Women’s March 2018: The Sequel is DOA
Remember the Women’s March? It was that thing that happened last year where about a half a million women descended on Washington, DC, shrilly reiterating the same talking points they’ve been blandly screeching about for the last thirty years. Remember how they had Linda Sasour, hijab-wearing defender of Sharia law, help orchestrate this march for so-called women’s liberation in the United States, where women are allowed to hold jobs, drive, and—for some godforsaken reason—even vote, and all without having to cover their faces? Remember the incredible media buzz it created, with talking heads and major outlets tweeting about it nonstop, completely eclipsing the anti-abortion March for Life that happened practically the next day, which drew comparable numbers of attendees? And oh, do you remember how this Women’s March was supposed to spark a year of anti-Trump protests organized with the zeal and vigor of a new peaceful revolutionary movement? It was supposed to be the call to action that united the people to stand against hate: a spark that lights the fire that burns the fuel that ignites the metaphor of the First Order, or something like that.
Well it turns out, organized marches on Washington do even less than petitioning does. Mobs of people holding signs and milling around in the streets isn’t exactly how real, progressive, tangible results are bled out of an incompetent democratic bureaucracy, and all of the less-politically inclined people that got swept up in the hysteria of last year’s inauguration have come to realize that. The rioters and looters, police incompetence at places like Charlottesville, combined with the generally repulsive and crass demeanor of the average protestor has rightfully put off the sensible American’s interest in Marching for Ambiguous Cause Number Forty Eight. Spending a weekend around a uniquely bachelorette-cat-woman vitriol and indignation, with people wearing hats shaped like genitalia and holding signs that even just ten years ago would have at least elicited a wince from the common bystander, is not the recipe for a good time. People seem to have jobs again. Weekends are supposed to be days for relax, not standing out in the cold listening to self-appointed activists pat themselves on the back.
Well, the Women’s March happened again this year. I didn’t even hear about it until two days after the event had come and gone. Presumably it’ll become another dull staple of the progressive Left’s attempt to harass the current president and his supporters. If a democrat ever gets back into presidential office, then like Rage Against the Machine, political protest films, and anti-war propaganda, the Women’s March will mysteriously evaporate into thin air and the top-down status quo will again be inflicted by the powers that be. Or at least, that’s probably their plan.
This year’s Women’s March only drew about twelve thousand attendees in the District, which is about one-fortieth the size of the 480,000 estimated attendees of last year’s hubbub. Maybe it’s because this year they lacked the star power of a Hamas-tied Islamite who regularly espouses the empowering virtues of Saudi-inspired lifestyles for women. Maybe it’s because the novelty of a Trump presidency is beginning to wear off of the Left’s hysteria-fueled engine. It could also be the fact that the media has gotten so much egg on its face over the last year that there aren’t enough people tuning in. Their shared hysteria, the political establishment’s loss of face, and the fact that any American can look around, one year later, and recognize that the country is doing better than it was in January of 2017, all punch holes into the boat of indignation that Women’s March organizers have been trying to stay afloat in.
I’m only focusing on DC here. Naturally, other cities had much larger turnouts—LA and Chicago, for instance, seem to have made it closer to the half-a-mil marks. Even being generous, however, those figures fall short of 2017’s numbers by hundreds of thousands of people, but at least it isn’t by orders of magnitude like we saw at the Capital. The difference is that LA had the star power in spades—none of these Literally Whos filling in for Linda. Famous actresses showed up to reuse the lines for the Oscar bait films that all got shelved after Weinstein went down—either that, or they were just using this opportunity to do a dry-run of their award acceptance speeches. Scarlett Johansson, best known for filling out an extremely form-fitting bodysuit in otherwise wrist-slittingly dull Marvel movies, allegedly gave a powerful performance up on a podium in LA, hastily shuffling her index cards while B-lister Kunis stood next to her awkwardly holding a microphone. Scarlett Johansson, best known for her pink-sheathed derriere that opened up Lost in Translation a decade ago, got to play-act as a women’s empowerment symbol, again, because in the USA, real power over people’s minds and actions originates from those clueless knuckleheads who are paid to pretend to do things for studio executives the silver screen. Scarlett Johansson, best known for jumping out of her high-flying career without a parachute by signing onto Ghost in the Shell, proved to us once again that the Hollywood socialite version of political activism is just another form of fetishized adult dress-up.
As the nation slowly comes to grips with the current administration, the bravado and grandstanding of the Left has slowed to its predictable and sullen crawl. It may be just a lull due to the holidays of last month and the frigid temperatures of January, but it seems more likely that Americans have been turning down the volume of their televisions and blocking people on their Facebook feeds—if not just outright avoiding the platforms entirely. That’s good. Political activism is a complete waste of time and one that sensible, upstanding people are not going to win. Let the shrillness in the harpies voices speak for itself, just as it spoke for Clinton two years ago, and just as it speaks for the media presently. If the turn-out of this rally is a sign of things to come for 2018, then it’s looking like a pretty good year already.
