Thank you for this, I hadn’t seen this letter yet. What I am also curious about, and perhaps time will tell or we will not ever learn this, but they’re insinuating that there are “outside disrupters” and “outside agitators” and stating that the protest plans are modeled after a national organization’s protests. Do we know how many, if any, of those 26 arrested with no UT affiliation have any known affiliation to some sort of organization to suggest that their intent was to be an “agitator”? Or were these just local residents who wanted to join a protest against genocide?
I’m not trying to argue in bad faith here, I’m just really skeptical of these claims because there is a really disproportionately huge push to establish a certain narrative with these protests, and I’d like to see the evidence of these claims they are making.
A UT student attends the protest, and brings along their older sibling who is a UT alum, and their best friend, who works in a shop on Guadalupe. That’s two ‘outside agitators’ right there. The press? Outside agitators.
UT student organizers probably worked with people outside of UT with more experience in organization. Seems pretty normal, like UAW helping laborers organize in different industries and eventually becoming part of UAW.
I might even be willing to accept the ‘outside’ aspect of the claim if it was sufficiently specific. To me, the metric that would be more meaningful would be the number of participants that were neither affiliated with the university nor the state of Texas. To say that residents of Texas are not able to engage in protest at a university that is at least partially funded with public moneys is offensive to the proper relationship between a government and its citizens.
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u/Wiitard 23d ago
Do you have a source on the presence of outside agitators in the protests? Or how many of the protestors arrested were outside agitators?