The weirdos, losers and mutations who make up the Occupy movement showed the world their glass jaw when their Denver branch descended upon the FreedomWorks BlogCon 2011 new media convention on Friday. There’s a lot for conservatives to learn from this close encounter of the dumbass kind.
Sure, we learned that their personal hygiene leaves much to be desired – like, well, personal hygiene. We learned that their concept of private property is shaky at best; radio host Tony Katz hilariously schooled one shaggy gentleman on the air at length about who owned a particular chair the Occupier attempted to occupy. And we learned that they wear Guy Fawkes masks not because of any particular affinity for the noted radical Catholic terrorist but because some guy wore it in the movie V For Vendetta and it was apparently a really bitchin’ movie.
These are not deep thinkers.
But the most important lesson is that the Occupiers are a joke; they are nothing but coddled, Potemkin protesters who collapse at the first sign of resistance.
These clowns have been treated with kid gloves by gutless (or even sympathetic) politicians from Zuccotti Park to the Port of Oakland. They’ve been allowed to live in filth, dominate public spaces and generally descend into a festering petri dish of social, criminal and epidemiological pathologies by cowardly mayors and other enablers unwilling to do the most basic job of any government leader and keep order.
The mainstream media adores them, viewing them as advancing their shared left-wing agenda while also recalling the activist Sixties of legend. And, of course, the media helpfully covers up the ever-growing roster of outrages perpetrated by these nimrods. No accountability there. Even the cops are required to treat these geniuses with professional respect.
It’s been all up-twinkles for them – until now.
Not to paint a couple of botched protests as the Battle of Stalingrad, but when these idiots rushed into the midst of the assembled conservative new media folks gathered at BlogCon 2011, it was about the first time anyone ever took these cretins on en masse.
They ran into an impenetrable wall of mockery, and they had no clue what to do. They folded like a house of stinky cards.
The foundation of the success of the Occupiers is the tacit agreement by the elite to treat them with respect, to take their incoherent assemblage of bad ideas seriously, and to ignore the fact that the emperor’s new clothes are dirty, clichéd and have Che’s mug emblazoned on them.
The BlogCon folks didn’t.
They did not play along. They showed no respect. Instead, they went on the offense, kept on the offense, and turned the Occupiers’ strengths against them. It was awesome.
Round one started at about 2:00 pm when several walked into the hotel lobby and tried to crash the meeting room. But it didn’t quite go as they thought it would. The losers suddenly found themselves surrounded by a horde of eager conservatives with flip cams immortalizing the happening.
Yeah, invade a conservative bloggers’ convention. Good plan.
There was some shouting and some pushing – a hefty, troll-like woman shoved the very buff Steven Crowder. He was quite patient with her, which was wise since she had weight on him. Stephen Kruiser, John Nolte, Dana Loesch and her husband Chris were right in the middle of the fun too, ladling out heaping helpings of mockery. The bad guys were stunned; no one has ever before told them that they are idiots to their faces.
This is what happens when you have a generation that got trophies for losing.
Nearby, an Occupier kid of maybe 20 with a ridiculous hat stood there, smiling wanly until he was hustled out with the rest of them to a chorus of laughs and jeers. Outside, the clearly-inebriated guy who had earlier tried to occupy Tony Katz’s chair got wrestled to the ground by a triumvirate of cops. It was pretty amusing.
The mainstream media finally showed up well after Round One was over. By then, dozens of citizen journalists were draining the hotel’s bandwith as they uploaded their video clips and, figuratively, tossed a few more shovelfuls of dirt into the open grave of the Dinosaur Media.
At about 5:00 pm, the gang showed up again, with a few dozen folks who looked like the dorks who worked in your college’s organic food co-op stopping outside the lobby and trying a new tactic. As the bloggers rushed out with their cameras to document Round Two, they started with the creepy call-and-response “human microphone” act to draw tenuous parallels between the Occupiers and the Tea Party and to invite us to join together in one giant, incoherent movement toward socialism.
We declined.
The bloggers took the offensive and commandeered the Occupiers’ human mic act, baffling the assembled radicals with a tsunami of chants, my favorite being “Where’s the dog?” Perhaps you haven’t heard, but they elected a dog as their leader. It was a collie named Shelby, if you’re wondering.
Sadly, we never met the dog.
They did not like it. As I chanted “Pay your bills,” one young lady went into a veritable spasm of fury in front of me. Her wide-open mouth revealed a metal stud disturbingly far back on her tongue. Perhaps she might find it easier to get one of those good jobs she demands if she didn’t look like a freak of nature.
Nearby, an ancient doofus in one of those blue Greek sailor caps announced that he was strongly in favor of “Palestinian self-determination.” He’s probably still hasn’t gotten over that whole fall of the Soviet Union thing.
I stood next to a young guy who was relatively clean-cut and asked him what he was outraged about. Understand that I wasn’t trying to engage him in a rational exchange of ideas and views – not only did I not even remotely care what he thought, but to do so would give him the false impression that his ideas are worthy of consideration.
I just wanted to see if he could articulate his beliefs. He really couldn’t. They boil down to a vaguely held belief in less regulation of individuals, but more on corporations. So, apparently, one guy alone should have more rights, but if you have two or more individuals together they should have fewer rights. Whatever.
It’s pretty clear he hadn’t spent a lot of time in deep thought pondering this conundrum; in fact, he seemed to become somewhat embarrassed by his companions as they continued to flail in the face of the bloggers’ withering torrent of contempt. It turns out that he was really more of an Occupier dilettante. I asked if he was actually sleeping outside every night and he sheepishly admitted he wasn’t. I assume that after the march he drove back to his parent’s house for the night in the Volvo he borrowed from his mom.
He was probably the smartest guy in the bunch.
After a few minutes of mockery, they decided it was time to go. However, before they wandered away, the troll-lady made another appearance and threatened Steven Crowder again. There was a little pushing and shoving and soon they wandered away. Later, on the way to Tony Katz’s cigar smoker at a local bar, the cabs passed their encampment. It looked like the same kind of Obamavilles that dot the country, except with a couple of signs.
The big lesson of the Battle of BlogCon? When the Occupiers encounter resistance – real resistance that attacks their cherished premises with mockery and contempt – they will fold. This is a generation of special snowflakes, of kids instilled with self-esteem instead of a drive to achieve. No one has ever called them idiots before and treated them accordingly.
And they can’t take it. They’ve never had to defend their views against people who think they’re stupid. They simply don’t know how. The Occupy movement is performance art, not political science. It is an information operation, not an authentic, organic expression of beliefs.
They have not earned respect and they don’t deserve it. Don’t “engage” them, don’t “reason” with them, don’t try to “understand” their views.
Mock them. Treat them like the buffoons they are. And win.