Why Stop The Steal Flopped
By: Melissa Ryan
Tags: Proud Boys, Elections, Trump, Election 2020, White Supremacy

Last week I wrote about Stop the Steal, the latest MAGA conspiracy and online sensation brought to you by the same folks who gave us the Tea Party and the #Reopen protests from earlier this year. The initial Facebook group gained members with staggering speed until Facebook removed the group. Facebook has since taken down other pages and groups promoting Stop the Steal, most notably a network of pages tied to Steve Bannon.

There’s undeniably a lot of online activity around Stop the Steal, but here’s what hasn’t materialized: large crowds. I’ve been tracking these events since last Saturday and with the exception of yesterday’s event in DC, which we’ll get to in a moment, I’ve yet to see one with a crowd of more than 200 people (and that’s a generous estimate.) Many of these events haven’t turned out more than a handful of people. As of yet, Stop the Steal hasn’t moved that many people up the ladder of engagement from online action to offline mobilization.

Yesterday’s DC event, billed the Million MAGA March, was ostensibly part of Stop the Steal but had more of the look and feel of another Unite the Right-ish white supremacy uprising, especially as the Proud Boys incited violence on DC streets last night. Organized by the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, the event managed to turn out somewhere in the range of 5–10,000 people. While it’s always unsettling to see white supremacists march openly in any US city, it’s not even close to a large protest by DC standards. Additionally, Tik Tok users and K-Pop fans managed to jam every hashtag the rally-goers tried to use with pictures of pancakes. Even with Trump endorsing the rally on Twitter, and suggesting he might drop by the day before, the Million MAGA March was a flop.

As much as Stop the Steal has generated media interest and conversation online, it hasn’t changed the overall narrative for Trump, nor has it reached enough of a tipping point to make an impact. Here’s why Stop the Steal has flopped.

The lack of a narrative or messaging Other than Trump remaining in office what exactly do these folks want? And how are they going to get that? More than a week later that’s still not clear. Partly because the candidate and his campaign haven’t come up with a message themselves. The ReOpen protests had a clear ask: reopen America. But Stop the Steal is a mishmash depending on what state protesters are in, and what conspiracy theories they’ve chosen to embrace.

The MAGA Cinematic Universe is colliding with reality Joe Biden won the election. The vast majority of Americans realize this. Legacy media is covering the election as both a done deal and chronicling Trump’s desperate attempts to win in the courts and spread disinformation as the last gasps of a desperate man. I continue to believe Trump’s base is shrinking and those left have further divorced themselves from reality, rendering them unable to grow their numbers with anyone outside of their galaxy brained bubble.

Centralized Facebook strategy as opposed to ReOpen Stop the Steal began as one mega Facebook group and not hundreds of localized ones in the same mold as the Reopen Facebook pages, a strategy that surprised me when I realized what they were doing. Having just one group initially made it much easier for Facebook to take down, but more than that, it made it more difficult for groups in the states to plug in and organize events and rallies locally. Whereas Reopen managed to look like a grassroots uprising initially, it was obvious from the start that Stop the Steal was a national and coordinated effort.

Rather than engaging with the public MAGA is retreating into their safe spaces. Parler, the Mercer Family funded, Twitter alternative and the Right’s current obsession is all the rage this week. According to the Washington Post, this week “experienced its largest number of single-day downloads on Nov. 9, when about 880,000 people installed it.” There are some advantages for the Right on Parler, mostly that as of right now they’re free to spread all the disinformation and hate speech they want without consequences. But by migrating to safe spaces, MAGA is removing itself from the public conversation and as a result, are guaranteed to have less of an impact on the overall narrative around Trump’s continued efforts.

Trump’s Army isn’t going to win this particular fight but they won’t go quietly either. Trump will use his last days in office to incite as much violence and chaos as he possibly can, and as we saw last night in DC plenty of his supporters are more than happy to answer Trump’s call. But they can’t stop a Biden Presidency. ​