PR Firm Openly Advertises Fake Protest Services
Once upon a time affecting political change required building a movement from the ground up. This required doing things like organizing rallies, protests, fund-raisers, petition drives and government lobbying for your cause. That’s how you build a real grassroots movement, like the Civil Rights movement or the Women’s Suffrage movement. It sounds like a lot of work and this author can tell you from personal experience that it really is.
But good PR people know that perception is reality and a well-organized PR stunt can go along way to influencing political actors and/or public opinion. So why go to the trouble and expense of building a political organization when a good PR stunt can make people think you have a grassroots movement?
Crowds on Demand, LLC
Enter Crowds on Demand, a for-profit limited liability company registered in the State of California. Founded in 2012 by an enterprising fellow (with apparently no scruples) named Adam Swart, Crowds on Demand is headquartered in that bastion of political activism, Beverly Hills. According to their website, Crowds on Demand provides clients with “protests, rallies, flash-mobs, paparazzi events and other PR stunts.” They also “provide everything, including the people, the materials and even the ideas.”
We use top notch professional talent with significant acting experience for our crowds . . .
Their talent page boasts that the company employs “top notch professional talent with significant acting experience for our crowds” and that they have over 30,000 actors across the nation as part of their “world class team” to put on a good protest for you. That should dispel any ideas you may have had that Crowds on Demand may be in the business of helping to organize real grassroots movements. This company employs actors to make people think there is support for or opposition to whatever the paying client wants.
Propaganda and Manipulation Are Nothing New, but . . .
For those who know their history, this sort of propaganda will hardly come as a surpise. Whether it’s FDR allowing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to sway public opinion in favor of the U.S. entering World War II or the fake testimony by a fake nurse about fake incubator babies being thrown on the floor by Iraqi soldiers in the run-up to the first U.S. war on Iraq, propaganda and propagandists have been employed throughout human history to manipulate public opinion and political actors. But never before have these kinds of services been so openly and brazenly advertised.
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