As an artist, activist, educator and organizer for nearly two decades, I have assumed since 2016 that I had a file. It is a responsible bet with a century of historical precedent behind it for anyone resisting the US police state (under any president). I’ve avoided assuming, however, that I have ever had anyone assigned to me specifically. Partly because I don’t want to feed into delusions of grandeur, paranoia or overstate the impact of my work. Nor do I want to participate in the myth of the ubiquitous and all-powerful state that the state would like for me to believe in.
More than anything though, since becoming disabled I simply view myself as a less “dangerous” political actor under this regime than its previous iteration or other regimes of the 2000’s. However, this regime is not those regimes, and how dangerous (or not) someone is to an established order—or imagines themselves to be—does not figure into that regime’s calculus. How dangerous you are believed to be is a direct reflection of both how dangerous they think you are and, relatedly, how unstable they know their hold on power to be.
It was a Friday night in early June, and I was reading in a little alcove of a literary café in Oslo. Perhaps fittingly, I was reading the opening chapter on torture in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain which examines not simply torture as a method of control, the corporeal experience of the victim, but also what the use of torture reveals about regimes that employ it.
I was enjoying the work and my espresso when I heard, “you’re a researcher!” I looked up and saw a man about my age, late thirties. He wore a flowing shirt that was not quite a Hawaiian shirt but was close enough. Either overly confident or a little buzzed, he entered the room on the far side with a beer in hand and nothing else. I wasn’t sure if he had been standing there for a while or if he had just walked in, but I was immediately on alert that someone I did not know, with an American accent, initiated a conversation with me in English with a fact about myself.
He was quick to inform me that he was fluent in Norwegian, though would not speak any Norwegian for our entire conversation. In Norway, if you speak Norwegian, you would never address someone in English unless you know they don’t speak Norwegian (I do), prefer English, or are themselves not Norwegian.
I stared at him waiting for him to go on, certain I didn’t know him, and curious why he seemed to know me.
“Have we met?” I finally asked when it was clear he was waiting for me to say something.
“I saw you at the library earlier, you just seem like the type!”
“You’re right, I am a researcher.” I had no problem admitting something about myself both true and easily discoverable online. I studied him and continued, “how’d you guess?” The research rooms were private and required key card access. I’m not based in Oslo so I hadn’t applied. The room I had been working in was a large central room, with rows of long desks in which every chair was filled. The Norwegian university calendar runs through mid-June. That week the library was full of undergraduates and graduate students. Two weeks later I would be one of ten people in room with nearly two-hundred chairs. The likelihood of someone working in the main room being a researcher vs. a student in the first weeks of June were negligible.
“I can just read a person; it’s like a party trick. What are you reading?”
“The body in pain.”
“What do you research? The body? Biologist?” At least he got that wrong. I relaxed slightly. Maybe he was just annoying.
“Cultural historian you could say. More or less. I study violence. From a cultural perspective. Mostly violence, memory and the colonial imagination in both world wars.”
“That make sense. You’re probably an activist? Into social justice?”
“Yep, you’ve got me.”
“I can just tell, you seem like the kind of guy who gives a fuck. Just looking at you, I can tell you give a fuck.” He was getting more excited now and joined me on the couch, asking if he could join me only after he did.
“You’re on fire. I absolutely give a fuck.” I said sizing him up while also growing irritated that my solo reading date had been interrupted.
“I can read people. Super smart, ADHD, probably on the spectrum, probably ran an urban agriculture youth group, worked with homeless kids.” He stared at me for an extra second when he said this, as if he wanted me to know something. And I did. ADHD and ASD are a coin toss these days, being a researcher who used to run an urban agriculture youth program and work in youth shelters are anything but. I wasn’t sure what to say and paused longer than I would have liked.
“See, I can just tell these things. What, you probably taught in the prison system too?” Another one.
“I’ve spent a lot of time working in my community in different roles.” I finally said back, hoping I was in control of my face. His confidence was growing, and he was clearly having a good time with it. Wearing a pair of jeans, Asics and a Carhartt t-shirt, reading alone in a café on a Friday night in Oslo can suggest a few things about a person, but not that much. Certainly not more than a decade of employment and diagnoses. I decided I needed to operate like this guy was an asset on assignment. It felt off even before he started batting .1000. I decided I’d rather be wrong and cautious than right treat it like some kind of serendipitous conversation in which a stranger happens to “know” me. “Man, I used to be like that. I was a big hippy before I became a capitalist.”
“Oh yeah? What do you do now?”
“I work with large language models.” I nodded. “Oh man, there I did it. You probably hate me now.” “So how’d you end up here in Norway? Vacation?” I ignored him. He went on to tell me he had taught at the University of Bergen, that he had lived in Norway for several years. He liked traveling around and picking up languages, living in different places. Was fluent in French, Japanese, Norwegian and Farsi before he pivoted and asked me to tell him more about my research and where I saw myself (and what I saw myself doing) these next few years.
I asked more questions back to him. There was a bit of a power struggle over who was going to ask the questions. Eventually, I capitulated and decided to waste his time talking about French postcards during the First World War. Whether he was an asset or not, he already fucked up my evening, I was at least going to make him listen to one of my hyper fixations, especially as I was behind on preparing for a conference presentation on the very subject later this year. I tried to go uninterrupted, ignoring questions that did not pertain to postcards, visual culture and representation during the First World War. He excitedly engaged, continuing to assert we needed to hang out, and eventually putting his phone in my hand with the new contact page open.
I informed him that I never take my phone with me and so am tough to get ahold of that way. I would give him my email instead. I gave him an email, though of course not mine. Even if he wasn’t a CIA asset, he was annoying. I told him I’d be leaving Oslo later that week but to reach out sometime.
“Oh yeah, where are you going?”
“North. Anyway, it’s getting late, and I have to be up at 4.” I handed him his phone back.
“Wow, 4am?! On a Saturday? What’s the story on that?”
“I like being up at four. It’s quiet.” I smiled exaggeratedly and shook his hand, staring at him for a long time so he knew I knew.
I walked out, went the opposite direction of my rental, and didn’t look back for a few blocks before circling around and walking toward my place.
“There’s no fucking way,” I muttered I said to myself, “no fucking way.” And maybe there wasn’t. And maybe, the assignment was just to let me know they knew where I was (that’s fine, most of the internet does). Perhaps the assignment was to get me talking and make a threat assessment. Maybe it was to build a relationship and this guy—being clearly bad at that—was as low on their list of assets as I am on their list of political threats. Maybe he really was just a smart guy who was good at guessing and bad at socializing and that’s why he ended up at a literary café alone on a Friday night without a book.
When I got home, I began to think about exits, about worst case scenarios, decided I had to find new places to work at the very least. I had been through the Minneapolis uprising in 2020 and the ICE occupation of 2026, had read enough of the history of Black Panthers, McCarthyism and the Cold War. I felt like I had a clear sense of what was possible but also, I realized, likely some unresolved PTSD as well. After connecting with a friend and replaying the experience a few times, however it became clear that changing anything or making any moves was the worst response.
Best case scenario, he wasn’t an asset—I wasn’t about to let a weird interaction feed any delusions. I liked that café. If he was an asset, then the regime was paranoid and wanted me to be paranoid too. Cointel Pro materially degraded and affected several movements between 1956 and 1971. Perhaps no group more than the Black Panthers.
Through assassinations, smear campaigns, infiltration, wrongful arrests, imprisonment and sham trials, Cointel Pro focused its resources and years of practice on every Black Panther Party chapter. As damaging as these material attacks were, however, paranoia sewed within the party was perhaps equally destructive. If the state can’t crack you, then the next best thing is making you believe that they have so you do their work for them.
Distrusting those around you, distrusting yourself, acting unnaturally, operating at high stress in low stress environments, being reactive rather than responsive or proactive, moving with constant suspicion, interpreting all internal disagreements, dissent or ideological differences as “proof” that someone is the “the feds” are the kinds of things that paranoia cultivate and the very things that kill movements regardless of the size, scope or the stakes. I decided I was returning to the café the next day. If he was there, he was there. If he was an asset or not, I was not going to allow discernment and intention to balloon into paranoia. There is too much work to be done and too many means by which the work needs to be carried out.
At the same time, I also decided the time where it is safe to downplay how worthy a target I was had come and gone. You, me, any of us, are as worthy a target as they think we might be. I came fully to terms with the fact that I did not have the privilege to make a threat assessment of myself for myself. Something that I’ve always known intellectually was now something I had to know in my body. It was not my politic and understanding of power that was interpreting me or my work. It was theirs.
In the opening paragraph of The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes,
“In the very processes it [torture] uses to produce pain within the body of prisoners, it bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body . . . The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.”
Mass surveillance is the intelligence wing of an authoritarian regime. Torture, even while it posits as a mode of intelligence gathering, is a performance. The body of the victim: a stage on which that performance is acted out. Each asserts total control and total domination. And yet, foundational to assertions of total control and absolute power is a deep paranoia of the state. The Trump administration is deeply anxious. Total control is only asserted when you know you do not have it.
The right (and the Democratic establishment to be sure) is increasingly worried about the lifeline of capitalism and the existing hegemonic order in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s win last November. That Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio’s statements last week and the convening of 60 nations to discuss the “Left-Wing” threat should come weeks after a wave of primary wins by Democratic Socialists is not a coincidence.
DSA, winning through democratic means, highlights the regime’s instability and “demands” their inclusion in the maligned “radical left,” “antifa,” “anticapitalist,” “Far-Left Terrorists,” “Marxists,” “communists,” and “anarchists.” Such is this necessary groundwork for interference with mid-term elections and the eventual criminalization of political parties. These are the strategies of regimes governed by paranoia and instability, not those guided by total control.
Instability should not be read as facile, however. An unstable empire is a dangerous one. The state wants all of us to know it’s reach is unlimited. And its reach is long. However, it is this very assertion of limitlessness that reveals they have nowhere else to go. When authoritarian regimes collapse, they collapse because of overreach, internally or externally. They overextend themselves politically, materially and narratively. The tension on the line becomes too great and snaps.
On the other hand, when movements against these regimes collapse, they often collapse due to similar dynamics. Paranoia cultivated by real or imagined encounters leads to cutting off potential alliances, undermining existing alliances, and interpreting internal dissent as infiltration. The tension between relations, organizations, and collectives becomes too great and it snaps.
This government has run its propaganda machine with such fanaticism that they’ve become paranoid by their own program. They more they are unable walk the line between discernment and paranoia, more we need to be able to so as to not to replicate their world for them
And as I walk that line perhaps, as I’ve said, this meeting in Oslo was all just a weird coincidence amplified by personal experiences on the ground and my understanding of history. But after the May 2026 USCT-Strategy document, the Cuba Report, and Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio’s statements which read as carbon copies of the Third Reich’s Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, the HUAC trials, and McCarthyism, we also can no longer brush such interactions aside as mere coincidences.
The evidence is plentiful and the political context which gives that evidence meaning is present. And still, the work continues. And that work—in so many ways—has always boiled down to who gets to dictate the terms of discourse and action, who asks the questions, and who gets to assert the answers.
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