BEN SHAPIRO: “OCCUPY” UNMASKED
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ben-shapiro/occupy-unmasked/
This week, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s Magnet Releasing revealed that they had purchased the rights to Occupy Unmasked, a Citizens United production, also produced by Andrew Breitbart, and created by Stephen K. Bannon. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to pre-screen the film along with the attendees of the Right Online conference.
Full disclosure: I’m editor-at-large of Breitbart News; I was a close friend of Andrew’s; I’m a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the Freedom Center. Leaving all that aside, Occupy Unmasked is a thought-provoking and powerful piece of work that will make you worry for your country.
The film itself explores the deep, dark crevices of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Where did it come from? What are its ideological and philosophical roots? And what was the goal of the movement?
Occupy Unmasked uncovers the answers through exclusive footage of the Occupy movement – footage that will leave your skin crawling and your stomach writhing. This was not a peaceful, hippie movement of the 1960s, with thousands of grassroots turning out for drug-induced love-ins. This was a top-down, insidiously planned movement with a set of very real goals: chaos, political pressure, undermining the existing constitutional order. Occupy was dangerous, and it was purposefully designed to be dangerous.
Through all of this, Andrew Breitbart acts as guide. Andrew was a larger-than-life figure – a passionate advocate for what he believed, and a deep believer in the great hope that is America. And you can see the fire in his eyes when he describes the shameful dreams and tactics of Occupy. The rapes, the assaults, the property damage; the smear campaigns; the media complicity. It’s all there.
When we get to the ideological roots of the movement, David Horowitz takes the fore. As a former leftist radical, Horowitz understands the motives of the thwarted ‘60s radicals standing behind the Occupy movement. He understands the underpinnings of an astroturfed operation, and he details how Occupy stole the Marxist philosophy of the 1930s radicals, combined them with the sit-in politics of the 1960s radicals, and then added a patina of legitimacy provided by a compliant mainstream media. There is a history to Occupy. It did not spring from the mind of Zeus, full-blown. It sprang from a hundred-year history of class and race discontent; it was fruit of the poisonous tree. Horowitz explains all that, and he also explains how so many Americans were duped into believing that Occupy was simply an innocent movement frustrated with the workings of the political machinery.
The film isn’t just commentary. It features undercover work by video journalists including Brandon Darby, Lee Stranahan, Pam Keys, and Mandy Nagy. It allows viewers to enter deep into the heart of a movement that wasn’t a joke, no matter how much it may seem so in retrospect.
And today, that is the true danger of Occupy: that we will take it too lightly, pretend that it meant nothing. In truth, it meant everything to the left. That’s why the Obama administration defended it. This week, Judicial Watch announced that it had obtained access to Obama administration Department of Homeland Security documents showing that the General Services Administration told law enforcement to “stand down” and allow Occupy Portland protesters to violate the law. As Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said, “These documents clearly show that federal agencies colluded with the Obama White House to allow the Occupy Wall Street protestors to violate the law with impunity. These documents tell us that the GSA and DHS can’t be relied upon to protect federal workers or property.”
Occupy may not be the first radical movement to seize the imaginations of millions of Americans. And it won’t be the last. But it may have been the first fully produced mass movement in American history – a movement created in back rooms, to specific ends. Occupy Unmasked documents the evolution of the Occupy movement in all its horrific detail.
And you can guarantee that we haven’t seen the last of Occupy. Not yet.
Watch the trailer of Occupy Unmasked below:
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