In the summer of 2020, federal law enforcement launched a broad, and until now, secret strategy to infiltrate racial justice groups.

As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.

it's another right-wing smear job to deligitimise what "may be the largest movement in U.S. history, as four polls suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations"

The attack has been made in recent weeks by Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer; Ben Carson, Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development; conservative talk show host Mark Levin; and PragerU, which has more than 4 million Facebook followers.

Black Lives Matter’s "emphatic support for gender identity politics sets it apart from historical Marxism," and the goals listed on its website "do not appear to be expressly anti-capitalist, which would arguably be a Marxist identifier," Berman added.

"I am fairly convinced these are mostly attempts to smear anti-racist activists. I think in some media, ‘Marxist’ is dog-whistle for something horrible, like ‘Nazi’, and thus enables to delegitimize/dehumanize them," Miriyam Aouragh, a lecturer at the London-based Westminster School of Media and Communication, told PolitiFact.

Black Lives Matter "is not an organization, but a fluid movement; it doesn’t actually matter if one of its founders was a liberal, Marxist, socialist or capitalist."

"I am not sad that Black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable but eminently desirable. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely... radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced... Today's dissenters tell the complacent majority that the time has come when further evasion of social responsibility in a turbulent world will court disaster and death. America has not changed because so many don't think it need change." - Martin Luther King Jr., "A Testament of Hope," 1969

has the silent majority only grown and become more complacent since?

It was only when these attempts at drawing attention to systemic problems failed that demonstrators rose up in violence, including in modern-day Baltimore and Charlotte.

"I was one of the ones who started the peaceful protests … the first seven days [after Gray's death], when it was fine and dandy," William Stewart, a West Baltimore resident who didn't participate in the riots, told Jenée Desmond-Harris for Vox. "I walked about 101 miles in peace. But if you protest peacefully, they don't give a shit."

"This is one of the greatest ironies. People would say that this kind of level of upheaval in the streets and this kind of chaos in the streets is counterproductive," Thompson said. "The fact of the matter is that it was after every major city in the urban north exploded in the 1960s that we get the first massive probe into what was going on — known as the Kerner Commission."