An open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occu py Wall Street movement.

(self.occupywallstreet) submitted 17 days ago by vaslittlecrow [Updated 10/13/2011] I don't expect you to believe me. I want you to read this, take it with a grain of salt, and do the research yourself. You may not believe me, but I want your m ovement to succeed. From a former tea partier to you, young new rebels, there's some advice to prevent what happened to our now broken movement from happening t o you. I don't agree with everything your movement does, but I sympathize with y our cause and agree on our common enemy. You guys are very intelligent and I tru st that you will take this in the spirit it is intended. I wish I could believe this Occupy Wall Street was still about (r)Evolution, but so far, all I am seeing is a painful rehash of how the corporate-funded governm ent turned the pre-Presidential election tea party movement into the joke it is now. We were anarchists and ultra-libertarians, but above all we were peaceful. So, the media tried painting us as racists. But when that didn't work they tried to goad us into violence. When that failed, they killed our movement with money and false kindness from the theocratic arm of the Republican party. That killed our popular support. I am sharing these observations, so you guys know what's going on and can preven t the media from succeeding in painting you as violent slacker hippies rebelling without a cause, or from having the movement be hijacked by a bunch of corporat ists seeking to twist the movement's original intentions. If you think this can' t happen, it happened to the Independence Party and the tea party movement. Don' t let it happen to your movement as well. Here's how they turned our movement into a bunch of pro-corporate Republican Par ty rebranding astroturf, and this is how I predict they are turning your movemen t into a bunch of pro-corporate Democratic party rebranding astroturf. I believe many of these things are already happening, so take note. 1- The media will initially and purposely avoid covering your dissenting movemen t to cause confusion about what your movement is about within mainstream audienc es. It might feel like this is to enrage you and make you appear unreasonable. P erhaps you will feel even invisible. 2- While the obsfuscation is happening, stooges will infiltrate and give superfi cial support, focus and financial backing to the targetted movement. In the tea party movement's case, it was the religious Republicans and Koch Brothers. In th is case, it's many unions that cozy up to the Democratic Party (the organization s as quasi-human entities, not the members themselves) and Ultra Rich liberals w ho pretend to care, but frankly do not serve liberators and freedom seekers but rather the interests of some union leaders and the Democratic Party. Democrat, R epublican, these parties are all part of the same corporate ruling system. Case in point: http://www.debates.org/ 3-The media will cover the movement only after this infiltration succeeds. Once the infiltration is completed the MSM will manufacture public media antipathy to wards the movement by using selective focus on the movement's most repulsive ele ments or infiltrators on the corporate Conservative media side, while the corpor ate Liberal media will create a more sympathetic tragic hero image -- this is th e flip side of the tea party, but same media manipulation tactics. I go into gre ater detail on this tactic: http://vaslittlecrow.com/blog/2011/09/08/how-the-med ia-and-ideological-groups-manipulate-your-beliefs/

4- Someone in the Democratic Party will feign sympathy for the movement and fals ely "non-partisan" entities provide tons of funding and unwanted organization, j ust as was done with the tea party movement by Republicans. Once people assume t hat the pro-corporate government operatives are their friends, they will hijack the movement and the threat of your movement will be neutralized. If this new Occupy Wall Street movement is to survive, here's what needs to be d one. 1- Loudly denounce violence and disavow the violent rabblerousers of the movemen t. They do not help the cause. 2- Be image conscious. Present your best face and call ols within the movement. People are more likely to pay Sunday dress and bringing homemade food, than when you Snapple and chomping on Big Macs while you are looking er/unwashed hippie stereotype. out those who act like fo attention to you in your are drinking a bottle of like a slacker rich hipst

3- Accept that you've already been infiltrated by the corporate-funded governmen t, and work hard to say, and state what your movement is and is not about. "No, this isn't about unions or liberals, conservatives or bored spoiled brats. This is about 99% of our population being exploited and manipulated for the sake of p rofit." "No we will not resort to violence." "Yes, all we want is for for the en d of government collusion with corporate entities that are illegitimately recogn ized as people." And, so forth... 4- Don't forget who you are as the illusions are thrown at you. Corporatists are masters of illusions. That's the most powerful weapon they have. That's how the y sell products you don't need and convince you to justify accepting atrocities for the sake of products Don't fall for it. Otherwise, your cause will be lost. Be wary of large donations from special interest groups or non-profit corporatio ns that were not involved this movement from the inception. Special interests gr oups are not your allies. Non-profit corporations are still corporations, and un fortunately, too many of them care more about donations than doing the right thi ng. Killing a movement with kindness is easy. 5- Remain independent and focused. If you can, pick a face to represent your mov ement. Rosa Parks wasn't just a random lady in a bus. http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu /systems/agentsheets/New-Vista/bus-boycott/ -- She was chosen. You too can use t he power of illusion against those who oppose you. 6- On the web, you can prevent a lot of hijacking simply by checking the small p rint, or going to the about pages of a group or individual. Non-profits and poli tical action groups are legally obligated to disclose a lot of things, and you n eed to be aware of this. If the information is nowhere to be found, do a whois p age. Image searches can also be helpful. Examine who is posing with whom. Compan y owner? Where is that company located? Did they have a convention/charity event ? 7- If you hear people who you know are part of the machine saying stuff like, "P rogressives need to be more like the tea party," don't accept it on face value. Always follow the money, study past statements and groups they claim to be part of. If such people are suddenly telling you to emulate organizations that they o nce consistently denounced as evil or racist, without any rhyme or reason, they are lying to you. I wish your movement better luck than we had with the tea party movement before it got hijacked by the theocrats and corporatists. We used to be non-partisan to o. We were the older version of you. But, I believe that as the media apparatchi k and infiltrators start to twist your cause, you will understand the frustratio

n us early adopter tea partiers felt and that we were not your enemy after all. A fascist oligarchy on the verge of winning is our common enemy. This should be your focus. Don't be dazzled by the illusion as we were. For the sake of our fut ure, know who you are. Thank you for reading. I would love to read your ideas on the subject. Correct m e where I am wrong. Explain what is going right. This is ultimately your fight. EDIT: To understand how movements get hijacked, check out this fantastic video t hat JamesCarlin shared: http://vimeo.com/20355767 tl;dr Hibernator's excellent and much less paranoid sounding summary below: "Someone starts a movement. It starts small, and there's a lot going on in the w orld, so the mainstream media gives it minimal coverage. Today's mainstream medi a is also understaffed, so they don't investigate and they wait for someone else to slap a label on it. Eventually a sound byte X pops up above the noise and the mainstream media uses this to engage viewers and define the movement. This defining characteristic X s preads like a meme. People in power now notice what's going on, and think to themselves "Hmm, this n ew movement is defined by X, and that's almost in line with my goals, so maybe I can use them to further my ends." But people in power are all labelled as Democrats or Republicans, so now the med ia applies the polarizing filter of American politics to associate movement X wi th one of the parties. The original movement has now been labelled X, and associated with a political p arty, and none of this happened because of any 'government conspiracy.' It just happened because that's what you get as output when you plug something new into the American political system." Thanks to Whiskey With My Coffee, Feed the Protest, The Free Patriot Press, Occu pyWallSt.org, Don't Feed the Animals, Politics in Zeros and all the other reddit ors who have been shared this letter.