Wheat & Weeds: What I Saw At The Stop the Steal Rally in DC

Since it was predictable that the legacy media would report only on ugly clashes and try to portray everyone as a racist, I spent Saturday afternoon taking pictures and talking to people at #StoptheSteal in DC. Here are some photos and my firsthand impressions of the mood.

I am aware of only two ugly incidents during the rally and March, both of which preceded my arrival at about 12:30 pm. You've probably seen the videos: white folks in BLM shirts harass a black woman taking her kids to the rally. And antifa types mixing it up, being separated out by the cops, and meanwhile, one of the marchers uses his bullhorn to hit.

Make of that what you will, but I didn't see anything even remotely like that for the four hours I was there, both at the rally at Freedom Plaza and then marching up to the Supreme Court, where a series of folks made remarks. I made it a point to leave before it started getting dark, because that's when Antifa types come out (you know, after the crowds thin and they can pick on the few).

This was among the most diverse crowds I've seen, rivaling the March for Life for being "here comes everybody." Except there were a lot more working class white men than you might see at the March for Life. Black, white, latino, gay, young, old, families..... The surprise for me was the number of Chinese / Taiwanese immigrants who are deeply fearful the nation's media and other elites are all in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party.

I didn't see any signs or hear any slogans that had anything to do with white supremacy. I did stand for a while next to a guy whose appearance gave me the creeps. His look seemed aggressive: lots of tattoos, including on his neck, and piercings involving not earrings but needles and such. And his American flag was mounted on a baseball bat (only thing of that kind I saw). But his comments on the speeches were appropriate and his chit-chat with people standing nearby --including people of color-- was courteous and even sweet, which is not like anything I've heard before from skinheads, so if he was a racist, he was hiding it.

This young man is the first person I ran into at the rally. He was in the same Metro train with me. I was impressed that he was willing to ride on the train with his big Trump flag when he was traveling alone, and I asked him whether he was afraid at all. "Not at all."

I asked him what brought him there and he said he was worried about the loss of the power of "we the people" in light of the non-transparency of many of the vote counts.

He likes Trump, although is to the right of Trump on several issues -- wants more free market solutions for healthcare, including medicaid.

I asked him if he'd grown up in a household that thought like that and he cracked up laughing. "Noooooo." So I asked if he got flak from the African American community for supporting Trump. He said his folks and most of his extended family hate that he supports Trump, but that he has been his own man since grammar school, when he took up skateboarding and loved punk rock music. He was bullied terribly for liking punk rock and for being a skateboarder, and that is what put him on the road to doing his own reading and looking into things. It was sort of funny. He seems to think that in his circle, it was worse to be a skateboarder than to be a Republican.

These two guys were chinning like old pals, so I asked them how long they'd been friends and they'd just met at the rally. One is from Cincinnati and the other from Detroit. Each came because he thinks his ability to earn a living depends on a Trump presidency, and because they think the fix is in.

As I say, a sizable contingent of all kinds of Chinese immigrants and Taiwanese who believe everything we hear from legacy media and politicians now comes at the behest of the CCP. They had lots of literature out about this. (In fact, a Chinese friend of mine is the person who told me about this rally.)

While my bro and I were at Freedom Plaza listening to the gearing-up before the march, people were mingling and having a good time. A gal originally from Guatemala was going around introducing herself and thanking people for being there. She said she fears the US is falling prey to the kind of tricks she has seen under dictatorships and feels alone when she watches the news. "We feel so isolated, but when we get together we encourage each other." Here are some other photos, just to give you the mood.

This man was blessing people in the name of Jesus as they passed by

This man was laughing at CNN. "They say we're just 10,000 people, y'all." (The crowd was at least equivalent to the 2nd- largest March for Life I've ever been at -- on the order of 500-750,000 it seemed to me from within it. Though I am a bit skeptical of the most popular aerial shot of the crowd going around. The crowd never seemed that dense to me and I wonder whether those are photoshopped Obama inauguration photos. Just asking.). My brother said the solution was that CNN should turn off its cameras and leave the area, and then we would count for them.