The shadowy cabal of evildoers who covertly fund every boycott, picket line, and demonstration are at it again.

“The protests at the airports are bought and paid for by George Soros,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners last week. “Protesting has become a profession now,” lamented White House press secretary Sean Spicer. “It’s not these organic uprisings that we’ve seen through the last several decades.” Most recently, Republican Utah representative Jason Chaffetz said that the angry people who swarmed his town hall were a “paid attempt to bully and intimidate,” and were not even from his state.

It couldn’t be the fact that a historically unpopular president has promised and enacted a series of reckless, revanchist policies that have energized people who would never have hit the streets otherwise. Rather, it’s the same nefarious and ever-changing lineup of wealthy protest-funders who have been bankrolling demonstrations since time immemorial who are to blame for the last two weeks of near nonstop direct democracy.