Boston’s Great Molasses Flood happened 100 years ago this month. While the cause of the accident turned out to be a faulty tank and warmer than average temperatures, initially reports blamed sinister anarchists intent on violence. A recent Federal Bureau of Investigation report on “Anarchist Extremism” shows just how little things have changed.

While a not-insignificant percentage of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities under Director J. Edgar Hoover were driven by personal vendettas, few were as well-known – or as publicly vicious – as Hoover’s feud with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. That clash quite literally came to a head on December 1, 1964, when, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, Hoover invited King to FBI headquarters for their first - and only - face to face meeting, captured in a ten-page memo in King’s file.

Throughout the ’60s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s infamous COINTELPRO operations targeted what it called “Black Nationalist Hate Groups,” for surveillance, infiltration, and ultimately, disruption. It was to that end in March 1968 that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to the New York field office, authorizing the use of the Bureau’s secret weapon against the Nation of Islam: the zine.

A recently released Federal Bureau of Investigation file shows that months after the public pressured the Bureau to pull out of an event sponsored by anti-Muslim group ACT for America, the FBI secretly initiated a liaison with the organization.

Documents from Homeland Security-run fusion centers in California, Kentucky, and Nevada indicate that law enforcement often over-focuses on Antifa other leftist-aligned groups while downplaying the threat of white supremacist violence.