The corporate media is promoting a demonstration on the National Mall organized by the far-left Fourteenth Now organization as a veterans march. However, the NowDC march on the National Mall isn’t a veterans march at all, and its organizer, Fourteenth Now, isn’t a veterans interest group—though that hasn’t stopped outlets like Newsweek from claiming so.
Fourteenth Now is a political group founded by Jessica Denson, a political staffer who worked on the 2016 Trump campaign and subsequently became a far-left critic of President Donald J. Trump. Despite Denson’s relatively minor role in 2016, she has used her Trump campaign stint to become a media darling and fundraise for her Fourteenth Now group. Notably, Denson is not a veteran; rather, she is a failed Hollywood actress who was accused by her supervisor during the 2016 Trump campaign of leaking President Trump’s private tax returns.
Denson and her organization have routinely held small protests in Washington, D.C., demanding Congress use the 14th Amendment to bar President Trump from office. The National Pulse has previously noted that Trump was never convicted of insurrection—a prerequisite for the use of the 14th Amendment—and the United States Supreme Court has ruled that Trump is not disqualified from office under the constitutional provision.
WHY IT MATTERS.
Simply put, what is being billed as a veterans march isn’t one at all. Fourteenth Now isn’t a veterans group; Jessica Denson isn’t a veteran, and the only connection to veterans the NowDC march has is that Denson and her organization are asking veterans to join them. At best, what Denson and Fourteenth Now are doing is a shameless political grift; at worst, it is a bizarre attempt at Stolen Valor.
Veterans’ marches in Washington, D.C., hold significant historical meaning. While the NowDC organizing website uses stock photos from Martin Luther King Jr.‘s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, by portraying itself as a veterans’ march, Denson is evoking the image of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler and his Bonus Army march on Washington, D.C.
In June 1932, Butler led nearly 50,000—including upwards of 20,000 World War I veterans—in a march on Washington, D.C., to demand Service Certificates be paid out early as the Great Depression left many veterans out of work. When Congress adjourned without action on the veterans’ demands, the Bonus Army occupied the National Mall for over a month until they were dispersed in a calvary charge led by General Douglas MacArthur.
