They can't be "student protests" if they are conducted by older people and non-students

A few days ago I posted, More than 50% of the protesters are not even students about the pro-Hamas demonstrations.  I commented:

I have had the general sense that the Pro-Hamas campaign has been largely manufactured.  Whether from youthful idiocy or malevolent activists I can't quite tell.  There just seems to be a rent-a-mob aspect to the dynamics on all the videos I have seen.

Two other impressions.  The mobs seem to be primarily constituted of two distinct groups.  One are older individuals, more often male, who do not appear to be students.  The other is the female, overweight, pierced, tattooed, bright dyed hair demographic.  I haven't been able to put numbers to either of these impressions but it seems real.

I also noted that the demonstrations, for all that they are noisy and well publicized by the mainstream media, don't seem especially large.  

My overall impression is of a manufactured, or rather, a bought and paid for, mass protest, dominated by older non-students and older fringe women.  For all that the protests are occurring on campuses and being characterized by the mainstream media as student protests, there seems to be a marked absence of 17-21 year old students.  

But thats just an impression.  In the earlier post I noted that we were beginning to get some empirical data on the non-student aspect.  Since then in reports across the nation, it does appear that between 25-50% of the arrested protesters are indeed of individuals not in any way affiliated with the university.

But the impression about the overrepresentation of the BSCW demographic (bat shit crazy women, courtesy of Bat shit crazy broads vs. the rest of us by Stephanie Gutmann) has not been addressed.  I just haven't seen any numerical reporting.  Gutmann, though, points to a single report in the New York Times.  From Locks, Chains, Diversions: How Columbia Students Seized Hamilton Hall by Sharon Otterman and Chelsia Rose Marcius.  The subheading is Some of those arrested during the pro-Palestinian demonstration were outsiders, who appeared to be unaffiliated with the school, according to an analysis of Police Department data.

In this reporting, with regard to non-affiliation:

On Thursday, Mayor Adams and Edward A. Caban, the police commissioner, released a statement saying that of the 112 people arrested at Columbia, 29 percent were not affiliated with the school. That percentage was similar to the findings of a Times analysis of a Police Department list of people who were arrested that night.

At City College, north of Columbia in Manhattan, 170 individuals were arrested, and about 60 percent of them were not affiliated with the school, the statement said.

In terms of the BSCW demographic so visually prevalent in news videos:

The Police Department list showed that most of the more than 100 people arrested in the sweep of Hamilton Hall and other parts of campus on Tuesday evening were in their late 20s, white and female. The average age was 27; more than half were women.

"Most" is strangely oblique.  55%?  70%?  90%?

We are edging closer to some sort of sense of reality.  Across various campuses, half the demonstrators are unaffiliated with the university.  Most are in their late 20s and most are female.  

So these aren't student demonstrations at all if we define students as enrolled undergraduate students.  

More and more, it appears that the story is actually about who might be renting these mobs to violently protest on campuses rather than what appears to be an increasingly false claim that these are student protests.  

UPDATE:  From The People Setting America on Fire by Park MacDougald.  The subheading is An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests

These resemblances are no accident. All of these tactics require a degree of instruction and training. Footage from Columbia showed the professional “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, a veteran of Occupy, BLM, Standing Rock, and Stop Cop City, teaching students at Columbia how to barricade themselves into Hamilton Hall, while recent video from inside the protest encampment at UCLA, meanwhile, showed masked men leading a hand-to-hand combat training. When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades.

“What you’re seeing is a real witches’ brew of revolutionary content interacting on campuses,” says Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism. “On the left-wing side, you have a broad variety of revolutionary leftists, who serve as rent-a-mobs, providing the warm bodies for whatever the leftist cause of the day is. And on the other side you have the Islamist and Palestinian networks: American Muslims for Palestine and their subsidiary Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, the Palestinian Youth Movement. We’re seeing a real mixture of different kinds of radical foment, and it’s all being activated at the same time.”

The far-left groups active in the protests include antifa and other anarchists: Anarchist literature has been distributed in the encampments, and antifa websites have published dispatches from “comrades” on the inside. They also include various communist and Marxist-Leninist groups, including the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International ANSWER coalition, a PSL front group that worked with several Muslim groups to organize the Jan. 13 March on Washington for Gaza, at which protesters flew the black jihadist flag. On April 29, for instance, shortly before masked assailants stormed Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside, The People’s Forum—a Manhattan event space affiliated with the PSL and funded by Neville Roy Singham, a wealthy businessman who “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide,” according to an August profile in The New York Times—urged its activists to rush up to Columbia to “support our students.” Similar calls for an “emergency action” were distributed throughout radical networks in New York City.

Some very deep and excellent reporting, especially with regard to the sources and mechanics of the funding of these manufactured protests.  

OWS, BLM, Climate Change Activists, the Trans Movement, and now Pro-Hamas campus protests.  All involving NGOs, Foundations and non-profits who have money and rented bodies and who work hard to appear to be speaking for some good cause on behalf of some good people.  But the reality appears to be simpler - they are rent-a-mobs using coercion and threatening tactics to undermine law and order and work against the goals and desires of ordinary Americans.  Funded by some big names.