While police around the country are raiding campuses and brutalizing student protesters, the authorities are once again trotting out narratives about "outside agitators."
They do this whenever a movement gets out of their control. It is one of the most basic tactics in their playbook, and they employ it indiscriminately.
As we wrote in 2014, during the demonstrations in Ferguson in response to the murder of Michael Brown,
"Rhetoric about 'outside agitators' is a military operation intended to isolate and target an enemy: divide and conquer. The enemy that the authorities are aiming at is predominantly black and brown, but it is not just a specific social body; it is also an aspect of our humanity, a part of all of us. The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize agitation, so anyone who stands up for herself will be seen as an outsider."