By Ryan Fatica and Dan Feidt
Chicago, IL – The owner-workers of Pilsen Community Books acknowledge that their store is “very cute.” A vintage typewriter holds a signboard featuring a quote that’s both intellectually stimulating and heart-warming. A repurposed mid-century card catalog cabinet holds a collection of vintage mass market paperbacks. Tarot decks with charming wood-cut illustrations and a caterpillar tote bag featuring an anti-police slogan greet the socially conscious shoppers.
But don’t be deceived. At least according to the FBI, there’s more to this bookstore than good vibes and book release events with the latest left-wing author. Beneath the cute exterior, feds insist, a group of “violent extremists” are “planning and networking.”
“That’s news to us!” said Mandy Medley, one of the owner-workers of the store, when told that the FBI believes her store to be a hotbed for terror plots and “pro-abortion extremists.”
Nearly 30 pages of FBI documents obtained by Unicorn Riot reveal a pattern of monitoring of Pilsen Community Books, a worker-owned and collectively managed bookstore in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.
In language reminiscent of the Red Scare, cubicle-lurking FBI intelligence analysts wrote in their reports that the store is used by “anarchist violent extremists,” or “AVEs,” “environmental violent extremists,” or “EVEs” and “pro-abortion extremists.” (While the reports talk about a “source,” importantly, there is no evidence included of physical surveillance.)
Medley and the other worker-owners of the store don’t hide that the space is sometimes used as a gathering point for leftist politics. “We’re open to the public, open to the community,” said Medley. “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.”
One thing that appears to have caught the FBI’s attention is what Medley describes as a “sign-painting event” that happened in the store in the lead up to a public demonstration in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs.
“Pro-abortion extremists used the PCB to prepare for a pro-abortion direct action, according to the same source,” the document reads, apparently referring to a confidential informant. Although the exact number is unknown, the FBI maintains a roster of at least 15,000 informants, or “confidential human sources” (CHS) in FBI-speak, some of whom are paid as much as $100,000 per case to spy on people.
“It’s really creepy that they call a bunch of socialist feminists who are painting signs and banners for a rally that Pritzker spoke at ‘anti-abortion extremists,’” said Medley, referring to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who was one of the speakers at the June 24 rally.
“Here’s the thing about PCB—we absolutely do support community organizing (and we are unapologetically leftists),” said Medley, “but community organizing is not illegal, and should not be treated as such.”
The FBI, however, has a long history of investigating community organizing as potentially threatening behavior. Over the course of its more than 100 year history, the FBI has demonstrated a near-obsession with anarchists, leftists, and communists and have aggressively pursued their “enemies” without concern for whether the activities they are investigating are legal or not. (A few other cases of FBI surveillance in Chicago are included below.)
U.S. presidents have ordered the FBI to “persecute pacifists as well as terrorists; they targeted the heroes of the civil rights movement along with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote historian Tim Weiner in Enemies, his monumental history of the FBI. At the direction of US Presidents, “the Bureau has violated the freedoms of the Bill of Rights to enforce the president’s powers as commander in chief.”
[Photo collage by Dan Feidt]
Leave a Reply