Ads in two dozen cities offer protesters up to $2,500 to agitate at Trump inaugural

Ads in two dozen cities offer protesters up to $2,500 to agitate at Trump inaugural

Demand Protest ads running seek operatives to “send a strong message” at presidential inauguration

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Donald Trump may have a point about paid protesters: Job ads running in more than 20 cities offer $2,500 per month for agitators to demonstrate at this week’s presidential inauguration events.

Demand Protest, a San Francisco company that bills itself as the “largest private grassroots support organization in the United States,” posted identical ads Jan. 12 in multiple cities on Backpage.com seeking “operatives.”

“Get paid fighting against Trump!” says the ad.

“We pay people already politically motivated to fight for the things they believe. You were going to take action anyways, why not do so with us!” the ad continues. “We are currently seeking operatives to help send a strong message at upcoming inauguration protests.”

The job offers a monthly retainer of $2,500 plus “our standard per-event pay of $50/hr, as long as you participate in at least 6 events a year,” as well as health, vision and dental insurance for full-time operatives.

Mr. Trump has complained about paid activists both before and after the 2016 presidential campaign, but if anti-Trump advocacy groups are juicing their crowds with hired help, nobody’s admitting it.

“There’s simply no credible evidence that the opposition to Trump is spurred by anything other than legitimate concern about what his presidency might entail,” said a Nov. 17 column in the Washington Post’s The Fix.

PolitiFact reported that a widely shared Nov. 11 article claiming an anti-Trump protester was paid $3,500 was fake news created by Paul Horner, who runs a number of phony news sites.

If the Demand Protest ads are ruses, however, someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to sell the scam. The classifieds are running in at least two dozen cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Houston, and the company operates a slick website that includes contact information.

A San Francisco phone number listed on the website was answered with a voice-mail message identifying the company by name. A request for comment left Monday evening was not immediately returned.

The website, which says that the company has provided 1,817 operatives for 48 campaigns, promises “deniability,” assuring clients that “we can ensure that all actions will appear genuine to media and public observers.”

“We are strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences and desirable messages,” says the website. “With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact.”

More than 100 left-wing groups, led by organizations such as Occupy Inauguration and the DisruptJ20 coalition, are calling on Trump foes to participate in inauguration protests being organized in Washington, D.C., and all 50 states.

The demonstrations are aimed at disrupting Friday’s inaugural ceremony and parade, as well as balls and festivities pegged to the celebration.

A search by the Washington Times showed the Backpage.com ads also ran in Austin, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Oakland, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-2500-agitate/

Some guy Dom Tulipso or something like that was just interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and apparently it's a scam or hoax of some sort. It was really weird. Catch a rerun of Tucker if he has one and let me know what you think.

I will. the Washington Times is usually reliable.

Far-Right Flips Out Over Obviously Fake Company Claiming To Pay Trump Protesters

BY CALEB PERSHAN IN NEWS ON JAN 17, 2017 11:30 AM

http://sfist.com/attachments/sfist_c...andprotest.png
Screenshot via demandprotest.com

A website that claims to represent a San Francisco-based company called Demand Protest supposedly paying "operatives" as much as $2,500 a month "on top of standard per-event pay of $50/hr" for their work as hired protesters is making the alt-right rounds today on forums like 4chan and 8chan, as well websites like Breitbart, Infowars, and the Washington Times.

Demand Protest, which purports to be a group of "strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences and desirable messages" has some on the far-right downright giddy, presented with what they perceive as evidence confirming their conspiracy-minded suspicions that, say, Trump protesters are simply paid shills rather than legitimately concerned citizens and Black Lives Matter activists are in it for the money rather than, you know, the racial justice.

But even Infowars had to couch its report on Demand Protest with skepticism, as the website and "company" appear to be a false flag operation.

Although Demand Protest has a working phone number with a San Francisco 415 area code, SFist has tried several times and failed to find any way to speak to an actual human person at the number — you can attempt to key in any extension number, and it simply says "not found" and hangs up on you.

While the site claims that "Demand Protest is the largest private grassroots support organization in the United States," Demand Protest is not a registered LLC in the state of California. Finally, while Demand Protest claims it has worked with 15 partners on 17 causes during 48 campaigns boasting 1817 operatives, those figures are suspicious considering that Demand Protest was first created on December 2nd. That's some very fast work in less than two months, and the timeline is also thrown into question by a "testimonial" quote purportedly from a campaign chair for an "unnamed 2016 presidential campaign." That statement touts the "momentous changes as a result of our first two campaigns," which is odd considering that the 2016 presidential campaign was over and done by the time Demand Protest created its web domain.

The Washington Times cites job ads from Demand Protest running in 20 cities on backpage.com. "We pay people already politically motivated to fight for the things they believe," those read. "You were going to take action anyways, why not do so with us! We are currently seeking operatives to help send a strong message at upcoming inauguration protests." A reverse image search of the supposed logo for this, the "largest private grassroots support organization in the US," shows that the image of a fist is little more than generic clipart.

http://sfist.com/attachments/sfist_c...ainsttrump.png
via backpage.com

While to me, Demand Protest looks like an obvious sham organization created for the purpose of dismissing real, grassroots protesters for liberal causes as potentially paid operatives, far-right sites like truthfeed see it differently. They speculate that Demand Protest could be linked to Democratic donor and activist George Soros. It's "hard to tell if they are associated with Soros but considering all of the violent protest movements are Soros funded, #BlackLivesMatter and #Occupy, it is a safe bet that Soros is also funding this radical leftist group." Very hard to tell indeed. (Also, just to make sure no one's confused here, Soros has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, though the alt-right has seized on the fact that a grantmaking group he once founded did give some money to groups engaging in Ferguson-related protests and activities.)

More likely Demand Protest could be linked to someone like fake news wunderkind James O'Keefe, the guy behind the 2009 "pimp" hoax involving Acorn and the 2015 hoax videos about Planned Parenthood harvesting fetus organs, and who the HuffPo reports was recently caught by activists on the left attempting to bribe them with large sums of money to incite a riot or "shut down a bridge" during Trump's inauguration.

Donald Trump himself has suggested, without basis, that protesters are paid to agitate against him in an appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes, perhaps because he read something to that effect on the aforementioned far-right websites.

A fake news story during the presidential campaign in which a protester supposedly claimed he was paid $3,500 to agitate at a Trump rally. That was entirely discredited when a Facebook fake-news writer came forward to confess that he'd written the story himself, inventing it from whole cloth. Paul Horner, a man who has convinced people he's the graffiti artist Banksy, told the Washington Post "[Trump's] followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything." With reference to onetime Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Horner added that, "His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist."

http://sfist.com/2017/01/17/demand_p...st_fake_co.php

There will be very real attempts to disrupt the inauguration events. I hope no one gets hurt as a mob mentality takes over these groups.