Andrew Breitbart

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.

It may be news to some that the leaderless Occupy movement didn’t spring up fully formed, but evolved with the help and aid of “anarchists” and radical anti-capitalists. It may be news to those people because they haven’t actually been paying attention: Of course there are veterans of the anti-globalization movement involved, Adbusters came up with the idea. Part of what’s causing all this paranoia is that the right wing’s old “hippies and anarchists are behind it all” line isn’t deterring people from identifying with and joining the movement.

Lest you continue worrying about the “true purpose” of this movement, I’d like to point out that the occupation’s direct democracy approach to decision-making means you get a better idea of what the movement’s “purpose” is by actually listening to them than by reading their semi-private emails. There isn’t a secret agenda. The agenda is right there, on the signs and at the General Assembly meetings, screened live online.

In their ongoing effort to report what is happening in the public square as a secretive conspiracy, Big Journalism now reports that liberal journalists and media figures sympathetic to the goals of the movement also emailed one another. (The MSM arm of “the institutional left” heard from, then.) If you wanted smoking gun proof that Dylan Ratigan supported Occupy Wall Street, you could’ve turned on his cable television show.

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.)

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

The first sentence is a mischaracterization of a summary of a study. Breitbart could conceivably argue that it doesn’t warrant a correction, even though it’s intentionally misleading. But the second sentence is straight-up factually wrong. As Mark Follman writes at Mother Jones, Professor Jurki Kauppinen is not one of the report’s authors. He just isn’t.

New York Times “Dot Earth” writer Andrew Revkin submitted a correction request to Mediabugs, a media error-tracking site, but, shockingly, Breitbart has yet to fix the post.

So you should drop Andrew a line, maybe? He’s pretty busy, destroying the institutional left and having insane feverish conversations with imaginary military dudes about the coming violent civil war with liberals, but I’m sure he will get around to fixing this blatant factual error once it is pointed out to him.

He was also uninsured — yep! — and the hospital visit he had to make in order to demonstrate the severity of his “beating” also made him a right-wing charity case. He then began appearing at Tea Party rallies and on Fox News in a wheelchair, etc., etc. Liberals laughed bitterly at the “uninsured person protests government-funded healthcare” story and then forgot all about Gladney, forever. But the conservative bloggers never forget an exaggerated or wholly invented tale of victimhood.

Now, two years later, there is closure: The two SEIU thugs who viciously beat Gladney went on trial (for misdemeanor assault) on Monday. The trial wrapped up on Tuesday. The jury deliberated for 40 minutes and then found both of the accused not guilty. (CASEY ANTHONY ALL OVER AGAIN!) Gladney’s own ridiculous testimony basically exposed how much of an overblown farce this entire incident was from the beginning.

(Gladney wore a neck brace during the trial. The neck brace was unrelated to the two-year-old incident. You know that whole thing about frivolous lawsuits and tort reform and the culture of victimhood and ambulance-chasing trial lawyers? Yes, well, the conservative movement totally means all of that, until someone in an SEIU shirt briefly knocks someone over.)

This is where it gets really good: TBogg found BigJournalism.com’s explanation for how this travesty of justice was allowed to occur. Because of Media Matters! See, SEIU paid Media Matters some money, and then, mysteriously, Kenneth Gladney lost his case.

This conspiracy, like so many others, goes all the way to the top.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets. However, we know that all will continue to deny it.

Apparently SEIU and Media Matters for America and George Soros and the Tides Foundation and Eric Boehlert and the city of Montclair, N.J., acting on orders from the White House, all used their wizard powers to convince a jury in St. Louis that Kennedy Gladney was not actually assaulted. And that is how the vast left-wing conspiracy works.