Crowds on Demand CEO Adam Swart has revealed that his company has seen a staggering 400% surge in requests for paid protesters compared to the same period last year.
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Swart told anchor Lawrence B. Jones that the pay for political demonstrators varies widely, often reaching into the hundreds of dollars.
“We don’t comment on specific protests, but generally the range can be from the low hundreds, the low one hundreds, into a few hundred,” Swart said.
“It really depends on the location, the duration and any challenges, for example, cold weather or early morning.
“You guys at Fox & Friends know all about getting up early in the morning.
“We tend to pay people more [for] that.”
According to its website, Crowds on Demand organizes “passionate demonstrations, rallies, flash-mobs, corporate PR events,” along with publicity stunts and brand promotions.
Swart insisted that while his company’s work has drawn online rumors, its protests are “peaceful and law-abiding” and aimed at “persuasion.”
When asked about hourly pay rates, Swart declined to give specifics but acknowledged that politically hostile environments tend to pay more.
“It’s hard to give you a specific figure,” he said.
“If you’re organizing a conservative demonstration in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that would be a higher pay rate — or a left-wing demonstration in rural Mississippi, that would be a higher rate because finding and identifying those people is harder, and that might be a more tense environment in those particular locations, as you would imagine.”
Jones pressed Swart on whether the protesters are ideologically aligned with the causes they’re paid to support or simply “out for a paycheck.”
“They genuinely share these beliefs,” Swart claimed.
“And I’ll put it this way, right?
“I’m asking your listeners, your viewers right now, if you got paid a couple hundred dollars, probably mostly your viewers lean conservative, would you guys go to a BLM protest for a couple hundred dollars?
“I bet most of your viewers are shouting into their TV screens, ‘No, I would not do that,’ right?”
While stressing that his company works with both political camps, Swart noted that conservatives often require more incentive to attend protests.
“There’s a lot of misinformation that we only work for the Left,” he said.
“We work for the left and the right, but always on the side of common sense and generally on the side of the underdog.
“A lot of conservatives use our service because, a lot of times, there’s a case where hippies with a trust fund are out there protesting, but conservatives are more likely to have jobs and families, so actually they require a little bit more of an incentive to turn out to a demonstration.”
Asked which political side hires more of his paid protesters, Swart said the demand tends to come from the opposition.
“So we tend to be hired by the oppositional party, right?” Swart explained.
“So, in the sense of right now, we are getting more requests on the federal level from Democrats, as you would imagine.
“But for example, in liberal states such as California, we are often brought in by conservatives because we are an outside-the-box strategy, right?”
Ultimately, Swart pushed back on criticism that paid protesters create a false appearance of grassroots political momentum.
“The reality is, Lawrence, people have different incentives for coming out there,” he said.
“There’s no such thing as a truly organic protest, Lawrence.
“Everybody has a reason for being somewhere, whether they’re flexing on Instagram, flexing for politics, staffer, or being compensated.
“So I don’t think there is such a thing as truly organic.”
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