Mobs are an organism. They act like a living creature. They might be made of people, but they react in known and predictable ways.
Mobs move in the path of least resistance towards their goal. If one person chooses a different path, others in the mob will follow, not a lot. But more people will follow those, and pretty soon there is a significant part of the mob moving in that new direction.
This is why breaking contact with the mob can be difficult. You need to fade out of the mob, not attract attention that causes parts to follow.
When there is a junction, the mob will flow down multiple paths from that junction unless guided. This is how multiple blocks can become involved with the mob: they move in the same general direction, but they fill all available space.
Mobs avoid hard points. They will flow around those hard points, but hard points cause a pain-like response, and the mob recoils from contact.
Riots are a type of mob behavior. My mentor told the story of how he and his Johns Hopkins buddies rushed to the rowhouse of one of the buddy’s moms. There they set up in the front window with long guns.
As the story was recounted to me, every rowhouse on that block suffered serious damage except for three. The rowhouse they were in and the two rowhouses directly across the street from them.
The mob avoided that hardpoint. It wasn’t worth the pain, and the organism retreated.
Mobs are dangerous. People get caught up in them and don’t know how to extract themselves. People that would never dream of being violent or vandalizing property will do it without even a thought. They follow anybody who acts like a leader.
During student protests that turned into riots at my University in the 60s, before I got there, there was no vandalism until one person threw a brick through the plate glass window of an upscale store. The student newspaper ran a picture of the man throwing that brick through the window to go with the story of the police vowing to track down the student who did it.
Oh, the man throwing the brick? He was dressed as a police officer.
The REST of the windows, those were broken by students who followed suit. Once one act of violence happened, the rest of the mob followed suit.
During the January 6th march to the Capitol, instigators changed the protest into a mob. That mob did not turn into a riot; they just did things that, as individuals, they would not normally do.
The reason that it didn’t turn into a riot was because there was no drive among the people to be violent.
We compare that to the BLM riots.
In Kenosha, we saw protests turn to mobs turn to riots. One of the interesting things that was caught on camera was people in all-black clothing, carrying umbrellas, throwing those first bricks. Starting the process of turning the mob into a riot.
The people in the streets were already angry. The media had been stirring up hate and anger for days and weeks. It took very little to drive the protests into mobs and the mobs into riots.
But there are things that mobs don’t do. They don’t have Command and Control structures. They don’t have security details. They don’t have assigned tasks for different units. They don’t have units.
One of the interesting, but not surprising, features of the “mobs” in MN is just how well organized they are.
All of which leads me to believe that they are not organic. There are parts that are useful fools/tools. But there are other parts that are most definitely acting to destabilize societal norms in the area. To foment a revolution.