Hilarious conservative crowd estimates: anti-Park51 edition
Written by Ben Dimiero
Published
Like clockwork, another conservative-organized rally has led to hilariously overblown crowd predictions. In a post about the anti-Park51 rally she helped promote, Pam Geller announced in a headline that “AMERICA SPEAKS! HISTORIC 911 RALLY DRAWS 40,000.” Writing about the crowd at the “historic” rally, Geller claimed that “There was no end. You could not see the horizon. The media pretends these tens of thousands [sic] people don't exist. It's criminal.”
It's true -- the “criminal” media is apparently pretending these “tens of thousands” of people don't exist. According to noted liberal bastion The Wall Street Journal, “about 1,500” people attended the anti-Park51 rally. But perhaps the WSJ has been getting their information from biased sources, as opposed to Geller's more reliable numbers. The WSJ bases their estimate on “the police.” Geller bases her estimate on...well, nothing.
She provides absolutely no citation for the estimate, other than this rather scientific observation about the reportedly larger pro-Park51 rally: “If the America haters had 4,000, we had ten times more. The media is playing the dueling rallies; it was no such thing.”
Geller is no stranger to the conservative game of thinly-sourced hyper inflated crowd estimates. During the game of conservative telephone that turned the 9-12 crowd last year into “2 million” people, Geller cited someone who “claims to have overheard DC police discussing crowd numbers.”
The crowd is now 40,000 (or 1,500 if you believe the biased police). Based on past experience, we can expect estimates to be up to around 200,000 or so by the middle of the week.