At American Greatness, Roger Kimball has fun at the expense of Kamala Harris’s no good, terrible, very bad week. It is all worth reading; he talks about the fake pheasant hunt, the “I’m man enough to vote for Kamala” ad, etc. But I want to focus on this story:
Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally. But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.
And that was not the worst of it. A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted. 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.”
Wot? An “audience for hire company”?
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.
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.
I suspect that Democrats have frequent recourse to such companies. The Harris campaign, at any rate, is nearly 100% synthetic. Its crowds are actors or activists for hire. Ditto the figures populating its ads.
Deep fake videos have been getting a lot of attention and, I think, rightly so. But it appears that the Democrats have also pioneered the use of deep fake events, as well as fake “non-profit organizations.”
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