The Spirit of America, Woo Hoo!

Well, here comes one of Green Eagle's favorite kinds of posts.  First, however, I've got to deal with this:


Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha.  Ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

There.  I think I am done with that.

So, early in February, I brought you this exciting news from Breitbart:

"Exclusive — The Spirit of America: Conservative Grassroots Leaders Plan Massive Pro-Trump Demonstrations Nationwide...

Conservative grassroots leaders are planning a series of massive pro-President Donald Trump rallies nationwide, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

On Feb. 27 and March 4, the rallies—dubbed the Spirit of America Rallies—will spring up nationwide in cities and towns across America...These rallies, organizers say, are meant to be a peaceful show of force from the “silent majority” that delivered Trump a landslide electoral college victory over failed Democratic president Hillary Rodham Clinton."


And wingnuts have been promoting their chance to strike back and show what a pathetic losers liberals are, with their measly three million participants in the women's day marches.  Here are a couple more samples:

World Net Daily:  ""PATRIOTISM LIVES: PRO-TRUMP RALLIES TO REVIVE 'SPIRIT OF AMERICA'  'This is definitely a time for national action like this'

Joseph Farah (editor of World Net Daily):  "it is so important for the Americans who elected him to the White House with a powerful Electoral College mandate to be out in the streets to make their voices heard loud and clear. The numbers need to be big, and the message needs to be obvious and focused: ‘You lost, we won. Now get of the way, stop the slander, the spewing of hate and lies, the obstruction, the violence, the lawbreaking and the instigation of chaos and disorder, and give new ideas a chance where old ideas failed.'”

And this one:

Politichicks:  "The Spirit of America: Massive Patriotic Pro-Trump Rallies to Launch Nationwide..."
Well, today was the first day of massive pro trump rallies.   And how did they do?  Well, here is a look:

Trump rally in Atlanta

Trump rally in Denver

Trump rally in Raleigh
Trump Rally in St. Augustine, Fla.

And let's face it, I can go on and on here, with ones like these:
Trump rally somewhere
Trump rally somewhere else

So, this is about the nine thousandth consecutive right wing mass demonstration I've documented that has been an utter humiliation to them.  I think the New York Times pretty much sums it all up:

"So on Monday, hundreds rallied across the country at statehouses and on courthouse steps to wave flags, listen to conservative speakers and stick up for a president who they say has been treated unfairly by the news media and his critics."

Hundreds.  Not millions, hundreds.  The left has actually outdrawn them by about a thousand to one.

I think it is time that we get something straight, once and for all:   The Trump people, or the teabaggers or the moral majority basically do not exist.  They are, and always have been a fiction, created through the lavish expenditure of money by rich Republican backers, to make it appear that there are actually a large number of people in the country that desperately want to see rich sociopaths plunder the rest of us dry.

Then how did they win the election, other than swamping public discourse with an unending tsunami of propaganda designed to frighten people into voting their way, and by enlisting the press to lie to the people about the very existence of the right in this country?  I do not think that these things, however abominable, could accomplish electing their miserable creeps like George W. Bush or Trump.  So we need to ask just how intact our voting system is, and how much Republican cheating is going on behind closed doors.  Because Republican victories cannot be reconciled with turnouts like this, and the reality of these pathetic results time after time cannot be denied.  Something is desperately wrong here, and it's time we found out what it is.

Comments

Magpie said…
That second last photo... Did you take it?

This is what I see, and what I think when I see it:

Are those people obese? Poor diet? Do they have health issues?
One person is so enthusiastic he's sitting.
In crappy furniture they brought to sit next to a crumbling pavement, beside a non-descript road to somewhere, nowhere, under a leaden sky.
The flags are bright - America has a beautiful flag - but the little ones stuck in the mud there look like impromptu grave-markers

Okay they can't really help the colour of the sky, but...
Is that winning? Is that what winning looks like? Is that what political passion looks like? Is that the glorious future they are inviting people to join?

There is all the joy there of a collapsed orphanage.
February 28, 2017 at 12:53 AM
Green Eagle said…
It's a wondrous thing to see, Magpie. And yet our mainstream press here in the United States has collaborated for decades in creating the illusion that this represents a huge national movement. Which, as I said, only leaves one question unresolved: where, exactly, did all the votes for Trump come from?
February 28, 2017 at 6:09 AM
Zog said…
You might want to see this post at Sociological Images about cultural capital and march participants.

"Cost and familiarity with travel, ease and options in taking time off of work, and geographic proximity to D.C. may have affected participation in Inauguration events. . . When Emily lived in rural Arkansas, many people she met had never left the state or in some cases even the county. Indeed, when she told a friend there that she flew home for Christmas and it cost $70, he was surprised that a plane ticket cost less than it did to fill up his truck, because he’d never flown before."


In Pennsylvania, Trump gathered around 80% of the white rural vote. If you're in Clearfield County, are you going to drive three hours to Pittsburgh and three hours back just to participate in a march? It's not like they can take a subway to the nearest protest.

I have relatives who live in rural Pennsylvania, and most of them are racist jerks. Some of them live just ninety minutes from Pittsburgh and haven't been there in decades because they think it's an urban hellhole. There are some of them who can't understand why anyone would go to New York since they believe there's nothing worth doing there. (I know someone who wouldn't let their child use a full-tuition engineering scholarship to the Cooper Union because it's located in Manhattan.)

There are some of them who live in such a bubble that I'm the only person they know who voted for Clinton over Trump. They are the ones who wonder how Obama could have won since everyone they meet on a daily basis went for McCain and Romney. The worst of them said she didn't want to see Obama assassinated only because "they would have to rename streets to satisfy those people."

That's where many of the Trump voters come from. They don't go to protests, especially in big cities like Atlanta or Denver, but they will go to the polls.
February 28, 2017 at 6:59 AM
Jerry Critter said…
All those thousands of Deplorables probably got lost on their way to the rallies. They forgot to take their Thomas guides.
February 28, 2017 at 9:36 AM
Green Eagle said…
Jerry, I doubt they could read a Thomas guide.

As for your comment, Zog, I am sure there is some truth to what you have to say, but I have been documenting the utter failure of these right wing marches and protests for a long time now, and they are never anything but a gigantic embarrassment. They are largely synthetic events; the fact that the Koch Brothers, Dick Armey and others have to resort to these dumb shows demonstrates that they know perfectly well how little support exists for their proposals; it's time the rest of us figure it out too.
February 28, 2017 at 11:00 AM
Paul W said…
those deplorables never thought to call their libraries to ask for help with their maps, I suppose.

there does seem this massive disconnect, doesn't there? Trump got 62 million votes but didn't get 62 million supporters.

The Republican Party is so organized in getting their partisan vote out, but they have a hard time getting a majority of their voters to show any enthusiasms. They're hard-wired to vote GOP no matter what, but even they are getting sick - or horrified - of what they're voting for.

I'm surprised nobody on the Far Right has excused away the poor turnout by saying "oh well, everybody was at work," because that excuse would fly against the logic of WHY they signed up for these protests on THAT day in the first place.
February 28, 2017 at 12:35 PM
Green Eagle said…
Well, Paul, I am very sorry to have to tell you this, but I have seen exactly that comment a number of times already on many right wing websites. This is usually accompanied by a remark along the lines of "Conservatives work for a living, but liberals are all lazy freeloaders." This was one of the standard explanations of why more people went to the Women's marches than to the inaugural, too. Mostly, however, they are following a long wingnut tradition of just ignoring their failure.
February 28, 2017 at 1:28 PM
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