If there’s one thing New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants you to know about the student protests on the campuses of Columbia University and City College of New York, it’s not that the students are justifiably upset about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. No, after nearly 300 people were arrested for protesting, Adams blamed “outside agitators,” saying, “This is a global problem that young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children.” It might sound crazy, but the NYPD has actually discovered irrefutable proof — a bike chain.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Isn’t a bike chain a very common way to keep a bike from being stolen? And don’t a lot of students who go to college in New York City ride bikes? Is there something I’m missing here? Did someone swing the bike chain at a cop or something?” And those would all be valid questions. To answer them, as best as we can tell, it’s yes, yes, no, no. It’s literally just a bike chain.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went on Morning Joe to show off the bike chain that proves the student protests are actually run by outside forces and not a bunch of college kids who understood what Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich meant when he called for the “total annihilation” of Israel’s enemies. “This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities,” Deputy Commissioner Sheppard said before explaining that they were used to chain the doors to Hamilton Hall shut.

To be fair, those chains are very strong and quite difficult to break, which is why they’re popular with cyclists who would like their bikes to be in the same place they left them when they come back. Oh, and also, as it turns out, Columbia’s Public Safety department sells those exact bike chains. And at a discount, even! And yet, we’re supposed to believe that instead of Columbia students using bike chains they most likely bought through the school itself, they actually got them from Hamas or George Soros or some other “people who were not affiliated with the university.” OK, Eric. Whatever you say.

Now, if you ignore everything that’s been going on in the U.S. the entire time these kids were growing up, it is fair to question why the student protesters were so good at keeping the cops out of the building they were in. They’re college kids, after all, so how could they possibly make it so difficult for the cops to get in without professional assistance?

Think about it for more than half a second, though, and you’ll remember that this is the generation that was raised with constant school shooting drills. The professional assistance they got almost definitely came in the form of years of detailed instructions and practice in how to barricade a door. If they didn’t want college kids to be pros at keeping a shooter out, maybe they should have actually done something to stop school shootings instead.

Alternatively, university administrators could have followed the time-honored tradition of ignoring campus protests until they inevitably fizzle out, but apparently, that was simply too much to ask. Instead, they decided to bring in the cops, a method we all know worked so well during the Vietnam war. Oh, wait…