The ‘Outside Agitator’ Trope

by dap | May 6, 2024 | CNN, Fox News, NPR, Outside The Beltway

I received some pushback in yesterdays’ “Campus Crackdowns Escalate ” post for my assertion

Talk of “outside agitators” is almost always a distraction. While there are indeed people who glom on to existing protests and try to egg on violence, it’s just absurd to think that this is happening at two dozen or so campuses across the country.

So let’s unpack that a bit. There’s a quotation from the late historian-activist Howard Zinn dating to 1971:

When students begin to defy established authority it often appears to besieged administrators that “someone must be behind this,” the implication being that young people are incapable of thinking or acting on their own. 

CNN’s Harmeet Kaur wrote a piece Monday “Examining the long history of the ‘outside agitator’ narrative.”

As university administrators and law enforcement crack down on campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, they’re invoking a familiar trope: the “outside agitator.”

[…]

In these instances, and others, authorities have not offered many specifics about who the “outside agitators” are, how significant their numbers are or how they differentiated outsiders from university-affiliated protesters.

Large-scale social movements can certainly be vulnerable to groups who seek to capitalize on the chaos for their own ends, said Aldon Morris, a professor emeritus of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University. But time and again, authorities have leveled the broad accusation of “outside agitators” to undermine or stifle protests.

“The notion here is that student protests aren’t really legitimate because the claim is they are being taken over by outside agitators who are violent, anti-government, anti-democracy and so forth,” Morris told CNN.

The use of the term is nuanced. This time around, city officials, university administrators and supporters of the student protesters have all cited “outside agitators” as people who are trying to hijack the protests for their own means. But whether the person using the phrase is trying to quell the protests or defend them, it’s not always clear who these “outside agitators” are, and whether they can be classed as such in the first place.

“It seems to me that the ‘outside agitator’ claim is one to shift the focus away from the grievances of the students and their protest,” Morris said.

You don’t have to look far back in history to find examples of the “outside agitator” narrative.

During a speech at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, then-President Donald Trump characterized the demonstrations occurring nationwide as being overrun with professional anarchists, violent mobs and other left-wing groups. As he spoke, police forcibly dispersed peaceful protesters outside the White House gates with tear gas, flash grenades and rubber bullets — a move that resulted in uproar and prompted a lawsuit from a coalition of civil rights groups.

While there were some reports of people with extremist ties showing up at protests, an Associated Press review of court documents published in October found that most of those who were arrested or charged at the time didn’t appear to be linked to highly organized extremist groups. Many of them, the AP found, were young adults from suburban areas that Trump had vowed to protect.

Claims of “outside agitators” — or “crisis actors,” which evoke a similar idea — also emerged during a 2018 walkout of Oklahoma teachers, in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting earlier that year and amid the violent unrest that followed the police shooting of an 18-year-old Black man in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

The “outside agitator” label was also frequently evoked during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, implying that protesters participating in demonstrations were driven by the nefarious agendas of shadowy “others,” as opposed to being motivated by their own concerns.

One example is the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, Kathleen Fitzgerald, a teaching associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, explained in a 2020 interview with CNN. A group of mostly White college students who traveled from the North to Mississippi to help register Black voters and open freedom schools were dismissed by White Southerners as outsiders.

“When they use that narrative, it’s an assumption that no locals would agree with these actions and no locals are on board,” Fitzgerald said in 2020. “And that’s certainly not true.”

Indeed, there are people who travel to support causes they believe in, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a significant distinction between them and those who were originally protesting.

For instance, Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were often called in to assist with civil rights demonstrations across the South. In doing so, they were portrayed as outsiders stirring up trouble — a notion that King rejected.

“Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea,” he famously wrote in Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Vox’s Li Zhou had a similar piece (“The trope of ‘outside agitators’ at protests, explained“) back in June 2020.

It’s a statement that activists have heard before, used throughout history to undermine the legitimacy of protests. By framing protests as the result of “outside” influence, lawmakers are able to undercut the validity of the protest itself and question activists’ capacity for organizing such a large-scale movement. At the same time, they’re able to maintain that they actually support activists’ broader cause of combatting police violence, while cracking down on protesters.

“The idea [behind the outside agitator] is that anything that’s formidable really couldn’t be pulled off by local black activists or protesters,” Howard University law professor Justin Hansford told Vox.

The term is one that he is very familiar with: Hansford was an activist during the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014 and now he runs the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard.

“In Ferguson,” he said, “it was the same situation: it’s an effective tool because not only do you delegitimize the protest itself, but you also delegitimize the activists as not being skillful enough, or clever enough, to do this on their own. You play on racial tropes as well.”

It can be complicated, Hansford notes, as there are some groups and individuals who are trying to capitalize on these protests to sow chaos of their own. There have been reports, for example, of white supremacist groups taking advantage of these protests to try to impair the cause.

But Hansford characterizes these organizations as “infiltrators,” not “outside agitators,” and says there’s a key distinction: “Infiltrators” are organizations he describes as working to undermine the protest, while “outside agitators” are (in theory) given credit for amplifying it.

[…]

Outside agitator is a racial term. The term means that protests are somehow less legitimate and really run by people who are, not black, usually white people, who are not local — people who are from different parts of the country or different parts of the world.

You may have seen people talk about Russian influence recently, fomenting this discussion. There’s another group they mention, which is seen as a predominately white organization. All these groups are, whether it’s Russia, whether it’s antifa, the idea is that anything that’s formidable really couldn’t be pulled off by local black activists or protesters. That’s actually the bottom line.

So, back in Ferguson, the outside agitator [that was raised] was George Soros. There’s an idea that these were paid protesters, it’s not legitimate, they are being paid to protest. Fox News was involved in promulgating that misnomer. I used to tell people — back then, if people were getting paid checks, I was wondering where my check was, because I never got a check. Nobody I know received a check.

[…]

Hostility toward the protesting can be justified easier. Legitimate protesting based on a legitimate problem: Being hostile toward it would make you seem like a racist. This gives you grounds for being hostile toward the protest in a way you can justify it.

In the history, most people will first think about Dr. [Martin Luther King Jr]. He was said to have been influenced by communists: In the aftermath of the ’50s, the McCarthy hearings, being a communist was a really harsh character assassination. Sheriffs and segregationists throughout the South said that Dr. King was being influenced by, again, white, foreign, outside agitators, who were the ones behind the fomenting. So if it wasn’t for those outside agitators, black people could not pull off such a formidable protest. That was the other big parallel in history.

It goes back before that. It does go back to even during the [anti-slavery] movement: If there was ever any disruptions, or even rebellions, it was the same thing. The trope was just more explicit at that point: “Black people couldn’t pull this off themselves, it must be some people from the North.”

So even then, from slavery up through segregation, the outside agitator could be in the communist concepts in the ’50s, ’60s, could be Russia, and back then in the 1800s, early 1900s, Jim Crow, slavery, the outsiders were the people from the North, white people from the North, the abolitionist from the North. Those were the outside agitators, so that’s the line: From the white people in the North to people who are communists in other countries, to George Soros … to antifa and Russia.

It’s the same process that’s been handed down over generations. That’s why it resonates so much and is such an easy thing to believe for folks who think that way, because there are so many precursors.

[…]

I have seen reports also of white supremacist organizations, who wanted to use this opportunity to create some sort of mayhem, specifically something called Boogaloo. I saw that report, so remember those are two different things: The outside agitator is trying to support, at least in the trope of it. When you think about white nationalists, now you’re talking about infiltrators.

The outside agitation trope versus the infiltration idea: It’s a subtle difference, but it is very true that there have been infiltrating groups in Ferguson, and I would not be surprised if there were infiltrators in the current protests. The infiltrator idea is a group that’s trying to harm the protest by doing things that are going to hurt the protesters’ cause.

The infiltrator thing is a real thing, I think that’s a legitimate issue. We had uncovered people in Ferguson, in the southern region of the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets, Native American groups, the American Indian movement.

Indeed, there were a spate of such articles at the time.

NPR’s Code Switch , “Unmasking The ‘Outside Agitator‘”

To help us understand why we’re hearing so much about outside agitators, we talked to Professor Peniel Joseph from the University of Texas at Austin.

[…]

The whole trope of outside agitator has a long history in American history, and it’s been used by everybody from plantation owners in the South during antebellum slavery to big corporate industry magnates.

We’re thinking about the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts and Andrew Carnegie. It’s also been used by the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, when talking about everybody from radicals of the early 1920s and 30s, to civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and certainly black power activists, including the Black Panthers and Stokely Carmichael.

So in our contemporary context—especially since the Black Lives Matter movement erupted around 2013 and 2014—it’s been utilized against activists who are trying to transform the criminal justice system in the United States. Basically, what it’s meant is that whatever conflict, political rebellion or demonstration is happening, it’s not organically home grown, it’s not authentic. That none of these troubles would happen if not for outside agitators.

[…]

When we think about the 19th century during antebellum slavery, there was this idea that those who were abolitionists and pushing for the eradication of slavery were outside agitators. And for a time, labeling people that way works. It even sparks new, more repressive legislation.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, labor struggles and labor strife was a big moment for the use of “outside agitator.” It allowed really morally reprehensible acts of violence against labor activists. We’re talking about Haymarket in Chicago. In Homestead, Pennsylvania, in the late 19th century, workers who were on strike were literally murdered by a combination of law enforcement and private security firms hired by the great industrialists of the times.

The high point of the idea being an effective tool of repression was during the start of the Cold War. In the early 1950s, there was this idea that if you were a civil rights activist, and if you were pushing for an end to racial segregation, you were a communist. You were somebody who wasn’t authentically American. You were trying to do something that was subversive and anti-American and anti-patriotic.

NYT , “The Long History of the ‘Outside Agitator’“

“The notion — or rather fiction — of the ‘outside agitator’ was a persistent trope, especially during the early years of the civil rights movement,” said Thomas C. Holt, 77, a professor of African-American history at the University of Chicago who helped organize demonstrations during the 1960s.

“Part of the motivations for the charge was to sustain the myth that the locals were satisfied with things as they were,” he said, “and if you could just crack down on the outsiders, the protests would cease. As the movement grew and spread, that myth became more difficult to sustain.”

But the concept of “outside agitators” in popular protests has persisted, in part because it is rooted in some truth: Then as now, activists and leaders traveled from city to city to help organize demonstrations or mutual aid programs. Freedom riders took buses across state lines to protest segregation. The civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who was from Atlanta, traveled frequently and was regularly labeled an outsider by local officials.

[…]

Recently, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the protests have flourished online. President Trump has tweeted about the influence of “the Radical Left, looters and thugs,” and threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy active-duty troops against protesters.

And while there is some evidence that fringe groups have tried to discredit the movement, there is little evidence behind the suggestions from some federal officials that members of antifa — a contraction of the term “anti-fascist” that is associated with a diffuse movement of protesters who sometimes engage in techniques like vandalism — are driving the looting and violence.

In this confusing landscape, it is worth remembering how officials have used rhetoric about infiltration to justify forceful responses to popular movements, Dr. Holt said.

“There can be little doubt that the Trump administration is using the ‘outsider’ ploy much as segregationists did in the 1960s, to justify extreme measures against all of the protesters under that guise,” he said. “As then, tear gas and rubber bullets don’t distinguish between natives and visitors.”

Again, I don’t doubt that there are instances of outsiders glomming on to some of these protests to stir up trouble. Or even that there is some external coordination helping students organize. But the phrase “outside agitators” just gets my Spidey Sense tingling.

UPDATE: Swarthmore College history professor Timothy Burke had this on his Substack yesterday:

If you want to claim there are outside agitators on campus, prove it. Especially prove it if a bunch of people on your campus got arrested and you want to claim that half or more were not students, alumni, or anyone else who has a relationship to the institution. That’s not a private personnel matter, it’s not FERPA-violating, it’s none of the things that universities and colleges hide behind when they want to assert that their claims or interpretations are valid but also insist that they can’t provide evidence that confirms the validity.

If you won’t provide proof on this point, you should shut up about it, since “outside agitators” is literally the claim that every institution and government makes when facing dissent from its own constituents, usually as a cynical strategy to invalidate that dissent pre-emptively, without having to deal with its specific content. And journalists should not credulously repeat the “outside agitators” trope without independently investigating it themselves. There are people lurking around the edges of some of these protests who are deliberately stirring up shit, and they’ve been spotted in a few cases—and it’s not entirely clear that they are actually sympathizers in any way with the protests. “Outside agitators” works both ways, as anybody who has ever been part of a protest movement knows. There are people who like to “heighten the contradictions” who are not clearly left or right, but instead are basically online trolls in the flesh. But I also think that at the heart of the encampments and other protests, almost everybody is a student, an alum, or a faculty member. I’ll also point out that administrations should be able to prove this accusation in other ways than arrest records. Most of them have built huge surveillance apparatuses on their campuses, and most of them have other on-the-ground ways of keeping track of who’s who. It’s a funny thing about surveillance: it gets shared out without hesitation in legal proceedings when you’ve got the goods on someone committing a crime, but then is quite notably withheld if it doesn’t easily confirm something you want to claim about events or actions.

There’s a whole lot more from him on the protests and the crackdown at the link but that’s the entirety of his commentary on this issue.