Every reporter has a patter for talking to people in a crowd. I start with a nakedly aggressive challenge—usually questioning or condemning their parentage. Alternatively, if they are bigger than I am, I say “gimme a dollar” and see if they comply. It tells me they’re easily cowed.
This past weekend I mixed things up at Donald Trump’s rally in Melbourne, Florida. There was only one question I wanted answered from people in the crowd: “How much did Donald Trump pay you to be here?” For some reason I didn’t make a lot of friends.
Most people take this inquiry badly because of the fundamentally malign question begging that lies at the heart of it. Asserting that someone attended a political event for the money implies that their belief system is so flawed and objectionable that they couldn’t possibly do it for any other reason. Either that, or they’re just a sellout.
Funnily enough, people don’t like that. Try it at a funeral sometime. Slam the casket lid shut, clamber up on that sumbitch like it’s the end of Dead Poet’s Society and start pointing fingers. “He’s here for the reading of the will… she is… so’s she… this whooooole cluster over here—all will people. Check out this one: big time will guy. Hey, what idiot called this a funeral instead of Will Call, am I right?”
If you want to be generous and compassionate about this, you could chalk up conservatives’ “paid protester” denunciations of the left to compensatory behavior. Nurtured for decades by the soothing lies of conservative media, they must be frightened to be confronted by the fact that the lugenpresse wasn’t fibbing about Donald Trump only winning 27% of the voting-aged public. If you believed Glenn Beck’s we surround them 9/12 grift, it’s terrifying to learn they they surround you.
Of course, this could also be payback. Conservatives have got to be pretty steamed that liberals wrote off the Tea Party phenomenon as an astroturfed racial tantrum directed at nothing legitimate.
Sure, they came out protesting on April 15, 2009 to condemn Obama’s tax plan—which they weren’t paying yet, and which lowered taxes on middle-income voters. And the whole thing was started by a CNBC journalist yelling on TV. And then it was taken up by FreedomWorks—courtesy of billionaire Steve Forbes and millionaire lobbyist Dick Armey—and Americans For Prosperity, which was founded by two politically active brothers each worth over $40 billion. And of course Fox News’s stars pimped the Tea Party events, with Glenn Beck eventually emceeing an entire rally from the Alamo. But the rest was 100% spontaneous.
Still, for some reason liberals were uncharitable to the couple hundred thousand people who came out to get mad about, well—based on the signs—the black guy. So you can bet conservatives are steamed to see Tea Party crowds getting dwarfed by leftists working outside their shambles of a party—so quickly that existing grassroots organizations are caught playing catchup, mostly writing protest and engagement guides for local actions that are already happening anyway.
With those kind of numbers, there are only two responses: surrender or claim everyone else is a mercenary. When the president and members of Congress echo that sentiment, you’d be a fool not to believe. And when the White House Press Secretary defines “paid protesters” so broadly as to include the sorts of paid organizers that both parties and countless charities and advocacy groups have employed for as long as charities and advocacy groups have existed, the accusation sticks like whipping a loaded diaper at drywall. Look around you: This shit is everywhere.
Nothing brings that home quite like bopping through a crowd like the one in Melbourne for four hours and discovering that nearly every single person you talk to is convinced that George Soros is paying protesters. Completely convinced. Pound-of-flesh-bet kind of convinced. You can even take out your phone calculator and plug in the $15/hour or $50/hour accusations flung at Soros, calculate two hours per person and about 200,000 people per day nationwide for the last 30 days and ask them why there isn’t a single economic metric showing a one-month injection of $180-600 million into the economy from losers who protest to earn money, and they’re so convinced that they’ll just assume Soros is paying burnouts with some kind of double-secret probationary money.
Maybe that has something to do with the conservative campaign against Soros, beginning in 2004 by aggressively flirting with mentioning Soros’s donations to MoveOn right next to words like “international Jewish financier,” then ramping up the intensity and mainstreaming the message for the next three election cycles—until half the right-wing avatars on Twitter are anime sex-cats wearing swastikas, while every Jewish community center in the country is expecting bomb threats to come in with the regularity of the Luftwaffe. But there’s another explanation.
It’s a false flag.
The only reason the right blames paid protesters on George Soros is because he’s a billionaire. One, he has that kind of cash. Two, you need a billionaire to cover up a billionaire. And who is definitely worth at least $10 billion, in money that is absolutely real? That’s right: Donald Trump, an international developer.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We know the Clintons attended Donald Trump’s wedding. Through them, he would have access to Bohemian Grove, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and—through Hillary Clinton at Secretary of State—Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. There are photos of all this.
It’s time for some game theory.
The Clintons, Trump and their masters deliberately engineered a Clinton/Trump showdown in 2016 to guarantee that no matter who won, America would lose. Why do you think Jared, Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric keep jetting all over the world? It’s because they work for the Clinton Global Initiative, which is putting the chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay. Once frogs are eliminated, the mosquito population will grow exponentially, spreading the Microsoft-designed bioware updates for Zika, AIDS, dengue and yellow fever. Of course, the only thing that can kill engineered mosquitoes are chemtrails—which Putin provides us from Tunguska mines—but guess who controls the FAA? That’s right: Donald Trump.
Connect the dots.
Now, you might want to retreat into your world of alternative facts and hide from this truth, but there’s one thing you can’t turn away from. As I was walking up to the airport in Melbourne this Saturday, here’s what I saw:
That’s right: the Trump team was busing in outside supporters. I saw all these coaches in the span of minutes, and there were at least two other locations, out of the line-of-sight, where other coaches could have been dropping people off.
You could tell these were Trump people because of the signs, and also because of how they get to these events. Trump has to advertise on Twitter and even his own press conferences, which is a dead giveaway. If it was a real protest, people would just go wandering around outside until enough of them ran into each other and started calling their friends to tell them where a good spot to meet and discuss what they might protest is.
Even more of a giveaway: Just to get a ticket to a Trump event, you have to register your full name and email address. Why? How else can they send you a W-9 and an invoice?
The whole point of railing at paid protesters is misdirection and manipulation. You get so worked up about Soros paying them or about being accused of being paid by Soros that you don’t notice that everyone is being paid.
I mean, why else would they be out there?
Jeb Lund is America’s foremost expert on gift wrapping, hot dog sandwiches and talking. Give him money or go to hell.