Yes, sadly this is a common tactic by the incumbent corruption (politicians, corporations, otherwise) to make the protestors seem dangerous. Nothing new, but maybe it hasn’t been exposed at home as much as it has been abroad.
There is no need to bring in agent provocateurs in this day and age. Both anti-fa and fa are a bunch of meth heads looking for an excuse to bash someone's head in. They are perfectly happy to start violence if the police doesn't actively stop them.
I think the claim isn't that agent provocateurs don't exist, it's that jumping to it as first explanation is lazy and slightly cranky. Just because the government has killed civil rights activists in the past, doesn't mean the next civil rights activist who dies was a government assassination.
I'm an antifascist and not a meth head. Nearly every protest I've been to has been peaceful. Sometimes the cops try to instigate violence by kettling or shoving people around really aggressively, but well trained protest leaders have people prepped for this and push hardline pacifism - well all know what happens when the cops "get the green light."
There was similar in Oakland, some white kids from who tf knows where were trying to break windows, and everyone around was shouting for them to fuck off and knock it off.
Agent provocateurs are going to become more and more necessary to "justify" the violence against protesters as protesters become more educated on pacifist strategies.
The Anarchist Cookbook (new version) https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html is free to read and gets into the effectiveness of peaceful protest and direct action, and the counter-effectiveness of violence.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline takes a slightly different perspective, analyzing the possible necessity of extremely limited, targeted destruction of property, that strives to be completely disassociated from the greater movement so that the benefits of the destruction (such as disrupted oil supply, plus attention) can be combined with the opportunity for the greater movement to condemn the action.
To use a real world example: of the three men that were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse all were felons with extensive records of drug use and prison terms for everything from domestic violence, statutory rape to false imprisonment.
If you randomly shoot at a anti-fa rally and hit 100% meth heads and felons there's an issue with anti-fa rallies.
Fascinating. So in his mission to hunt and kill pedophiles, he managed to kill one while in a crowd, leading to everyone thinking he was an active shooter, which led to him then killing someone else who thought they were stopping an active shooter (which, to be fair, he was), and then shooting someone else who also thought they were stopping an active shooter.
Seems only one of the three people shot was a pedophile. That's ok, though, 1/3 is certainly a majority, I agree with you, it indicates that basically everyone at the protest was a pedophile. Except Kyle and his friend. And anyway, the other person killed had a criminal record of violence - I wonder how Kyle was able to identify that when he shot him in the middle of the crowd? We could potentially leverage this technique in a new machine vision model. Luckily Kyle killed him before he could commit more crimes. Once someone commits a crime, they might commit more, and should be shot by unelected strangers without a trial.
As for the third, a notorious anti-cop creep that would frequently get arrested for doing weird things like photographing police stations and the cars parked there. Degenerate behavior, he's lucky police never harass and frequently arrest those weirdo first amendment audit types. If they did, there would be obvious signs, such as a huge list of overturned convictions and dismissed court cases. Anyway the guy was probably a pedophile, because the first guy was.