Watch: Rent-a-Protester CEO Rejects $20 Million Contract to Stage Anti-Trump Protests

"We had to reject an offer worth around $20 million for nationwide, large-scale demonstrations across the country."

This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Tyler Durden

Free speech in the U.S. was never intended to serve as a perpetual vehicle for permanent protest.

However, over the past decade, it has morphed into a billion-dollar industry fueled by dark-money-funded, far-left-aligned NGOs—many backed by opaque funding sources, including leftist billionaires and entities based in countries classified as foreign adversaries.

Yet here we are. Far-left NGO networks, some aligned with Marxist ideology, attempted coordinated acts of civil unrest in Los Angeles last month, including arson and insurrectionist behavior.

Simultaneously, operatives tied to far-left color revolution operations, including the Indivisible movement, have targeted Elon Musk and President Trump. In fact, Indivisible has maintained a continuous, nationwide protest pressure campaign against Trump.

Just yesterday, Indivisible foot soldiers were spotted outside Carnegie Mellon's facilities in Pittsburgh, where the President Trump attended an Energy and Innovation Summit.

Most of these protests are highly organized, and emerging evidence suggests they are largely artificial. In other words, NGOs are hiring "rent-a-protesters" to amplify their message and create the illusion of popular support—when in reality, that mass support does not exist.

The latest evidence comes from an interview between NewsNation's Brian Entin and Adam Swart, CEO of an activist group called "Crowds on Demand."

Swart told Entin that an unnamed organization offered his company $20 million to recruit demonstrators for the anti-Trump protests on Thursday.

He told the journalist, "We had to reject an offer worth around $20 million for nationwide, large-scale demonstrations across the country. Personally, I don't think it's effective. I'm rejecting the contract not because I don't want the business, but because, frankly, this is going to be ineffective and make us all look bad."

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Thursday's upcoming color revolution operation, titled "Good Trouble Lives On," is a front group supported by dozens of leftist nonprofits, some of which have participated in previous protests (e.g., "No Kings"). The new development is that the CEO of a protest-for-hire company publicly admitted that a group offered $20 million to recruit fake protesters and amplify an artificial narrative.

Good Trouble Lives On's partners...

Attempting another nationwide color revolution operation....

Thursday's Good Trouble Lives On's mobilization focuses on civil rights, not issues like Tesla or DOGE or Trump—topics addressed by earlier calls to action.

Jason Curtis Anderson from One City Rising comments on this latest development:

Most people who defend the right to protest are really defending the right to free speech, which is important. The thing they don't understand is that it's become a permanent protest industry, and there's a lot of components about it that should alarm all Americans, but most do not understand what is going on.

Someone creating a national 'crowds on demand' business and someone from the NGO world offering them $20M shows that omni-cause advocacy is a national business, and it actually pays quite well. Something that the American people have failed to grasp, even as protests become permanent, is that the tax-deductible 501c3 nonprofit world is the unregulated wild west of this behavior. It's the only sector where someone can get paid to sow chaos and protest every day, not have any tangible deliverables or metrics that prove they are in-fact working for the public good, and that there's a multi-billion dollar network of NGOs behind these entities to support them.

Another really alarming component is the co-mingling of foreign interests. Just a few weeks ago, it was revealed that CHIRLA, a California-based nonprofit that receives large federal and state funding, had members that were part of Neville Roy Singham's network.

It's bad enough that we can't even address the organizations that are doing the bidding of foreign governments, but mix this in with people who want to throw millions of dollars into paid agitators and the general public no longer has the ability to tell what is real.

Copyright 2025 ZeroHedge

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