Being on the Canadian side of the border, my first notice of “Occupy Wall Street” was, of course, through the media—and not even they knew what they were describing as they attempted to define for their audiences a collection of age-diverse, tent-dwelling anarchists vaguely furious about capitalism et al and positive that someone should do something, and that that something was sleeping outdoors on someone else’s property. Left-wing media outlets (which is to say, most of them) were giddy in their praise, hoping to have finally found a Tea Party foil. Most conservative outlets registered (naturally) suspicion—it was “astro-turf,” they opined, and rather unwashed at that. I was in Calgary when the Occupy movement came to Canada, and the lack-lustre collection of Arts major outdoorspeople got very little attention. This was Canada, after all—who needs the NYPD when you have winter?
A new documentary, however, attempts to reveal a more nefarious side to the Occupy movement. Occupy Unmasked, directed by Stephen K. Bannon and featuring the late Andrew Breitbart, follows the paper trail and the organizers of Occupy, and exposes what actually happened to create the supposedly spontaneous and grassroots movement. To those—myself included—who felt that the late New Media mogul Andrew Breitbart had perhaps overdone it at bit when he stormed out of the Marriot Hotel to confront an Occupy herd protesting the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, screaming at them to “behave yourselves” and, more seriously, to “stop raping people,” Occupy Unmasked was quite an eye-opener.
The revelation that the Occupy movement across the United States devolved into violence frequently and explosively was not a particular surprise to me. The Left has a disconcerting habit of resorting to violence to make a point, especially when they find themselves unable to do so intellectually—as anti-abortion activists, my colleagues and I encounter this frequently. Last summer, a union-organized mob swarmed outside one of our speaking engagements in London, Ontario—one young woman struck one of our staff members, and attempted to damage one of our vehicles by clawing at it with a coat hanger. A little research soon revealed that she was the head of “Occupy London.” Similarly, when we arrived in Ottawa some days later, a gang of the 2012 “Montreal rioters” who had been protesting Quebec’s inability to fund their entire education took a road trip to blockade the parking lot of the church we were speaking at and harass the attendees (bi-lingually, of course.) Chanting—the practice of showing people how little you know by repeating it loudly and often—is an important feature in all of these protests, and the slogans have not changed much over four decades.
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Neither did I find it shocking that Occupy Unmasked revealed that, again and again, Occupy initiatives (including assaults on businesses and corporations) were organized and initiated—often without the knowledge of the intentionally homeless rank-and-file—by the big unions. The documentary shows union organizers waving the beginning of a marching swarm into a bank. The rest of the crowd believed this action to be spontaneous, rather than a union-organized targeted protest. Unions, of course, generally hold stringently to a left-wing ideology. My colleagues and I were surprised last summer to find out that our cross-country tour was being protested by the Canadian Auto Worker’s Union (CAW), which ostensibly has little to do with abortion. (At one point, CAW was protesting us in a city we did not even visit, which sparked a counter-protest by pro-life union members across the street. You can’t make this stuff up.)
What did surprise me was the number of rapes and the sexual assaults that took place within the hazy precincts of the Occupy campsites, as sexual “freedom” collided with social anarchy. Occupy Unmasked features several chilling interviews, revealing the cause of Andrew Breitbart’s rage. The idealistic Occupy organizers even attempted to keep the police from investigating, saying that they’d rather deal with the “problem” themselves. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the anarchist world of “taking whatever you want.”
The documentary does very well when tracing the roots, progression, and results of the Occupy movement. It also does very well in illustrating the media bias in how Occupy was covered. It does not do very well in trying to tie the Occupy movement to left-wing movements of the past (beyond, of course, the similarity in tactics) or in tying the movement to the Obama administration, which it half-heartedly attempts to do. Obama, after all, wasn’t exactly opposed to the bailouts the Occupiers raged against on their cardboard placards.
Occupy Unmasked does a great job in providing a snapshot of what left-wing opposition looks like on the street level, and what it inevitably evolves into—chaos. Without any coherent worldview or structure to operate within, street mobs overturning cars, screaming at police, and smashing store windows is really the best they can hope for. The Occupy movement claimed to be battling for Utopia, but as Occupy Unmasked proves, all they brought was petulant protest signs, vandalism, and extended, unsanitary and at times violent occupation of public property.
Speaking truth to power involves saying something coherent, and differs distinctly from shrieking profanity at authority. That lesson has yet to be learned.