Call Off the Buycott? Another Tea Party Media Stunt

Back in April, the St. Louis Tea Party called for a "buycott" of Ford because Ford was apparently the Last Great Patriotic American Car Company. The tea party was excited that Ford did not take funds from the U.S. government as did General Motors and Chrysler, and thus they considered it a True Paragon of Capitalism, smacking away the hand of the Oppressive Big Government who offered to help Ford stand up.

But, alas, this once noble Galtian company has apparently succumbed to the pernicious propaganda of the socialists trying to take over our country, because today it became official that Ford is going to receive $100 million in incentives from the state of Missouri. Apparently their desire to be ruggedly independent did not overcome their desire to get some nice freebies. Will the tea party now call off their "buycott" of Ford?

This reinforces once again that the buycotts put on by John and Gina Loudon and the St. Louis tea party are nothing more than p.r. stunts. The Whole Foods buycott was a joke, as evidenced by the fact that prominent tea party leaders were bragging about shopping at Trader Joes a few months later. You know, Trader Joes, the place that sells stuff that's similar to Whole Foods except cheaper? After their initial Whole Foods buycott and a few more p.r. opportunities, the Loudons forgot all about Whole Foods. And after sending their big press release about Ford, they forgot all about it too.

These campaigns are not designed to actually change anything. Or, if they are, they are being run by people with no ability whatsoever to actually have a significant economic impact. There's only one thing the buycotts are good at: they do a great job of getting publicity for the tea party, and more specifically for the Loudons.

Arizona "Buycott" Event Appears to Be A Huge Failure

You know when St. Louis tea party co-founder Bill Hennessy writes a post claiming that some Tea Party event was a "huge success" without providing any evidence whatsoever, there's a good reason to take a closer look. Local non-elected Tea Party leaders John and Gina Loudon played an early role in promoting the "Stand With Arizona" rally in Tempe, a rally designed to offer monetary support to Arizona to reward them for their new racial profiling law. Hennessy wrote a post congratulating the Loudons for the rally, but the only video he provided was a promo for the rally rather than any footage or photos from the event. So I investigated a little, and sure enough the rally fell far short of expectations.

Rally organizers said multiple times that they expected 20,000 people to attend the rally and were confident that "at least 10,000" would be there. In fact, news estimates of the number of people who actually showed up ranged from "a couple thousand" to "close to 5,000" people. In other words, they got at best 1/4 of what they were expecting and maybe even far worse.

You can see a several pictures of massive numbers of empty seats from the blog "bullet people:"



In fact, this screen shot from a news report was taken 30 minutes after the rally was scheduled to start, and you can see huge numbers of empty sections in the stadium:


Meanwhile, a rally and march opposing the new Arizona law attracted 10,000 to 20,000 or over 30,000 people, depending on the estimates. One white supremacist counter-protester with a loaded shotgun was spotted at the rally, but kept separate from the marchers.

Recall that Gina Loudon was able to get a lot of media attention after greatly exaggerating her "Wholefoods Buycott" last year without ever having to present any evidence of the amount of money actually raised. She and husband John Loudon also played a central role in the anti-Prop A campaign that somehow only managed to get 37% of residents in the county to vote against a sales tax! It will be interesting to see if the local media further embarrases themselves by presenting this event as a huge success.

Teabaggers inflate, invent numbers: will local media notice?

Earlier, it was stated that the teabaggers' "buycott" was one of the dumbest strategies ever.  After thinking a little more about this, I don't think that's quite correct.  While it clearly is true that the buycott is not going to do anything to help Whole Foods Market, the mistake in this way of thinking is the idea that the teabaggers care at all about Whole Foods or their CEO.  It was never about Whole Foods for them. It was about a cheap gimmick to get media attention, and they were successful at that. 

On the other hand, as I have written earlier, the teabaggers ability to turn out people appears to be diminishing rapidly as time goes on.  After surprisingly large initial rallies, their "recess rallies" were a huge failure, as was their attempt to organize a counter rally to OFA's bus tour.  They tried to cover this fact up by hyping up their "buycott" and claiming it was a huge success.  It wasn't, but even if it had been, it was easily matched by the MoveOn vigil the night after, which attracted more people and as much media attention.  And Obama's speech has clearly shifted the momentum even further away from their obstructionist agenda.

However, I want to focus on just how much the teabaggers are willing to completely invent and inflate numbers as they desperately try to pretend that they still have momentum, and how willingly the local media goes along with this nonsense.  The teabaggers claimed that 1,000 people attended the "buycott" and spent $50,000.  However, numerous signs point to the fact that these numbers were completely fabricated:

1.  First of all, the teabaggers themselves only ever claimed to have collected, "600 or so" receipts.  Knowing how they round their numbers, this means that at most they probably collected 501.

2.  They asked for people to mail in receipts before the buycott day.  In other words, many of the receipts they were counting were not actually from purchases that day.

3.  Not only did they ask people to mail in receipts, they asked people to email receipts.  

4.  At the rally, they collected receipts from previous days.  Dana Loesch even kindly posted video of it (go to the 2:30 mark to see Gina Louden accepting receipts from a different day).

5.  And finally, many of the receipts they collected that day weren't even from people who supported or know about the buycott.  As the following video shows, our good friend Adam Sharp was outside collecting receipts from anyone who left, regardless of whether they had ever heard of a "tea party" or "buycott" before.  The whole video is very funny and worth watching:

(side note: it's very funny how Adam Sharp admits on this video that he uses his camera to videotape people without their knowledge, despite being offended when I mentioned that fact at the OFA rally).  

In other words, despite claiming that they had 1000 participants that day, they never collected more than 600 (i.e. 501) receipts, and there were at least five ways in which they were counting receipts that weren't part of the day's protest as receipts from the day's protest.  They then proceeded to take a, like, totally random "sample" of receipts claiming that the average amount spent was $50, multiplied it by their made-up number of 1,000, and claimed that they generated $50,000 of spending for the day.  And despite the fact that the whole point of collecting receipts was that they would actually have a record of what was spent, they have still not released any real numbers two weeks later!

But more important than the long-known Fundamental Law of the Universe that teabaggers are compulsive liars is the fact that the local media is so willing to eat up their garbage numbers without the slightest bit of critical thinking.  How do they let them invent numbers like 1,000 people and $50,000?  Why wouldn't they ask them to actually provide receipts?  They are called reporters, and their job is to find out the truth and not to uncritically pass along whatever b.s. they are spoon-fed by the teabaggers, who by the way have nothing but contempt for the local media.

 

In the video Loesch posted, after the lady gave Gina Loudon a receipt from a previous trip, Loudon said (2:32), "I hope they don't check!"  Well, Loudon's in luck, and the rest of us are out of it, because the last thing the local media seems willing to do is to call the teabaggers on their inflated numbers and outright lies.