Potemkin Villages All the Way Down

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And now, another performance of Occupy Kabuki Theater. “Fake Google Employee at San Francisco Bus Protest is Actually Union Organizer,” as spotted by Free Enterprise.com‘s Sean Hackbarth:

Since membership has been declining for decades, unions have gotten more desperate to draw attention. The latest is a stunt in San Francisco.

A group of protesters in San Francisco is upset with Google for running private bus lines between the city and its offices in Silicon Valley. At one protest, a bus rider claiming to be a Google employee confronted them yelling, that if they didn’t like the city they should move somewhere else. Joe Fitz Rodriegez, a San Francisco Guardian reporter, caught the exchange on video which blew up on social media and news sites like Business Insider.

There’s just one problem — as the line went in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, he’s not real, but you can’t have everything:

Several minutes later, after Twitter had been whipped into a collective rage, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which had originally identified the man in the video as a Google employee, changed its story, saying instead that the man had been a “union organizer” impersonating a Google employee.

The paper ID’d the false-flagger as Max Bell Alper, an Oakland-based activist who had previously helped in shutting down a Wells Fargo building as part of the Occupy movement.

The lefty SF Weekly adds:

It was both a surreal moment and a transcendentally stupid one. Now everyone is left to feel that much angrier and dumber for the morning’s misadventure.

Alper, somehow, decided the proper method of channeling the undeniable statistics and heart-wrenching narratives of the city’s Malthusian housing economy into some means of relief for the afflicted was to hoodwink everyone with a brazen display of phony playacting.

Yes, that happens so frequently on the left these days. As Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner asked last year, in a headline that inspired a running theme at Instapundit, “What if the Left is just one Potemkin Village after another?”