It should be recognized as common scheme by now that:
A. The cops never shoot mass murderers if they’re white.
B. The media always undercounts demonstrations held by anyone left of Atilla the trump.
This has always been hard for me to understand. After all, they never seem satisfied to leave it to your imagination and report on the mere “thousands” attending a Super Bowl or a Rolling Stones concert in New York City. We know why, but it’s frustrating all the same. So this morning, after I and my daughter attended the HUGE pro-choice rally in D.C. yesterday, I did my due diligence and perused the “news”, looking for hard numbers, or at least fair estimates for how many people gave up their Sundays to break the law (according to The Hill) to express their outrage at five Supremes trying to take us back to the 17thCentury. No such luck.
Fortunately for my readers (you know who you are), I developed the habit of estimating crowds when I was perpetrating them for the Montana Human Rights Alliance back in the days before my wandering the Earth seeking adequate education services for my deaf daughter whom our inestimable Montana School Superintendent, Elzie Arntzen, may or may not describe as a “vegetable” not deserving of such services, as some of her honorable Republican colleagues have done in the past.
It’s pretty easy and here’s how I figured it this time. First, here’s a pic of the march from Washington Monument, where the rally was held, and the Supreme Porch, where the march was aimed at, and concluded:
The cops had us channeled down Constitution Ave, so I had a finite area from which to make a micro-estimate of (thank you, cops). Constitution Ave is 8 lanes huge, and it was packed all the way across for the mile (plus or minus) between the presidential phallus and Porch (we were somewhere in the middle here). 8 lanes times 8 ft is 64 feet and cars are 2 passengers-width apiece (plus the extra space for the rest of the car). Suffice to say that a very fair low-ball figure for a Constitution Ave packed like it was yesterday would easily hold 100 “pro-choice extremists expressing unadulterated rage” (The Hill) per every 10 feet. Now, simply multiply that by 500 (5000 ft divided by 10 ft) and there you have it. 50,000, The magic number you’ll never see on the nightly news.
Okay, okay. I feel your pain. "I get it", as the more fashionable marketing houses are fond of putting in "cool peoples" mouths these days. Let's do give The Hill even more than its due and admit that we “pro-choice extremists expressing unadulterated rage” are so immature as to be prone to exaggerate. So let's do cut that already-conservative figure in half...and there we have it again. 25,000 this time. A number no reasonable human being sitting on that fictitious-but-certainly-uncomfortable-ass-poking fence can argue with. That’s still (conservatively) 10 times more than the “thousands” that most people would assume attended these rallies if they merely perused Corporate Media and then believed them.
Now let's multiply by 10 any lowball estimate you may or may not have seen about how many citizens of this country are truly outraged and ready to show it that Alito (or let’s be honest, Barrett, cuz, you know, govt. funded, top-tier healthcare) can’t have the pleasure of experiencing a terminal ectopic pregnancy.
And furthermore, as much as I generally assign The Hill to the toilet bowl of corporate propaganda, they do have journalists working for them, who occasionally let slip something useful like the following:
"Demands that Garland arrest all of the protesters (at justices' homes) is a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. Such prosecutions could create a massive chilling effect on free speech, even if any convictions are unlikely to be upheld. After all, protests are common at the court itself, which is covered under the same federal provision; if it is unlawful to seek to influence a pending decision through picketing “near a U.S. court,” such protests could be viewed as crimes under this interpretation."
Are we there yet? Can we move on from having any respect for these pearl-clutching A..holes and focus on saving our democracy"?
Here's my story and I'm sticking to it. We are the vast, undercounted, over-pissed-off majority. Don't forget it. Don't back down.
