“Outside agitator is a phrase with its origins in the late 1940s during the earliest days of the Black freedom struggle. It was first said by John Birchers and Jim Crow cops to denigrate and slander civil rights activists.
Their argument was that Black people in the South were more than content with white supremacy until a bunch of Northern, radical, carpetbagging communists showed up to tell them that there was something wrong in the world.”
“The fiction of the ‘outside agitator’” an essay by Dave Zirin in thenation.com
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Say, are those outside agitators anyway?
Agents of Hamas? Putin propagandists? Chinese agents who wafted into the country hanging from weather balloons?
Or that rowdy bunch that came to GNV from Live Oak looking to party hardy…
…and ended up beating a UF student to death during a Florida-Tennessee football weekend.
Actually two people were beaten to death in two separate brawls during that rivalry weekend in 1999. And outside agitators were almost certainly involved in both brawls.
Face it, on any given football Saturday UF plays host to hundreds, nay, thousands of outside agitators. Many of whom get, um, carried away due to an excess of alcohol and team spirit.
Which brings me to the statement “attributable” to Tigert Hall spokesman Steve Orlando?
Which made the assertion that “many” of the campus pro-Palestinian demonstrators (who, incidentally, did not get drunk and beat people up) “were outside agitators.”
Who exactly were these outside agitators? The statement “attributable” too Orlando didn’t bother to say.
The clear intent was to discredit student demonstrators as wide-eyed babes in the woods who are so impressionable as to easily fall under the influence of the first silver tongued devil to show up on campus with a bunch of protest signs in tow.
Which pretty much makes a joke of UF’s ongoing boast that the students who come here are the best and brightest.
The smartest. The most motivated. The highest achieving.
You know…nobody’s fools.
Listen, we may never know who were those unnamed outside agitators running the demonstrations. But if I had been one of them I would have advised those so-gullible students to hold their, um, fire until the next Gator baseball, football or basketball game day.
And then show up in full team rah-rah regalia: Tennessee orange, Seminole garnet, Alabama crimson…whichever may be the camo of the moment.
Hell, they could plant signs, pitch tents, swagger, shout and spit on the lawn to their hearts content.
Just like all the other outside agitators who come to campus on any given game day ready to raise hell.
FreeGNV 