Category: Political Repression

• The Palmer Raids False Flag

  The Palmer Raids False Flag theory held that the package bombs mailed to officials in April 1919 and the larger June 1919 bombings were not truly the work of anarchists, but were staged, manipulated, or knowingly exploited by the Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice to create public fear and justify a crackdown on radicals, immigrants, and labor activism. The historical record shows that the bombings and their aftermath had a major impact on the expansion of federal anti-radical operations, and contemporary investigators linked the attacks to Italian anarchist networks associated with Luigi Galleani. The theory arose because the bombings so neatly preceded and energized the logic of the Palmer Raids that some critics came to see them as a manufactured pretext rather than a genuine attack wave.