Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
When Republicans are facing a public backlash, they have a go-to lie they tell.
In an appearance on Fox News on Thursday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer claimed that protesters opposing abusive behavior by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in his home state of Minnesota were being paid by nefarious unnamed sources.
“The people that you’re seeing in the videos, the vast majority of them, I’m going to tell you, I do not believe, are from Minnesota. These are organized chaos agents. They are agitators that are paid,” Emmers told the right-wing network.
Emmers argued “the vast majority” of Minnesota residents who have spoken to him about the incursion into the state, where an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old mother Renee Good, “appreciate” the agency’s presence there.
Over the past year, Republicans have hit a similar refrain as part of a campaign to minimize grassroots opposition to Trump and his policies.
After people protested the deployment of federal troops in Los Angeles last June, President Donald Trump falsely labeled them as “paid insurrectionists.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisted last Sunday that protesters in Minneapolis were “organized, funded protesters.”
Asked about the federal government declining to investigate Good’s death, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNN, “If they’re investigating anything, they need to be investigating the paid protesters.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, a GOP megadonor, even claimed last April that the grassroots protests at Tesla dealerships against his so-called Department of Government Efficiency were “very organized” and “paid for.”
People protesting Elon Musk's actions in the Trump administration hold signs outside a Tesla showroom in Seattle last February.
None of these figures offered up evidence of their smears. But all of them were simply keeping a longstanding tradition on the right: falsely claiming protests are paid for, rather than organic.
During the Civil Rights Movement, racist leaders of towns, cities, and states in the South frequently alleged that Black-led protests for equal rights were not a reflection of the community but were being conducted by outside agitators. Often, the racists alleged that these supposed agitators were paid or were agents of the Soviet Union.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who faced this accusation, mocked the sentiment. He compared himself to an agitator in a washing machine and told audiences, “I’m agitating to knock the dirt out of our society—discrimination, Jim Crow, segregation, racism. So they’re right. I am agitating—agitating to clean up our democracy. That’s what all of us need to do—agitate for a better America, a freer America, a fairer America.”
Even more ironic about conservatives’ accusation is that their own movement has a much more extensive and documented history of paid protesting, agitation, and faux civic engagement.
The tea party movement’s protests against the policies of former President Barack Obama were often organized and significantly funded by right-wing pressure groups like Freedomworks as well as the billionaire Koch family.
Protesters march near the White House on the anniversary of President Donald Trump's first year of his second term in office, on Jan. 20.
Groups opposing quarantine policies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were also put together by a network of conservative donors and activist groups, while they were portrayed as a grassroots uprising against an oppressive government.
In one of the more infamous moments in phony organizing, when Trump first announced that he was running for president in 2015, his campaign paid supporters to cheer for him at Trump Tower in New York.
What conservatives don’t want to contend with is the reality that Trump’s policies and the ideas put into place by congressional Republicans are unpopular. Anti-immigration violence and cost-increasing tariffs generate genuine opposition.
Republicans would love a world where they can disregard protesters as a paid distraction. But they are very real, no matter how furiously the right tries to spin the reality being witnessed by millions.
