Peak insanity?

Maybe we've arrived at the crest of this whole "No Kings" tantrum.

Photo by Bradley Andrews on Unsplash. No idea which rally this was, but you get the point. I sure don’t waste my time going to them.

How appropriate this comes up on April Fool’s Day.

The Astroturfing folks over at Indivisible were sure proud. Supposedly they had achieved the “largest protest in U.S. history” by holding 3,300 events drawing 8 million people. But Tyler Piekarski points out one VERY important fact:

The legacy media told you on Saturday night that eight million Americans marched. Wall to wall. Every outlet. Eight million. The largest single-day protest in American history. That is the headline that went coast to coast and will be repeated as established fact for months.

Here is what they did not tell you. That number came from the organizers. The same people who built the movement, designed the signs, booked the venues, trained the local coordinators and wrote the press releases are the same people who counted the crowd and handed the media a number. Indivisible posted on its own website within hours that over 8 million people participated in 3,300 protests and immediately began using that figure to recruit for the next action. That is not a count. That is a marketing claim. And the press ran it without a single asterisk.

Here is what independent counts actually showed. At the flagship St. Paul rally, organizers claimed over 200,000 attended. The Minnesota State Patrol independently estimated approximately 100,000. The organizers doubled their own marquee event. In New York City, police estimated tens of thousands while organizers were claiming 350,000 for the city. In Providence, Rhode Island, police put the crowd at 20,000 while organizers had projected 50,000. In San Diego, police independently counted approximately 40,000 marchers. Everywhere an independent count existed, it came in dramatically below what the organizers reported. Not slightly below. Dramatically below.

No independent body produced a verified national aggregate. None. The 8 million figure has no independent confirmation. It is a number the movement invented about itself, laundered through a press corps that no longer asks basic sourcing questions, and delivered to the public as established fact.

It’s worth mentioning that every organization worth its salt will try and make themselves sound more influential than they are. But let’s say that they indeed had the numbers they claim for No Kings 3.

I went back to October for No Kings 2 and found out the following, which I used to respond to a social media post:

But the interesting thing to me is that they only went from “nearly 7 million” in October to 8 million this time, with the “goal” being in the 11 million range per Chenoweth.

Your side is peaking at less than critical mass, even with all the promotion and dark money behind it. It’s not drawing new people in, just the same malcontents who have been showing up - good on them, but the real majority doesn’t see Trump as a threat because he’s not.

You would have thought that, with a war going on and gas prices surging to the $4 a gallon mark locally because of it, there would be a lot more people out protesting - but there aren’t. Give or take, it’s the same 2% of the population that passionately never liked Donald Trump to begin with and were just peachy with how President Autopen tried to ruin the country. (Notice, for example, that these protestors are quick to peg Trump as a “pedophile” for unverified claims but brushed off the same thing about Biden’s “probably inappropriate” showers with his young daughter.)

I’ll grant that the No Kings protest is much larger than the TEA Party protests against Barack Obama 17 years ago, but also bear in mind that many of these were held during the week and no national organization picked out a date: aside from the general idea of Tax Day, some local TEA Parties decided to meet the following Saturday since April 15 was a Wednesday that year. So the estimate of 1.2 million for those is probably pretty valid, particularly when you figure that many millions who would have attended were instead trying to keep their jobs during the Great Recession.

The Chenoweth rule I allude to above simply states that once a particular percentage of people rebel against authoritarian rule, change is imminent.

In the U.S. context, 3.5% would mean more than 11 million people—an enormous number, but not impossible in a nation of 330 million. Recent years have already seen mass mobilizations in the millions. The lesson of the research is simple but profound: it doesn’t take everyone. It takes enough people, acting together, nonviolently, and strategically.

This, of course, means we have to have authoritarian rule, which I don’t believe we do under Donald Trump. (We were closer to it under his predecessor, but no Astroturf group organized protests back then because productive people don’t have time for them anyway.)

Having lived through the TEA Party, I have a bit of an idea how this whole thing works. (The big difference being the amount of grift possible because of all the money flowing from the left wing.) At some point holding up signs becomes ineffective for moving the needle because it’s no longer new and unique, so look for more political activism on behalf of particular candidates out of No Kings. (As it is, Indivisible has endorsed candidates for years.) At that point, the movement will begin to fray as faction goes against faction on particular issues and fight over which candidates they should support the most.

Bottom line: No Kings has peaked because we don’t have a king and the daily Two Minutes Hate only goes so far. There may be another rally or two in them, but they’re really going to have to stretch the truth in order to continue portraying themselves as a growing entity.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there.