There are people who look at every expression of truly populist, left-wing direct action, and reflexively say, “false flag”.

Particularly when it’s illegal, liberals specifically but lots of kinds of people, will want to say, “Well, that’s exactly what the powerful people want to have happen, isn’t it?” This is a pessimism in everyday people that is effective only in paralyzing. This is a skepticism of regular human agency that becomes itself magical thinking: “I don’t believe people can do disruptive or dangerous things; only the secret cabal can do it and pretend it’s someone else.”

In the 19th century, slavers blamed secret abolitionists around them when enslaved people revolted against them (plus, toward the end, any random fires in their town). “Enslaved people hate slavery and want to be free” was not possible for slavers to hold in their head. The personal agency of tortured and abused human beings could not be considered whatsoever.

You also had structured, elitist paranoias like the Freemasons or the Illuminati, and by the end of the 19th century, those sort of global, hierarchical conspiracies grafted themselves onto the traditional European antisemitism to produce “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”-style conspiracist fantasy antisemitism that is still with us today and seeps into everything.

(Indeed, you even see this with people on the left crediting the CIA as being supernaturally competent and gifted at controlling world events or domestic unrest rather than the agency often being completely incompetent, absurd, or taken by surprise and then trying to take credit for things. “Impossible that some people are legitimately upset at their own government and chose to act. Must’ve been the USA tricking and instigating them.” This is not accurate or helpful.)

Now, as criticism for other people’s direct actions, “I wouldn’t do that” or “that seems counterproductive” are fine thoughts to have. All people are dipshits, all of us some of the time, some of us all of the time; we all do dipshit stuff. And powerful people will take every opportunity for advantage that they can. That’s the whole point of power: having advantages always.

But if it really were so pointless and hopeless, why would they be investing so much in propaganda? If there really were no point in resistance because those in control know were so strong and already controlled every single thing that happens and can happen, why all the money for the military, paramilitaries, cops, prisons, and concentration camps?

The right wing is not feigning its panic when it sees people show up and act. The reactionaries are not pretending at being frightened. The ones against you are brittle and stretched thin and hoping no one realizes their weaknesses to test them enough to reveal it.

Parties that exist to win elections and candidates who want to preserve power to take their turn at wielding it won’t test this, no. But you could, can, will.

Find the Potemkin village relevant to you. Push on it. Knock it over.

You do not need to call your elected official. You do not need to join your vanguard party.

You, yes you, are terrifying to those who want you to assume that the only thing that happens is what powerful people want to have happen.

Imagine instead that anything you can do can happen.

Then go be the “someone should do it” you want to see in the world.