THE "PROFESSIONAL OUTSIDE AGITATORS" DELUSION IS A LOT LIKE TRUMP'S BIG LIE

Eric Adams, the nominally Democratic mayor of New York, believes that "outside agitators" bear a great deal of responsibility for the pro-Gaza protests on colleges campuses in the city. On Fox News (naturally), a deputy commissioner of the city's police department delivered the city's official line on this issue:

NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard to Neil: "We're very confident that we know that these, outside agitators and influences were present and, will continue to be present at these protests." pic.twitter.com/PKwKAdFyu8

— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) May 2, 2024

CAVUTO: ... You have no doubt that some of what you picked up and saw shows that there are outside agitators involved. How would you know?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER SHEPPARD: Absolutely. So, some are self-identified on social media. We recognize them from the past and some of the protests they've attended before. But also, when we look at the arrests and we run histories of some of the people we arrested, we see some of them who have participated in some protests, in some of the actions that they've participated in before. And so we're very confident that we know that these outside agitators and influencers were present and will continue to be present at these protests.

So Sheppard can identify some of these "outside agitators and influencers" because they're among the arrestees, right? Gosh darn it, he can't.

SHEPPARD: But make no mistake: They may not be swept up in an arrest. These are professionals. They get a heads-up when we're starting to tac up and get ready to go into these schools, and they may just fly in for a day or two and leave. But their job is --

CAVUTO: So they could be coming from way outside --

"They could be coming from way outside" is a dog whistle to the Fox audience, one that's instantly understood to mean They could be trained terrorists who crossed over Biden's open border so they can destroy America.

SHEPPARD: Many times --

CAVUTO: And they go from protest to protest, or spark one --

SHEPPARD: Absolutely. You'll see them travel around the country. And they have funding. They are funded by private individuals around the world sometimes who --

So that's the Conspiracy So Vast part of this argument. Here's the brainwashing part:

CAVUTO: But how do they get the students involved, then? Do they gun them on, or -- What's their role?

SHEPPARD: Yeah, it's propaganda, it's social media, it's -- the student are already passionate and upset about an issue and now you have a person whispering in your ear that "Hey," you know, "we should take over the building," or something like that. It's -- when young minds are in that state, it's pretty easy to then be influenced by somebody who is a professional at manipulation.

This is so ridiculous that even The New York Times isn't buying it:

One of the people arrested at Columbia University this week was a middle-aged saxophonist who headed up to the campus from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment after learning about the protests on social media.

Another was tending his sidewalk pepper patch a few blocks from the student demonstrations when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students’ aid.

A third had been active in other left-leaning protests across the city but also happened to work as a nanny nearby. She went to the university gates on Tuesday and linked arms with other protesters in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the advancing officers, she said.

... Mayor Eric Adams and other city leaders have accused so-called outside agitators — professional organizers with no ties to the university — of hijacking a peaceful student protest and spurring its participants to adopt ever more aggressive tactics.

... A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country....

But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.

There was little evidence to suggest they had helped organize or escalate the protests, and many were arrested without having ever set foot on campus. Typical among them was Matthew Cavalletto, a 52-year-old computer programmer who has lived within a half-mile of Columbia for most of his life. Mr. Cavalletto, the gardener with the dog bowl, was arrested on the street outside Columbia after he stood in the middle of the intersection and refused to budge. He dismissed the notion that any outsiders were pulling the strings.

“I sort of had to laugh because I guess you could think of me as an outside agitator,” Mr. Cavalletto said. “Not that far outside, like six blocks away, but, you know, almost outside.”

Here's a photo of Cavaletto:

He doesn't exactly look like a guy who's living large on globally sourced payments from Big Unrest.

What Sheppard and Cavuto say reminds of the way Donald Trump and others talk about the 2020 election. There couldn't possibly have been 81 million legitimate votes for Joe Biden! It's unimaginable that anyone would prefer Biden to Trump! Professional vote fakers and vote tally manipulators must be responsible!

Similarly, no one would actually want to do what the students are doing now. Professionals must have brainwashed them!

Trump generally argues that some (most?) of Biden's votes in 2020 were fake, but he argued for brainwashing in his speech to donors at Mar-a-Lago yesterday:

“When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40 percent because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat.”

It's just unimaginable to these people that anyone would freely make a decision to act in a way they wouldn't act. Only bribery explains a vote for a Democrat.

You don't have to be an ignoramus like Trump, Adams, or Sheppard to think this way. Here's the Very Smart public intellectual George Packer explaining in The Atlantic why the students are revolting -- it's because the unrest of 1968 turned colleges into brainwashing factories:

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The students can't help themselves! These malign instincts have been inculcated in them!

(I was Class of 1980. I'm not sure why this never happened to us.)

There's hardly an inch of daylight between the very smart George Packer and our not-very-bright mayor:

On a local Fox News channel, Adams was asked to provide firm details but instead gave an analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50 bad professors speaking to 50 students.”

He added that “if it’s one, if it’s two, it’s 20, that is what we need to be focusing on”.

It's the evil professors! It's the international cabal of outside agitators! It can't possibly be that the kids have actually thought about the issues involved and arrived at their own conclusions.