I noted over the weekend that the right-wingers are all up in arms about China supposedly financing and instigating the Black Lives Matter protests. I’m not kidding. I guess George Soros is so busy putting together those caravans he asked his Communist Chinese allies to step in.
This “outside agitator” trope is hardly unprecedented as Rick Perlstein and Richard Kreitner illustrate in this interesting article called “A Brief History of Dangerous Others” in the New York Review of Books:
This spring, protests against police brutality and systemic racism erupted in thousands of towns and cities across all fifty states, sparked by the on-camera murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd. Of the first wave of these protests, the vast majority were entirely peaceful, but several devolved into mayhem—looting, arson, smashed windows, gunshots, scuffles between protesters and the police, random acts of violence. To listen to public officials in many jurisdictions, the worst of the chaos was the intentional work of shifty, shady agitators who traveled from near and far to menace communities in which they did not themselves live. The rage over Floyd’s death was their pretext for destabilizing the whole social order.
On Saturday May 30, the day after street protests first got out of control, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter told reporters that “every single person” arrested came from out of state, and “about 80 percent” of rioters had done so. His Twin Cities counterpart, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, pinned the blame on “out-of-state-instigators, and possibly even foreign actors,” who had set out to “destroy and decimate our city and region.” Within hours, the president of the United States repeated Frey’s unsubstantiated claim in a tweet sent to his eighty-three million followers. It was thereafter echoed in press coverage.
The statistic could not stand barest scrutiny. But that didn’t stop other officials around the country from saying the same thing. Marco Rubio claimed that some of those arrested in Miami were outsiders “from as far away as New York and Minnesota.” Why, one might have asked, would New Yorkers travel a thousand miles when they could have stoked flames closer to home? Perhaps to make room for other roving rabble-rousers to descend on Brooklyn and the Bronx, for a top police official there soon passionately complained about all the Californians; meanwhile, three thousand miles away, California officials blamed outsiders, too. An Antifa exchange program, perhaps subsidized by George Soros?
The absurdity reached a nadir in Columbus, Ohio. Police impounded a psychedelically painted school bus and detained its owners on “suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters,” including “bats, rocks, meat cleavers, clubs, & other projectiles.” Senator Marco Rubio tweeted vindication: “But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests, right?” It soon emerged that the bus in Columbus that had authorities trembling—baptized “Buttercup” by its owners, a troupe of traveling circus-style performers—involved an effort by local residents to feed protesters and help with first aid. The “rocks” were fossil specimens; the axes were for chopping firewood; the meat cleavers were for… cleaving meat. Thousands of tweeters nonetheless homed in on the word “MURDER” painted plain as day on Buttercup’s side—ignoring those that preceded it: “STOP LEGAL.”
Everything would have been fine but for the outside agitators: the hoary cliché has been deployed by those in power to insulate themselves from accountability at least since the scribes who wrote the Book of Chronicles described the archangel who came down from the heavens to make mischief: “And Satan stood up against Israel…”
If you find this as fascinating as I do, please read the whole piece at the NYRB. This stuff runs so deep in our culture — maybe all cultures. I have a sneaking suspicion that we are about to see a gigantic spasm of them.