Protest Creep, Movement Creep, and Co-option


Posted On: Tuesday - December 11th 2018 7:49PM MST
In Topics: 
  Commies  Liberty/Libertarianism  World Political Stupidity

Remember these guys?:



(Did it really take them 2 years to get going?
The big bank bailouts were in '08, and these guys were around in '10.)


In the previous post on the gilets jaunes, or Yellow Vest, movement* Peak Stupidity coined the term "Protest Creep" (Yes, we have a mint in the back of our Mom's Basement West Coast Campus Headquarters.) These protests have been going on long enough and in enough places to be called a "movement" by now. Just a some protests a few days in a row in one place (sometimes it's hard to get everyone together, even with Twitter) is nothing, but, if there is a common theme in a number of places day-after-day, well, that's a movement. This has necessitated a new term, "Movement Creep".

What is this movement creep? Well, ostensibly the first protests were just about this increase in the diesel fuel tax. It'a about more now, though. This is to be expected. Once the participants realize how much power they have (and often how much fun some of the ass-kicking of officials and the destruction is), they'd naturally want to bring up some other beefs. There are things that have been stewing in all of us, and the time is ripe in France now for the population to air their grievances to the elites. That's all fine. If the movement goals creep onward and upward, eventually it becomes a real revolution.

One could say the American Revolution went on along similar lines, at least until the Declaration of Independence put many men's lives, fortunes and sacred honor directly on the line. There were incidents 10 years before, and then things would quite down, then a new tax on this and the Boston Massacre, then the Boston Tea Party, etc. It wasn't until the goals of the "rights of Englishmen for Americans" movement got high enough that it all got wrapped up into one goal, a Great Brexit, way before "Brexit" was cool, you might say. Of course, it all worked out well for the Americans in general, but that's definitely not usually the case.

Within many political movements, there creeps something else, infiltrators of political ideologies that want to take advantage of the momentum for their own purposes, like say... I dunno ....

COMMUNISM?!

Yes, that's the history of lots of these things, going back a century or more, as I think of Bizzaro Germany (more here.)

Do you remember those "Occupy Wall Street" people seen in the picture at the top? It was supposedly first about the big bank bailouts and the economy tanking (not due to that, but the bailouts being an egregious example of the problems). The occupiers never seemed to be any kind of Ron Paul libertarians to me from the get-go, but these people got more Socialist and Communist in their demands as time went on, their camps got filthier, and their leaders got stupider:



Yeah, that's the kind of slogan a Commie would take to, indeed. The Occupy Wall Street movement may have been somewhat, let's say, unsound, at the start, but it got co-opted toward a total Communist, totalitarian vibe by the end. It was kind of like those anti-Globalism protests way, way back, in 1999-2000 in Seattle, Washington, but more long-term and filthier. Those anti-Globalists may have originally been on the right track, but their complete lack of conservatism made pretty much everyone hate them. Did some Commies infiltrate and originally-decent movement? I don't know, as I never learned enough about it.

Speaking of the Occupiers again, around this time near the end of the 1st decade of this century, there was the Tea Party movement. It was not exactly the type of Tea Party movement mentioned above, ready to raise hell and dump someone's private stash of tea into a harbor while dressed (very un-PC'ly, I might add applaud) as Indians. However, these were very libertarian types at the beginning, pushing for smaller government and rule via the US Constitution - kind of a pipe dream nowadays, but one can at least push things a bit. Look at those Gadsden flags to tell you where these good people originally stood:



The movement creep within the Tea Party was originally for the good, support for certain kinds of candidates, downvoting of Øb☭macare, more term limit talk, etc. However, the infiltration this time was not by Commies, as they would have been weeded out like a pot plant in my neighbor's Yard of the Month. There were instead establishment conservatives, no liberty-lovers they, who used the Tea Party to elevate themselves above their status as standard Washington, FS Beltway regulars. Some of them were indeed still better than average conservatives, but they were bound to let most of the principles of the Tea Party slide, when they obtained their goals of national political offices.

Sarah Palin - not a bad lady or candidate**, ...



... but not stalwart enough to really help the movement.


Some of the neocons nudged their way in:

Also a decent conservative, but not tea-worthy:



And then there's Beck:



Any questions?




* BTW, just as a Libertarian, I'd have been pissed off to begin with to be required to carry a yellow vest in my vehicle. That is the law over in France, they say, and that's where the yellow vests came from. Laws like that were reason enough for Revolution in our forefather's time. I think bright yellow and orange are getting so ubiquitous, that our eyes may just see them as background scenery after a while.

** As written here, Mrs. Palin was the only reason to have even CONSIDERED voting for the Neocon scum McAmnesty.

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