The Mask Slips

It turns out that much of the Ferguson riots last summer were effectively staged, the work of paid activists.

Yesterday, Katie Pavlich, Debra Heine, and Ed Driscoll drew our attention to a demonstration, unmentioned in the mainstream media, that took place in St. Louis and eventuated in the occupation of the offices of an outfit called MORE – Missourians for Organizing Reform and Empowerment. MORE is an offshoot of ACORN, and it is funded in part by George Soros’ omnipresent Open Society Institute (which has spent something like $5 billion supporting such outfits in recent years).

What makes this particular demonstration newsworthy is the fact that the demonstrators were demanding that they be paid, as promised, for the work they did in organizing demonstrations in Ferguson last summer. ...

Do you remember Occupy Wall Street? The demonstrations that the community-relations division of the Department of Justice helped organize against George Zimmerman in Florida? The riots in Ferguson, Missouri? The disruptive demonstrations in the Supreme Court building regarding Citizens United as the court began its last session? Those that recently interrupted Senate hearings? The demonstrations in New York and Boston that took place in the wake of Eric Garner’s death? And the recent riots in Baltimore?

The press has treated all of these as a series of spontaneous eruptions occasioned by understandable outrage on the part of the demonstrators. What we learned yesterday shows that much of what happened in Ferguson was theater. ... I would be willing to hazard the guess that virtually every demonstration and riot along these lines that we have witnessed in recent years was, at least in part, bought and paid for. And I would not be surprised to learn that the “reporters” dispatched to these various venues to cover these demonstrations and riots by Pravda-on-the-Hudson, Pravda-on-the-Potomac, and Pravda-on-Television in its various, more-or-less indistinguishable forms know a great deal more about the manner in which all of this was staged than they have told us.

I'd say I'm surprised, but that would be a lie.