Brief: The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope (w/Dr. Peniel Joseph)
Two weeks ago, several university administrators asked militarized police units to smash pro-Palestinian encampment protests on quads and in occupied buildings. It happened at places like Columbia and CUNY, and the University of Texas in Austin where our guest today, Dr. Peniel Joseph, teaches on the history of the Black Power movement.
In the midst of the news cycle frenzy, an old phrase began popping up in discussions of who the protestors were and whether the police actions were justified. Authorities said (and media figureheads repeated uncritically) that protestors were infiltrated and influenced by “outside agitators.”
It’s a phrase with a long history to it. Joining Matthew to unpack it is Dr. Peniel Joseph, a historian of the Civil Rights era, during which time the trope reached peak exposure, when it was lobbed at Martin Luther King Jr., as he sat in Birmingham Jail.
Show Notes
Peniel E. Joseph
NYPD Chief of Patrol on the “unknown entity”
Thursday's Headlines: NYPD Discovers Chained Bike Locks Edition
Nearly all Gaza campus protests in the US have been peaceful, study finds
Unmasking The 'Outside Agitator'
Debunking the “Outside Agitator” Trope amid pro-Palestinian campus protests
Cost of repairing occupation damage at Portland State library estimated at $750K
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everyone and welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today I can add to that tagline that when the extremely unlikely conditions come together for people to organize against injustice, there's always rhetoric verging on conspiracy theory ready to run interference.
I'm Matthew Remsky with a brief called The Outside Agitator Conspiracy Trope with Dr. Peniel Joseph.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Now, two weeks ago, several university administrators made the call
to ask militarized police units to smash pro-Palestinian encampment protests
on quads and in occupied buildings.
It happened at places like Columbia, City University of New York, Dartmouth,
and the University of Texas in Austin, where our guest today, Dr. Peniel Joseph,
teaches on the history of the Black Power Movement.
In the midst of the news cycle frenzy, an old phrase began popping up in discussions of who the protesters were and what should be done about them.
The protesters, we heard authorities say, and then media figureheads repeat, were infiltrated and influenced by outside agitators.
People who, for one reason or another, couldn't be authentically exercising their rights to speak and assemble.
They weren't really students.
They were mobilizing chaos towards some other end.
As reported in the Washington Post, a statement from the New York Police Department's Chief of Patrol, John Chell, cited a, quote, unknown entity radicalizing our vulnerable students.
Now, vulnerable is an interesting word here, because it implies that the students en masse have no agency of their own.
They're subject to undue influence, to cultic dynamics, perhaps.
And this merges with another common claim, that without outside agitation, they are simply clueless, although sometimes the goalposts move with the alternative framework that they are elite and overeducated.
Therefore, through outside agitation, protesters only think they are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and a divestment of university endowments from the global war machine.
Because of outside agitation, protesting Jewish students become traitors to their ancestors, delusional with cognitive dissonance.
Because of outside agitation, Muslim protesters remain ignorant of the corruption of Hamas.
Now to my ear, Outside Agitator rings a number of conspirituality bells when framed as a disruption organized by a shadowy elite.
I mean, at some point, George Soros' name started popping up as the bank roller of tents, poster boards, and sharpies.
The Outside Agitator embodies some kind of aberration of homegrown, all-American social and political norms.
Quote, taking advantage of their young minds, as Chell said, quote, as parents and Americans, we must demand some answers.
But that answer, in the eyes of the order keepers, was to purge all illegitimate influences and to, in effect, save the children from political and moral corruption.
And this is a theme that bounces throughout the no-man's land of the culture war.
The children are being corrupted by DEI, CRT, by wokeism, by books in libraries about Rosa Parks and gay dads.
None of these ideas, representations, and movements are organic, or so the logic goes.
They can't be coming from inside, from the people themselves.
In the most poignant example of turning insiders into outsiders, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Tariq Shepard showed up on Morning Joe with a heavy bike chain as proof that outside agitators had run the occupation of Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus.
But New York City residents and college students alike pointed out that the chain was actually on sale at and recommended by the university store, that it was a common device in the city protecting against bike thefts that are rarely investigated by those same police.
Now the lockmaker, Kryptonite, actually calls this lock the New York Forget About It Chain, and as 404 Media reported, Kryptonite will reimburse people if their bikes are stolen out from under the chain within Manhattan.
Part of the effect of the this-can't-be-from-here themes, I think, is to save some adults from the gravitas that young people confront them with.
Now, to be clear, there have been inflammatory and anti-Semitic outbursts within some encampments and Islamophobic and violent responses.
There have also been some incidents of serious property damage.
Damage caused by protesters to the library at Portland State University, for example, is estimated to cost $750,000 to repair.
But when the campus protesters stay on message and enforce their internal discipline, and they're able to hold the microphone for longer than a Twitter-sized news clip, they talk about inter-religious solidarity against genocide, the demand to divest from war profiteering, and a web of connected issues like anti-gentrification and labor equity on campuses with massive real estate holdings and incomprehensibly large hedge funds.
And despite a lot of news coverage focusing on the yelling part, those messages appear to be animating the bulk of protest motivations.
A research organization called the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, or ACLED, found that, and I'm reading from The Guardian here, quote,
an analysis of 553 US campus demonstrations nationwide between the 18th of April and the 3rd of May
found that fewer than 20 resulted in any serious interpersonal violence or property damage.
Over the same period, ACLED documented at least 70 instances
of forceful police intervention against US campuses.
campus protests, which includes the arrest of demonstrators and the use of physical dispersal tactics, including the deployment of chemical agents, batons, and other kinds of physical force.
So, in Outside Agitator, we have a weapon of political rhetoric that, like Elite or Woke, hits some of the conspiracism notes that we study here.
But it's also a phrase with a long history to it, and I wanted to learn more about how it has worked over time, and there's no one better to unpack that for us than Dr. Joseph who's a historian of the civil rights era
during which time this trope reached peak exposure when it was lobbed at Martin Luther King Jr
among others. In our discussion Dr. Joseph takes me on a tour through various deployments of this idea
against anti-slavers, the emerging labor movement in the early 20th century, post-war
communist sympathizers, anti-racist and anti-war activists in the 60s and 70s and Black Lives Matter. And
this leads us all the way up to the present day where we consider the complexities of the stats
of students versus non-students in the encampments, who has insider status versus outsider status,
what happens when bad actors really do disrupt peace movements and what it all means about where
the demands for change come from and who is allowed to make them.
Here's our interview.
My guest today is Dr. Peniel Joseph, history professor at University of Texas in Austin and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
His latest book is The Third Reconstruction, America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the 21st Century.
Hello, Dr. Joseph, and welcome.
Hi, Matt.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thank you.
So getting down to it, in April of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr.
writes in his letter from the Birmingham jail famously, quote,
injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
Never again can we afford to live with the narrow provincial outside agitator idea.
Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
So he uses the term in the letter two more times and one of those times he's flagging the way in which the first Christians were slurred by the authorities of their day.
But who was accusing Martin Luther King Jr.
of being an outside agitator in Birmingham?
Many people.
Right.
So, the Birmingham local authorities, including at the time it was run by a commissioner system, with the city commissioner being Eugene Bull Connor, a notorious racist and anti-communist and white supremacist.
But Birmingham clergy, white clergy, were saying the same thing.
There were even some black ministers who were in the pockets of the white establishment were saying that.
The White Citizens Council was saying that.
And the White Citizens Councils in the 1950s were white supremacists who were similar to the Klan, even though they were a different class strata of the Klan.
They were white supremacists and racial terrorists, but who are also business people, church leaders.
And remember, Alabama In the year that you're talking about, in 1963, Matt, had outlawed the NAACP.
So there was no NAACP in Alabama.
All of which, again, is unconstitutional and illegal, just like the outlawing of DEI and the book bans in our own time.
So in 63, what King was aligning himself with was the Alabama Christian and human rights movement under the aegis of a local pastor, really brilliant pastor called Fred Shuttlesworth.
What King is saying with the outside agitator trope, it's very, very interesting because he's making this case, and this is what King always tries to do, that we can find the universal through the particular.
Yeah.
So even though he uses Christianity, but he's saying that these Dissidents are all of us, right?
And James Baldwin does the same thing.
And so it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting theme.
And really, I'm glad that you're starting with Letter from Birmingham Jail, because in many ways, Letter from Birmingham Jail is really the most profound thing that King ever wrote.
And the reason why it's so profound is a number of different things, but as we've known post King's death, With the plagiarism, different things going on.
This is really King's voice because the plagiarism with King is because of both sloppiness, but also King is brilliant.
But when it comes to scholarship, which is different from being an intellectual, scholarship is getting your stuff very, very careful.
He often becomes too derivative and he's too interested, unlike Malcolm X, Because of how he's formally educated in a cloak of white Western civilization.
Malcolm's not interested in that.
Right.
Malcolm is just, you know, Malcolm is jazz and the blues and hip hop.
And he's just, he's freestyling, but he's freestyling and he's a genius.
And he's daring people to challenge him, because he knows he's smarter than the white and black PhDs he's up against, and he publicly humiliates them each time he defeats them.
So when Malcolm, it's not Kendrick versus Drake, it's Malcolm versus the world.
It's Malcolm against the world.
And he wins every time.
The only thing that stops Malcolm X is an assassination.
He never loses the argument, never.
Not even with Elijah Muhammad, because then he defeats him in arguments, too, right?
Initially, he's for him until he's saying, I've discovered and I've got sight beyond sight.
So with King, what's so profound about Letter from Birmingham Jail, King, like presidents, has all of his speeches, much of his speeches, ghostwritten and books ghostwritten.
Letter from Birmingham Jail is king.
It's just king.
It's on scraps, and then it's typed up, right?
And you can see it's unbelievably brilliant.
It's unbelievably brilliant.
And this outside agitator trope that you just talked about is something he uses to really show how this particular struggle is actually universal, and it's universal For millennia, and that's why he draws the comparisons with Christians.
Yes, King is using these spiritual metaphysical arguments, and I wanted to start there because we specifically look on this podcast at the ways in which spirituality is often mobilized in the opposite direction, in toxic ways to judge and exclude.
And King is often an antidote to that, I think, in the entire American imaginarium.
But furthermore, I have this feeling that King's approach gets to the real heart of the accusation of outside agitator, which on a superficial level is saying, you know, you're whipping up trouble, but you have no business here.
But on a deeper level, it's suggesting you can't hold those views and be an American and be a Christian.
You can't hold these views and be welcome.
So is that fair?
Yeah, I think it's fair.
I think that the outside agitator trope is a delegitimization trope.
It's a delegitimizing trope, but it's also a devaluation of your religious beliefs, of your human dignity, your civic activism, your freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
And I would, you know, I would expand what King is saying when he talks about Christianity to folks who are Muslims, to folks who are Jews, to folks who are, you know, practicing Buddhism or Hindus or whatever religion you want, because I think that That's what it does.
It devalues your intrinsic rights in multiple ways.
And King was saying, in this context, that it really is actually something that's patriotic, something that's Christ-centered, something that's deeply... King always talked about our Judeo-Christian roots.
And I think we have expansive religious roots that go even beyond Judaism and Christianity.
So we could include multiples there, but I think that that devaluation is right, and that continues to this day.
Now he's also pointing back to a slavery era idea in which Northern abolitionists are labeled as interlopers into Southern racism.
And then the term we have today explodes during the Red Scare in which communist sympathizers are never the right kind of people.
So that could be Jews.
It could be black people organized by Jews.
It could be hippies.
Is that like the genealogy?
Yeah, and I would include carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, the idea that these Republicans or Northerners who came and they said that they were, especially those who were willing to work with blacks, Democrats who were willing to work with blacks were called scalawags.
These people were interlopers.
They were outsiders.
You know, when you get to the 20th century, this really impacts early labor movements, 19th and 20th century.
So we're thinking about Haymarket in Chicago.
Right.
We're thinking about Homestead, Pennsylvania and, you know, Pinkerton and, and different federal agencies really literally slaughtering and murdering white and black workers.
Then when you think about the 20th century, by 1919, the red, bloody summer of 1919 is also Red Scare.
So before you get McCarthyism, what a lot of Americans don't remember is that that's how you get Sacco and Vanzetti.
That's how you get the case against anarchists and the case against black radicals and white radicals. And we really start to
get the European-based socialism and social democratic philosophies, Matt, starting in the early
20th century. So it's the teens, you know, I could show you the international workers of the
world or the Wobblies and people like Hubert Harrison and different socialists.
1912.
1912, socialists got millions of votes nationally and elected dozens and dozens of candidates at the local level in 1912.
So there's a history, a strong history, of very radical progressive activism in the United States that is countered through this outside agitator trope.
And that outside agitator trope is always utilized as a fig leaf Not just for devaluing these beliefs, but for violence.
So that brings us to the spring of 2024, where we are now, so April, May.
I want to ask you about how Outside Agitator has been a standard talking point in mainstream coverage of the student encampment movement so far.
It's been repeated by all major networks, top journal figures like Blitzer and Cooper, with few exceptions.
There's only one walkback I've seen from MSNBC on a fairly marginal show.
But before we talk directly about how this trope is being used, I think there's some tricky territory because as a historian of civil rights activism, there's got to be distinctions and points of order that, you know, you're keeping in mind if you consider, you know, this lens of outside agitator as applied to student protests against Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank.
So these are similar contexts.
They're also different contexts.
How do you think about the comparison?
Well, I'd say even before we talk about 2024, it'd be useful to talk about both the 1960s and 70s and to talk about Black Lives Matter as well.
So by the time you get to the 1960s and 70s, we usually think of that period as just anti-Vietnam War protests, but it's not.
It's bigger than that.
It's really anti-racist protests.
Before we were using such a term of anti-racism, Angela Davis introduces it and Ibram Kendi popularizes it in a huge way after 2020.
That outside agitator trope was happening on the campuses of Howard University, on the campuses of Fisk, on Columbia University's campus, Cornell University.
So we get not just anti-war protests, but the start of black studies, Puerto Rican studies, Chicano studies, and you start to get women and gender and queer studies as well, right?
The whole ethnic studies movement.
So, it's important for us to remember, when we think about those protests, not every single person who was part of those protests, Matt, was an actual student on that campus.
And that's how it always has been.
So, there were people who felt they were in community with those students on campus, right?
So, we're thinking about, you know, even, you think about the Back of the Yards and Saul Alinsky in Chicago, and you think about Studs Terkel, and you think about James Baldwin and Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer.
These are all people who felt they were part of this larger, broader, universal, progressive community, human rights-based community.
So it wasn't that you came to Howard and protested, and you had to have a Howard University ID, and you had to be enrolled that semester, and that was the only way you could be an authentic part of the movement.
If that was so, we would think of things like SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as outside agitators because they went into Southwest Georgia and into Arkansas and into Mississippi and into Alabama and helped organize sharecroppers and poor people for better wages and for voting rights and health care and all these different things, right?
So we have to think of the students the same way we think about Mississippi Freedom Summer.
We didn't call Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, two of who were Jewish, who were murdered on June 21st, 1964, outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi in Neshoba County.
Only the white supremacists called them outside agitators, right?
They were murdered on behalf of this idea of black citizenship and dignity, and dignity and citizenship for all people.
And then when we get to the 1970s, what we have to remember in comparison to this spring, by 1970, there's going to be the Kent State year and Jackson State.
Jackson State, the black folks were murdered first and then Kent State.
And in 1968, the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, where police tried to murder Cleve Sellers and they ended up killing some others.
It's important to remember that there was over a million students on strike.
This was a huge national global movement against bombing in Cambodia, against Kent State, against Jackson State, just to have some proportion on what's going on now.
So the encampments have been big, big news, but the depth and breadth of this has not been as big as 1970.
We're talking about 80 campuses and I think 2,500 arrests so far.
What they don't want these young people to understand is that 54 years ago, in many schools across the country, there were no finals in May of 1970.
And yet people still graduated.
That's what people don't want to understand.
Well, it's a Ponzi scheme, right?
This whole college thing, and I'm a university professor.
It's all, you know, like, they can do what they're gonna do, right?
So people didn't take exams yet.
They didn't just say, hey, all those people are not getting college degrees, right?
Right, right.
So students have a lot of power.
They have a lot of people power.
Then we move forward to Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter, people accuse activists in Ferguson of being outside agitators.
And Ferguson is where Michael Brown was murdered in 2014.
And we think about the protest after Trayvon Martin's murder in 2012, but then the acquittal of his murderer in 2013.
And so when we think about this outside agitator trope, in the 2010s all the way to 2020, There's been a huge, huge renaissance of that outside agitator trope because of both progressive movements and white supremacist movements.
And here's what I mean.
The progressive movements were the BLM protests that culminated in 25 million people in the streets in the spring and summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd on May The reactionary movements are going to be the January 6th uprising where people are going to say the far right wing is going to say it was outside agitators who did it.
Right.
So they shouldn't go to jail, right?
So we have to remember all that when we're talking about this spring of 2024.
And when we think about BLM protests, most of them were peaceful.
There was some violence there at BLM protests, and some of the violence was connected to outside groups, including groups who were saying, They were agitators and they wanted to cause violence at BLM protests.
Sometimes they were white supremacists.
Sometimes they're going to be people who are self-described revolutionary anarchists, right?
Sometimes those groups are connected to governments and their fronts for local law enforcement and national law enforcement and federal law enforcement, but sometimes they're just on their own.
It becomes very, very dicey the more protests you get to have a clear cut definition of who is who, right?
And so when you get to 2024, there's going to be both the far right wing and those who are on the left who are accusing the other of sending in professional organizers, mobilizers, but also sometimes professional disruptors to these campus encampments.
Well, some of that confusion comes out in the statements of New York Mayor Adams, because after he's hounded for details related to what he described as a gut feeling that the protesters were outsiders, the New York City office of the mayor released statistics about how many protest arrests at Columbia versus CCNY were students versus unaffiliated with the university.
Now, they didn't define unaffiliated.
They said that for Columbia, the ratio of students to non-students was higher than at CCNY, but together, they say that nearly 50% of the arrests were of unaffiliated persons.
But the day after, The Guardian in the UK pokes holes in those numbers, pointing out the lack of definition for affiliated, as I mentioned, but also describing the overnight court scene as chaotic and overflowing with It can be effective.
mainly students. So what do you make as a historian of noisy data like this in the moment?
Does it ever validate the use of the trope, do you think?
It can be effective. This happened at University of Texas where I'm at too, where what the
administration tried to do in the aftermath of sending state troopers in on April 24th
and brutalizing students and faculty, and then doing it again a week later after students
tried to set up an encampment, was try to parse out who was a student and who was not
a student, right?
As if the higher the number of non-students you get, the more illegitimate the protests were.
Right.
And so for from the side of from the perspective of authoritarians, they're going to continue to try to slice and dice and say that if if a student, if a person at Columbia is arrested who's not a student, it just shows you that this is all about outside agitators.
Right.
Right.
The very fact that, you know, Matt, we're in an era right now where when we think about freedom of speech and expression, It's the billionaires who are having the most freedom of speech and expression, and it's the billionaires who own a political class in the country and a class of elected officials who are then suppressing the speech of others, right?
So you see it in Texas with SB-17, in Florida with the Stop Woke Act, with the book bans, the assault on K-12, the assault on teaching American students American history.
So, I think it's going to continue to be used, but I also think that we can see from people's public opinions about what's going on in the war in Israel in October, in the aftermath of the massacre on October 7th, and support versus criticism of that war, that the outside agitator, that trope, is not working effectively in that sense.
Okay, now speaking about the sort of internal dynamics of a protest movement, what happens when certain members do cross into anti-Semitism or harassment or violence and then are disowned by the group as agitators?
Because I imagine that the trope can work in reverse as well to kind of launder a group.
Does that happen as well?
Yeah, I mean, I think it can happen.
I think it's hard to, unless you're part of the big organization like the NAACP, BLM is so loosely organized, it's very hard to, you can, like you said, disown groups of protesters who have moved into anti-Semitism or Islamophobia or any kind of hate speech.
But then it's also hard to do that.
And I think that's the problem for campus groups, whether they're pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli groups.
There's going to be folks in there who are going beyond the pale, so to speak.
And it becomes, you can announce that you're disaffiliating with this person, but if this person shows up to a protest, what can you do?
It's always very hard to police extremism in a discreet way, in that sense.
It makes me wonder what the civil rights way, if there was such a thing, was of dealing with movement discipline.
It was very, very difficult.
There were groups that were non-democratic that could try to do it.
So you think about the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers.
But the more democratic a group, like Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, It was virtually impossible, you know what I mean?
Because everybody was sort of a free agent and could get to say and do what they feel as an individual, even if they weren't going to be connected to the group, right?
For groups like Martin Luther King Jr.' 's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, it was not a mass membership organization, so it was easier to keep people in line.
Right.
You know, you knew who was working for King.
Same thing with the Congress of Racial Equality.
Same thing with the Urban League.
So in certain ways, the more the more corporate your group is, right, the more you have a chance to have that kind of discipline.
And what we've seen from the encampments and what we've seen going on here is that, you know, it's not been this hugely corporate movement, even as people are going to accuse people of saying, oh, it's George Soros who founded, funded this.
And people are going to say, well, it's the Bill Ackmans who fund the counter protesters, right?
And so that's what we've seen.
And there's been great reporting on this in The Guardian and in The New Yorker with Keonga Yamada Taylor saying the kids are not all right and they want to be heard.
The idea of There's both very real anti-Semitism that has proliferated on campuses and throughout the country alongside of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism and queer phobia.
And how do you talk about that?
And are you using, are there efforts by the far right wing to use real anti-Semitism as a way to halt speech and to bring in a new authoritarian wave?
That is modeled after Trump and Trumpism, but also modeled after what we've seen in Europe and really the handbook of fascist authoritarianism.
And I think so we're seeing all of those things on campus at the very same time where gerrymandering, where January 6th, where xenophobia and racism and anti-Semitism have really risen.
But we're responding to it by saying somehow less speech is going to make us safe and secure.
And that's an impossibility, right?
Less speech is not going to make us, less freedom of speech and expression is not going to make us safe and secure.
Well, especially when the speech that is the product of movement discipline is really articulate, because you are right, I think, that there can be a lack of corporate cohesion that we see within the encampments.
But also, when the spokespeople actually are given the microphone, they know what they're talking about.
They know exactly what they're asking for.
The thing about the outside agitator trope is that It seems to be saying, you can't actually believe what you're saying.
You can't actually be standing there, you know, believing what you're believing.
And I find that to be really, really dismissive.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this, you know, that trope happened in the South, too, during the Civil Rights Movement.
So people like National Review and William F. Buckley, they were constantly accusing King and what was going on in Birmingham, Mississippi of being Outside agitators.
You know, you read the National Review, and I've had to for a book I was writing on 63, and you see not just Buckley, but just, you know, and very, very lucid and articulate essays that, hey, you know, the people in the South are good white people, and the local black people, the indigenous black people are good too, and there'd be no civil rights movement without these Outside agitators coming in and setting the whole thing on fire, whether it was Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi or anything, none of which was true, but certainly was used as a way of weaponizing rhetoric to say that, hey, we're all civilized here.
And if people would just Just leave these indigenous people alone, right?
So it's basically, one thing about the outside agitator argument, it's really a state's rights argument.
And it's state's rights, not cities and local municipalities rights, right?
So it provides a kind of hegemony and domination to states, right?
So the state of Texas can send in, and the governor can send in troops to the University of Texas, but Austin does not have any autonomy from the governor.
Right.
And then the governor doesn't want the federal government to tell Texas what to do.
Right.
So it allows it allows states to be these fiefdoms that are tyrannical and authoritarian.
Right.
In the name of freedom.
A lot of the accusation around the outside agitator has to do with the more volatile, conflictual aspects of protest events.
And so I wanted to finish by asking, what did Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and let's say Stokely Carmichael think about things like flag burning, occupying public spaces, and property damage?
Yeah, I would say that for For all of them, certainly King wouldn't believe in property damage.
I'd say that somebody like Malcolm X was really all about self-defense when Black people were being attacked, but not to just overtly go out and do property damage.
In terms of civil disobedience, however, all of them believed in a measure of civil disobedience, right?
And so this idea that you don't have to obey an unjust law really goes through, you know, in certain ways all of their rhetoric, especially Dr. King's rhetoric.
Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture, by the late 1960s, with all the police repression that was happening against black people, saw the urban rebellions as something that was justified.
Malcolm X did too, because he lives to see urban rebellions in Harlem and New York and throughout 1964, even though he's
in Africa while this is happening.
I think that the idea of protest, you know, King, one of his last, his last speech, he
says, the greatness of America lies in the right to protest for right.
So they all believed in the right of protest, right?
Malcolm X was trying to get the United States censored in, in, in before the United Nations
when he, when he died.
And Stokely Carmichael visited Fidel Castro and visited all these different leaders around the world in the third world.
So I think in a lot of ways, they would have supported these protests, especially the human rights element of the protests in the sense of saying, hey, we want human rights for all people.