The Women’s Protest March Was Yuge — But So What?
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On January 21, the day after new President Trump’s long-awaited inauguration, a very different crowd made its way into Washington, D.C. Most observers say this crowd was significantly larger than the turnout for Trump.
But less important than the crowd’s size — which was estimated by some sources at over one million marchers — was their message and their political will. These marchers were nearly all women, and almost all of them were angry about Trump’s secretly recorded comments of 11 years ago made by television tabloid show Access Hollywood when Trump thought he was enjoying a bit of privacy with host Billy Bush.
We all know the contents of that tape, but it wasn’t just those comments that brought marchers out; it was a larger perceived threat to women’s rights — including abortion, LGBT protections, equal pay and other issues.
However, if one questioned a typical young marcher, in most cases, she was only able to cite the now-famous tape of Trump’s misogynist remarks, something about Planned Parenthood and not much else, other than that Trump and his cabinet are from a conservative class of politicians that they thought had been permanently banished from Washington after eight long years of the progressive administration of Democrat Barack Obama.
That the Women’s March was so large is a testament to the influence of the usual suspects of the globalist media — specifically, outlets such as CNN, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic magazine and The New Yorker — all liberal stalwarts that have by now figured out that branding Trump a racist or a homophobe are more or less two strikes out (there’s much extant video of Trump repudiating racists, and nary a word can be found online of Trump insulting gay people).
On the other hand, calling him a misogynist results in plenty of Google hits and video clips. And so, the “trigger” reaction of getting women to march was fairly easy to pull; what was surprising was the huge turnout of rude, angry protesters who left the city full of garbage and homemade detritus when they exited.
The demographic spectrum of marchers was not as wide as the March’s organizers would have liked; some marchers held up signs castigating white women for voting for Trump — thus betraying their sex — while others decried the fact that the march lacked a specific purpose other than to complain vaguely and generally as Trump had not actually taken any political action yet.
But what encouraged veteran organizers was the fact that there were older women mixed in with the crowd, who are statistically more likely to vote and possibly organize — if they’re motivated to do so.
At Washington D.C. think tank American Enterprise Institute, scholar Stan Veuger wrote a study of how demonstrations that formed the Tea Party transformed into political actions that put the group’s candidates into office and allowed the party to be taken seriously as a movement. Of the Women’s March, he said, “Political protests can have an effect. But there’s nothing guaranteed.”
Some past marches on Washington have boasted similar numbers of participants as 2017’s Women’s March, but brought about scant political change, such as the protest against the Iraq War in 2003 or the African-American-centric Million Man March in 1995.
Another example is the storming of the state Capitol building in Wisconsin in 2011 by citizens after Governor Scott Walker moved to weaken unions in the state. Tens of thousands of people participated, but Walker was still reelected in 2012 in a special recall election.
Indeed, as President Trump tweeted about the Women’s March, “Watched protests yesterday, but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote?”
Saudi Garcia, a female graduate student at New York University who participated in the march in Washington, knows about following up protests with action. “We need to be like the Tea Party was in 2009,” Garcia said. “Those people were relentless — showing up at town council meetings, everywhere.”
Beth Andre, an academic crisis services worker from Austin, Texas, who marched there instead of in the nation’s capital, echoed Garcia’s sentiment. “We want to be able to harness that energy and anger that we have right now and turn it into something good.”
The organizers of the Women’s March promised participants that there would be 10 additional actions they could take in “the first 100 days” of the Trump administration, but so far they’ve only announced one of them — writing to one’s senator or representative — a step that’s typically not followed by many people.
But one person who’s surely delighted with the oversized turnout on January 21 is billionaire liberal activist George Soros. It was confirmed recently by online news reports that Soros was connected with at least 50 organizations that had played a part in the March.
Soros isn’t a novice when it comes to political action, but counting solely on women as a group is likely not as reliable as a working with a broader coalition of people. So, while women may compose a solid core of Soros’ army of anti-Trump protesters and activists in the future, their unreliability at the polls means that he’ll probably have to integrate them into a larger movement — something that may not be feasible with the ease that he would prefer.
~American Liberty Report
