Hillary Clinton Echoes Classic “Outside Agitators” Propaganda as She Continues Her Attacks on College Students Over Gaza

In 1960, a group of Black college students took out a full-page ad in Atlanta newspapers calling for “An Appeal for Human Rights” that expressed solidarity with the Civil Rights protests sweeping the country. Segregationist Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver said, “it did not sound like it was prepared in any Georgia school or college; nor in fact did it read like it was written even in this country.”

Outside agitators became such a classic lie amongst the pro-segregationist crowd during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s that Martin Luther King Jr. addressed it in his letter from the Birmingham Jail in 1963, writing “never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.”

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, who seems to disagree with MLK and believes that the notion of outside agitators still has plenty of legitimacy today. This weekend, she was on Fareed Zakaria’s mid-curve program on CNN where the most mediocre thinkers in politics come together to say absolutely nothing of substance in Very Serious tones, and Hillary Clinton looked right at home baselessly claiming that campus protests against Israel’s genocide of Gaza were driven by outside agitators, alleging that:

“We were doing an event, and we started being protested. The dean and I and our guests, and being screamed at, being called, you know, all kinds of names. What happened in that period [since a respectful class discussion the week after October 7th]? And the best I can sort of unpack it is that there were already existing groups within our country and particularly on certain campuses like Columbia who had talking points. They had a plan for protests and disruption. And I watched it sort of morph into something that was not student led, even though students participated, but which had outside funding, outside direction and I still to this day, I’m not quite sure all that was going on with it.”

Presumably, if Hillary Clinton had evidence of “outside funding” and “outside direction,” she would provide it, and if she were being interviewed by a journalist and not a fanboy for empire, that journalist would ask her for proof of her assertions. Instead, Zakaria just let her launch these evidence-free allegations against her own students while he sat there and nodded and pretended to look intelligent.

That said, you can’t blame Zakaria too much for refusing to do basic fact-checks when this is how the entire media functions on this subject. Anything intelligence agencies tell them, they blindly repeat as if it were a fact, as evidenced by this NYT line in a straight news article echoing the outside agitators line without providing any independent evidence that this is actually happening. This is what it looks like when you replace journalism with stenography.

Across the United States this spring, Iran also used social media to stoke student-organized protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, with operatives providing financial assistance and posing as students, according to American intelligence assessments.

Mainstream American journalism is dead, and Gaza is where it was buried. The New York Times literally trademarked the word “truth” and yet they still report intelligence assessments as if they were hard facts without any appreciation for that one time they royally fucked up doing exactly that, and helped lead us into a war that killed over a million people. Zakaria’s Very Serious Brow Furrowing Hour is a great acting job for people who like to pretend they’re smart thinkers without actually committing to it, and this sham of an interview where Hillary Clinton just gets to make unfounded allegations totally unchallenged is another data point proving he and everyone like him are just TV show hosts, not journalists.

The powers that be like Hillary Clinton want you to believe that fake news on TikTok is the problem, when all available evidence indicates that her preferred TV show hosts are a far bigger issue than any slapdash intelligence operations foreign agents are trying to run on America.

Hillary Clinton went on to say that “I am willing to sit down and have a conversation with anybody, but it’s difficult to have conversations with people who hold strong opinions with no factual or historical basis,” which is a pretty rich statement coming from someone echoing the classic segregationist outside agitators line. Maybe Hillary Clinton should do some research on what happened in the 1960s before assuming that any kind of protest against America must be organized by “outside direction.”

This is full-blown conspiracy theorizing designed to sell her shitty book, all packaged as intelligent thought by one of cable news’ most mediocre thinkers. Hillary Clinton has proven time and time again that she is one of America’s most out of touch politicians, and her open contempt for young people is practically unmatched in modern politics. This is who she is, a Barry Goldwater girl entirely wedded to the declining sclerotic American state’s violent power, and it should come as no surprise that when backed into a logical corner of defending a genocide, that she is retreating to the outside agitators line that animated her original political movement in the 1960s.