On Thursday afternoon, The Washington Post “Afternoon Buzz” email carried a very misleading headline from the online edition, which was “‘March For Our Lives’ gun-control rally bumped from Mall by ‘talent show’.” The headline in Friday's newspaper was similar, "'March for our Lives' rally bumped from Mall." It sounds like a Trump conspiracy to interfere.
The word “bumped” would imply the gun-control activists had secured a permit from the National Park Service, and were then “bumped.” Instead, permits are first come-first serve, but liberals think anything they’ve developed should urgently come first. The Post story by Justin Moyer submerged the most important facts until paragraph 11:
Permits for the Mall are processed in the order they are received, [Park Service spokesman Mike] Litterst said, and the number of attendees or ideology of groups involved aren’t factors in their approval. The Park Service sometimes contacts applicants to see if they are willing to alter plans for larger events, he said, as in January 2017 when the Women’s March on Washington conflicted with an application from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. In that case, the inaugural committee withdrew its claim on the Ellipse adjacent to the White House, Litterst said.
Litterst said the Park Service has reached out to the initial applicant for the Mall for March 24, but hadn’t heard back yet.
“The original applicant always has the right to exercise their preference for an area,” he wrote.
This is how the Moyers story began, with a harrumph about how everyone in D.C. should roll over for an Oprah-Clooney funded rally where liberals predict a half-million crowd size:
A planned rally against mass shootings can’t be held on the Mall later this month because it conflicts with what’s described in a National Park Service permit application as a “talent show.”
A permit application filed last week by survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school massacre indicated the “March For Our Lives” rally will be on March 24, with up to 500,000 attendees expected. Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the Park Service, said organizers proposed holding the event on the Mall but were looking to move the rally to another location after the request conflicted with a film crew’s permit.
Litterst said the film permit was “from a student group at a local educational institution,” but he wouldn’t name the institution because “applications from educational institutions are withheld from release for privacy reasons,” he wrote in an email.
A redacted Park Service permit application this week given to The Washington Post showed the application is for a “student project” related to “filming for a talent show.”
Maybe the talent-show folks will bend to the will of Oprah and The Washington Post. But the leftists were not "bumped". They just always expect to go to the front of the line.
