Why Andrew Breitbart can’t grasp Occupy Wall Street

[meegbear]

Andrew Breitbart has tracked down secret internal Occupy Wall Street emails that prove the entire movement is a leftist conspiracy to destabilize capitalism. There are anarchists involved! And ACORN!

Breitbart obtained a couple thousand listserv emails from some Occupy Wall Street participants and organizers arguing strategy and planning events, and he has "crowdsourced" his analysis of these emails because he doesn’t really understand any of it.

Despite his inability to grasp who these people are and what they want, he has determined "the true purpose" of the movement, based on a couple of random things some anarchist organizers wrote to one another:

The true purpose of the Occupy movement appears to be further economic and governmental destabilization, at a time when the world is already facing major financial and political challenges. By embracing the Occupy movement, President Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and their union allies may be supporting an effort to harm both the domestic and global economies; to create social unrest throughout the democratic world; and to embrace other radical causes, including the anti-Israel movement. Ironically, the emails suggest that the President and the Democrat Party may soon find their friends in the Occupy movement to be a political burden. The email below calls for the Occupy movement to begin "executing higher-risk actions, civil disobedience and arrests," and suggests: "We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable."

The emails themselves show the participants chafing at the prospect of the Democratic Party co-opting the movement, which makes it a bit harder to paint the whole thing as a White House plot of some kind. You can practically hear the gears in Breitbart’s head grinding against one another as he struggles to make sense of that idea.

You’d think Tea Party champion Breitbart would welcome an independent popular movement that seeks to distance itself from the Democratic Party that he hates so much, but he can’t process the idea that these scary leftists aren’t in league with Obama. Poor Andrew Breitbart doesn’t understand Occupy Wall Street because he has a simple-minded, binary understanding of the world: There are good, Tea Party things, and there are bad things supported by the White House/ACORN/SEIU alliance. This is his obsession with "the institutional left," which he is forced to imagine as a monolithic entity encompassing everyone in a position of power in Hollywood, the media, academia and the government. The idea of members of "the left" have wildly different priorities and goals does not compute.

<snip>

David Graeber, a writer affiliated with Adbusters, says the email list is "just an expressive forum." Matt Taibbi describes it as "a bunch of emails from friends of mine, talking about what advice we would give protesters, if any of them asked, which in my case anyway they definitely did not."

The emails were leaked by some clown calling himself "a cyber-security expert," who has been on something of a crusade against the online activist collective Anonymous. His aim seemed to be to prove that Anonymous is "secretly" behind the entire movement (their participation has not been a secret, as anyone who’s seen the Guy Fawkes masks could tell you) and to somehow claim that they intend violence. (They’re certainly waiting a while before making their move on that front, what with it being a month into the occupation.) What no one’s been able to prove is that any group — anarchists or Anonymous or the White House — is "controlling" the movement, because there’s no top-down control going on.

(The leaker also passed on emails to the NYPD and FBI. Anyone who’s been involved with any sort of left-wing/anarchist/antiwar protest movement over the last century or so understands that the FBI and the cops will plant people with the movement. Modern demonstrators must obviously also be on the lookout for freelance agents of the right-wing media.)

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/why_andrew_breitbart_cant_grasp_occupy_wall_street/

[spanone]

1. andy, get a life.

[dionysus]

5. but he only feels alive when he's being a douchebag...

[louis-t]

2. His gibberish and limited thinking skills make my head hurt.

Does he purposely shut down 3/4 of his brain?

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

3. Breitdouche is nothing more than a pimple in Laimbaugh's ample ass. nt

[bullwinkle428]

4. Uh, Breitfart? Why don't you go back to looking for pictures of genitalia.

[Scuba]

6. Because he's a slippery slimeball. n/t

[starroute]

7. There's a fundamental asymmetry between left and right they can't handle

The right does things covertly. They form front groups with deceptively could-be-anything names. They get money from millionaires while pretending to be grassroots. They move campaign funds from pocket to pocket to conceal its origins. They set up tax-exempt educational organizations and proceed to violate their tax exempt status by lobbying. They even sneak around in weird disguises. All of this makes it very easy to expose them and reveal their covert operations.

The left doesn't do any of those things. Even a group like Anomymous, which keeps aspects of its planning secret for obvious reasons, doesn't use front groups or engage in money laundering. But people like Breitbart are convinced that they must -- because its what they would do themselves -- and are obsessed with digging out the non-existent details.

This is why they keep trying to "prove" that George Soros is behind OWS. Or the Democratic Party. Or Hollywood. And it's why Glenn Beck pulls out these complicated charts that tie everything in the last 50 years back to Saul Alinsky or Frances Fox Piven.

And it's why they think they've scored a coup if they can triumphantly reveal on the basis of some stolen emails that there are Marxists or anarchists supporting OWS -- even though nobody's ever made a secret of the fact that there are.

And because they're essentially trying to do the equivalent of one of those "prank" mathematical proofs that shows that 1=0, they've doomed to frustration at best and functional insanity at worst.