empower the FBI, the Department of Justice, and other law enforcement agencies to target political dissenters through domestic and foreign terrorism laws and anti-protest legislation. By limiting opportunities to mobilize and silencing dissent, prosecutors and law enforcement use such laws to neutralize and disrupt movements for justice. 

Like authoritarian leaders and governments in Egypt and India,^[19] Pelosi employs rhetoric used to quell mass mobilizations by criminalizing dissent and justifying state violence against protesters. These actions will further centralize state power^[20] at a time when most Americans already have “unfavorable views” of Republicans, Democrats, and Congress,^[21] and Biden’s approval rating sits at a low 38 percent.^[22] It is a historic moment. Amid widespread dissent, established political parties and institutions are experiencing a legitimacy crisis. To save itself, the state, its institutions, and its collaborators will do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo—that is, to ensure that the state has power and the people it represents do not.

While Pelosi turns to the FBI to repress progressive dissent, MAGA Republicans have turned against the FBI and Department of Justice. Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Jim Jordan, and Marjorie Taylor Greene want to defund both federal law enforcement agencies for investigating them and members of their constituencies.^[23] Regardless of which party pushes or pulls at these institutions, their politicization indicates that both parties are now using authoritarian tools to maintain their power in the face of democratic challenges from below and within to their legitimacy—whether it’s dissent from their constituents or institutional attempts to hold them accountable for wrongdoings. 

Power Struggles Between Institutions and Communities 

Amid such political repression, organizers have developed strategic campaigns to voice dissent. Muslim and Arab American organizers urged community members and progressives to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference”^[24] during the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan,^[25] Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Minnesota, among other states, to protest Biden’s enabling of genocide against their people and relatives overseas, to push for a permanent ceasefire, and stop U.S. aid to Israel. 

The Uncommitted movement’s success in these states has prompted some “vote blue no matter who” Democrats to call up fears of a second Trump term and preemptively blame protest voters for potential harm to other vulnerable communities. They position Arab and Muslim Americans within the “outside agitator” narrative for caring for those outside the imperial core. This framing criminalizes and demonizes diasporic communities impacted by the Global War on Terror—historically marginalized communities that the Democratic party needs to secure the 2024 election.

If anything, government leaders and police invoke the foreign, outside agitator to deflect critiques of structural injustices, systems, and dynamics, offsetting the state’s responsibility for violence onto racialized communities such as Arabs, who have long been portrayed as “ambiguous insiders”^[26] in U.S. media and politics. Pelosi asking the FBI to investigate calls for a ceasefire over spurious allegations of foreign funding thus threatens the party’s constituencies and endangers people who have experienced FBI harassment.

Politicians like Pelosi thus justify increasing law enforcement powers and funding to repress dissent while diverting attention from their political failures. When the outside agitator narrative is activated, social and political movements must reexamine their strategies to meaningfully dissent from harmful policies and build power since, as Abdullah said, “war has been declared on us.” 

While organizing over the last four years against Atlanta’s Cop City, activists have encountered police violence and faced numerous serious charges;^[27] testified for over 13 hours to Atlanta City Council;^[28] petitioned for referendum votes;^[29]; and been detained and physically harassed during SWAT-like raids,^[30] with limited success for their efforts. Similarly, Palestine solidarity activists have been brutalized by law enforcement^[31] and counterprotesters with unknown chemical agents^[32] and guns;^[33] doxxed by Zionist organizations;^[34] fired from their jobs;^[35] arrested for protesting in elected officials’ offices;^[36] and in the case of Representative Rashida Tlaib, censured by her House colleagues for using the phrase “from the river to the sea” on social media.^[37] How can activists organize and mobilize movements if they are maligned and criminalized for every way they dissent? 

Outside, Yet Together

When politicians, elected officials, and law enforcement frame dissenters as foreign, outside agitators, they inadvertently reveal how struggles and movements for justice are interconnected. Indeed, what we see from the state’s response to Stop Cop City protesters and Palestine solidarity activists is how interconnected these movements are politically, economically, socially, and environmentally. Atlanta—a city that lies at the intersections of multiple movements—is a site for experiments in surveillance and policing before this infrastructure is exported nationally and internationally.^[38] This is why Palestinian movements and Muslim and Arab groups impacted by the Global War on Terror have expressed solidarity with the Forest Defenders^[39] and vice versa, as organizers connect the dots between U.S. settler colonialism, Israel’s military assault on Palestinians, and anti-Black policing.^[40] These groups have seemingly different demands, yet their worldviews exist in an abolitionist framework that threatens status quo institutions and structures. These “outside/foreign agitators” challenge the legitimacy of authoritarian actors at a time when American democracy is at a crossroads: the U.S. either radically transforms into a multiracial, just democracy, or it descends further into White supremacist authoritarianism. 

This struggle does not begin or conclude with the 2024 elections—it’s part of a global struggle against fascism and authoritarianism. And in this struggle, outside agitators aren’t entirely outside—they’re in growing solidarity with one another.