Were There Really 800,000+ Bikers in D.C. on September 11th? This Woman Was There…

September 11th, 2013 is a day I will never forget. I was supremely inspired by the reports of 800,000+ bikers rolling through Washington D.C.

I wrote an article about it Wednesday morning and the piece took off like a rocket. Considering how small The D.C. Clothesline is, I find it miraculous that at least 200,000 people read that article in the first 24 hours. Over half of those readers came from Freedom Outpost where my articles are also featured on a regular basis. America was ready for some good news.

But on the 12th I went looking for verification, because as much as I was inspired, I still wanted to do a follow up piece to verify the miracle that America had just seen. My mistake was looking at too many mainstream media sites where the story was basically back page news. By the sounds of it, even though they weren’t stating hard numbers, there were less than 10,000 bikers in D.C.

I was devastated and thought I might have to print a retraction. Thank God I came to my senses and kept digging. Because even though I wanted to believe it, it is seriously a miracle of sorts that we could get 800,000 people together for anything. But it appears those numbers are very much accurate.

Allow me to step aside and turn it over to a reader of Atlas Shrugs, who was there and graciously shared her story on Thursday:

Atlas reader Denise Lee was there. Here are her observations.

“….. the place was absolutely packed and at least a mile long. I interviewed several of the bikers later in the day and one guy told me that as of 10:00am that morning there were 56,000 bikers riding. Another one said that there were 200,000 present at the Harley Davidson staging area. Park police confirmed the number at 880,000 bikers riding through the city yesterday. Information during the day was sketchy because the police created a state of confusion, no doubt at the command of some higher power. Many of the bikers I talked to expressed their frustration at not being able to get into the city to ride all together. One biker told me that the police would not let them leave the Harley shop unless they went on the Beltway. For those not familiar with our I-495 Beltway, picture Washington, D.C. as a diamond in the middle of a big somewhat irregular circle. To the right of the diamond is Maryland; to the left is Virginia. To send someone who is not from here towards the Beltway when they are trying to get downtown is just plain cruel. Washington, D.C. is one of the craziest cities you’ll ever drive in. It has parallel and perpendicular streets but with diagonal ones coming at you from strange angles. And to add to the fun many of them are one way. One guy told me that the police had sent several groups of bikers to various locations that ended nowhere. The bitterness in this man’s story was telling. I could feel the frustration of a patriot who came from very far away and came to support the cause but was sent on a wild goose chase. And to top it off the heat index yesterday was 98 degrees.

My friends brought their camcorders to video the ride and the march and to record interviews with different people that attended. We had plans to interview and record Muslims who were marching and ask them what their grievances were but we never got the chance. We searched for the millions of Muslims but in the end, I never saw any. One of my friends who came from Florida said he had seen a total of five Muslims (count them, FIVE!) down near the Washington Monument around noon. He did get this on video. One of them was MD Rabbi Allam, the organizer of the Million Muslim March, later changed to the Million American March Against Fear because the first title sounded so ominous. He was with Cornel West, who later joined a couple dozen hippy, dippy 9/11 Truthers. In fact at one point I heard that the total count for the Muslims was around twenty five but in observing the march that did take place it was a Truther march, not a Muslim one.

My friends and I split up and went in search of the Muslim March. We were up near the Capitol Building off of 3^rd Street. We watched for a couple of hours for the Muslims to come marching up from further down the mall but they never showed. At one point, probably a little after 3:00pm, we heard sirens and saw a lot of police activity and flashing lights and thought this was finally them, going north on 3^rd Street. But what we saw behind all the hoopla was the 9/11 Truthers with a bunch of hippies carrying a yellow banner. And the police were all over the place. There were dozens and dozens of them, in fact, there were more cops than there were marchers. I saw police on horseback, police in cars, police in emergency vehicles and policemen surrounding the Truthers as they spoke under a couple of large trees. I was wondering what the police thought was going to happen. It was overkill to say the least.

The bikers I talked to were all polite, well-mannered and well behaved. Their worst offence was being cranky at what they rightfully felt was a lack of communication brought on by D.C. refusing to grant their permit for a non-stop ride-thru and the bikers not trusting them so they didn’t update their Facebook page to let everybody know what would happen during the day. One biker told me that in the end there was some sort of permit issued at the last minute and they did have a police escort into the city in the morning. But that memo did not get to everybody and so some of the bikers felt that the ride through town was not as impressive as it could have been.

But I was impressed. I talked to bikers who came from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. One group came from near Austin, Texas and another all the way from Toronto. There were bikers from Michigan and Ohio, and those were just the ones I talked to.  And the one thing that they all had in common is they came to stand up for freedom and denounce the Muslim takeover of the remembrance day that is 9/11. Over and over again I heard the bikers say that if the Muslims wanted to march that was fine, just NOT ON THIS DAY. They talked about preserving our freedom and had no use for our current administration. And President Obama might want to sit up and take note because these people were able to put together a grassroots effort within about a month and get almost a million bikers here on very short notice. That was the measure of their resolve.

The Muslims were only able to muster five, and I don’t know about you but that really makes me angry. How much money was spent on security and extra police for their march and who has to pay for that when they don’t show up? (Yeah, I know…you and me.) Since the beginning of this year we’ve heard this hype that there would be a million Muslims marching on the mall on 9/11. Did they just say they would get all those people downtown with no intention of doing it? Is the news media so in their back pocket that they can snap their fingers and they will spread whatever misinformation the Muslims want them to? Or in their arrogance do they believe that they can just lie and that everyone will believe them? (I believe they call that assuming the sale.)

Unfortunately for them, yesterday was an epic fail for the Muslim narrative because in the end the bikers successfully took back the day.

What I saw yesterday was determination, resolve and lots of talk of taking our country back. And the bikers proved they meant business just by showing up. How many of them had to take time off from work and drive for many multiple hours to get here? One gentleman told me that his thumbs weren’t working anymore because he had been riding for twenty-one hours and holding the handlebars for that long made them useless. And yet he came and stood with us anyway.

I think yesterday proved we need to take what Muslims say with a grain of salt and not let them fool us into thinking they are more powerful than they really are. I understand that they are relentless in their quest to establish a world-wide Caliphate and make Islam the only religion on the planet, subjecting all people to their will, and that we need to be vigilant and make sure that the Constitution remains the supreme law of the land. But it also proved something I have been suspecting for a long time, that there are many, many Americans that love this country and will stand and fight to protect the freedoms we’ve enjoyed for so long when the time is right. I saw a glimpse of that American Spirit yesterday and I am heartened that many of the bikers said they will be back next year on 9/11 and keep that day a day of remembrance for a war that started twelve years ago. If I had to put some money on it, I’m betting that the organizers of the 2 Million Biker Ride are downtown today, getting their permit for next year’s ride on September 11, 2014. Only this time, they will have a whole year to plan for it.”