‘One Nation’ Rally: Liberal Media Concludes Size Doesn’t Matter (Beck Rally Crowd Much Bigger!)

The widely publicized, heavily subsidized “One Nation” rally was Saturday in Washington, D.C. As has been openly admitted by the organizers, which included the AFL-CIO, the SEIU and Obama’s perpetual campaign organization Organizing for America, this rally was held in the same place and at basically the same time of the day as Glenn Beck’s 8/28 “Restoring Honor” rally, specifically to demonstrate the depth of support for the president’s program. The convention organizers had a number of advantages, perhaps the greatest being that the buses bringing in demonstrators were apparently subsidized by the rally organizers.

Some of the initial reports were very positive: the organizers estimated 175,000 to 200,000 attendees, according to Crooks and Liars‘ report of “preliminary satellite estimates … at about noon EST [sic].”

(Where do they get these satellite estimates? PJM has been completely unsuccessful finding satellite companies that can give us these sorts of pictures on demand; there isn’t a satellite passing over Washington, D.C., any time you want one.)

Naturally, we were interested in the topic. Following various crowd estimates has become a running topic of interest at Pajamas Media, starting with my original crowd estimates that began with a “back of the envelope” calculation in a comment at Vodkapundit, followed by a more formal calculation here in PJM (“March on Washington: How Big Was the Crowd?“).

Since then, I’ve built up a fairly well described methodology: we use Google Earth to estimate the area of the crowd from whatever photographs are available, then multiple by several different constants depending on the crowd density. These estimates are taken from published Park Service standards going back at least to the Obama inaugural.

Since the “One Nation” rally was consciously positioned at exactly the same place as the “Restoring Honor” rally, we can compare with my original baseline very easily.

That area was about 2.4 million square meters. Using the crowd density estimates, we finally arrived at these estimates for the Beck crowd:

The assumptions there correspond to the Park Service’s standard for a “dense crowd” of about 5 square feet per person, my estimate of the crowd densities observed in the photos (10 square feet per person), and estimates from people in the most densely packed parts of the crowd (2.5 square feet per person).

All things considered, I think the best estimate, finally, is that Beck attracted somewhere between 250,000 and 400,000 people.

Compare and contrast as necessary — as the lawyers say: “the thing speaks for itself.”

It’s difficult to place the edges of the crowd from these photographs, simply because the crowd in that one overhead photo is so far down the picture. However, the grassy area around the Lincoln Memorial is roughly one tenth the area in the full map above. That means the “One Nation” crowd would have been roughly 22,000 to 85,000 people at most.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the US. It is one of two official U.S. affiliates of the Socialist International. It was formed in 1982 from a merger of the Michael Harrington led Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the smaller New American Movement.

DSA publishes a quarterly journal, Democratic Left.

By “capitalism” I mean an economic system characterized by private property and voluntary exchange. By “communism” I mean an economic system characterized by public property and compulsory exchange. The myth that the America is a “capitalist country” is widespread. According to the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels (first published in 1848), the following ten steps are necessary for a communist takeover:

1. “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form.”

How many of the above do we have in the U S A currently? Fits right under the title of “Democratic Socialists of America”

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Estimate	10 square feet per person	5 square feet per person	2.5 square feet per person
Maximum:	215,000 people		430,000	860,000
90 percent	200,000	400,000	800,000
75 percent		163,000	326,000	652,000
50 percent	108,000	216,000	432,000
CBS News Estimate	87,000	87,000	87,000
40 percent	86,000	172,000		344,000