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You can't really talk about protests like they're a unified group with a specific plan. It's like asking "what are those people on the Motte hoping to accomplish?" There's a lot of them, and they're all different.
I think a big part of protests is to improve the cohesion of the protestors. They start out as just a mob of dissatisfied individuals who hate the current status quo, but they'll talk to each other, march together, chant slogans together, and eventually figure something out. Over time they turn into a unified, coherent political activist group. They might alienate a lot of neutrals, but those random neutrals don't have much political power either. A small, committed activist group can wield disproportionate power. See for example: AIPAC on the other side.
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position. That's going to have ripple effects down the line.
Of course they are. This is all planned.
By whom?
I'm sure you can find any number of groups who are proud to participate. I don't think any of them deserve much credit.
I don't know, I'm not on their mailing lists (or Discords as the case may be)
Then how do you know it exists?
The bailey, I mean, where these discord servers somehow distinguish their members from "a mob of dissatisfied individuals." Anyone can give out an email address. That puts them roughly on par with a local HOA. Scary.
I see what appears to be co-ordinated protests, I know protests have been co-ordinated in the past, I infer the existence of a co-ordinator. It's not rocket science.
I would gently posit that your level of conscientious organization is slightly higher effort than these flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street and Chaz exhibit hallmarks of being coalescing of disparate bedfellows rather than a coordinated mobilization effort. Coordinated efforts if anything exhibit geographical dispersion to maximize visibility, like deliberate disruptions of uninvolved parties and events by the pro-pal protestors. Staying in a single region to protest dance is just a magnet attracting the crazies, and those tend to dissolve the moment a power struggle arises.
The CHAZ/CHOP in particular had 3 phases, at least to my eye. The first had a lot of influence from the local anarchist community, and had some rhetoric about seceding from the US and suchlike, hence the name "autonomous zone". Then there was some sort of low-key power struggle, possibly just the natural result of all the anarchist-style meetings that were going on, and the BLM faction came out on top, and ditched the more abstract stuff in favor of focusing on police interactions with black people, and changed the name to "occupied protest". Then the police backed off, and there was no resistance, and the normie-lefty contingent kept growing, and it turned into a giant homeless encampment, resembling Hamsterdam from "The Wire" but with smartphones and guns. And then enough people died there that public opinion soured and the mayor felt comfortable shutting it down.
After the first few days, the CHAZ was just where you went if you were a lefty. At first it was the core protestors against the police (the East Precinct substation being right there), but it spread out to people who liked to protest in general, and people who wanted to change something about America's police or America's treatment of black people, and also people who got bored of sitting around in lockdown. I was regularly in the area for other reasons, but one time I think I heard someone talk about "coming down to the protest to see what was happening today".
There didn't need to be a co-ordinator, it just became a Schelling point for every protestor in the city.
I've seen antifa show up to events a couple of times, and I don't doubt that they've got some form of co-ordination, although it might not be very centralized. The earlier riots and looting in Seattle might have had some co-ordination like that, where people passed the word on to friends, and then everyone showed up that evening to a march that rapidly degenerated. But the CHAZ/CHOP thing seemed organic.
Your assessment largely tracks with what I read, with a single point I'll raise about Raz Simone turning warlord at phase 3 being the major trigger for a violence spiral, instead of armed lefties suddenly finding their christiania.
Calling it a schelling point really reminds me of OWS, just where people WENT if they had nothing better to do. I was at Zucotti and there was this bartender from Georgia who quit his job to live a crust-punk existence with the other OWS. This was like 2 days before the crazies started using the park as their bully pulpit and the progressive stack became implemented to manage the crazies, only for that to morph into its own retarded beast.
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