Here’s Jon Stewart’s final speech from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, where he drops the bits for the most part and talks about why he held the rally. It’s worth watching!
As for the attendance of the rally, it was pretty insanely packed. Estimations have the crowd at between 200,000 and 250,000 people. This can be compared to the Glenn Beck rally which inspired this rally as a response, which had about 87,000 attendees. Here’s a nice graphic that shows the scale of the two crowds:
So, did you go? Was it worth it? I made it down there, but not early enough to get anywhere near anything, so I didn’t get to see or hear much of the rally itself. But I did get to experience that crowd, which was like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve been to a lot of rallies, but this huge number of people far eclipsed any event I’ve ever been to. It took up what felt like a huge chunk of the city, with not only the Mall filled up, but blocks and blocks of streets and sidewalks around it. It was pretty insane.
I’m not sure if the rally will achieve its goals, as nebulous as they are, but it was heartening to see a crowd so large that wasn’t rallying together against another group of people. Well, at least not many of them were.