Inflategate: Democrats Caught Wildly Inflating Moral March Attendance Numbers

No way.
No way.

Move over, Common Core. Β We now have ‘Moral Math.’

Remember a few weeks ago how outraged Democrats and the media were over the Trump administration’s questionable claims about attendance numbers for his inauguration?

Infuriating them even more was senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s assertion when questioned that the White House was simply providing “alternative facts” on the numbers.

Fast forward to this past Saturday’s “Moral March” festivities and you’ll see that Democrats – shockingly, I know – do not practice what they preach when it comes to alternative facts.

The number of the day for marchers and many watching on various live feeds and social media was “80,000 or more.”

The 80,000 estimate from 2014 came straight from organizers and no one else. It should be noted thatΒ is where the 80,000+ number came from this year as well.

And yet without a shred of independent confirmation or verification, the myth of 80,000+ began.

North Carolina House Representative Pricey Harrison (D) even got in on the act:

Except the number, also cited as factual by The Nation, is wildly off the mark of what the true numbers likely are. In fact, they are so far off the mark that both the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer, normally staunch allies of the activist left, stepped in and said – in so many words – “Whoa! Wait a minute!”

From the Charlotte Observer:

“Organizers claim 80,000 people marched in downtown Raleigh last Saturday, but some crowd-counting experts say it looked to them like less than 20,000.”

While careful to not label the march itself a “failure”, Will Doran from the N&O’s Politifact division threw some cold water on the 80,000 number as well:

According to an Associated Press report from this weekend, β€œthe surface area that the crowd covered neared the march’s previous peak from 2014.”

[…]

The News & Observer at the time talked to two crowd-counting experts, both of whom said there were 15,000 to 20,000 people there [in 2014].

[…]

So while this year’s HKonJ march was clearly big, it’s hard to imagine that it was four times as big as other massively attended protests, like this year’s Women’s March or the 2014 HKonJ.

Doran didn’t give it an official pants on fire rating because he said other variables made it difficult to confirm definitive numbers but, yeah, I think it’s safe to say organizers blew up the numbers.

This year’s Super Bowl didn’t even have 80,000 in the crowd, and there’s no way the Moral March in Raleigh eclipsed attendance for the big game.

Unless folks really believe more people wanted to see Rev. Barber lecture than Lady Gaga sing.

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Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on mainstream media bias and the culture wars.