When we did the Get Out of Cheney's House protests we had thousands of newbies join us for weeks without incident or bad press. They had signs and some wore costumes. We had fun, made our point and got no bad press because we policed our own but didn't get all Glenn Beck on people.
I'm not suggesting being a stiff. I'm suggesting coming off as normal. There are people who can pull that off in costume and with signs. There are also people who can't and don't.
When we did the Get Out of Cheney's House protests we had thousands of newbies join us for weeks without incident or bad press. They had signs and some wore costumes. We had fun, made our point and got no bad press because we policed our own but didn't get all Glenn Beck on people.
Like I said, it's really less about costumes and signs than about not giving ammunition for the media to falsely portray the people there. If you can police your own, then that's great, but Beck can't individually police everyone who shows up at a rally with tens or even hundreds of thousands of people and all it takes are a handful to problematic costumes and signs to give the mainstream media their defining shot of the protest. Whenever you try to create a blanket rule rather than treat something on a case-by-case basis, the blanket rule is either going to go too far or not far enough in many cases. And I think people are getting way to hung up about the specifics of Beck's point than the spirit of it, which is simply to look appealing to the mainstream.