More Evidence Emerges That Much of the Chaos at the Gaza Protests Is Inorganic and May Be Arising From Non-Leftist Sources
A rising tide of evidence suggests the problems at the Gaza protests are being caused by three outsider groups associated with Republicans: cops, anonymous agitators and pro-Israel counter-protesters.
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Introduction
It’s not hard to understand how and why the 2024 Gaza Protests have proceeded as they have.
Whatever you may think about the continued existence of the State of Israel, an under-indictment head-of-state like Benjamin Netanyahu, 2016 Trump-Israeli election interference, the armed (as opposed to civil-service) wing of Hamas, or the viability of a “two-state solution” in the Middle East as opposed to a “multiethnic unistate solution”, no person of conscience can possibly accept tens of thousands of non-combatant women and children dying in Gaza. There is no waving it away.
Even if one chooses to put the entirety of the blame on Hamas for the war now raging between it and Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party administration, you would agree that, it being 2024 and Israel having one of the most powerful and technologically advanced militaries on the face of the Earth, it is essential that Israel take elaborate and perhaps even historically well-planned care to avoid civilian casualties, and you would have to agree that—whether you wish to agree with such assessments or not—there are now both U.S. and UN reports raising, at a minimum, serious concerns about how cautious Donald Trump friend and ally Netanyahu is being with the deadly munitions America is sending him en masse.
Whoever you are and whatever your views, you are not thrilled that America is clearly providing at least sufficient munitions for ethnic cleansing to a far-right leader who is currently evading prosecution on corruption felonies and was last seen trying to end judicial independence—indeed democracy—in Israel in order to escape prosecution for his alleged crimes. Even the most hardened MAGA supporter would grumpily admit that if a Democratic Party politician were charged with what Netanyahu now is they wouldn’t want that politician leading America in wartime, and even the most trigger-happy Second Amendment proponent in the United States doesn’t want our men and women in uniform to have to fight World War III in the Middle East because Benjamin Netanyahu thinks killing Gazans is the best way to stay in power and stay out of the Israeli courthouses he’s due to appear in on serious criminal charges the very moment he ceases to be the prime minister of Israel.
And it hardly need be added that right now it’s the MAGA “movement” talking near-daily about whether it makes sense for America to provide billions in funding for a foreign war; while MAGAs may be directing that particular rhetoric at a European democracy, Ukraine, now under assault by Republican Party allies and war criminals in the Kremlin, they can hardly deny that their arguments apply with equal force to a democracy in the Middle East likewise under attack by war criminals.
So it’s no surprise—literally it couldn’t have surprised anyone here in America—that there would be protests over the Biden administration sending no-strings-attached military aid to Israel; and in fact, we could argue that even the most hardened MAGAs ought to be giving credit to young leftist activists for being as willing to protest actions initiated by a Democratic Party administration as they have, in the past, Republican Party ones (indeed, a common theme in what passes for MAGA cultural criticism over the last decade is that progressives give Democrats a pass on things they deride their MAGA opponents for). So when young leftists launched peaceful protests on college campuses across the United States, it should have produced only minimal stir. College campuses have been hotbeds for activism—not just left-wing activism, but right-wing activism as well—for decades and decades, and foreign conflicts are perhaps the most common subject for such protests.
What was different this year was that it was an election year.
What was different this year was that it was an election year in which the Republican candidate is currently facing 88 state and federal felonies related to his alleged serial lawlessness from 2015 through the present day.
What was different was that Republicans saw in 2020 how useful left-wing protests can be at mobilizing right-wing voters, particularly if (a) most of the protesters are young (because most GOP voters are older), (b) most of the protesters are nonwhite (because most GOP voters are white), (c) most of the protesters are Democrats (for the obvious reason that most Republican voters are currently registered Republicans), (d) most of the protesters are willing to spar with government agents like local police (as despite their party’s leader facing 88 state and federal felonies, Republican voters like to see themselves as “law-and-order” advocates), and (e) circumstances align such that these Democratic-presenting protesters come into conflict with police and thereby create a media-ready spectacle of supposed lawlessness certain to get out the vote for Trump in November 2024.
So despite the fact that MAGAs temperamentally oppose foreign aid; despite the fact that right now it’s the Republican Party seeking to defund the police; despite the fact that these protests are protests against the Biden administration, which MAGAs oppose with every fiber of their being; despite the fact that MAGA has made a central theme of its worldview the idea that Jews (e.g., George Soros, but the idea would apply with equal force to Benjamin Netanyahu) must never be allowed to puppeteer U.S. foreign policy; despite the fact that Netanyahu is now destroying the very Abraham Accords that arguably stand as Donald Trump’s only foreign-policy accomplishment, MAGAs decided after the 2024 Gaza Protests began that—despite all their reasons to support them—they would instead use them as a cudgel against (i) higher ed, (ii) Joe Biden (not for his foreign policy but, paradoxically for a political party that’s supposedly against Big Government) his unwillingness to use his federal forces to crush constitutionally protected free speech, and (iii) those who criticize the police at a time when, candidly, we hear as much criticism of law enforcement from the political right as the political left for perhaps the first time in American history.
So Republican politicians, led by Donald Trump, pushed for colleges and universities to call in Big Government to suppress constitutionally protected demonstrations, and had support in this from supposed far-right “free-speech absolutists” like Elon Musk; pushed for GOP governors, like Greg Abbott of Texas, to exercise Big Government authority to suppress free speech (which request Abbott was visibly excited to oblige); pushed for law enforcement to be as aggressive as possible, even as they daily criticize law enforcement for its supposed excesses of aggressiveness in prosecuting Donald Trump; gloried in the prospect of nationwide violence at the same time they were preaching law-and-order and continuing to opine about the George Floyd protests of almost half a decade ago (which protests one might have thought would cause MAGAs to want American towns and cities to remain as peaceful as possible); and in short did all they could to urge the 2024 Gaza Protests to turn in a bloody spectacle that could be blamed on Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, leftist activists, non-whites, higher ed, supposed Hamas proxies inside the United States, and in general any group the public subjugation and humiliation of which gets MAGA voters ideologically rock-hard and ready to vote for Donald Trump in November of 2024.
And it worked.
It worked for many different reasons.
It worked because, pushed by the American right, particularly in the form of wealthy ideologues MAGAs are suspicious of when they’re Jewish or foreign-born (like Soros), American colleges and universities begged for Big Government police interventions they would never have normally sought, terrified that a failure to do so would lead to continued congressional probes that—spoiler alert!—were coming either way because this is, as if it even needs to be repeated, an election year.
It worked because American police, pushed by the American right—who’ll never let law enforcement forget its supposed dual failures during both the 2020 George Floyd protests and the January 6 insurrection (in the former case a failure to be violent with nonviolent nonwhites, in the latter case a decision to be violent with violent whites)—decided to march onto U.S. college campuses this spring ready to rumble.
It worked because just as the scattered violence of the 2020 George Floyd protests has now been shown to have been the work of organized crime and white supremacists and apolitical anarchists and 4chan trolls, there’s sufficient evidence of “inorganic” outsider involvement in the pro-peace Gaza protests that they were probably always going to ramp up to counterproductive, ideologically incoherent violence that would demand the sort of violent Big Government response MAGA demagogues hoped for.
Did a peace movement have any reason to get violent? No. Was it helpful for this peace movement to cause the cancellation of final exams and graduations and block traffic and take over private property and scare passersby? No, of course not—but a little bit of inorganic outside agitation, coupled with a lot of law-enforcement provocation, coupled with far-right political incitement of all sides, went a long way. So though it made no sense at all for it to happen, these protests became exactly what the political right wanted and exactly what Trump qua presidential candidate desperately needed.
Donald Trump and the 2024 Gaza Protests
Many people forget that Donald Trump launched his career by paying people to go to a protest and then pretending that they were attending it organically. His “golden escalator” campaign-announcement speech of June 2015, which remains one of the most contemptible events in American political history, was styled as a grassroots protest against the supposedly ultra-liberal direction of American politics that just happened to occur in the lobby of Donald Trump’s tacky New York home. The reality? It was a “false flag” operation, which many of the attendees being apolitical or even leftists but willing to be anything Trump asked them to be for an hour to get a quick paycheck. Did Trump care that he was launching his political career with a vile lie that he’d carefully orchestrated? Of course not. Did he care that he was launching his political career with exactly the sort of “paid protest” he would thereafter spend years loudly decrying as the chief tactic of his most despised political enemies?
Of course not.
Fast-forward to 2024, and Donald Trump is still staging public events with evident glee—from the fake Blacks for Trump group that makes an appearance at every Trump rally to lying literally as part of his stump speech about this rallies’ attendance numbers.
Moreover, he’s the leader of a political party famous for staging public events at which its members pretend to be either independents or even their political opponents, from the 2000 “Brooks Brothers Riot” (organized by one of Donald Trump’s oldest friends and advisers, Roger Stone), which stole the 2000 U.S. presidential election for the GOP by preventing a full recount of votes in Florida that year to the 2021 January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, during which the same far-right terrorist entity (the Proud Boys) Trump had weeks earlier instructed to “stand by” for his further instructions showed up wearing leftist “antifa” black to dovetail with a pre-arranged if also incoherent Trumpist plot to blame Trump’s armed rebellion following the election of a Democratic president on leftist protesers (if it’d failed, at least; had the riot on January 6 succeeded, Trump clearly would have immediately taken ownership of it).
So now that protests advocating for peace in the Middle East have become inexplicably violent at exactly the moment Trump has declared them to be so and noted how this fact helps enormously his 2024 presidential campaign because any violence must be blamed on his chief political adversary, President Joe Biden, is media circumspect about whether this all this sudden violence might be caused by pro-Trump plants?
No.
But surely media is looking at the history of proven (not theorized) MAGA false flags; Trump’s own history as a fabulist; the fact that over half of all arrested protesters can’t be identified as belonging to the communities they’re protesting in; and the obviously cynical use MAGA leaders are putting the violence at these protests to in now asking some hard questions about whether that violence is organic or inorganic?
No.
But given that MAGAs want the Gaza protests to get violent (on this there’s no doubt or disagreement, with leftist violence is certain to animate Trump voters in 2024 the same way alleged—but not, it turns out, organic—violence at the 2020 George Floyd protests animated Trump voters and was designed to do so during the most recent presidential cycle we had), and given that Trump, the leader of the MAGA Republican Party, was recently caught swooning in public about how “beautiful” it was to watch anonymous, largely non-Columbia University agitators removed from Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus, major media is surely starting to get a bit suspicious?
No.
What about the fact that the conservative Wall Street Journal has started reporting on the alarming number of protest arrestees who are outside agitators not affiliated with the colleges and universities whose good names they’re besmirching by engaging in criminal activity on their campuses? Mainstream major media has now been cowed into doing some investigative reporting on whether violence at the 2024 Gaza Protests is organic or inorganic, now that even conservative major media is on the case… right?
No.
While the term “outside agitator” is inherently problematic because it’s historically been used by the far right to discredit leftist—most particularly civil rights—protests as inherently illegitimate, as CNN points out, it’s certainly possible (and this did in fact happen during the 2020 George Floyd protests) to state with specificity why there are concerns about the legitimacy of a given protest. In 2020, CNN notes, the protests caused by the murder of George Floyd were coopted, according to Mr. Trump’s own federal law enforcement officials, by “anarchists and white supremacists” (as well as organized crime and some “far-left extremists” unassociated with the Black Lives Matter movement), even as Trump selectively “focused just on Antifa and the far left.”
So we can, in 2024, speak of “inorganic violence” and outside agitation without again committing the sins of America’s past—which were sins of narrative omission. Here, we can explicitly note that recent major-media reports have revealed outside agitators’ presence at the 2024 Gaza Protests even as, not surprisingly, Trump has implied that all of those at the protests are “college students”: which is MAGA code, these days, for leftists, and therefore just the sort of rhetorical bait-and-switch Trump pulled in 2020.
What we also know is that many of the problems being caused at the Gaza protests are being caused by three entities that are (a) angry about the protests, (b) have something to gain from the protests being perceived as violent, and (c) are usually associated with the same conservative political groups that now see violence at the Gaza protests as a win for Donald Trump in his beleaguered efforts to regain political power in America.
It all adds up to a series of perverse incentives in which bad actors with a MAGA bent may find the temptation to anonymously wreak havoc inside the rapidly spreading, campus-located anti-IDF protests to be too alluring to resist. Another way of putting this would be to say that the Gaza protests have become a hotbed of criminal activity—but it increasingly looks as though that criminal (or, at a minimum, disorderly) conduct is being authored in significant part by conservatives rather than leftists.
This Proof report takes at look at the three entities now unexpectedly at the center of the Gaza protests: police, anonymous agitators, and counter-protesters. But we’ll also look at how MAGA leaders—Trump included—are actively inciting domestic unrest.