I was there and I can tell you there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of patriotic Americans. Glen Beck is a true American hero and patriot.

I attended Barack Obama's rally in Manassas, Virginia the day before the election in 2008. His team announced the event only days before, yet the crowd that attended was estimated at 80,000. Beck announced his rally months ago. What happened???

I was there and I can tell you there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of patriotic Americans. Glen Beck is a true American hero and patriot.
Posted by: Al on August 29, 2010 at 8:09 AM | PERMALINK

Dude, you totally under-estimate the power of the movement and the dedication of those involved. Clearly, there were billions of people in attendance. The crowd was so large that it stretched North almost into Philadelphia and South to almost Williamsburg. It was wall-to-wall patriots and America-lovers. I would not be surprised if the number actually reached into the trillions or gazillions and the left will try to cover it up.

An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

And a safe assumption that not a black, brown, or asian face to be found in that crowd? At an "MLK" rally, no less. So many insecure, unthinking, easily led fools in one place. Beck has got to down as one of the greatest charlatans of this century.

Beck claimed upwards of 500,000:

"The reflecting pool holds about 200,000," he said, noting the fields that hold 250,000 - 300,000 people as well.

Why has no one taken issue with the things he said? News reports simply repeat that these people wish to return to the Christian religious values of the founding fathers. No one has pointed out the fallacy of believing that the nation was founded as a Christian nation and that the founding fathers deeply believed in the separation of church and state, with people who live here free to worship, or not, as they please.

The obvious technique used here is the venerable yet ancient one employed by a master con artist . While exploiting the wonder of three card monté , with all its ability to divide attention , master propagandist sales pitching energizing the rubes in zero content flattery . Borrowing form from successful movements , a simple diversion with the by now classic republican 'judo' of flipping an opponent with their energy , or more properly principles , while waiting as a predator to strike .

The predictability of the Marc Antony style of personal hubristic nihilism is helpful to focus on infinite mediocrity of the claimed schoolyard bragging rights 'success' .
Now while we wait for the cries of triumph to become wails of betrayal the game changes , a little more cruelly . Boochists have plucked the low hanging fruits via Blackwater , KBR , Halliburton , and all , so the next squeeze will something more precious than the treasury . The loathsome reactionaries wish plainly for the next bump in the road to complete control to be the vestiges of constitutional interference . Corporate politics differ from Mao's China in very little , there is no meaningful bill of rights at Coca Cola either .
The checks and balances have been long weakened in a fixed game and the populist movement Rupert's employees are playing at is what the predator does laying in wait to strike . They don't know how to do anything else . The groundwork is fixed with media and all other meaningful access to the public with repeals of rules guaranteeing no individual control over multiple regional outlets . Now they only need to make people question their own lying eyes .
So a clown replaces Martin Luther King , it's so easy .

The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance on aerial pictures it took over the rally.

1. The aircraft fly above the crowd.
2. Using skywriting, the pilots spell out a message designed to get the crowd to look up -- the equivalent of "Hey, where da white women at?"
3. The crowd looks up.
4. The pilots snap their picture using a gazillion-megapixel camera.
5. The pilots turn the images over to the government, which, using facial-recognition software, identifies those who were at the rally, rounds them up, and puts them in detention camps.

Isn't it obvious?

From Wikipedia's list of protost marches in Washington DC:

August 8, 1925 - Ku Klux Klan march. 35,000 Ku Klux Klan members march to show support for the KKK.

Hey, Beck got over TWICE what the Klan did. Of course, the US population in 1925 was only about 1/3 what it is now.

Maybe it's easier to get people to show up if they don't have to have special "outfits".

300,000, 500,000, millions, billions? What are mere numbers compared to The Rapture and BeckyBoy's "magical thinking". The number of idiots attending yesterday's snake-oil sales event is no more relevant than the content of Beck's "Lawrence Welk-style" infotainment circus.

Why are people that beleive in God and country called the Far Right?? For those that do not know there were black speakers,native American speaker and plenty of blacks. There were mainly families. Hatred of anything is not healthy.

These numbers are obviously a hoax. Michelle Bachmann did a head-count and said there were at least 2 million people there, so you know that's gotta be the real figure.

Just a technical note, wrong use of the phrase "margin of error" which is a statistical term usually expressed as a percentage.

I think what they meant to use was the highly technical term "give or take" 9,000.

A dispute over numbers was inevitable and predictable. Whether there were 10,000 or 100,000 at what Beck hoped would be a Nazi Nuremberg rally is hardly important. With enough advance time and enough money you can get 100,000 people to attend anything in this country. Just hype it enough. The turnout was puny, and certainly not the harbinger of a right-wing revolution, or a major religious revival, or whatever that slap in the face to MLK was.

While Beck is a self-serving clown, and interested in raking in as much lucre as he can squeeze out of his dimwitted followers, like many of his predecessor he will, quite likely, at some point begin believing his own press releases if he doesn't already. Given his media platforms, it will be interesting to watch what happens when he announces his deification.

The air photos I saw [and I did not see the time stamp] showed the crowd thinning to the point of 0 towards the far end of the pool. I have a hard time seeing at 300,000... There is also the confounding factor of random tourists who may have wanted to see the memorial sans nutjobs looking on, etc.

One way to get at a decent number is to ask the port-ajohn companies - how many were used: how much poop did they spew [literally, not figuratively].

The post above targets a more important point; this rally seemed to be about some sort of "christian" renewal etc... which of course Beck's over enthusaism for his religion being the chosen on supports. There are some very serious, and very very dangerous, aspects to these kinds of thinking that people need to be very watchful of...

But but but this can't be true. 'Cause Fox News said that the actual attendance number was ten thousandz gazillion jillion! (Of course, just as they've freed themselves from liberal science, they've also freed themselves from liberal mathematics with its secularist commonly agreed nomenclature and pedantic insistance that numerals correspond to numbers.)

I just heard a report on this morning's news that there were "an estimated 300,000 at the rally." Soon enough, that will become "fact," no matter how many were actually there.

OK, so it was about as many people as might attend a pro football game?

We're certainly stuck with a figure of 300,000 regardless of reality. It will be repeated and echoed throughout the media and blogosphere and, as Peter writes, it will become "fact."

The volume at the rally is irrelevant, really. What would be relevant is what impact the event has on our society and the political scene. I suspect that the impact will be non-existent. The 86,000 or 300,000 individuals that showed up are already Beckaphiles or Palinbots. No one drove to DC out of curiosity, and if they did, they must still be wondering WTF?

Not only was Beck's event some weird revival meeting, but Beck is an awful speaker. I admit, I couldn't bear watching too much of it, but what I saw was Beck reading (oooh, a telepromter!) a lot of silliness and occasionally remembering to look up at the crowd. All the little mannerisms (the tears and breathiness) that seems to work for him on TV was a massive Fail in public.

Beck and his confused "movement" didn't gain a single new member, I'm sure. Anyone accidentally channel surfing to coverage was probably scratching their head wondering, "who the hell is this guy and what did he just say? Where's the game?"

Actually, the crowd was in the millions, but they were really, really, REALLY spread out.

From my earlier post on a separate topic:

"On a separate note, this must be like the 3rd or 4th 'event' the right-wing has held in DC and each time it receives unwarranted and excessive media coverage. Yet liberals and progressives have yet to stage a rally that counters the false perception of a large right-wing movement.

At some point, we're going to have to get out of our chairs, hop in a car (or in my case, buy a plane ticket) and assemble in large numbers to show the world that right-wing extremists DO NOT RUN THIS COUNTRY. It would also serve to generate some synergy on our side.

Unfortunately, that's an effort that probably should have started in the early spring. Is it too late?"

It looked much smaller than the annual SF Gay Pride Parade along Market Street.

CBS News says "only" 87,000 people showed up at Glenn Beck rally yesterday. By golly, isn't this the same CBS news that gave us the forged documents regarding Bush's national guard service in the 2004 election. Of course the Soros-funded media Matters was quick to jump on the CBS news bandwagon. The real reason the leftwingers jump to CBS News defense all the time is their polls ALWAYS show a 12 to 14 Democrat point edge over the GOP. Speaking of expectation games, how's the "Recovery Summer" the Democrats told us was going to happen this summer. Remember their trillion dollar boondoggle known as the stimulus was supposed to keep national unemployment no higher than 8 pct and guess what it's now OVER 10 pct.

The Fox Crowd Tabulating Machine will massage the numbers and make each participant count as ten.

I don't think the Tea Partiers quite realize how few there are of them.

One of these days, these folks will learn how to play the expectations game.

They aren't playing the expectations game. They're playing the perceptions game. It doesn't really matter how many people showed up to Beck's rally - they aren't going to lose seats in Congress based on that.

But they can push the idea that there is a widespread conservative movement demanding change (as defined by Glenn Beck and the Tea Party). Considering every media outlet (including all the liberal blogs) are covering it, they're doing pretty good on that count.

Shelly Bachmann claimed a million showed. Gateway Pundit says 500,000.

Personally, I'm waiting for Sarah Palin to tweet that eleventy-bazillion attended.

I'm more interested in how many doors Democrats knocked on yesterday across the country. While our media (Steve included) obsesses the deranged Beck not one word about the national canvass Democrats held yesterday. The target was 200,000 doors. My volunteers and I knocked on 326 in one small town and will do about another 100 today.

The probable size of the event has to be played up beforehand in order to attract attendees. Who is going to travel across the country to attend an event which is expected to have a crowd of a few thousand?

For comparison:
"The University of Michigan football team has played 223 consecutive games in front of crowds in excess of 100,000 through the 2007 season. The last time The Wolverines did not have 100,000 in attendance was Oct. 25, 1975 vs. Indiana when a crowd of 95,857 was on hand for the 55-7 Michigan victory."
Michigan Stadium Attendance Records
It can get very chilly in Ann Arbor in the late Fall.
oldswede

...and Michigan has sucked for several years now.

If the true believers cared about facts - the aerial photo count being so much lower than the supporter's claims would indeed be embarrassing.

However - when you can denounce that number as a liberal media conspiracy, announcing the higher number makes sense.

To me, even one person showing up to hear Glen Beck spew his hate-filled lies makes me nervous. I rather expect the conservative media will talk about a major cultural shift when all that's really going on is that people angry about job loss and fearful about their future can be easily manipulated into irrational behavior. Remember the Twilight Zone show "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street). Glen Beck's playing the alien - fomenting people's suspicions until they start attacking each other - while Glen Beck's masters wait to enslave us.

Maybe we could get this group to compete against the Ohio State football crowd. Same kind of ignorant passion. Same kind of dress-up and sloganeering.

87,000 brainless rednecks posing for a mass "Show Me Your Throng" photo. Sticking that picture on my refrigerator door might actually help me lose weight.

I'd like to know how many were there on there own and how many were bused in by the kochs, which I understand was on the brother's weekend agenda.

Also, Steve, Obama's inauguration was year before last, not last year, or even a year ago.;) Time do fly, don't it?

Are these numbers suppose to be that impressive anyway? There are quite a few college football stadiums that seat over 100,000.

I live in Chicago, and many events here attract far more people. The two Saint Patrick’s Day parades used to each attract more than 300,000 people (one was discontinued due to the fact that it brought too many people into a residential neighborhood). The Mexican Independence Parade also attracts that many spectators (this year, the parade will be on September 11—it may be especially large due to Mexican bicentennial celebrations). The Thanksgiving Parade and the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade get between 400,000 and 500,000 spectators. The Bud Billiken parade gets somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million spectators every year!

if you include attendees from the planet zorcon (where glenn beck is worshiped as a god) the numbers get into the trillions. it's difficult to count them because they only become visible in the total absence of light.

CBS News deserves a pat on the back for taking an aerial shot and counting.

It doesn't strike me as technically difficult to get an estimate of the crowd size. This made me curious about why the National Park Service stopped making estimates; they seem like the right agency to do that. The things one forgets over time! I assumed it was another Bush era cut, but a quick google informs me that Congress prohibited the NPS from making crowd estimates in the District of Columbia in 1997 after controversy over the size of the Million Man march in 1994.

For those of you who have forgotten as much as me, in that 1994 Nation of Islam-sponsored event, a large number of individuals marched in D.C. to win attention for urban and minority issues. The organizers claimed that 1.2 - 2 million people attended, but the NPS counted only 400,000 based on aerial photographs. Huge uproar! Subsequently, ABC funded researchers doubled the size of the crowd to 837K +/- 25% but other academics support the lower figure.

So the issue here is political, not technical. We don't have good estimates because supporters and detractors don't actually want to know. They want to believe what they want to believe, and reality be damned! We can deal with issues of reliability but there's nothing that can be done about willful ignorance.

I live in Chicago, and many events here attract far more people.

I think a lot of the reason attendees at these Tea Party events vastly inflate the crowd numbers is that they don't live in cities and never see large crowds. They have no sense of the difference between 50,000 and 100,000 and 500,000. I live in San Francisco, and to me the aerial photos look like a crowd at one of the main stages at our annual bluegrass festival, so yeah, maybe something approaching 100K.

Wow, did you see how well behaved that crowd was? Amazing, and the Mall was spotless after they left.

Ever see lefties leave a place like that? Google "obama inauguration trash" -disgusting, they expect other people to clean it up.

"The Trash Was Historic, Too - washingtonpost.com
Jan 20, 2009 ... Washington trash trucks hauled away at least 130 tons of garbage after the inauguration of President Obama, with more to go..."

Oh, and how many people do you think would show up at a rally called by Olbermann and Maddow?

Here's a link with videos comparing the two events.
Beck Rally vs Obama inauguration

http://goodsensepolitics.blogspot.com/2010/08/compare-garbage-after-glenn-beck-rally.html

Do babies in strollers count? There was a last minute push to turn the whole thing into a family-oriented, picnic-like event (probably in keeping with the non-political official position because of the sponsor request/tax situation).

Oh, and how many people do you think would show up at a rally called by Olbermann and Maddow?

Touchy, eh?

Since neither one of them have declared themselves the new leaders of the civil rights movement the comparison is hardly relevant.

Also, it's not "intolerant" or hateful to find Beck's politics and message abhorrent, offensive and hateful. The same goes for free speech rights-- you have a right to speak but you don't have a right to be shielded from people disagreeing with you.

Who the hell was Bud Billiken, and why do 1 million people show up in his honor in Chicago???

The resolution probably isn't very good in those aerial cameras. I suspect it was either 50,000 fat people or 300,000 very thin people.

The news reports leave out a crucial detail. Although roughly 90,000 people showed up at the event, only 60,000 were actually there for the event. 20,000 people showed up to mock the 60,000, and another 10,000 showed up because they heard that there was free food.

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