Democrats Fallback on ‘Outside Agitator’ Trope to Justify Police Violence

On Wednesday, Jeffries was asked about the NYPD’s excessive use of force against protesters at New York City schools on Tuesday.

There have been no credible accounts of protesters engaging in Anti-semitic activities at Columbia, where the biggest police crackdown took place on Tuesday, and many Jewish students are participating in the protest. However, videos posted on social media that night showed the NYPD fighting with protesters and arresting more than 100.

Earlier this week, Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams has asserted that “outside agitators” hijacked the protest but has so far declined to provide evidence of the charge.

In 2020, former President Donald Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr claimed that the protests surrounding Black Lives Matter protests were coming from “Groups of outside radicals and agitators” who were “exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.”

In 2014, the Ferguson, Missouri unrest over the police killing of Michael Brown, Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, blamed outside agitators. “We continue to worry about folks who are coming in from outside who are using this,” he told local media. The protests were “attracting bad guys across the country,” he added.

“It’s like looting tourism,” An unnamed Ferguson police officer was quoted as saying.

The history goes back further than that. In 1965, in the wake of protests over racial equality and the killing of black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, Alabama Governor George Wallace signed a resolution that blamed “continued agitation and demonstrations led and directed by outsiders.”

Former President Richard Nixon instructed the FBI to find evidence that the Kent State shootings were provoked by outside agitators and was reportedly dismayed when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t find any.

Students at Columbia say the government is using the same tricks today.

Even if some of the protesters are from outside the school or even the State, that would not make them agitators, after all, “outsider” is only half of the moniker. Traveling to protests to support a cause you believe in is a time-honored tradition in the United States, going back at least to the Bonus Army March on Washington in 1932.

That protest, of WWI veterans from around the country asking to receive their bonus pay early, camped out in and around the nation’s capital for months until Republican President Herbert Hoover ordered the army to remove them. Days before, Washington police shot at the protesters, killing two veterans.

According to Historian Howard Zinn, the group was labeled by the media as “Red agitators” and Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur claimed that it was full of “traitors bent on overthrowing the government,” adding that “pacifists and its bedfellow communism are all around us.”

While Hoover was successful in squashing the protest, he lost his reelection bid later that year. In 1933, Congress awarded WWI veterans their bonus, overriding a veto from Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt.

Protesters at Columbia believe their movement has similar resiliency. “There were so many freshmen in the encampment as well as graduating seniors,” the student told Political Misfits, “I am not worried that the graduating class is going to leave any sort of gap. You might know that Admitted Students Day happened on day three of the Columbia encampment, and my conversations with those admitted students were incredibly hopeful.”

“I’m hearing accounts of freshmen saying if I wasn’t radicalized before [the crackdown], I’m radicalized now,” she added later.