The issue of whether sexual assaults and violence have happened at Occupy is long settled. The reasons why these assaults have occurred have been established. Keith Olbermann’s vain, attempt to save face over a segment where he and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas joked about rape at Occupy not existing doesn’t change either of these established facts, no matter how much paper he throws t the end of his show.
“We have certain people within this movement that want to invite the mentally ill and the drug addicted homeless and we are trying to explain to these people that we are not a homeless shelter or a mental hospital and these bad homeless people don’t belong here.”
If you want to understand violence at Occupy and why it’s happened so much, just watch the first few minutes of my interview with Cody, a homeless man who spent time at Occupy Portland, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Berkeley. You’ll see a fight almost break out and you’ll hear a clear statement of what the problem is.
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Keith Olbermann’s lame attempt to ‘debunk’ violence at Occupy by claiming that homeless assailants have nothing to do with Occupy is not just false but shows that Olbermann has no idea what he’s talking about. The homeless are part of Occupy and always have been. How they are dealt with by Occupy IS the major issue behind the violence. As you can see from my interview with Cody, some of the homeless are also articulate spokespeople for the ideas–you can disagree with Cody but it’s impossible to deny he’s part of the movement. The Occupy movement has allowed in dangerous criminals (many homeless) and let them return even AFTER violence, in many cases. Why? Because of the “equalitarian” ideas of the Occupy movement.
I’ve done any number of interviews that make this case clearly It’s been an active topic on the mailing lists of the Occupy movement itself. This is all evidence that Keith Olbermann will ignore.
When I initially put together a list of reported incidents of rape and various other sexual crimes, I made an editorial decision to gather links from external sources and not rely on my own extensive reporting on the subject. I was trying to counter Keith Olbermann’s absurd and dangerous claim that sexual assaults at Occupy were “imaginary.”
It didn’t occur to me that I was creating a “Breitbart Rape List” for Olbermann to deconstruct and twist so as to create the false meme that Andrew Breitbart fabricated the Occupy assaults out of thin air. Honestly, I never thought Olbermann was either that evil or that stupid. The idea that Olbermann would justify a 14 year-old girl sleeping with a number of people at Occupy Dallas as “consensual” or any of his various other lies or excuses didn’t see plausible. I never thought I’d have to defend the list. I thought that linking to external press reports would show that there was plenty of objective proof of assaults, since I assumed that Olbermann and his ilk would just reject my reporting out of hand–even video interviews–since it appeared on an Andrew Breitbart’s site.
So, while I dutifully did a point-by-point refutation of the Olbermann’s bizarre segment “debunking” the list, I have no interest in endless defending or debating the reporting of mainstream sources. I can’t vouch for other journalists’s work. More importantly, the disposition of any particular story on that list has no relationship to the overarching, clear truth: Sexual assault and violence have been a problem in the Occupy movement.
I now see how truly wicked the left is and I know how they will attempt to twist things. They will use the Alinsky trick of isolating “The List” and making THAT the focus. If they can nitpick the list to death- for example, ultimately there was no arrest in the Cleveland case–they will do so in an attempt to chip away and raise doubts about the overall claim.
So, I say again, there is no doubt that sexual assaults and violence have been a problem in the Occupy movement. None. Olbermann flatly denied this and he needs to retract and apologize.
The people IN the Occupy movement know all about the problem. This is why they’ve had to respond with “Safe Spaces” and resolutions and other attempts to stem the assaults. While the mainstream media (mostly local press, as Andrew Breitbart pointed out to Cenk Uygur) HAS reported on individual cases of violence, they have NOT covered the story writ large and they have NOT tried to explain the causes of the violence and assaults and how they relate to the ideas and organization of the Occupy movement itself.
One of the reasons I know with total certainty that sexual assaults and violence have been such a problem at Occupy is that for months I’ve done actual reporting on the Occupy movement. I’ve been to numerous camps. This is in stark contrast to Keith Olbermann whose hermetically sealed world rarely brings on a guest who disagrees with him. In other words, whereas my work is based on hours and hours of interviews with people on the ground at the Occupy movement and even more time reading the mailing lists of the Occupy movment, Olbermann’s “work” is based on bloviating from the confines of his head and pandering to his dwindling fanbase.
Andrew Breitbart and the Big sites have, for months, been consistently delivering more solid, factual, original reporting about the Occupy movement than any other news source I can think of. I’m proud of the work we’ve done. Much of that work has been doing something that no mainstream news sources–and certainly not Keith Olbermann–has done: we’ve given a public voice to the dissent within the Occupy movement about issues like safety and finance. Our work has ultimately had the effect of applying outside pressure and making the Occupy movement somewhat safer, something that the cheerling denialism of Olbermann hasn’t achieved.
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