At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in August 2000, police raided the puppet-making warehouse on the word of state-police infiltrators — arresting seventy-five people for assembling street theater — and swept up more than four hundred others in the streets. Prosecutors then did something new: they charged organizers as ringleaders and asked for bail designed to incapacitate. Ruckus Society director John Sellers was held on $1 million bail on misdemeanor charges; organizer Kate Sorensen faced $1 million as well; young activist Camilo Viveiros was charged with assaulting the police commissioner and faced decades in prison.

The cases collapsed at a rate exceeding ninety-five percent — Viveiros was acquitted in 2004 after eyewitnesses contradicted the police account — and civil suits followed. But the R2K prosecutions marked the tactical frontier the next two decades would inhabit: infiltration of art spaces, conspiracy theories built on organizing itself, ruinous bail as pretrial punishment, and charges calibrated to consume a movement's resources regardless of verdict — the direct ancestor of the J20 prosecution seventeen years later.