Outside Agitators
When education is cast as radicalization, students face new legal risks. Even if they're adults.
While defending the police crackdown against protesters at Columbia University, New York City Mayor Eric Adams described student activists as naive children who had been whipped into a frenzy by devious outsiders.
“These are our children,” Adams told MSNBC last week, “and we can’t allow them to be radicalized like children are being radicalized across the globe.”
Adams’ comments draw from a rich canon of campaigns to discredit protests as being controlled by shadowy “outside agitators.” But they also wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a reactionary promoting moral panics about “critical race theory” or “gender ideology” in schools. This latter mentality, that of the K-12 school board warrior, has given the right a powerful censorship tool, curtailing education out of fear that children develop ideas without parental permission. It’s woefully optimistic to believe these tactics will only be weaponized against children.
That Columbia’s students are young adults and not minors hardly matters. Several legal frameworks for controlling children have shown recent risk of expanding to older age groups. Multiple states that banned gender-affirming care for minors are now pushing legislation to ban treatment for adults under 26; it’s become something of a fashion for Republican candidates to argue for raising the voting age to 25, especially immediately after Republican losses at the polls.
We blame “outside agitators” or “agenda-driven teachers” when the popularity of a protest or the reality of children’s agency is unpalatable. Now the legal tools for suppressing both of those threats—conspiracy investigations against well-organized protests, and censorship orders against free inquiry in schools—are beginning to synthesize. Adults should be worried, too.
Adams is far from the only official to infantilize student protesters, only to suggest greater legal risks for those protesters on the basis of their alleged immaturity.
“There is somebody behind this movement. There is some organization behind this movement,” the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of operations told media last week of protests at the New School and New York University. He went on to claim that.”There is somebody funding this. There is somebody radicalizing our students.”
The NYPD’s chief of patrol John Chell went further, tweeting of student protests last week, “from NYC to Chicago and I’m sure for a few other cities, Who is funding this? What is happening? There is an unknown entity who is radicalizing our vulnerable students. Taking advantage of their young minds. As parents and Americans we must demand some answers! I can’t speak for the rest of America, but in NYC we won’t rest until we find out! We will broadcast what we see and find. We will use the might of our Intelligence Bureau and our Federal partners to quite simply connect the dots. Follow the money!!!!!!”
These remarks, especially Chell’s, represent no small threat to protesters, even if couched in the language of parental care (“as parents” “our vulnerable students”). When protests are investigated as criminal enterprises, their participants can face increased surveillance and police intrusion for years. The charges they face are often greater, sometimes paradoxically for smaller alleged acts which are treated as participation in a sprawling criminal conspiracy. (A version of this phenomenon has been playing out for years in Atlanta, where an overzealous racketeering case has led to environmental activists facing terrorism and conspiracy charges for allegations as minor as misdemeanor trespassing or running a bail fund.)
Even small and legal acts of care, like teaching or raising bail money, can be extrapolated into something darker when officials seek to smear solidarity as an illegal scheme. When an interviewer pressed Adams last week on the percentage of protesters who “were from outside,” Adams referred to the influence of teachers, in abstract.
“I don't think that matters,” Adams said. “I gave you an analogy. One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as dangerous if it's 50 bad professors talking to 50 students.”
In borrowing antiwoke censorship rhetoric that casts whole categories of thought as unacceptable for students, Adams et al are treating the presence of pro-Palestinian sentiment among students as evidence of a dangerous conspiracy.
Of course, these conspiracy claims do little to protect Jewish students. Antisemitic movements have always portrayed Jewish people as nefarious outsiders bent on corrupting minds and sowing dissent. In an ironic twist, Republican lawmakers who purport to care about on-campus antisemitism have leaned into bigoted conspiracy theories by accusing Jewish philanthropist George Soros of “funding” the pro-Palestine demonstrations. Antisemites often invoke Soros, specifically, and Jews in general, in anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theories, including accusing them of being an “outside” force radicalizing children into identifying as queer or transgender. That overlap in intolerance was evident at UCLA, where pro-Palestine demonstrators were antagonized by a well-known antisemite who posts explicit neo-Nazi propaganda and also attends anti-LGBTQ+ protests at local schools. The man was photographed at UCLA wearing a “Leave Our Kids Alone” shirt on a night when pro-Palestinian students were violently beaten.
Our freedoms have always been bound up in those of our children. When their abilities to learn, to assert themselves, and to disagree are stifled, we can expect that censorship to extend to adults soon thereafter.
An aggressive investigation into student protesters will likely reveal communication between activists, even of different generations. That is not an illegal conspiracy, but very simply how education works, and no amount of infantilizing will change the urgency of these protests for the students organizing them, or change the charges for students arrested at them.
The fixation on “outside agitators” is not a search for outsiders at all, but the creation of them. It is drawing a hard boundary around public free expression, delineating between the insiders allowed to speak, and the margins, the people relegated to the status of children and told to pipe down or else.
It feels like you can't do anything at all right now without hitting some partof this wall of gerontocratic freakout. It felt that way even before october 7, but now it's in overdrive. There's like a constant cascade of rationalizations and hysterical projections directed at young people, this rabid urgency to explain why they are largely rejecting the failed paradigms of the older generations... You see it in other right-wing hot topics too such as the TERF movement. So much hatred and resentment of young people, always being repackaged in one way or another.