There was a somewhat stunning article in the Daily Mail about the descendants of the original oil barons using their family fortunes to pay professional protesters to do their thing at climate and fossil fuel protests around the world. What we found stunning about this article is that anyone was even discussing this. Even right-leaning publications, like the United Kingdom-based Daily Mail, rarely acknowledge that there are a lot of protesters at leftist rallies who are there at the behest of others and receiving a paycheck for their participation.

Typically, when a political tactic works, you'll see the other side emulate it and try to improve upon it. After Barack Obama's community organizing approach to Get-Out-The-Vote efforts destroyed John McCain and the GOP in 2008, the Republican Party began building its own voter databases and sharing their data with county organizations. Today, the GOP database is even better than the Democrat's. It took almost a decade, but this is how the tools and tactics of political war develop and evolve.

However, there is one tactic that the left uses that the right never seems to use: the professional protester.

It's not like the Paid Protester is a new development. It's been used by labor unions for generations and wealthy liberal activists for all kinds of issues and causes have been at this for decades. Yet, despite this, the closest thing the right has to a paid protester is pro-life pregnancy centers paying full time and part time staff who spend time praying outside abortion clinics and trying to convince women to hear alternative options to abortions.

The Tea Party and Patriot movements popular in 2009 through 2011 never had paid protesters. In 2009, Kevin Tracy was speaking at Tea Party events across the country when he attended a rally protesting Barack Obama in his home state of Indiana. The SEIU brought in over a thousand paid union workers at a moment's notice for a counter-protest. They didn't even know what was going on, they were just there because someone was paying them between $100 and $200 to stand around in a purple t-shirt. Of course, aside from being completely dishonest, there's nothing wrong and certainly nothing illegal about paying people to stand around, hold signs, and yell about whatever. There was a time when we believed Republicans were simply more honest than Democrats, but the rise of Trumpism has proven that to be false.

So why then aren't Republicans paying professional protesters?

There are several reasons. For starters, the media has been pushing the progressive agenda and covering for Democrats for decades. If Republicans or conservatives started paying protesters, it would be broadcast on every cable news channel to discredit the entirety of whatever protest or event they were at. When Democrats and progressives do it, the fact that some, many, most, or even all of the protesters present is completely hidden from their coverage. Simply put, the bias in our news outlets makes the tactic more rewarding for the left and incredibly more risky for the right.

Another reason is that wealthy Republicans often value their wealth more than their political ideals. Paying someone to attend a protest, even in their stead, just doesn't make sense in the mind of your typical Republican.

Continuing on that thread, Republicans also don't suffer from the same guilt complexes many wealthy Democrats do. If a conservative Republican has inherited a tremendous amount of wealth from the founder of an abortion franchise, they aren't going to lose sleep over it unless they are deeply religious, and most Republicans are not (despite what they say). Democrats, for whatever reason, often are not awarded that luxury and will convince themselves that they need to do something with the money to offset the harm that came from obtaining it.

Finally, conservatives are generally more practical than progressives. Paying someone to stand in a street while holding a sign seems like a waste of money compared to giving money to a political campaign, a PAC, a county or state Republican party, a pregnancy center, or a legal defense fund for religious liberty. In the grand scheme of things, these victories are more important than a few hundred people standing around in a street expressing your opinion for you.

How Important Is The Protest?

A few hundred people can look like an army when your camera has a relatively low angle shot on the street. Alternatively, it can look like a poorly attended disaster if shot with a wide angle lens from a helicopter. How the media records the event is based entirely on whether those protesting are right wing or left wing. This means the protest is more effective and therefore more important for Democrats than it is for Republicans.

Protesting is an important right Americans have; and in terms of politics today, protests are important because many people use them to judge how popular a point of view is. Of course, this is an enormous fallacy for a great many reasons; but it still happens. Likewise, it's a well established fact that people generally like being on the popular, winning side. So, protests that appear to be well attended can alter public opinion; and public opinion of course is an enormous part of winning issues in a democratically elected Republic such as our own.

Protests are important, and Republicans are under-utilizing them and the paid protester. However, until Republicans figure out how to level the reporting playing field, it won't make sense for conservatives to play this game.