Why do wingnuts keep threatening to swamp Washington with a million trucker convoy, a million bikers, or a million gun owners? Sure these things are announced, but there's no follow through.
Why do the Tea Party and militias think it is possible to rally a million bikers or whatever? They seem to be brimming with misplaced confidence. And what is the philosophical importance of this theme?
Well the original 9-12 rally in 2009 was a bit of a dud, but the Tea Party tried to claim that about a million Tea Partiers attended. And this is how they have rewritten history:
Remember the 2-million person march on WDC in September 2009? Washington and the mainstream media never even blinked.
No, actually we don't remember it because it never happened. It's fun to make believe, but there isn't really a Santa Claus or Easter Bunny either. It's the same deal pretty much.
Two million? You think?
In fact most of these people aren't even on the Mall - they are on the lawn at the base of Capitol Hill, east of the reflecting pool and Ulysees S. Grant Memorial and spanning First Street NW DC Compare this to Google Earth images and you can see that the bulk of the crowd is in an area 450 north to south and 350 feet east to west. Most of the crowd was in a well defined area about the size of a Super Walmart parking lot, and while that headcount is nothing to sneeze at, it's not a million people.
You tell me, does this crowd perched on the edge of the Mall look bigger than the entire population of Delaware (pop. 925,000)?
I did a diary on the size of the 9-12 crowd, and my estimates the crowd size at maybe 40,000 was closer to the media estimates of about 70,000. I based my estimate on my knowledge of the Mall and Capital Hill. Also the Metro system did not record a significant increase in ridership.
You can compare that crowd to the Comedy Central Rally To Restore Sanity, which was actually on the Mall and completely filled several sections of the Mall with a tightly packed crowd. This small sea of people probably totaled 100,000 to 200,000 people, and they didn't need to offer charter buses and box lunches to bring people in, like freedom Works did with the Tea Party. You can see a shot of the crowd size at 1:36:31
Maybe the OathKeepers and Tea Party are just bent out of shape about Obama's inauguration. Note that the inauguration is using the same space as the 9-12 rally, but the fences are moved out much further. And the crowd extends for nearly a mile. Lowest estimates put the crowd at over a million on a day so cold the Potomac was frozen.
The inauguration worked because it involved months of planning, and managing the crowds used the full resources of DC. From historical accounts of military maneuvers, we know that a crowd of a million people would be paralyzed without strict discipline and planning. After the Civil War, the 300.000 man Army of the Potomac marched in review in DC, and it took all day for the men to pass the reviewing stand, even though these were people who marched like they meant business. Apparently the Luitpold Arena where Hitler addressed the Nuremberg rallies only held about 150,000 adoring Nazis. Even standing shoulder-to-shoulder in tight ranks, they seemed like an almost incomprehensible sea of (in)humanity.
And if we look at the Oath Keepers web site, we see that the mythical 9-12-2009 crowd size has grown to 2,000,000 wingnuts, a crowd so large that it would have mostly paralyzed the entire Washington region for several days.
In the quotes below, they complain over and over that their fabulous march was "ignored." And the fact that they are being "ignored" is seen as a terrible provocation, another excuse for violence against a system that won't take them seriously. And being ignored is just unbearable for people like this who have an overwhelming sense of personal insignificance. But if you can make other people afraid, that proves you aren't insignificant, right? This is primitive and violent stuff. Seriously, watch this clip and see how Glenn Close in fatal Attraction goes from homicidal rage at being "ignored" to gloating that she can "frighten" people:
What has the rank and file RWNJ baffled is why won't the leadership call for more million man rallies? They "know" the numbers are on their side, they "know" they did it once and they can do it again, they "know" all they have to do is walk to the Whitre House and tear it down with their bare hands.
But the leadership knows for a fact that the 9-12 march was largely a hoax. And they could get away with lying about the crowd size because the Park Service had stopped providing head count estimates. But private companies have picked the slack, and the head count for Glenn Becks rally was done with a camera on a weather balloon. If the 9-12 rally was done today, some news organization would fly over the crowd with a tiny helicopter drone the size of a pizza box and get a headcount using image analysis software.
Anyway, let's see what the OathKeepers believe:
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