Rent an Audience? Or a Mob?
1st July 2025
How many Twitter personalities are actually bots? Apparently, a great number. Many, pretending to be human beings, presumptively Americans, are in fact bots created in Iran, China, Russia, or some other likely-hostile country.
The same is true, I think, of mobs. Demonstrators can be turned out for many left-wing causes: today, it’s “Palestine.” Yesterday, it was “No Kings.” The day before, Black Lives Matter. To what extent are these protesters, sometimes violent, the same people? And to what extent are they being paid to protest?
I think they are, in fact, largely the same people. In the summer of 2021, my organization did an anti-Critical Race Theory tour of the state of Minnesota. We had protesters and bomb threats, and at one or two venues arrests were made. So we had armed security at all of those events after the first two. Toward the end of that tour, we did an event in Duluth that drew left-wing protesters, waving signs, chanting, etc. (It was a bit surreal, as the nearly all-white demonstrators accused one of our speakers, a black woman, of being a racist.)