These days, outside agitators are everywhere. According to politicians, police commissioners, university administrators, and mainstream journalists they lurk on every campus where there has been resistance to the unfolding genocide in Gaza, especially at the solidarity encampments. Emory University president Gregory Fenves complained that “highly organized, outside protesters” were behind the school’s pro-peace demonstrations. The University of Texas at Austin followed suit, releasing a statement expressing “concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the University, including groups with ties to escalating protests at other universities around the country.” In a story that ran under the headline “Professional protestors of Texas unmasked,” the Daily Mail salaciously reported that the infiltrators included an elementary school teacher, a Palestinian shopkeeper, an interpreter, and a costume designer.

No one has sounded the alarm louder than New York City’s compulsive liar mayor, Eric Adams, who has complained that “outside agitators” are out to “radicalize our children” — the implication being that young people would be quiescent in the face of mass starvation and bombardment if not for some nefarious external influence. Recently, the city released data that purportedly bolstered his claims: approximately a third of the people arrested during protests at Columbia University and 60 percent of those arrested at City College of New York were not “affiliated” with those schools.

Encampment sympathizers understandably responded to these accusations by arguing that allegedly “unaffiliated” outsiders are, more often than not, actually insiders of a kind. Progressive journalists and online commentators have highlighted how students from other schools, alumni, community members, curious onlookers, veteran activists, and the like all have legitimate ties to local campuses, and thus their presence hardly merits concern, let alone panic (particularly at City College, which is only one of twenty-five colleges in the City University of New York system, and students of the other twenty-four schools could be included in the city’s number of allegedly unaffiliated arrestees).