Wielding the outside agitator trope has always, at bottom, been a way of putting dissidents in their place. The allegation is not even necessarily meant to be believed. It is simply a cover story, intended to shield from responsibility not only the authorities implicated in crimes or abuses of power, but also society as a whole. It is a strategy of shock-doctrine reaction. But now the side of social justice has its opportunity.
The swiftness with which the self-exonerating claims of the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, blaming the riots in their cities on menacing strangers, were disproven and debunked suggests this once-dependable method of paving over necessary pressure for change might finally be on its way out—that the Barr–Trump strategy to sustain it might not succeed. In an age of widely available information and rapid-fire fact-checking, the evasion no longer works, even for merely buying the authorities time to divert attention and defuse the public uproar. Certainly, it need never be taken even half-seriously again.
We must also dispense with the underlying ideology reflected, often unconsciously, in the ritualistic trotting-out of that exhausted cliché. When authorities try to deflect attention harnessed by mass protests and more rambunctious crowd actions by alleging that the problem, invariably exaggerated, was brought in by interlopers with their own agendas, there is something going on that is both more complicated and more dangerous than an attempt to delegitimize protest. From colonial times to today, the label “outside agitator” has served as a denial and repudiation of American nationhood, for it suggests that what goes on in one part of the country is of no rightful interest or concern to residents in other cities, states, and regions. What the outside agitator allegation ultimately implies is that the authorities leveling it belong to, and speak for, a given polity more fully than those whose radical demands and disorderly actions they oppose. Defenders of the status quo are defined as the only rightful inhabitants of a place and the only ones who get to have any say in its workings.
We shouldn’t judge protesters based on whether they’re “outsiders,” or even “agitators.” Agitation on the side of right should be welcomed, from wherever it arrives. In fact we ought to reconsider whether there should be “insiders” and “outsiders” in America at all.