I Know Paid Protesters Are Real (Because I'm One Of Them)

His career started when a friend of his asked for a small favor, "Can you bring some food to our Occupy Wall Street Meeting?" Matt agreed and decided to hang out. While everyone was brainstorming protests, he had the bright idea to stage a "corporate wedding." Everyone loved it so much that they asked him to organize it. He did, and it flopped.

"We stood in the rain and pretended to marry a bunch of people in wedding attire with corporate logos. I don't think anyone even realized we were there."

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Still, Matt was hooked. And three months later he had made some connections at a union that offered him $20 a day to participate at the Take Back the Capitol protest in DC. They knew he was dedicated and supported the cause, but since he lived in Boston, he couldn't afford to go 400 miles out of his way and not even have a place to stay (he ended up sleeping on a church floor and spending his $20 on food). A few months after that, Matt took a job organizing non-unionized workers into unions for the SEIU.

Turns out most of the biggest and most important protests in American history were subject to some behind-the-scenes handling. As we've covered before, Rosa Parks wasn't the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat to a white person -- 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did the exact same thing nine months earlier, but the NAACP didn't think she was media friendly enough. Partly because "they didn't think teenagers would be reliable," so they asked Rosa Parks to do the same thing. Parks wasn't a paid protester, but someone on a salary decided she should be the face of the bus boycotts. And we're comfortable saying that the Civil Rights Movement ended up turning out OK.

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Strategy is a big part of protesting, there are tons of articles about effective grassroots organizing, and all talk about the best ways to convince people to be a part of a movement. While energy and enthusiasm come first, it's a lot harder to turn it into lasting change. Occupy Wall Street was all outrage and no direction, and right now a lot of prominent leftist organizers are trying to figure out the best way to turn the huge turnout from the Women's Marches in January into something that truly affects policy.

Of course, there are real "paid protesters" (said with that hateful inflection). It's enthusiasm and faith that makes the difference between someone like Matt (who accepted the $20 stipend to make his activism possible) and the paid actors who attended Trump's campaign announcement as his supporters. We spoke to Angelo Carusone, the journalist who broke that story, and he said that his first big clue that the event was (at least partially) staged was that "nobody was posting any selfies." Turns out $50 (the rate those actors were supposed to have been paid) isn't enough to motivate someone to get on social media. Only narcissism and video games can do that.

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It's similar to the problem the NAACP ran into with the bus boycotts.

"I definitely ran into the 'Rosa Parks problem,' where the people with the most compelling stories are the least able to be the face of the movement because of how involved their work is. I wanted to bring that woman to talk to the governor and senators about her life and work. It would've been really effective for the cause because the story is so compelling. But she couldn't get the time off."

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Meanwhile, Matt has plenty of free time to go to rallies, get mad at Donald Trump for attacking food stamps, and get kicked out. It's true, Donald Trump even called him fat because of it. Real protesters have curves.

The very same problems that call for protests also make it super hard for those most affected to protest, since protesting requires the kind of energy and time that the downtrodden don't have. Hence, the protesting.

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"You basically climb a ladder of enthusiasm, moving slowly toward the top. The higher you get, the more energized you feel, and the more responsibilities you take on. They start off with tweets or Facebook likes that they then expand into more in-depth activist training camps or messaging seminars. Bernie Sanders had a slack channel for his more devoted supporters," Matt explained. "It's the same kind of incrementalist reward structure that MMOs use."

Nerd! We caught you being a nerd. Never mind that we made that same comparison. Nerd!

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Anyway, back to the subject at hand (nerd), in the last year (before Trump was elected) college students were more politically engaged than they have been in 50 years. That was, in part, due to people from across the political spectrum being paid to tweet their views at certain times, and with certain hashtags. The Clinton campaign "signed up and trained an unknown number" of tweeters, while the Koch Brothers funded the "Grassroots Leadership Academy" for their own side. And nobody knows what to make of this, because as the Washington Post described it, "This isn't fakery, per se -- but it's also not 100 percent certified organic."

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Compare that to cold, unsexy facts. While attempting to organize some healthcare workers in Vermont, Matt ran into a critic who thought, "If there was a union, he wouldn't be able to choose to pay more than a starvation wage. He basically misunderstood how collective bargaining works and thought any extra money that he gave his own employees would be shared with every worker in Vermont."

Matt was able to clearly explain that that's not how it works. The union would establish a baseline income, not a salary cap or a redistribution of wealth system. But if the guy had said "I drink your liberal tears!" and taken a long swig from the mug he bought off Twitter, Matt wouldn't have had a comeback, because that's just raging partisan nonsense.

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But while memes are bad at communicating ideas, they're pretty much the best at generating enthusiasm. They're funny, easily shareable, and they target the apathetic people who might otherwise not vote. A lazy 20-something who isn't following politics is definitely following his Facebook feed, and if the weird memes convince him that it might be funny or even ironic to vote for Bernie, then he might become another Bernie voter.

Matt isn't the first person to notice this. Palmer Luckey, the billionaire founder of Oculus, spent most of the last election secretly funding anti-Hillary memes that adhered to the same rules as BSDMS: Glib comments that were satisfying to conservatives, but nonsensical enough that liberals couldn't "debunk" them.

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Like it or not, this is the future of politics. But hey, at least it's no dumber than that time John Adams' supporters tried to win an election by spreading a rumor that Thomas Jefferson was dead.

Anyone working behind the scenes at a rally knows that, like a bass player, they're only doing their job if nobody notices that they're there. So anytime you can make your protest seem like nobody has organized it, the better. Which is something Matt has totally done.

"Before I worked for the union -- while I was still developing my organizing chops -- I tried to organize a joint Tea Party/Occupy rally over Obama's NDAA, because they both hated it equally. I thought it would be a novel event and attract a lot of attention, plus, the gimmick boosted turnout because neither group wanted to be the under-represented one -- a lot of progressives who weren't with Occupy showed up just because they hated the Tea Party. I was manipulating identity posturing."

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Incidentally, this is why Trump needed those paid protesters at his campaign announcement. He needed a lot of people there to make the event look huge. "He doesn't have a political base," Carusone insists. "And even if he did, it certainly wouldn't have been in Manhattan, or even New York City [where his campaign announcement was held]."

Later on, it wasn't as necessary.

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"He never would have gotten his campaign off the ground," Matt says. "But I'm convinced that the rally in Worcester I went to, where Donald Trump called me fat, didn't have paid people. He didn't have to do that at that point. But when he was first finding his feet, yeah, for sure."

So yes, there is absolutely some money floating around activism, that's inevitable in a capitalist society. But in the end, the whole "paid protester" thing is far more complicated than either side wants to admit ... kinda like every other political issue, now that we think about it.

JF Sargent is a senior editor for Cracked. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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