Was GameStop's Rise Actually Orchestrated By Hedge Funds?

Robert J. Shapiro advised senior members of the Obama administration on economic policy, and served as an Under Secretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton.
Now a senior fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, he's suspicious of the surge in GameStop's stock price:
Allegedly, this is the tale of scrappy, small online day traders buying shares of a beleaguered company to thwart a hedge fund scheme to take it down... Yet, certain facts are publicly available, including GameStop's da