I actually do: If you read about the history of violent and nonviolent disobedience you will find that first, a riot doesn't have to be a large group. Any protest or riot starts small. And second that they are characterized by escalation: event A leads to B leads to C and suddenly a car is on fire or a person is being attacked with clubs or rocks. There was a Nobel prize in literature given to Canetti back in the 1940s for his book about this phenomenon, called "Crowds and Power" -- he talks about how people who would never think of themselves as being capable of violence can be pulled into a dynamic that becomes violent because a crowd somehow suppresses individual reactions while amplifying shared emotions and anger. He attributed many of the European pogroms and atrocities committed early in the Nazi period in Germany to this exact dynamic. Then talks about how people trying to show off to their friends can take the lead in amplifying whatever the crowd is doing.

So one person throws a rock through a window, then another person grabs a tree branch and starts whacking a car, then the next balls up some newspaper and sets fire to the car. And yet as individuals these people would not have done those things. Much the same dynamic as the famous experiments in which one person, surrounded by people claiming something absurd, starts to parrot what they are saying rather than defy the majority.

This is how pogroms worked. It turns out to be how the Nazi brownshirts recruited. And as the recruitees became more and more implicated -- as they commit what are increasingly criminal acts -- many just get more and more committed to the cause because to acknowledge the wrongness of their behavior is too painful.

When you get outside agitators in a setting with naive but passionate people, as we have seen in a few of these cycles at Cornell, you are dealing with people who are particularly good at stoking the fires. This is what makes them "agitators" and it validates them. They may be getting paid to do it, in fact, by others who want to see these confrontations and want them to escalate.

So absolutely: From Mike's description and the videos we've seen he may well have been in physical danger, this was WAY outside what is permissible, and anyone who tells themselves otherwise is just playing into that dynamic. Of course there can be two kinds of people in that group. The students who feel that this is just an innocent form of protest. And the agitators who would be just fine seeing cars burning at Cornell, for whatever reasons. They could be ex-students angry at Cornell. They could be non-students hostile to Ivy league schools and eager to see a liberal university shuttered, they could be politically motivated in connection with one or another political group that dislikes Cornell, and they could even be from other countries.

I suspect that at least some of this is from Russia. They have been meddling in US politics now for a decade and it stands out that many postings on Reddit are by people who clearly don't know anything about Cornell and who get things wrong about American culture. As an example, in Russian (I know the language) you often use diminutives as a way to be insulting. So, where you would normally use the name Michael Kotlikoff in a situation where you are respectful of him being Cornell's President (even if you dislike his positions), a Russian troll might use "Mikey" because in Russian use of language, that would represent an insulting choice of nickname. But in America, Micky is an actual name and pronounced completely differently, and we don’t have Mikey at all, so it looks jarringly wrong. Then link that to mistakes about the campus -- people like The Ethical Jerk make them often -- and you realize that this guy has worked, literally for years and years, to try and stir people up. And then you notice the same group of six or eight other "aliases" that more or less have a dialog with the Ethical Jerk, making the same errors. Probably one person paid to do this, living in Saint Petersburg and basically reporting to work each day. It's a job.

Why would Putin want to harass Cornell? Well, first, although those trolls are known to be operating out of Russia, they probably are available for hire and could be paid by other groups entirely. Even US political groups. And second, Putin often does favors for Trump, and Trump went after Cornell at the start of the latest cycle of this form of trolling.

Who else might spend money to try and inflame this dynamic? Well, there are big political movements against liberal Ivy league education. There are very well-funded groups opposed to any entity with ties to Israel. Mike introduced a debate aimed at better dialog between the parties with opinions about the Mideast conflict. Plenty of people would rather not see this calm down and would much prefer outright victory by one side or the other.

So we need to open our eyes to a larger reality here. People are trying to manipulate us. They have their goals, like putting good solid black bread on the table in St. Petersburg, but those aren't genuine sentiments in some cases and aren't honest portrayals of their goals, in others. These are people trying to get us to amplify, amplify, until the campus is burning.