Exactly how many people attended isn’t yet known, but the numbers are significant since the park can hold from 25,000 to 50,000 people, depending on the setup. On top of that, 22,000 RSVP’d on Facebook for Sanders’ event in LA, and crowd size photos show a significant turnout. In fact, so many people showed up that an overflow crowd formed on the steps of City Hall across the street.

Los Angeles right now. Not everyone has arrived. We're just getting started. #BernieInLA pic.twitter.com/qKuAt4CdnN — #BernieSanders for President 2020 (@WeLoveBernie20) March 23, 2019

Look at this movement RT @People4Bernie: WE will not accept a handful of billionaires controlling our economy! #BernieInLA pic.twitter.com/4Ws7HV5LXZ — John Cusack (@johncusack) March 23, 2019

How did Bernie & Kamala spend the weekend in LA? Bernie joined UCLA’s striking workers, visited the Islamic Center of SoCal, & held a free rally that drew 15K+supporters. Kamala went on Jimmy Kimmel & to a $2,800-$10K per person fundraiser. #BernieInLA https://t.co/S5i2L2uA6D — OurRev305 #ElectTheBern (@OurRev305) March 24, 2019

Bernie is now taking the stage to John Lennon's "Power To The People"

The @BernieSanders crowds keep getting bigger. This is a significant political development. He is generating the sort of enthusiasm—in a key state: California—that is usually seen on the eve of a major primary. If Sanders sustains this energy, it changes every 2020 calculation. pic.twitter.com/XmxHWMBd0a — John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 24, 2019

The reasons for posting this essay are varied.

Mainly though, I think for anybody who's committed to seeing victory for this campaign there has to be in place sooner than later an emergency rapid-response press team for times like these, which presumably went under-reported in the MSM (given its size and the earliness in the campaign of it). Most pressingly will be the strength of such a unit's response when the inevitable hit-pieces, misinformation and outright lies begin to be flung by the MSM.

How the MSM covers such a rally, and this early out, may not be of that much concern. But it probably should. It's a clear example and reminder that the MSM will do its best to minimize Bernie, when he's at his best, and ridicule and denigrate Bernie, when he's just going about his campaigning business.

As for the sizes of these campaign rallies, in 2016 one of the many typically condescending pontifications handed down by the snobby, elitist Neoliberals at TOP, which were the same as in the corporate media, was the reflexive dismissal of Bernie's awe-inspiring and fear-inducing (to his opponents) rally sizes. The notion of whether crowd sizes mean anything concretely to election results was laughed about. They were the professionals who knew what they're talking about, which if you listen to cable news all day is the basic bullshit presumption underlying their whole existence.

“That doesn’t mean they’ll all vote,” they’d say like bratty, jealous schoolchildren taunting on a playground.

These kinds of responses are designed by their adherents to divert the conversation to a place where their narrative remains in control. And these quick comebacks seem readily available and repeated by the media - because they're pre-packaged by DC "think-tanks" who pay marginally bright but highly manipulative people to come up with them and get the stick them, like on a lyric call and response sheet somewhere, which is exactly what the $hills in the Democratic Party did at the DNC convention in Philly in an attempt to drown out more-impassioned Bernie supporters.

But upon thinking about it for even a half moment further it's apparent, like most of their bullshit, that that didn't make sense whatsoever. Not only do most people who attend rallies wind up voting for sure, but they're much more inclined to want to do some of their own canvassing or at least some convincing of their inner circles to vote too. What's more is they'll also probably be more inclined to either donate, volunteer or canvass for the candidate. Attending a rally, I think, is exponentially more likely to not only secure the vote but expand it to others.

It's just one in a slew of examples of how propaganda is spread about so hard and fast to get you to doubt both a sensible and rational truth and your own intuition.

The more we talk about things like this the less power these malicious vipers will have.

As Amy Goodman observed about the 2016 campaign season,

The media played a critical role in creating President-elect Donald Trump. The Tyndall Report, which tracks how much airtime different issues and candidates receive on the major news networks, summarized media coverage of the candidates in 2015. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage, at a time when he had 16 Republican challengers. "ABC World News Tonight" aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, according to Tyndall. On March 15, 2016, after the primary day dubbed "Super Tuesday 3," the networks played all the candidates' speeches, except for the speech by Sanders. The networks actually spent more time showing Trump's empty podium, filling the time until he spoke, than playing any words of Sanders', who addressed the largest crowd that night. Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves told a Morgan Stanley-hosted media-industry conference, speaking about the volume of political advertising that the "circus" of Trump's campaign was attracting: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. ... The money's rolling in." As world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky says, "The media manufacture consent."

(emphasis mine)

From the podium Bernie said,

"We are going to bring a little austerity to the 1%."

One of the best things about Bernie's previous campaign was a reigniting of the Language of Occupy Wall St. And I love that.

The single best line I've ever heard in a presidential campaign was his in 2016 when he said,

"The business model of Wall St is fraud."

Crowd sizes are arbiters. Obama consistently had massive turnouts - and won. Bernie had massive turnouts - and lost. Hillary had miserable, embarrassing turnouts - and won? No, of course she didn't. Which was made evident to the rest of the world what we had been screaming for the two years leading up to the 2016 election - when she fucking lost, again.

Guess this is a just friendly reminder to you Bernie folks: there's already plenty of evidence that the MSM intends to collude, with the DNC and Democratic Party, against a Bernie nomination. Better start warming up that rapid response team together ASAP for when you'll really need it.