Operation American Spring v. Lymanfest

Blogger predicts small-town festival will out-draw national protest

I’ve lived in Lyman, South Carolina, for 6 years now but so far I’ve not actually made it to Lymanfest, the annual town celebration. I tried to go one year, but I couldn’t find it (they never mention on the web site exactly where it is), and I’ll miss it again this year because I’ll be attending the Obot meetup in Philadelphia that day.

I feel pretty confident that Lymanfest will significantly out-draw the Obot meetup, but Operation American Spring I’m not sure about. I give Lymanfest the edge. All three are scheduled for the same May weekend.

Neither Operation American Spring nor Lymanfest is getting much media coverage beyond niche Internet sites and social networking. On Facebook, Lymanfest is trailing OAS by a considerable margin. The official OAS Facebook page has 5,611 “likes” as of this writing compared to 65 for Lymanfest. There are OAS splinter group pages (here and here) that are doing better.

I am trying to get estimates on Lymanfest attendance. The original claims from OAS organizer Col. Harry Riley (US Army ret.) said that there “1.8 million definite militia members” coming (reported Mother Jones back on January), however that number has been called into question since it exceeds by several orders of magnitude the total number of militia members in the United States. The Vocativ web site published an informative article on OAS yesterday titled, “A Former Colonel Plans to Overthrow the U.S. Government on May 16,” subtitled, “The founder Of Operation American Spring is planning a million-man march on D.C. But will anyone show up?”

Unlike Lymanfest, which is a single-day event, Operation American Spring envisions persons camping out in the Capitol until President Obama, Eric Holder, and the Congressional leadership resigns. President Obama will leave office January 20, 2017.

My personal prediction is that Lymanfest will be the attendance winner. I don’t think that many Americans want to turn the United States into Egypt.