Until yesterday, the movement to occupy Wall Street was genuine, with a handful of lunatics and a few homeless hippies who had lost their way to the 1969 San Francisco love in. The hilariously tiny turnout, and the general level of idiocy, was an embarrassment to the left, revealing that the left is not a mass movement, but an elite movement, that the left is merely the voice of the state, that there is no mob with pitchforks that the state is protecting the rich from. And so, predictably, the astroturf showed up.
To provide some decent numbers, and some protest signs that showed a connection to this universe, the Professional Staff Congress Union, and a bunch of students turned out by the professors of the City University of New York, came out to “Occupy Wall Street”
When the “left”, also known as the United States Government, calls a protest, if they astroturf it, it looks astroturfed. If they don’t astroturf it, hardly anyone shows up, and those that do show up are an embarrassment.
Tags: astroturf
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[…] He has set up a bunch of youth organizations which spontaneously support Putin’s movement. Sounds familiar? There’s a huge amount of such small mobs, which are activated whenever its needed. Overall […]
By “this” I mean of course that the ’60’s New Left was a weapon in a faction fight within establishment liberalism, and not any sort of a “populist” movement. Contrary to popular belief, conservatives were not much involved in any way, except as occasional (unwanted) allies of the Right New Dealers.
It would be funny, if it wasn’t so typical of how the left moves the Overton Window. I’ve seen this crap over and over since the ’60’s, and as stupid as it looks, it works enough so that they keep trying it. Of course, the whole 1960’s was astroturf on a Superbowl sized scale, deployed in a successful power grab by an alliance of older Left New Dealers and student radicals (themselves a creation of the Left New Dealers, who retreated into Academia after their defeat in the late 1940’s – early 1950’s) against the ascendent Right New Dealers. It’s remarkable how few people seem to realize this.
1960s was not all astroturf. When there was conscription, there were real grass roots protests against conscription.
The attempt to hold a genuine protest over Wall Street reflects the elite’s sincere expectation that there is widespread rage against Wall Street, but in fact, what people are angry about is Wall Street being bailed out.
They tried for a week to hold a real protest.
Ok, I’ll grant that there was some anger over conscription, but that was only a portion of the whole sixties business. Let’s say 75% astroturf, 25% real popular protest.
The saps in the leftwing blogosphere believe this is all real – real arrests, real protests, etc. The collapsnik blogosphere thinks the astroturf arrests were the genuine article.