Category: #Occupy

What Part of ‘Fuck You, Commie Scum’ Is So Hard for @BurkelyH to Understand?

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Burkely Hermann, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Class of 2016

Burkely Hermann describes himself:

#Socialist, citizen of the world and college student who fights for global justice and works to challenge the powers that be.

Well, who is Burkely Hermann and why should anyone care? He popped up on Twitter this morning to deny an obvious truth:

Michelle Malkin is never going to bother responding to an insignificant troll like Burkely Hermann, a freshman at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, but it’s Saturday afternoon and what better to do today than to make an example of this ignorant Occupy-loving scumbag?

For some unknown reason which he did not bother to explain, Hermann went on a sort of Twitter rampage of pro-Howard Zinn messages, re-Tweeting three-year-old messages including these from Michael Moore and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal:

As to Howard Zinn’s role in the Communist Party (CPUSA), I wrote about this extensively when Zinn’s FBI file was released in 2010:

Read either or both of those articles, and then read the 400-page FBI file itself, and make up your own mind. No honest and intelligent person could disagree with my conclusion:

The FBI files demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that Zinn — author of A People’s History of the United States, widely used as a textbook or supplement in many of our nation’s high schools and universities — was a card-carrying Communist at a time when the Soviet Union was America’s most dreaded enemy.

Burkely Hermann is neither honest nor intelligent, however, and yet supposes himself both intellectually and morally superior to anyone who calls attention to the obvious facts about Zinn.

This is how it always is with leftist punks: They imagine that their ideology confers on them a special insight, providing them with access to esoteric truths which no one outside the Cult of the Enlightened can understand, so that if you disagree with them, the very fact of your disagreement is proof (to them) that you are “ignorant,” etc.

Facts and logic that contradict their arguments are dismissed as somehow tainted because they don’t come from reliable (i.e., leftist) sources, whereas any specimen of counter-factual lunacy is acceptable to them, so long as it supports their anti-social worldview. There is therefore no point in trying to reason with such fools.

Case in point: After I responded to Hermann’s deliberate trolling, he Tweeted to one of his allies a link to an article in The Progressive about Zinn’s FBI file, as though the article somehow disproved Zinn’s CPUSA affiliation, which it certainly does not.

What that article does is to portray the FBI (and its director, J. Edgar Hoover) as unreliable, paranoid extremists who were persecuting Zinn because he “was active in protesting and speaking out at that time,” as Zinn’s daughter is quoted as saying — but this does nothing at all to contradict the evidence against Zinn. It may be true that (a) Hoover was paranoid, (b) FBI agents were sloppy, and (c) Zinn was an idealist, without in any way discrediting the testimony from multiple sources that (d) Zinn was an active member of the CPUSA.

This was a problem with the pro-Communist Left going back to the time of John Reed: No matter what evidence you offered about the evil folly of Bolshevism, they would always find some way to deflect or deny or ignore it. And this problem persists into the 21st century — here with the punk Burkely Hermann, who wasn’t even born when the Soviet Union collapsed under the massive weight of Marxist lies — because American educators and intellectuals will not teach the truth about the Cold War.

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have documented the ways in which historians have obscured the reality of how the CPUSA abetted Soviet espionage during the Cold War, and I can damned well guarantee that Burkely Hermann knows nothing about that book.

There are vast libraries of books that leftists refuse to read, because their worldviews are so fragile that they cannot stand contact with reality. If you ever encounter a leftist who has read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed or the Peter Collier/David Horowitz classic, Destructive Generation, please let me know, because I’ve never met one such person in the past 15 years.

Notice how conservatives instantly repudiated David Cole (a.k.a., “David Stein”) once his past as a Holocaust denier was exposed, yet the Left dissembles and accepts any flimsy excuse for Howard Zinn’s embrace of the maniacal mass-murderer Josef Stalin. Notice also Burkely Hermann’s “fuck the FBI” response:

Scratch an Occupy/Anonymous activist and a sociopathic cop-hater bleeds — which is one reason I pay attention to trolls like this.

Back in 2009, one such troll decided to get up in my face and I kept an eye on him for the next three years until one day, he melted down in public, threatened an FBI agent and got himself arrested. Can’t say I never tried to warn him, but these fools never listen.

 

 

UPDATE: Re-reading my July 2010 post about Zinn’s FBI file, I see nothing I’d change except a few typos. What I think may confuse some younger readers (and perhaps Hermann is confused by this) is how the FBI or anyone else could determine what sufficed as evidence of CPUSA membership at a time when the CPUSA was effectively outlawed and its members were intensely secretive.

In Zinn’s case, there was at least one CPUSA informant who reported having attended lectures on Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the Party’s Brooklyn headquarters. This unnamed informant, interestingly enough, named George Kirschner as a Brooklyn CPUSA official at that time — evidently the same George Kirschner who later co-authored one of Zinn’s projects. But beyond that kind of direct evidence (including the presence of Zinn’s name on a 1947 CPUSA mailing list), there were multiple incidences of Zinn’s involvement in Communist “front groups.”

You really have to study the history of that era to understand the significance of the fact (to cite just one example) that Zinn served as a delegate from a Communist-infiltrated group (American Veterans Committee) to the national convention of a group blacklisted by the Attorney General in 1947 (Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee). Let anyone ask some of the surviving anti-Communists of the 1950s and ’60s — especially M. Stanton Evans — how conclusive that evidence was, in terms of Zinn’s standing with the CPUSA. And when you fast-forward two decades from there to the late 1960s to find Zinn teaching a seminar entitled “Marxism and Contemporary Problems,” sponsored by an organization founded by Herb Aptheker . . .

Well, for crying out loud, if you think further proof than that is required, you probably wouldn’t believe Zinn was a Commie even if his membership file turned up in the KGB archives in Moscow.

 

Convicted Felon John Tiessen: Crazy? Certainly, But Is He Also Dangerous?

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John Tiessen, ranting on YouTube about Nixon and Jesus and the Rothschilds

Where do all these crazy people on the Internet come from, and why do they always seem to end up obsessively stalking me? Maybe I should write a book, Troll Magnet: How to Become an Irresistible Scapegoat for Every Deranged Lunatic With a Twitter Account.

Sunday afternoon, I Tweeted an item that Lee Stranahan posted about how one member of Anonymous “doxxed” another member of Anonymous who is involved in the Steubenville rape story. My plan had been to write a long article about the Steubenville case, but that got pushed back a day because of the inauguration. And in the meantime, my Tweet attracted attention from a kook named John Tiessen.

Tiessen associates himself with Anonymous, and also claims affiliation with the defunct “Project PM” started by former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, who notoriously got arrested after a September online video meltdown in which Brown threatened an FBI agent’s family.

After seeing my Tweets with Stranahan and the person from Anonymous that Stranahan was writing about, Tiessen called me a “racist pig” in a message that was, for some unknown reason, also CC’d to the anti-Anonymous hacker known as “The Jester.”

Uh . . . bad move, Mr. Tiessen.

At some point in the past, it seems, Tiessen got the brilliant idea to falsely accuse Jester of being a child pornographer. This cheap smear was apparently an attempt by Tiessen to make himself a hero to the Anonymous movement, whose members all hate Jester.

John Tiessen’s Excellent Adventure, however, had the effect of making him a target for Jester and — wouldn’t you know it? — the Jester discovered that John Tiessen is a convicted felon himself:

I think at the very least, we have a classic case of something called ‘projection‘ — Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where John Tiessen subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.

Something about John Tiessen and a 1992 sex offense. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that “dox” — what is it with these people always doxxing each other? — Tiessen admitted that he’s a convicted felon in his weird 17-minute YouTube rant against Jester. A few excerpts:

“I do have a lot of things going on . . . Been down to Occupy Minnesota. I’ve got a lot of things going on there. . . .
“Nixon was bombing Cambodia long before Obama ever thought about bombing people. . . . And he was doing the same thing Obama’s doing today. . . . To me, nothing has really changed. . . .
“When I got out [of prison], I joined a lot of [Web] sites of ex-cons, prison groups and prison rights groups and ex-con rights groups . . .
“Most control freaks are either rapists or child molesters . . .
“I still have contacts in law enforcement. . . . I don’t lie. I have no reason to lie . . .
“Some people blocked me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people denied knowing me — ‘Anonymous.’ Some people said some things about me — ‘Anonymous.’ . . .
“I’m a Christian. I’m not the kind of Christian you see on TV. . . . People are bashing gay people or bashing Muslims. . . .
“I’m a true Christian. . . .
“You people who kicked me to the curb because of my lifestyle, you’re doing the same thing that you’re fighting against. . . . You want these people to get out of prison and . . . you want them to be ridiculed, laughed at, made fun of. . . .
“That’s just one of many things that I’m accused of and today I still have a hard time with what I did. I know I’m guilty. . . .
“The coke whore that I picked up promised me a blow job if I gave her coke and then she tried to renege on it, and I said, ‘No, you’re going to do it.’ . . .
“Don’t ostracize people who are coming out of prison. . . .
“I’m a f–king true freedom fighter. I’m not one of these f–king wannabes. . . . You want to grow some f–king cojones and be a true freedom fighter? Stand up like Jesus did. Stand up to these kings and these so-called f–king religious leaders. . . [Tell them] ‘You’re not speaking for God.’ I don’t care who you are — Obama, Putin, on and on — I don’t care. You’re speaking for the Devil, man.
“You ain’t speaking for the people. You’re speaking for the Rothschilds and the J.P. Morgans and the f–king banks of this world.”

Those are merely excerpts, of course, and if you’re a graduate student working on a thesis about abnormal psychology, maybe you’ll want to watch the whole 17 minutes of pure crazy-talk:

Notice how Tiessen lacks the self-awareness to realize that this video completely undermines his avowed purposes:

  1. To convince people in Anonymous that he’s not worried about having his criminal record exposed; and
  2. To establish his credibility so that people in Anonymous will take his word — as a “true Christian” and a “f–king true freedom fighter” — that Jester is actually a child molester, because Tiessen’s law-enforcement sources told him so.

When he ends up crazy-talking about God and Obama and the Devil and the Rothschilds, everybody can see that Tiessen is a deranged wacko. Even if you’re OK with Tiessen’s method of dealing with dishonest coke whores, it’s hard to say, “Yeah, I’ll take this guy’s word that he’s got solid sources in law enforcement,” once he starts spewing lunatic gibberish about God and Jesus and the Rothschilds, with an f-bomb or two in every other sentence, just for good measure. Continue reading Convicted Felon John Tiessen: Crazy? Certainly, But Is He Also Dangerous? →

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Middle Class’ Looks an Awful Lot Like Occupy’s ’99 Percent’

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Guest Post by Badger Pundit

Writing at National Review’s The Corner (h/t Instapundit) Patrick Brennan chides Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Mass.) for declining, in a recent televised interview, to explain her definition of “middle class.” Even when asked specifically, “what numbers are we talking about, in terms of income level,” Warren declined to get specific — except to disagree with the reporter’s statement (at 1:00 of the linked video) that surely someone making a million dollars a year is not in the “middle class.”

Perhaps Mr. Brennan should have done a little homework before criticizing the soon-to-be senior Senator from Massachusetts. Warren has been on record for more than a decade that the “middle class” extends all the way up to highly successful lawyers, doctors, and other professionals — even up to high-tech millionaires One must keep in mind that, as Warren herself confessed, she “created much of the intellectual foundation” for Occupy Wall Street. To her, “middle class” is just another term for “the 99 percent” — the base of support that Warren and her fellow occupiers rely on in their class war against the ultra-rich evil “1 percent.”

Don’t believe me — believe what Warren herself wrote in two books describing the problems of the “middle class”: 2000’s The Forgotten Middle Class (PDF excerpts here), and 2003’s The Two-Income Trap (PDF excerpts here).

On page 1 of her 2000 book, Warren and her two co-authors state that they have written the book about, and on behalf of: “Stolid middle-class people, such as ourselves” (emphasis added). Recall that in 2000, as in 2012 before she was elected to the Senate, Warren was part of a household earning easily $500,000 annually, and probably substantially above that. She and her husband, Bruce Mann, were both full-time Ivy League law school professors, and Warren made substantial sums consulting for corporations on the side, charging $675 an hour. So right off Warren alerts readers that her definition of “middle class” includes households comprising two lawyers each earning substantial six-figure salaries. For example, Warren’s salary alone (not counting the six-figure amounts she earned from other sources) for her last year of teaching at Harvard was $429,000,

But later on page 1 of her 2000 book, Warren makes clear that households such as hers are hardly at the top of the “middle class.” She speaks of the “many molders of opinion” for whom “the notion that the middle class could be in crisis is remote, even unrealistic. Their part of the middle class is thriving, and they point proudly to the growing ranks of young high-tech millionaires as signs of the success of the great American economic engine.” (Emphasis added) That high-tech millionaires are part of the “middle class,” as defined by Warren, is consistent with Warren’s statement to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in January, 2012, that she does not regard herself as a “wealthy individual” — wealthy individuals (aka “the 1 percent,” though she did not use the term), are those who do not work for their money, but instead “have a lot of stock portfolios.”

Further confirmation that the “middle class” includes highly successful professionals such as Warren and her husband is found on page 6 of Warren’s 2000 book:

The middle class is, of course, a huge portion of the American population. . . . The debtors in our sample include accountants and computer engineers, doctors and dentists, clerks and executives, salesclerks and librarians, teachers and entrepreneurs. They are middle-class folks . . . .”

Finally, page 7 of Warren’s 2003 book further confirms the breadth of her definition of “middle class,” indicating it extends nearly all the way to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, to include everyone who has gone to college, or owned a home, or “held a good job.” Using this expansive definition, Warren reports “more than 90 percent of those in bankruptcy” are “middle class.”

So to sum up, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual godmother of the Occupy movement, has long been on record that when she uses the term “middle class,” her rough meaning is “the 99 percent,” excluding only the dreaded “1 percent” — the ultra-rich evil Americans who don’t work for a living but instead sit around enjoying their stock portfolios and exploiting the hard-working “middle class.” What else is there for her to explain?

(Follow Badget Pundit on Twitter.)

Sneaky Tea Party Extremists!

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The latest news from Manhattan rural Oklahoma shows the danger posed by Harvard graduates racist hillbillies joining Occupy Wall Street Tea Party extremists and engaging in violent terrorism:

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.
Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.
People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.
Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.
A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.
Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Sounds like these Harvard graduates Oklahoma trailer trash were planning real trouble. Imagine how angry liberals would be if Naomi Wolf Pat Buchanan was defending the “civil rights” of these terrorists.

Objectively Worse: Democrats to Blame for the Hyper-Partisanship They Decry

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NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1, 2011

Commenting on the post-election rancor — e.g., Log Cabin Republicans targeting Chuck Hagel — Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:

You know, somebody — Dave Weigel or Matt Yglesias, I think — was tweeting the other day that the GOP was doing worse post-election than in 2008. Well maybe; at this point, after all, Bush was still in the White House. But Obama is definitely doing worse than in 2008. First the Susan Rice debacle, then the departure of scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and now the stalled Hagel nomination. Definitely not as well as in 2008.

Meanwhile, we see gloomy prospects for avoiding the “fiscal cliff,” and the question we ought to be asking is, “How did we get here?”

The problem in trying to answer that question is that the information stream is polluted by the Conventional Wisdom manufactured by the national media, where Democrats out-number Republicans by a factor of no less than 7-to-1. Thus, we must begin the quest for truth by un-learning what our indoctrinators —  the “apparatchik MSM,” as Ed Driscoll calls them — would have us believe, and consider the possibility that something quite nearly opposite is true.

Our liberal friends would have us believe that the problem is that Republicans have been captured by Tea Party extremists and are engaged in politically motivated “obstructionism” because the GOP is captive — “epistemic closure”! — to extreme voices on Fox News and talk radio.

What if that MSM-produced narrative is, in fact, the mirror-reverse of the truth? This relates to a comment I made about Barrett Brown, the “Anonymous” spokesman arrested in September:

The specific object of my critique is the outlaw “civil disobedience” vigilante protest mentality involved in the “Anonymous” and “Occupy” movements, an attitude that excuses crime so long as it is committed against enemies of The Cause.
This attitude was revived and popularized by anti-war protesters during the Bush era, where the information-warfare aspect of their propaganda was clearly displayed: President Bush himself was de-legitimized as an election-stealer, the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” and the U.S. military response to those attacks was “war for oil,” allegedly undertaken on behalf of Halliburton, etc. There is a narrative that justifies Barrett Brown’s demonization of the FBI, you see. The fact that this left-wing rationalization has passed its sell-by date — like the fragments of the Weather Underground that continued their “revolutionary” violence long after the Vietnam War ended — does not prevent people from continuing to carry the radical torch as if it were still 2005.

As Rodgers and Hammerstein might say, you have to be carefully taught to think the way Barrett Brown and his comrades think, and what Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” never bothers to expose and debunk the counterfactual beliefs of the radical Left. Why? Because liberals believe that having a loud, militant left-wing fringe — angry shock troops to assault the GOP-allied institutions of bourgeois society — is good for the Democrat Party.

Whatever you may think of the Republican Party, it is not (as the MSM would have you believe) controlled by “Birthers” and other kooks, and the GOP is not pursuing any kind of extremist agenda. It is actually the Democrats who embraced a dangerous anarchist fringe movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” and in fact it is Democrats who are even now pursuing the radical OWS agenda against “the 1%”: Taxes must be increased on “the rich,” Democrats keep telling us, and they are willing to take us over the “fiscal cliff” if they don’t get their way.

 

Further Tales of ‘Heroic Hatred’: Down the Rabbit Hole With Neal Rauhauser

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

Patterico comments on the habits of sociopathic monsters: “I have seen this exact pattern play itself out, again and again.” One of his commenters offers a helpful comparison:

Like Richard Dawkin’s attacks on religion — completely irrational and hateful but he justifies it by claiming that he’s opposing something hateful and irrational.

Is the hatred of religion a coincidental aspect of this problem? Let us recall that Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who was arrested in September after an online video meltdown, was once the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote (a/k/a, Godless Americans Political Action Committee). Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Along his path to destruction, Barrett Brown let himself fall under the sway of Neal Rauhauser (a/k/a, “Carlito2000”) and was drawn into Rauhauser’s paranoid fantasies involving HB Gary, Jennifer Emick, Tom Ryan, et al. This brings us back around to something that will surely be of further interest to Patterico. Mike Stack today posted a message to someone who is engaged in a feud with Emick:

Neal Rauhauser is the reason I was SWAT-ted.
Your girlfriend is friends with Neal. . . .
You have a long-standing war with Jen Emick and the only reason that she was thrown into the mix was because again of what Neal Rauhauser did with the Michigan Police Department.

Stack was the first victim of SWATting in the wake of the WeinerGate scandal. Rauhauser became obsessed with the idea that Weiner was the victim of a hoax, eventually focusing on Patterico as the alleged mastermind of the (wholly imaginary) conspiracy against Weiner. In the comments of Stack’s post today, someone linked to a Pastebin document from August, transcribing an online chat in which Rauhauser (using the alias “BangoSkank”) was trying to gather information on his enemies. A few key excerpts:

20:59 you want a Maltego graph of this stuff? . . .
21:00 yer smack in the middle, I started with nachash dox
21:00 and melded it into my other stuff . . .
21:11 This Maltego graph is sort of the top level map
21:11 for the last two years, for me
21:12 There is a federal grand jury in D.C. and I presume one attached to the cyber task force in Chicago . . .
21:12 this graph contains what I know about the subjects, and I have left a number of their associates who appear only due to social media link analysis . . .
21:23 New York grand jury, too. Forgot that one.
21:23 So that’s a map of those I think may be culpable, their close associates, and then a ring of Twitter accounts that are well connected enough that they are interesting for comparison’s sake when I get new information . . .
22:19 I did this in an iterative fashion for the cluster of groups I watch
22:19 and then one day one of those connected eggs
22:19 matched a twitter account that pulled up when I brought a mailing list into Gist
22:20 and then the light came on, because it was the third time a specific funding source had popped up on the graph . . .
22:21 NY grand jury, DC grand jury, Chicago cyber task force
22:21 and it all come back around to the same central place

OK, you’re asking, “What the heck is Rauhauser talking about?” And I can’t fully answer that question, however (a) Rauhauser has repeatedly claimed to have high-level law enforcement contacts, (b) Rauhauser has routinely asserted that his enemies, including Patterico and others, are the targets of federal investigations, and (c) this particular online chat took place just a few weeks before Barrett Brown’s meltdown.

What Rauhauser seemed to be focused on in that particular chat were a number of enemies of “Anonymous,” including Emick, William Welna and various of their supposed associates. At one point, Rauhauser made this comment about “White Hat” hacker Thomas Ryan:

22:50 I catch Ryan from behind, he gets a skull fracture with something good and heavy

Hey, why the hate, Neal? Oh, maybe it’s because in October 2011, Ryan obtained “Occupy Wall Street” leadership planning e-mails that were published by Andrew Breitbart! And we remember that Rauhauser was involved (representing himself as an agent of Brett Kimberlin’s “Velvet Revolution” non-profit) in the “Occupy” movement.

So whereas Neal Rauhauser was allied with the “Occupy” thugs, Ryan was allied with Andrew Breitbart and opponents of “Occupy.”

In August, Neal was claiming that his enemies were under investigation by federal grand juries and a Chicago-based federal “cyber task force.” What happened instead? Within a matter of weeks, after Rauhauser tried to sic Barrett Brown onto his enemies, Brown melted down and was arrested on federal charges. At one point during his 13-minute video rant, Brown accused Thomas Ryan of being an “FBI informant.”

Think about this for a minute: In Barrett Brown’s perverse worldview, being an FBI informant — i.e., helping law enforcement investigate crime — makes someone an agent of evil.

Similarly, in Rauhauser’s worldview, Thomas Ryan deserves a “skull fracture,” while Patterico (who is himself an agent of law enforcement) can be falsely accused by Rauhauser of criminal wrongdoing — a “perp“! — and yet Rauhauser, having shown himself willing to lie to accomplish his purposes, expects his political allies to view him sympathetically as the victim of a “wingnut” conspiracy.

People like Brown and Rauhauser inhabit an inverted moral universe, where those who obey and uphold the law are the villains, while criminals — including Rauhauser’s associate, “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin — are noble and heroic warriors against “wingnuts.”

At any rate, the commenter at Mike Stack’s blog who linked the Pastebin document asks of Rauhauser, “Can you just see this wanker in court trying to sell his ever-changing conspiracy theories?” Read it for a laugh. We have not heard the last of Neal.

 

The Truth Goes Viral Again: Progressive Labor Leader Speaks Explicitly About Occupy Movement’s Communist Goals

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Leadership Institute intern Danielle Saul got video inside an Occupy DC meeting Sunday where union activist Mike Golash said:

“Progressive Labor is a revolutionary communist organization. Its objective is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system and build communism. . . . An organization has to be built which can bring down capitalism . . . a disciplined organization made up, not of a few people, but of millions and millions of people, can bring down capitalism.”

Hat tip to Danielle’s mom, Ginny Saul. How did I get scooped by Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller on this, huh? Greedy capitalists!

UPDATE: Just interviewed Danielle Saul by phone. “There were three of us” who produced the video, Danielle said, naming Andrew McCaughey and Nicolas Tomboulides as her collaborators. Danielle explained that the Occupy DC meeting Sunday brought together various constituent groups involved in planning protests next month to mark the one-year anniversary of the Occupy movement.

Mike Golash was speaking on behalf of the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist group which (if memory serves) was instrumental in fomenting the 1969 split in Students for a Democratic Society that led to the formation of the Weather Underground.

After Danielle sent out the video on Twitter late last night, she was contacted immediately by Boyle of the Daily Caller. When Danielle’s mom woke up early this morning, the video was already being played on Fox News, which amazed Danielle: “Who would have thought that it would have  gotten on Fox News?”

Who would have thought it? A guy I used to know, that’s who.

UPDATE II: A quick glance at Wikipedia clarifies the role that Progressive Labor played in the SDS split:

[The so-called “Weatherman” manifesto] had been written by an 11-member committee that included Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and John Jacobs, and represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wing of SDS, most of which later turned into the Weather Underground Organization. The New Left Notes issue was full of the language of the Old Left of the 1930s; and was thus impenetrable and irrelevant to the majority of SDSers.
Once it became clear that the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) faction was the largest contingent with a majority of the delegates, the convention quickly fell into disarray, as the RYM and allied groups moved to expel Progressive Labor (PL) members and the WSA faction of SDS. The Black Panther representatives attacked PL and at the same time proved itself inclined towards sexism by advocating “pussy power.” The entire convention fell into something approaching chaos, or worse, farce.
The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn, led a breakaway meeting from which PL and WSA members were barred. This group then voted by about 500 to 100 to expel PL from SDS, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500.

This was a necessary clarification, and also an interesting history lesson. I had remembered that Progressive Labor was involved in the collapse of SDS, but had forgotten that the Maoists were, in fact, the target of the purge led by the RYM, also known as the “action faction,” which subsequently became the Weather Underground terrorist cell.

UPDATE III: The Progressive Labor Party is still in operation, more than 50 years after it was formed in 1961 by dissidents from the Communist Party USA who charged that CPUSA leader Gus Hall had taken “the capitalist road.” PL promoted conspiracy theories of JFK’s assassination as an “apparently well-planned execution,” and organized early protests against the Vietnam War. PLP’s Web site nowadays features headlines such as these:

Capitalism Equals Mass Racist Murder and War

Mexico: Building International
Unity and Communist Solidarity

Dark Knight Rises: Batman Spews
Anti-Communism to Save Capitalism

UPDATE IV: Linked by William J. Hoge and Walla Walla Tea Party Patriots — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE V: A Memeorandum thread with further commentary by Weasel Zippers, The Lonely Conservative and Gateway Pundit.

 

 


Witchy Woman: Did Christine O’Donnell Try to Hijack ‘Occupy vs. Tea Party’?

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BEAVERCREEK, Ohio
This is either (a) a serious trademark infringement or (b) a generous gesture of free publicity: We told you last month about Gordon Gebert’s proposed “Occupy vs. Tea Party” reality-TV show. A few days ago, I learned that Gordon got the funding to make it happen, and will begin with a debate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Well, it seems that Christine O’Donnell — whose Tea Party-backed GOP Senate campaign made national news in 2010 — has planned an event for Tampa that got headlined by ABC News, “Christine O’Donnell to Stage Tea Party vs. Occupy Debate in Tampa,” which provoked an outraged reaction from Gebert and his lawyers:

Former Delaware Tea Party candidate and “witch” Christine O’Donnell has issued a press release which has been picked up by ABC News, Yahoo News, DailyKos, et al… announcing Christine O’Donnell to Stage Tea Party vs. Occupy Debate in Tampa at Channelside Cinemas 10 IMAX Theater in Tampa, Florida just one block from the Tampa Bay Times Forum, site of the Republican National Convention. Problem is Christine O’Donnell was told in a conference call Thursday evening she could not use the Tea Party vs Occupy or the Occupy vs Tea Party name because both are trademarked and copy righted by Gordon G.G. Gebert, creator of the reality TV Show of the same name.
During the Thursday conference call O’Donnell was attempting to reach a broadcasting deal with The Young Turks while representing that she was the creator and owner of the trademark. Despite repeatedly being told by the Trademark & Copyright owner she could not use his brand in her Tampa event, O’Donnell decided she wanted to take her chances in litigation and told Gebert, “sue me.” According to spokesperson for Mr. Gebert after becoming aware of O’Donnell’s press release by email which was picked up by ABC News, Yahoo News, Huffington Post, and others; Attorney’s for Mr. Gebert will file the necessary documents to obtain a restraining order prohibiting O’Donnell from proceeding with the unauthorized use of his trademark brand to promote her event.

Read the whole thing. Is this a serious legal throw-down? Has O’Donnell attempted to rip off Gordon’s idea? Whatever it is, it has now added the vital element of controversy to the story and, in the news business, nothing is more valuable than controversy:

CONTROVERSIAL DEBATE
SCHEDULED IN TAMPA!

Get your money’s worth out of it, man.