I have protested for decades. I protested against the Iraq invasion and marched for Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I wasn't able to march in 2020 or camp during Occupy but I would have. I've even protested by myself, once I was the only person with a sign picketing Sarah Palin.

But lately I've been tracking disinformation, and the college protests around Gaza have been manipulated into something else. The fact that they were directed to mimic Occupy was an immediate red flag for me because of what happened at UC Davis last time. They didn't get what they wanted and they got pepper sprayed in the eyes. Then I noticed that a lot of influencers recognizeable from other protests were showing up on these campuses mingling with students about it, getting in fights, and giving them ideological and tactical cues. That's not right.

I wouldn't have responded by displacing them with police, I would have engaged with the psychology, law, history, and maybe journalism departments to figure out how to better negotiate with them and talk them down. AND I would have had lessons on lobbying set up so that they could be taught how to get something like a policy request. If I was an Ivy League student and I wanted my school to sell a stock, I would try and organize my parents and their fellow donors, not camp on the lawn. A class on cause and effect or how decisions are made at these institutions would have defused some of the chaos.

And chaos was the goal of some of the off campus influencers and influences that did interact with the protests. The real security problem was those influences, like the disinformation on Tik Tok, and calling the cops to beat up students doesn't mitigate those.

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