"Join the Impact" began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett's who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.
[...] Balliett responded to her friend's email saying, according to a post on the site, "We shouldn't wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country."
And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, '"Join the Impact" hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women's desire to turn despair into resolve.
By midnight, 20 cities' worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.
The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.
By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.
Balliett said supporters in 300 cities in the U.S. and other countries were holding marches, and she estimated 1 million people would participate, based on responses at the Web sites her group set up.
Thousands of people rallied outside Boston City Hall yesterday to voice their support for same-sex marriage and protest the recent California vote that made it illegal in that state.
Despite intermittent rain, about 4,000 people from Boston and beyond attended, organizers estimated.[...]
I don't know whether Bailliett's claim of 1 million people worldwide participating in the protest is accurate, but at the current moment Pajamas TV is estimating the total turnout of the tea parties at 208,000.
A bit more context from the Tea Party people themselves:
The Tea Party protests, in their current form, began in early 2009 when Rick Santelli, the On Air Editor for CNBC, set out on a rant to expose the bankrupt liberal agenda of the White House Administration and Congress. Specifically, the flawed "Stimulus Bill" and pork filled budget.
During Rick's rant (see video below), he called for a "Chicago tea Party" where advocates of the free-market system could join in a protest against out of control government spending.
So from 19 February to 15 April, the tea party people only manage to muster 200K for their great cause.
So unless Bailliett is overestimating by a factor of more than five, she was able, without the help of ACORN, Soros or Michael Moore to organize more people in 8 days than all the Koch's horses and men could do in almost 2 months.
We're also comparing the tea baggers to a protest about an issue that only directly affects at most 10% of the population (the usual upward estimate of the proportion of the population that is homosexual), including at least one fairly big protest (Boston) in a state where gay marriage is already legal. A whole lot of people showed up in true solidarity even though they had no direct stake in the outcome.
On the other hand taxes and government debt are of direct concern to everyone. The subjects have been covered extensively in the media, and were front and centre in a well attended and high interest national election just 6 months ago. This stuff is on just about everyone's mind. It's not as if people aren't annoyed about the bailouts either. There actually is some anger to tap. Yet the right has clearly failed to find but a thin vein of rage in this mine.
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