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Redditors have done it. Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in DC 10/30/10.

121 points by markkat ↗ HN
It started with this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/d7ntl/ive_had_a_vision_and_i_cant_shake_it_colbert/

And they donated more than $240k to Donors Choose on Stephen Colbert's behalf to convince them: http://www.colbertrally.com/

Jon and Stephen's announcements:

http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/

http://www.keepfearalive.com/

Amazing.

51 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 89.8 ms ] thread
markkat
My wife and I just decided to go. This should be fun.
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Pyrodogg
Nice work, enjoy. I think if I mention a trip to DC to my SO she would be excited. When I get to Stephen Colbert she might look very annoyed, or throw something at me.
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Vivtek
Another of those things in life that just blindside you with their complete unexpectedness.
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peregrine
I wouldn't say it was unexpected, reddit has been pushing hard for this for about a month now.
brmj
Believe it or not,it has only been 17 days since the post that started it all.
clavalle
I am not convinced that Reddit was not played on this one.

It is easy to get anything to do with Colbert upvoted on Reddit. It was around 17 days ago that he seemed to start making personal appearances in the comments too.

All it would take is one Colbert/Stewart staffer to seed Reddit and it is off and running.

Not disparaging it. I think the rally is a great idea and the theme is brilliant. Reddit and other similar sites can be a powerful initial catalyst but it feels like this happened awfully fast to attribute the real genesis to the Reddit community.

llimllib
If "playing" reddit ends up with >$150k donated to charity, then I say, play on.

edit: I think it was $150k when I checked this morning, now it says $244k. A quarter of a million dollars in less than a week.

clavalle
True. I am constantly astonished at how fast online communities can come together for the common good.

I can be a bit oversensitive with anything that smells like astroturfing, I suppose, even when it is for events/organizations/people/causes I like.

brmj
That is depressingly likely. However, the user who made the post that started it all had been a redditer for over a year and posts on a number of topics, so if your theory is correct they were fairly subtle about it.
clavalle
I would be willing to bet that most of Colbert's and Stewart's staff have an average Reddit age of over a year :)
clavalle
Do you have the username of the post that started it all? I'd search but, you know, their search feature....

Now the idea is starting to bug me and I'd like to look into it a bit.

Vivtek
No, no, I'm just saying that if you asked me in 1985 whether an online community of people who had never met one another could raise hundreds of thousands for charity in order to get a liberal political entertainer posing as a mock conservative to hold a rally in contrast to a modern-day rabble rouser posing as a real conservative, I would have failed even to understand the question.
hugh3
Me too, but to be fair I was five years old and wouldn't have understood most of those big words.
vinhboy
You know, I debated in my head for a while wether to get HNer in on the fun. Obviously I decided not to because I know how strict people are here about this kinda stuff. But in retrospect, this story is about taking something that is 'online' and making it a reality by reaching out to people in the real world. Not unlike what we try to do with our startups. Also, I learned a ton about how to use social media properly.

Edit: I think you guys should still donate: http://colbertrally.com/donate =)

seanb
"My students need iPads to assist them in English, Social Studies and Creative Writing!" ($10,648 to go)

I bet they do.

(Of course, a lot of the requests are reasonable, but I'd like to see the donations go to students a bit more impoverished... Room to Read comes to mind.)

vinhboy
Thats why you get to choose who you want to donate to. Someone else may find this project important.
tyree731
I know a lot of people are into this, but anyone who is probably already and saw it on reddit and this really does have nothing to do with Hacker News.
[dead] si2
meh, if you don't like it ignore it like a bunch of other posts.
9ec4c12949a4f3
I browse reddit for lulz, cool stories, and sutff like that. I don't really check it out at work because of the damn "surprise nsfw boobs" pics. Hacker news is nice and work safe, especially when I change the background colours to look like a terminal emulator.

While I see your point, I feel there is a grey-area for this item.

robobenjie
I was very happy to read this story. I found in interesting and I don't read reddit, so I wouldn't have gotten it another way.
markkat
A YC startup enabled the organization of a national rally? -I think it is of note.
points
When does Reddit stop being a "YC startup"?

FWIW I'd rather not see political stories like this on HN.

philwelch
When does Reddit stop being a "YC startup"?

Yeah, you never see anyone use the term "Reddit (YC 05)".

markkat
I understand where you are coming from, and I did hesitate for a moment before I submitted. However, here we have a link sharing forum, that evolves into a community, and that finds a voice with national scope. I believe the medium and management of Reddit played a role in this.

IMHO, there are learning opportunities here for HN folk.

powrtoch
I don't know if this can even be considered a political story. I expect it will have all the political potency of an Improv Everywhere skit.
pavs
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

antidaily
While I can agree that it's a stretch to call this story hacker news, let's go ahead and let HN decide - not the chance that we "already and saw it on reddit".
luminary
>>There's no way to have a logical public discussion with the teabaggers. The best we can do is to mimic them. Show them a mirror and hopefully some will realize how ridiculous they actually are... Or maybe they won't even realize that they're being mocked, which could be even more awesome.

This brushed generalization (notwithstanding how "funny" it may be) from both sides of the political aisle is what's wrong with this country.

[dead] ajkirwin
I'm sorry, but when it comes to the tea party, a collection of histrionics and hysteria, it's fairly accurate.
markkat
I agree with you about the generalizations. However, I think injecting humor into the current political tension is really a powerful thing. I don't agree with name-calling, but it might do us all some good to take ourselves a bit less seriously.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this rally, will be to see how the MSM deals with so many making light of issues that supposedly divide the country.

eli
I really miss Billionaires for Bush. Clever satire beats name calling any day.
caseysoftware
Yeah, he seems to miss that insulting someone before you even talk to them is not a winning strategy. Unfortunately, that passes as rational discourse at this point.
initself
If you listen to the irrational speech that comes out of the mouths of teabaggers on a daily basis via all forms of media, you'll find that the phenomenon of ignorance is real.
jacoblyles
God forbid a grass roots collection of people mobilize to advocate for causes they believe in (if they're from the "wrong part" of the country). What could be more unAmerican than that? We obviously need to come up with sexually derogatory names to mock these people.
adamilardi
I'm fairly certain they were going to do this just to mock Glen Beck but then they were like... hey this is a good idea.
netaddict
Does this have anything remotely related to Hacker News?

Except may be reddit is a ycombinator startup.

onedognight
I'd say that getting Steven Colbert and John Stewart to hold a rally is DC is as impressive a hack as I've seen on HN.
timdorr
And you can use AirBnB to find a place to stay while you're there ;)
mindslight
Sigh, it's just the standard divisive politics masquerading as non-divisive politics. There's a reason these liptons are prone to doing and believing crazy things and it's the same reason Bush protesters acted crazy - the government is utterly out of control, and it's hitting all of these specific protesters' pain points. It's unfortunate that it takes political groups such a short amount of time to flip from expressing viewpoints to mocking others, otherwise we might actually have a productive dialog.
hugh3
Indeed. I respect John Stewart's style of humour, but Steven Colbert seems to belong to that particularly useless form of political discourse in which instead of addressing what your opponents actually believe, you instead (a) accuse them of believing something that they don't believe and (b) then make fun of them (or in less light-hearted contexts, call them evil) for believing that thing.
BlazingFrog
I love Stewart and what he's been doing for the last 10+ years but I'm worried this rally thing puts him in the same position as the very people he's been mocking for so long. IMHO, much of his power stems from the fact that he's on the outside looking in.
dkokelley
You're right. It's a tricky thing, to (fake) report on a story without becoming a part of the story.
samtp
Not if him and Colbert keep the satire in the rally
BlazingFrog
I disagree. The one thing that keeps his discourse credible is that he does not have an agenda. The minute he asks tens of thousands of people to show up at a rally, then stands in from of them to ask them to "restore sanity", he has an agenda.
smhinsey
Nothing has been said about the content of it yet, so it's a little early to speculate, but I suspect it's basically going to be some sort of music/comedy thing with them MCing. In other words, more of an anti-rally than a counter-rally.
eat
Off-topic, but I wonder if Jon Stewart realizes how easy it would be for him to get elected to some political office. Not saying he'd want to, I'm just wondering if he's ever thought about it.
jacoblyles
I always knew that Stewart and Colbert were leftists. But it was easy to ignore the soft overtones of progressive bias and enjoy the show. First they were comedians, illuminating the insanity of our political class as only comedians can.

Now Stewart and Colbert walk the dangerous line between comedian and just another partisan water carrier. They should be careful lest they lose what made them popular in the first place.