Are Far-Right Insurrectionists Infiltrating the Pro-Ceasefire Protests As Part of the Run-Up to the November Political Violence Trump Just Hinted at in Time Magazine?
On social media, whispers have become chatter, chatter a chorus of concern. Is some percentage of these Gaza protests attributable to MAGA stagecraft? The evidence of inorganic mass action is growing.
The Introduction to this report is free; the remainder of the report is for Proof subscribers. To gain free access to the full report—and 275+ others—for a week, just click the button below.
Introduction
Proof adamantly rejects the post-January 6 conspiracy theorizing of the insurrectionist far right—which, without evidence, said that the armed attack on the United States Capitol that day was both instigated and carried out by FBI agents—so we begin our consideration of the 2024 Gaza Protests by stating unequivocally that a great many of the protesters demanding a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza War at scores of colleges and universities across America are indeed leftists.
Proof would even add that the overwhelming majority of them are leftists, but candidly—as this report shows—that would be journalistic overreach, as we simply don’t know anything about the majority of the protesters, let alone an “overwhelming” majority.
What we do know is this:
Supporters of Donald Trump have already begun to verbalize online their view that these protests, which have been largely nonviolent, are in fact terrifically violent; that these protests, which are animated first and foremost by a desire to save Gazan children from being killed in a conflict they have nothing to do with, is in fact a domestic terror operation; and that in view of these two false claims, MAGAs are entitled to engage in nationwide political violence if Trump loses this November because they would merely be doing the same as leftists are doing now.
Trump supporters in government are almost universally calling for aggressive law enforcement responses to these largely nonviolent protests, despite knowing that such aggressive responses often lead to violence that would not otherwise have occurred (and despite knowing that government suppression of protected speech is in many cases a free speech violation, which one would expect conservatives to know after years of them falsely calling a free speech issue non-government actors like Twitter engaging in content moderation under their publicly posted Terms of Service). The closer a demagogue is to real power in the Trumpist GOP—whether it be Governor Greg Abbott in Texas or Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, Republican Party leaders in Congress like Mike Johnson and Elise Stefanik or the hundreds of online influencers atop the MAGA “movement”—the more likely that person is to be advocating for actions in response to the campus protests that any public policy or law enforcement expert would tell you are far more likely to enflame the situation on college and university campuses in America than resolve them.
Trump just told Time magazine that he cannot promise that his supporters won’t get violent if he loses, and that he will not instruct them to remain peaceful. In fact, Trump, who has consistently said that if he doesn’t win the election handily it by definition was rigged against him, has made clear that the only guarantee of a peaceful transition in 2025 is a Trump victory. All this puts him in a precarious legal position, as he’s already under federal indictment over January 6 at the state and federal levels (and an unindicted co-conspirator in at least Michigan and Arizona so far) but has under six months to prepare his followers for the violence he’s now implicitly expecting of them; how can he incite another armed rebellion without facing new charges? In 2021, he and his followers justified January 6 by pointing to the 2020 George Floyd protests—a miniscule percentage of which became violent when they were infiltrated (per a Just Security report submitted into the congressional record) by organized crime, white supremacists, apolitical anarchists, and suspected 4chan trolls—and seem to be positioning themselves now to justify a second round of post-election violence using the Gaza protests. This means that Trump, his associates inside the Republican Party apparatus, and his rank-and-file followers all see a benefit in the Gaza protests turning violent.
A Supreme Court ruling just upheld the most serious abridgment of Freedom of Assembly in America in generations, though thankfully the decision for now only affects Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Under the new legal regime in these three red states, it only takes one far-right agitator infiltrating a left-wing protest for the leader(s) of that protest to face legal repercussions that could destroy their lives forever. This, despite the evidence that the far right has engaged in exactly these sorts of infiltrations this decade. Unsurprisingly, this attack on the First Amendment garnered absolutely no complaints whatsoever from supposed far-right First Amendment “absolutists” like Elon Musk. So what does this have to do with the Gaza protests? Well, it means that at many of the campus protests—especially the several now ongoing in Texas and Louisiana—there is a significant potential benefit to far-right agitators who are able to successfully infiltrate the protests that goes well beyond just possible rhetorical cover for post-election violence in November and December of this year, as it also could extend to efforts to decimate the organized left in an election year through new lawsuits targeting left-leaning political organizers.
And it’s in the context of the items above that two further observations must be made:
We don’t know how many American and Israeli Jews now saying that the campus protests are threatening them are supporters of Trump or his friend Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not to say that there haven’t been documented instances of antisemitism at some of the now-ongoing Gaza protests, as there certainly have been), but simply that we can’t ignore the context in which these protests are occurring: months of efforts by far-right billionaires to attack higher education through overheated claims of antisemitism against the nation’s top academic institutions, accompanied by a concerted effort by the far-right Likud Party in Israel (and the Trumpist GOP in America) to equate any complaint against the Netanyahu administration with not just antisemitism but terroristic antisemitism. Just recently, Netanyahu described young people in America exercising their constitutional right to free speech en masse as nothing more than the “horrific” actions of “antisemitic mobs” that have (and it’s not clear what he’s actually referring to here) “taken over leading universities [in America]” (emphasis added). Netanyahu went on to lie about what has been happening during these protests, describing a fanciful epidemic of physical “attacks” on Jewish students and faculty and using such an imaginary portrait of ongoing mass violence in America as grounds to compare America in 2024 to “1930s Germany.” Netanyahu calls these exercises of free speech “unconscionable” and demands that they be “stopped”, taking great care to excoriate presumptively left-leaning college administrators and praise presumptively right-leaning government “officials” for their response to the protests (he seems to refer to Governors Abbott and Youngkin particularly). And in his most shameful incitement of all, Netanyahu claimed that the student protesters broadly writ want to “kill Jews wherever they are.” That’s outrageous.
As the data below confirms, over 50% of those participating in the largest campus protests now ongoing have no affiliation with the campuses on which the protests are occurring. To be clear—and as is confirmed below with major-media sourcing—Proof is not saying that the majority of those who are participating in the Gaza protests aren’t students at the colleges and universities where the largest protests are occurring, Proof is saying (again, with the benefit of hard data) that a majority of those at these protests have no affiliation with the campuses on which these protests are occurring whatsoever. They aren’t students or faculty or staff or administrators or longstanding contractors or alumni; they are, in fact, totally anonymous. This means we know nothing about their backgrounds, their motivations, or, yes, even their political affiliations.
So there’s ample data and precedent to support the idea that some number of Trumpist agitators could be infiltrating these protests to discredit them, inflame them, direct them toward violence, build from inside them a supposed precedent for future far-right political violence, direct otherwise peaceful leftists toward actions that could put them out of commission during the upcoming political organizing season, and, above all else, seed within their ranks an utter hatred of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party that we already know the Republican Party is angling for because it’s more or less all their leaders talk about anymore inside or outside of Washington.