Word of the Week: Who gets called an ‘agitator’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — As Americans across the country demonstrate their opposition to Donald Trump’s immigration offensive, the president and his administration aren’t classifying them as protesters. Instead, they’re calling them “agitators.”

In the words of the Trump administration, Renee Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent while protesting enforcement actions in Minnesota, and her wife, Becca Good, were part of a “mob of agitators.” A bystander who could be heard in a video of the interaction crying “shame, shame” was an “agitator, probably a paid agitator.” Minnesota residents who are protesting, angry that one of their neighbors was killed at the hands of federal authorities, are “professional agitators.”

“Agitator” is a Latin word meaning driver or charioteer, from the verb agitāre, meaning to put into motion, to rouse up or to disturb. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines an agitator as “a person who instigates public dissent or unrest,” while American English authority Merriam-Webster defines it as “one who stirs up public feeling on controversial issues.” (Separately, an agitator is also the post in the middle of a washing machine that helps slosh the clothes around.)

Exactly who is instigating public unrest or stirring up public feeling is a matter of interpretation. Throughout US history, the label “agitator” has largely been deployed in one direction — “by the powerful to delegitimate real grievances of the marginalized and oppressed seeking change,” Aldon Morris, a professor emeritus of sociology at Northwestern University, wrote in an email to CNN.

Per Morris, the “agitator trope” was used by enslavers to describe abolitionists, by business magnates to characterize labor union organizers and by segregationists to smear Black civil rights activists. (In some instances, so-called agitators appear to have claimed the label as a point of pride.) And from 1967 to 1971, the FBI kept what it first called its Rabble Rouser Index, then renamed the Agitator Index, containing information about dissidents that it deemed a threat to order.

Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most well-known figures ever to be deemed an “agitator,” warned against dismissing those who engage in nonviolent civil disobedience.

“And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies — a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare,” King wrote in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Despite King’s warnings, the idea of the “outside agitator” — along with its siblings “paid agitator” and “professional agitator” — has endured. Authorities invoked the phrase in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and in 2024 during university campus protests against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. The word transcends US politics — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently referred to the protesters challenging his regime as “agitators who want to please the American president.”

“Agitator,” which was first used as a synonym for “instigator” around the 1700s, didn’t always have a negative connotation. Before that, it meant an “agent,” or a person who acts on behalf of others.

In the mid-1600s, during a political struggle between England’s Royalists and Parliamentarians, elected representatives of rank-and-file soldiers in the Parliamentary army were called “agitators,” according to an entry in the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. These “agitators” brought the populist concerns of soldiers before the generals, advocating for democratic freedoms such as regular elections, civil rights and religious tolerance. Though they weren’t immediately successful in achieving their political goals, they pioneered forms of protest such as petitioning and pamphleteering, and their ideas laid the groundwork for modern democracy.

The now-obsolete meaning of “agitator” as someone acting on behalf of others might apply to Renee Good. Her wife, Becca Good, said in a statement last week that the couple had “stopped to support our neighbors.” She added, “We had whistles. They had guns.”

As Morris has previously said, social movements can indeed be vulnerable to infiltrators who seek to sow chaos and undermine the cause. But in his view, authorities often invoke the term “agitator” to undercut deeply felt grievances and paint earnest dissenters as “misled rebels irrationally bent on unlawful destruction.”

“President Trump and his administration realize that large segments of Americans are genuinely opposed to their mass deportation campaign and feel that it is unamerican and unconstitutional. In this view, these ‘protesters’ including the slain Renee Good do not have real problems with the deportation campaign nor its aims and tactics,” he wrote in an email. “Rather, the Trump administration claims resistors are being doped by paid outsiders to disrupt legitimate efforts to make America great again.”

Morris noted that Trump did not accuse his supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, of being “agitators” (a new White House website unveiled last week recast them as “peaceful protesters” unfairly maligned as “insurrectionists”). ICE agents who have violently pulled people from their cars or their homes, as well as the officer who confronted and fatally shot Good, have also managed to escape the label.

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