Turning Point USA propagandist Savannah Hernandez has the eagle eye – both for people getting up and exiting an arena during a political speech and for how to edit it into a 15-second montage of footage she captured at Tuesday night’s raucous Kamala Harris rally at the GSU Center in Atlanta.

She spoke for maybe 30 minutes so it was a pretty short speech. I was honestly surprised to see people leaving so quickly and started filming after seeing continuous streams of people leaving fairly quickly after seeing her

— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) July 30, 2024

Whoa, right? That’s like 15 Megan Thee Stallion fans who came for a free performance and then left while the actual headliner was still speaking. Which was more than enough for convicted felon former President Trump – who has the very same venue booked for his act on Saturday – to post that Harris “needed a concert to bring people into the Atlanta arena, and they started leaving 5 minutes into her speech,” later echoed Wednesday morning by the couch crew on Fox and Friends.

Now if there’s other footage out there showing a shit ton of people walking out of the arena while Harris was speaking it appears that Fox News were unable to track it down and put it up during their highly-rated morning show. That might be a little more effective rather than having Sean Hannity’s girlfriend simply mentioning it in passing. Good b-roll that more or less speaks for itself.

Or at the very least requires only brief context like “Mar-a-Lago security blocked people from leaving speech early” during the Orange Pharaoh’s November 15, 2022 campaign launch speech.

That clip aside, we’re not trying to “counter-own” the MAGA propaganda industry here. We don’t need to, given the deep body of reporting on Trump fans – who will no doubt still crawl through broken glass to vote for him – that regularly get bored and walk out of his rallies after seeing him for 20 minutes. As there is a much shallower body of reporting on people who couldn’t get in still gathering outside Tuesday’s Harris rally in Atlanta. And then there’s Herman Cain’s last visit to Tulsa.

We’re a little more interested in feeling out the why, as in “Why are Trump and Fox News trying to make this a thing, are they really at least starting to get that fucking desperate?” The question is important as we’re trying to gauge the panic level in the MAGAverse. Like if late November 2020 through January 2021 was the absolute historic apex of freak-the-fuck-outery in Trump’s fanbase and media ecosystem then where are we right now? Trying to turn 15 people walking out on Kamala Harris into a placebo for the audience is stupid and unforced – and as telltale a sign of panic as was that day’s Project 2025 drama (objectively a bad look for Team Orange). It’s just that after eight years of essentially non-stop horseshit it’s not always clear how bad the apprehension is getting.

Or to put it better: We know the mercury’s rising. The question is how fast and how hot it’s getting.