Nine years ago, I stared down the barrel of a rifle pointed at me by a Denver riot squad as the man holding it screamed at me and my companions to “Go home! Now!”
Let me back up.
Nine years ago, a group of disgruntled youth set up camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, located in the middle of the Big Apple’s financial district. Their goals and demands were clear as mud. Protest financial inequity, topple the capitalist system, and redistribute all the wealth they saw as being stolen from the people by Big Banks and Big Capitalists…by Wall Street.
They aptly named themselves Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and it became a movement that spread across the country over the next year. Encampments popped up in nearly every major city. At that same time, the Tea Party had just sprung up to protest Obamacare and rising taxes. The mainstream media was portraying old people in walkers wearing American flags on their hats as dangerous, racist terrorists bent on burning down “Obama’s America”, while at the same time touting OWS as a glorious, peaceful example of courageous young Americans marching for equality.
It was anything but. However, these were socialists and they were seen as the antithesis of the free-market Tea Party protesters. President Obama picked his side (OWS) and Democrat politicians across the country followed suit. While they sent out riot squads to monitor the ridiculously tame Tea Party events, they changed city ordinances on vagrancy to allow OWS protesters to set up camp on city properties. In fact, to this day Los Angeles City Hall has a raging homeless problem on their grounds (that resulted in a rat infestation and several City Hall employees testing positive for typhus) because they lifted the ban on camping on city property in order to accommodate the OWS protesters. The homeless came with them. They never left.
The “battle lines” were drawn and the narrative was set. Occupy Wall Street – good and heroic. Tea Party – racist and violent.
In 2011, I attended my first conservative “new media” training conference in Denver – BlogCon.
Because of the media-stoked tension between the OWS and Tea Party movements, there was a lot of interest in our little gathering and soon, protesters showed up and invaded the hotel where the conference was being held. It fueled the bloggers gathered there. This was premium content! We poured into the lobby to meet the protesters. It was glorious chaos.
Eventually, police were called to break up the melee and pull away the protesters. We had been portrayed (unsurprisingly) in local media as rabble-rousers and right-wing racists (so funny to think about that now, because it was such a fun and silly little blogger conference but media bias was hitting its stride at the time) but the truth is the OWS protesters were the aggressive ones. The cops pulled them out and we followed them into the street. Somehow I ended up standing next to a police car and watching as police officers stuffed two rumpled but gleeful OWS protesters into the back seat. A young protester beside me began to cry. A clean-cut, professional-looking young man who looked like he was dressed for work at an office turned to her and said, “Don’t worry. We already have lawyers at the precinct and we’ve got bail funds. They’ll be out in time for tonight. Just go get ready.”
That was my first introduction to the concept of professional protesters.
read more here: https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2020/05/30/846427/?fbclid=IwAR2tF3WKMnwrQsnExdR2hjvi1ivEHpbFS1pbW86M7CJzJdzW4FdrJB2Mvcw
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