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The national media employ a long-held double standard on political protests. They boost left-wing protests regardless of crowd size and pretend they're not leftist. When conservatives protest, it's either ignored or it's treated as menacing, laced with a "dark undercurrent."

Saturday's nationally organized leftist "No Kings" protests against President Donald Trump were boosted as "massive." "Morning Joe" co-host Jon Lemire gushed, "The vast, vast majority of these 'No Kings' protests were very peaceful and the crowds were huge!"

But protests are not elections. Leftist Garry Kasparov -- the Russian chess grand master -- bragged about that "huge" turnout on Substack: "Five million people protested across the United States over the weekend -- for liberal democracy and the rule of law and against a wannabe strongman. That's 1.5% of all Americans taking part in a coordinated action."

Read that again: Even if you accept this exaggerated crowd size, how does 1.5% of America represent public opinion? Five million protesters is a much smaller sample than 77 million Trump voters. Democracy is measured at the ballot box, not with the most activist voters in the streets.

Protests could be analyzed as "pseudo-events," as defined by Daniel Boorstin -- events staged to draw media attention. Protests by the president's opposition are morale boosters for the people who lost the election. You could have said that about conservative protests against President Barack Obama in 2009.

It's instructive to review what happened back then. On Aug. 7, 2009, then-MSNBC host David Shuster was spreading fear about protesters at Obamacare town hall meetings. "We know that threats to President Obama are up by, like, 400% compared to the Bush administration. Is this putting our president in some sort of danger? Because of some wacko that will see this stuff and say, 'oh, yes, it's fascism and the way we dealt with Adolf Hitler was to try to kill him, so therefore, let's do this with our president.'"

That's fascinating, since in the Trump years, MSNBC hosts and guests have routinely smeared Trump as a dictator and a fascist and Hitler, and no one worries about their loose talk endangering him.

CNN displayed a complete contrast in 2009. First came a big Tea Party rally with an estimated 75,000 protesters on Sept. 12. CNN's Jim Spellman couldn't locate a scary nut in D.C., so he aired canned footage of a man -- somewhere in Michigan -- holding an AK-47 and talking of a possible civil war. Then he warned of that "dark undercurrent" poisoning the right: "It's a bit of a dark undercurrent. You have the bulk of the people that are there for low taxes, less government control, but there really is an element that's got these kind of outlandish conspiracy theories about death camps and about the, you know, this takeover, people comparing President Obama to Hitler."

Just 12 days later in Pittsburgh, the radical Left held a protest in Pittsburgh against a G-20 summit. CNN reporter Brian Todd robotically cited the usual talking points for leftist rallies, highlighting the "very, very diverse" nature of the protesters: "We're told this is the biggest march in Pittsburgh since the 1970s, estimated at least a few thousand people. But it is much more peaceful, less confrontational. Very, very diverse group of protesters here, everyone from people protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet, to women's rights groups, to anti-capitalists."

This "much more peaceful" protest ended with 200 arrests.

The Left clearly thinks protests are Their Thing, and whenever conservatives protest, it must be a dastardly conspiracy that endangers democracy. In their minds, democracy only flowers when their stilted narratives dominate.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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