Occupy the Mobius Loop

Or, two MSMs in one!

Reuters’ Maureen Tkacik blows the lid off the greatest conspiracy of all time:  “The radical right-wing roots of Occupy Wall Street.” How radical? Barry Goldwater is name-dropped along the way, maaaaan:

If there’s one thing that united Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party movement from the very beginning, it’s a virulent aversion to being compared to each other.

The Tea Partiers started sharpening their knives before the Occupation even began. Two weeks before last year’s launch Tea Partisan blogger Bob Ellis wrote a post entitled “Socialists Plan to Rage Against Freedom on Constitution Day” – all but daring the lamestream punditry to compare the “infantile” plans of “spoiled children” to “throw tantrums” and “thumb their nose at the American way of life” to the beloved movement that “sprang up from nothing a little more than two years ago in the face of a Marxist president and Marxist congress.”

In reality, of course, no political movement springs “from nothing.” Indeed, both of them have roots in the same man. Fifty-five years earlier that fall, the Tea Party movement’s direct ancestors met in Indianapolis to launch their first bid to rally citizens against the “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” occupying the White House, Dwight Eisenhower.* But when their beloved anti-communist Barry Goldwater was buried in the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party moved swiftly to officially renounce the “radical organizations” that had sullied its public image. Then the most radical of the right-wing radicals, Goldwater’s beloved speechwriter Karl Hess, moved into a houseboat, renounced politics altogether and dedicated the rest of his life to peacefully protesting the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the new aristocracy he dubbed “the one percent.”

You read that right: The first guy to call the 99 percent to arms was the author of a speech that claimed: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Goldwater had fondly referred to Hess as “my Shakespeare.”

But isn’t this all academic? After all, as JournoList-tainted Buzzfeed tells me, “Occupy Lives On — In The Conservative Imagination.”

Does this mean that Buzzfeed believes that Reuters has radical rightwing roots too? Or the news agency keeping this dead movement alive for its own nefarious purposes? In any case, this is making me, along with 60 percent of the rest of the country, Question Authority, to borrow from another ’60s-era cliche.

* As Russell Kirk famously quipped in response, Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer!