Dan Mogulof, a vice chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, must boast X-ray vision. After about 150 people rampaged through his picturesque campus in early February, setting fires, smashing windows, and launching fireworks at the police—all ostensibly to protest an appearance by an obnoxious and now, thanks to the rioters, increasingly famous conservative speaker and provocateur—Mogulof was quick to declare that the rioters were not connected to the university. They were certainly not students, Mogulof insisted. Rather, the vice chancellor said, the spasm of violence was the result of “an unprecedented invasion.”

We suspect that Mogulof is right. Berkeley students tend towards the bookish, more likely to pen tomes than to burn them. And these protesters—armed as they were with Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, and steel rods—had a whiff of professionalism about them. But it would only be because of that aforementioned X-ray vision that the vice chancellor would know for sure just who wreaked havoc that night. Only one rioter was arrested, after all; and many of the rest, who escaped unscathed, wore masks that obscured their identities.