Where There’s A Demand

     …a supply will appear. Roger Kimball informs us:

     As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”
     An “audience-for-hire company”? Yep. I am not sure exactly which company team Harris employed, but it turns out that such initiatives are a booming business. Consider, for example, the company Crowds on Demand. Their website advertises “PROTESTS • RALLIES • ADVOCACY” and goes on to boast that:

     Whether your organization is lobbying to gain approval of a project, move forward a legislative initiative, bring additional pressure within complex litigation or trying to see swift and effective action in another way, we can set-up protests, rallies, demonstrations, alternatives to litigation or business disputes, coordinate phone-banking initiatives and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.

     Yes, Gentle Reader: the crowd-for-hire phenomenon of 2020 and 2024 has actually evoked an industry. The allegiants of the Democrat Plantation Party aren’t interested in leaving their sofas to attend “rallies” and “protests.” But for a few bucks you can hire a crowd to fill your hired hall… and such is the low estate to which our media have fallen, they’ll never lift the curtain to reveal where those “enthusiastic attendees” hail from, or on what terms.

     John Hinderaker comments:

     I knew you could hire protesters, but I didn’t realize it was an industry. A couple of years ago my organization put on an anti-Critical Race Theory event in Duluth. A number of protesters showed up with signs, chants, musical instruments, and so on. We had armed, off-duty police officers for security, as we did at all of our CRT events. One of the officers told us they recognized the protesters. They are the same ones, he said, who had recently protested against a natural gas pipeline. Watch, he said, they are being paid. At the top of the hour they will pack up and leave. Sure enough: when the two hours for which they had been paid expired, they all disappeared.

     That’s economics in action, sir. Here in the Land of the Formerly Free, politicians and cause hustlers need “shows of support.” Besides, people have to make a living somehow. Perhaps this capitalization of private citizens’ steadily swelling political indifference is the coming thing. As it doesn’t appear to require any aptitudes or skills other than shouting and applauding at the required moments, it might prove a fertile field for the “educated” products of our “institutions of higher learning.” Every two to four years, at least.