Occupy Wall Street Bashers Organize Against Protest Movement

As the Occupy Wall Street movement moves into a new phase following the Nov. 17 international Day of Action, a host of new groups and old voices are cropping up to protest the protesters.

From old-guard media to the new-media vanguard, the anti-occupiers are using every form of communication they can to get out their message.

Beginning with the oldest of news providers--the newspaper--The New York Post has repeatedly run stories aimed at undermining the movement, with headlines declaring Sex, drugs and hiding from the law at Wall Street protests and Rabble returns to Zuccotti to 'drum' up support.

The criminals are crashing the party, an Oct. 10 story began. Lured by cheap drugs and free food, creepy thugs have infiltrated the crowd of protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street, The Post has learned.

And editorial pages and columnists in conservative papers like the Post and the Wall Street Journal have gone even further.

Doug Wainwaring opined Tuesday in the ultra-conservative Washington Times that the Occupy Wall Street movement is the result a vast left-wing conspiracy to supplant the Tea Party, that things are wind[ing] down for the Occupy movement and that it will soon peter out.

From the start, the movement has been about liberals attempting to capture control of the Democratic Party and supplant the Tea Party as the voice of Main Street America, Wainwaring wrote. However, the images and message from Occupy Wall Street are foreign, if not grossly un-American, to Main Street. If liberals were attempting to 'take back the American dream,' so far they have succeeded only in portraying the American nightmare.

The proof is in the pudding, however, and appears to be neither with the right- or left-wing agitators, as a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Saturday and Sunday indicates that 56 percent of the 996 adult Americans polled neither support nor oppose the movement.

Despite that fact, it does appear that popular support for OWS may be slipping, which may be in part due to the loud assault it has weathered at the hands of these proliferating anti-occupy groups. According to the USA Today/Gallup poll, 31 percent of Americans disapprove of the protest, up from 20 percent in October, while one in five approve, down from one in four in October.

But as the movement's supporters continue to fight the power across the nation, the barrage is not letting up. Andrea Peyser, a Post columnist, ran a story Oct. 24 called The hate in Zuccotti, in which she airs her belief that anti-Semitism is a major part of the OWS movement.

She goes on to quote a number of protesters who air anti-Semetic leanings, while the movement's organizers emphasize in the piece that the views expressed are those of isolated individuals and that their beliefs do not reflect those of the mainstream occupier.

More than two dozen groups with monikers belying their stances as anti-occupiers, as angry about the protests, and even as members of the 1 percent in several cases, have popped up on Facebook in the past two months.

With names like U.S.A. Citizens Against the 'Occupy' Everything Protests, Evict Occupy Wall Street and Im [sic] against Occupy Wall St Protesting, they have loyal followings who regularly post their opinions as well as news items that support their views on OWS.

Occupy Wall St Has been EVICTED! THEY ARE GONE!!! read a post on Evict Occupy Wall Street a couple of hours after the NYPD cleared Manhattan's Zuccotti Park of protesters last week. Please join us in a celebratory solidarity chant song.

Dozens of Twitter accounts have also been created with the aim of spreading counter-OWS news and information, as have a growing number of websites.

Robert Stevens, 29 is an investment banker and co-founder of Occupy Occupy Wall Street, whose members maintain the oows.org website and attend OWS rallies to protest the movement with signs of their own.

We think it has kind of gone for quite long enough and we totally support the end of it. People should just go leave and occupy something else, Stevens told the IBTimes earlier this month.

Conservative television and radio have both issued full-frontal assaults, with former Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck perhaps casting the movement in the worst light as he said on NBC in October that he believes its protesters are mostly radicals, revolutionaries, communists, socialists and Islamists, who are not on the same page on a lot of stuff [but] will gather together to end the capitalist system and the western way of life.

And the We are the 1 percent and We are the 53 percent initiatives are both gaining steam, playing off the ubiquitous We are the 99 percent motto OWS has used to reiterate the concept that its members see themselves as an oppressed economic underclass.

These groups operate under the mindset that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are lazy, unpatriotic, dirty men and women who should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get jobs rather than stand in public squares protesting their sorry lots in life.

Those of us who pay for those of you who whine about all of that... or that... or whatever, reads the description of the popular We are the 53% Tumblr page.

In the end, Republican politicians may have the largest soapbox when it comes to preaching against the OWS movement, and GOP presidential candidates are using the movement as a way to bash the left and attract extremely conservative primary voters, as Newt Gingrich did Monday on conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh's show.

All the Occupy movement starts with is the premise that we all owe them everything, Gingrich said Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath.'