Debunking Occupy Wall Street & the Zeitgeist Movement… 10 Years Later.

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um what's your occupation this is my occupation [Music] what's your name my name is michael thomas and your occupation well i've been unemployed the last 15 months my last job was a maintenance technician for uh an auto maker subcontractor and why are you here well it makes sense to be here i mean we have corporations who are running this country that have no problem in exporting the manufacturing base and it's resulted in a lot of americans like me they do not have pain-powered plan why are you here um [Music] um [Music] we've heard that it is either a mile or two miles please please make it only a mile uh a lot of people think i'm now handicapped because i'm limping along because of an injury that i sustained heroically playing basketball this weekend uh but i think it gives me more street cred in the liberal community because they think i'm handicapped okay uh but if this really is two miles i'm in a lot of trouble i want to be able to say to my kids i walked in this protest but there's some chance we have to take a cab later no well definitely on the way back i'm not walking back and i know a lot of people are all here learning from each other we have a lot of different groups we've got you know complete anti-capitalists we've got liberals we've got democrats we've got marxist we've got anarchists we've got god knows what a lot of us are really i'm personally here trying to learn from a lot of other people and trying to also i've realized that this is actually getting more attention from more media people and independent media to actually learn about some of the bigger issues of um you know like the banks taking um a lot more money and keeping it in reserve and not putting it into the economy and how long have you been here before and how long do you plan to be here how it can be okay all right great thanks for your time i believe in the process that's all i need and how long do you plan to be at this occupation um and how long do you plan to be here long okay okay oh great thanks for your time i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you nine years ago occupy wall street took over newspaper headlines in the united states canada and around the world very briefly the most powerful and influential political organization on earth was a magazine based in vancouver british columbia canada called ad busters it was this magazine ad busters that commenced the whirlwind of conspiracy theories self-righteous stupidity and frankly advocacy for eco-fascism that occupy wall street became that sounds like hyperbole on my part stick with the video for just a moment and today ad busters is nobody and nothing going nowhere they didn't stop trying to instigate this kind of panic stricken the sky is falling street protest social activism rebellious disruptive activity just four weeks ago they launched their latest sequel to occupy wall street it was called the black spot collective if you've never heard of it it's because it was much much much less successful than occupy wall street the youtube video uh proclaiming it has only 264 views on their youtube channel and that's four weeks after it launched their their campaign before that was called rebel jazz trying to get people to play jazz instruments uh in spontaneous improvised sessions while marching down the street uh and each and every one of these causes or miniature rebellions is accompanied with much the same over-the-top anguished speechifying about how capitalism is about to collapse so on and so forth themes and tropes familiar from nine years ago with the occupy wall street movement in some ways what adbusters has been doing hasn't changed what's changed is the public appreciation for it or or interest in it which has dwindled away uh to nothing now if we're going to make a chart i would say that ad busters it was briefly the most influential voice for the radical left in the world and in the ten years before that there had never been any such similar radical voice left but you'd say okay so nine years ago ad busters was so so influential and then they've crashed down i would say someone like michael moore his line on the same chart for how influential it's been pretty steady it's gone up and down with specific film projects coming up but michael moore is still a very influential voice in the world obviously michael moore's podcast has far more listers than the youtube channel for ad busters and again adbusters has a lot of money behind them they have a i believe a monthly magazine i forget if it's monthly or quarterly now to be honest but they have a regular magazine a regular publication and they have uh decades of uh constituency building you know behind them they so in that sense the lack of public interest in the lack of public sympathy for their message today is is all the more uh significant the other major voice i want to draw attention to here which many of you will remember as soon as i mentioned them but it's worth reflecting on how little you've thought about them in say the last five years was the zeitgeist movement all right often initialized to tzm now ad busters initiated occupy wall street the zeitgeist movement and their hit film here on youtube i just looked this up i just checked the first successful broadcast of their movie um was actually on google video a precursor to and competitor with youtube um before google corporation purchased youtube and then made it their own video platforms there was a time when youtube was a separate company and then it became a creature of google corporation but anyway it actually went to google video and then later uh youtube where it received millions of views now look when i reflect on this there were a lot of lessons i myself could have taken from the rise and fall of occupy wall street or the rise and fall of the zeitgeist movement even though i was i was the world's harshest critic of it at that time and i'm still the world's harshest critic of it now i think it's very important to say that it's it's not just that the zeitgeist movement um you know is is laughable from a conservative perspective it's not just that it's laughable from say a mainstream liberal perspective all right it's also really point important to point out that although their base of support their constituency was left-wing most of what the zeitgeist movement presented and garnered support for through through occupy wall street on a massive scale again with millions of viewers and reaching a mass audience and being covered in newspapers and mainstream news tv touches on most of what they're presenting were actually right-wing conspiracy theories with a very thin veneer of left-wing packaging and looking back at it today looking back at it nine years later i think for many of you in the audience that will be obvious and probably it wasn't at that time that in fact what the zeitgeist movement was presenting the public was what we now call eco-fascism now you mentioned eco-fascism i can remember when that was just kind of used as an insult in politics it was it wasn't really a serious theoretical approach there was nobody self-identifying as an eco-fascist like was just you point people would point the finger at each other and call each other eco-fascists like you want to force everyone to recycle their bottles and cans that's eco-fascism or something uh no i mean eco-fascism today is a very real movement i would say especially in europe rather than uh north america in western europe but um the approach to the zeitgeist movement in presenting insane conspiracy theories about september 11th insane conspiracies about the banking system the nature of fiat currency in contrast to the gold standard and insane conspiracies about a world government secret world government globalization etc these were all and they still today are very transparently and palpably anti-semitic conspiracy theories just with the anti-semitism i can't really even say concealed with a sort of ellipsis or fill in the blank element for the anti-semitic part of the conspiracy theory it was many people who who already came out of a anti-semitic conspiracy theory background would recognize that and relate to it there's a lot of that kind of thing here on youtube frankly where the people use these uh catchphrases like you know blaming the powers that be and then they expect you and the audience to know what they're talking about you know certain shadowy forces behind the banking system etc etc this uh this was presenting in relation to things like free trade agreements like nafta their elections the united states and mexico uh in relation to how the federal reserve bank worked in terms of other banks of europe um this was really presenting anti-semitic conspiracy theories in a form that left-wingers concerned about ecology would be willing to relate to willing to adopt willing to accountants willing to willing to hear and it was massively successful you may say it was massively successful despite derision from the mainstream press or you may say it was massively successful because of derision from the mainstream press obviously there were mainstream newspapers that just respond to this by saying look these are crazy conspiracy theories about september 11th that tended to be the the aspect that was easiest to laugh at i saw and still today i did some research for this video i saw much less interest in criticizing the insane spiritual theories behind the zeitgeist movement maybe just people feel uncomfortable talking about this stuff but there was also a reinterpretation of the myth of jesus and also this really heady you know lsd trip hippie approach to uh spirituality in the history of religion that's part and parcel of it um i saw much less sincere interest in attacking their ecological claims sense restricted like strictly defined like the claims they make about farming and agriculture that are equally insane and can be you know disprove just as easily as what they're saying about economics they're equally ignorant about everything we can concentrate food production and regionally all across the world in very simple technical manners such as vertical farms vertical farms we put on the coast of los angeles run with desalination processes and nutrient extraction processes coming from the ocean and we can grow hundreds of tons of organic nutrient vegetable food enough to meet the the actual in a protein generating food too you know all sorts of things have been grown as well actually meet the nutrition high nutritional quality of everyone in los angeles locally no importing now i'm not advocating that's all we do but i'm giving you the example so what that means is that you could have for example in transition and i'm just i'm jumping ahead is all food free in los angeles of this nature to everyone to meet everyone's need period because it's in abundance no one's going to hoard it and steal it even in a market system because it's going to go to waste it's available to everyone and you would see an enormous increase in public health and less strife in the community i don't want to go this angle because it's really complicated to include the market economy that's why i advocate the removal of it the wikipedia article very nicely notes a number of scathing criticisms of the zeitgeist movement and of what they were doing in connection to occupy wall street generally that were published in mainstream newspapers okay um but the zeitgeist movement and their leader appeared on the young turks where they were treated with great respect and deference and referred to as you know this guy was referred to as the respectable leader some kind of mainstream respectable political movement that the left-wing should take seriously he appeared in the ted talks the so-called tedx talks where he gives a lecture and he appears respectful he appeared of course on innumerable uh podcasts and youtube channels right what i wish i had learned back nine years ago was the importance of youtube was the importance of filmmaking and today you know here i am i'm using youtube both positively and negatively to calibrate this i mean negatively in the sense that i'm looking at the ad buster's youtube channel and i'm going to say look you guys may have a website and you may have a magazine and you may pretend you're important leaders in politics in year 2000 but looking at your youtube channel looking you have only 264 views on that video and you can go back through the you know through their history i can see how thin the level of interest in what you have to say is i see how few people are are really buying and of course with any political movement they may have a foundation they may have an endowment that maybe that people donated enough money in the past during their period of fame nine years ago or before that they're able to keep going forever but you can't buy you know real constituency real support real public sympathy real interest right like this is the one thing you you can't buy and they have the money by the way if you haven't seen these videos these are very well produced slick artistic videos they're not like my videos on my channel a lot of effort has gone into making this message appealing but i can see here on youtube again using it kind of as a negative index or the state of that moment i can see just how little how little purchase that little effect it has you know with the audience but then positively so still today just going through the list of videos from that era from nine years ago right i'm seeing videos on youtube with 28 million views from the protests okay the original zeitgeist movie uh uploaded at youtube at that time five million views i think it'd be very hard it's been uploaded in so many places that so many times i think would be hard to know how many tens of millions of user really has but like i found one upload with more than five million views you know um a short column in a newspaper saying this is all hogwash for one thing that just may inspire people to go click on the youtube video it may just create positive interest maybe intriguing to people but really already what this shows nine years ago is that self-directed reading self-directed youtube video watching self-directed exposure to uh social media that that was the way of the future for politics was that people were going to seek out expose themselves that people were going to decide for themselves what was credible and what wasn't and that the significance of old media was diminishing down to nothing and i've got to tell you something that wasn't that wasn't obvious nine years ago someone who cared passionately about politics under many different headings and i could see the futility and uselessness of what was going on at occupy wall street like in the physical sense of what people were doing in those tents in that park right and there were all these youtube videos being uploaded um and for the most part they were just stupid and you're looking at this thinking what significance can any of this has have and of course what i'm failing to realize is it's the platform itself that matters it's what's being demonstrated to us just here in the framing of this image that you know and this this movement did briefly it legitimately did involve millions of people right and one of the ways it involved them was through the medium of the youtube video right now again just very briefly in terms of content you know people attending a march and chanting a slogan it's not a lot of content there right even people who got into clashes with the police that may have really traumatized them that may have really had an emotional effect and a radicalizing effect and politicizing go for the rest of their lives there will be people today who were just volunteering with bernie sanders within the last two years who you know formed their political opinions and drew their sense of purpose from that experience with occupy wall street nine years ago there's no doubt i mean i'm on a mass phenomenon what i find myself wondering is shouldn't somebody get out and make a documentary film coming up now on the on the 10-year anniversary of occupy wall street shouldn't somebody go and speak to these people and speak to their opponents and speak to their harshest critics because their opponents and their critics were right and you know they were wrong they were laughably unbelievably mind-blowingly wrong and yet we can see in the example of occupy wall street nine years ago in many ways this this prefigured this pressage this predicted exactly what exploded in the year 2020 right i mean what happened uh peacefully in 2011 you know general i think we can say that about occupy wall street right then came back you know with violence in in 2012 now all right very briefly you know the mean the main premise of this video is adbusters was a magazine based in vancouver canada and they have tried again and again and again since occupy wall street to instigate the same type of civil disobedience phenomenon and they have failed again and again again down to and including the black spot collective from just four weeks ago all right so at that time a set of genuinely unrelated and miscellaneous social concerns overlapped people were very upset about the war in iraq and afghanistan people were upset about the perception of corruption on wall street stock market the banking system truly truly miscellaneous disorganized sources of dissatisfaction i would go so far as to say there was still dissatisfaction even though it was many years earlier about the corruption of the elections that put george w bush uh in power i would say these things were circulating and percolating and there was this outpouring of dissatisfaction with the status quo and ad busters themselves they both did not attempt to lead this or funnel this in a particular direction and they did not exceed so they did not succeed so both are important you know their philosophy that they set out that the nominal leaders of the occupy wall street movement were saying well there should be no leaders this this is a theme that's occurred again and this even inspired many vegan activist movements many animal rights activist movements kind of taking the wrong lessons from this strange episode in history where they said that no the distinctive thing about occupy wall street was going to be that they don't have any hierarchy they don't have even a program of action they don't have a manifesto they don't have any direction they're just going to get these people together in a park and have them live in tents and they're going to have this kind of open democratic forum for the airing of ideas okay this is phase one and then phase two who are the winners who co-opts this who takes advantage of this it's the zeitgeist movement it's this unbelievably stupid fringe ideology that mixed together conspiracy theories about september 11th which was 10 years earlier right but still very much on people's minds in some ways 10 years is a long time some ways that you're done but conspiracy theories about september 11 conspiracy theories about the banking system and how the banking system works how to solve that and then really this whole tradition that i would say is properly called eco-fascism which is you know it's not socialist it's not communist it's an anti-free market you could say syndicalist in the fascist that's the word cynicalist approach to they would say in their terms taking a scientific view of how to completely reorder the economy from the top down so they are very interested in for example completely abolishing the free market in farming and agriculture so that you would get a command economy um and all they would end globalization so people here in canada would not be able to buy oranges from the tropics they would not be able to buy mangoes from southeast asia so that los angeles california would grow all of its own food and then this food would be distributed for free they have this a lot of it um comes out of specifically the white hindu hippie tradition of spirituality and there are specific um hindu gurus who are linked to you know the zeitgeist movement it's the most laughable nonsense and nine years ago nobody was laughing right this is being presented deadpan serious as like an important positive new movement within the left within the left wing by sources like the young turks and nine years later we can say the young turks really matter and those youtube videos are still up and still being seen today all these youtube channels they really matter and there is a sense in which an article in the wall street journal that came and went at that time or an article in the new york times that may have expressed reservations about or raised an eyebrow at this crazy conspiracy theory stuff or this crazy uh hindu spirituality stuff or wanting to bring back the gold standard and you know gee doesn't this sound more right-wing than left-wing those things came and went right they were published for a day people saw them or ignored them or moved on and i think what we've got going on in the left wing right now in many ways is uh the legacy of occupy wall street the legacy of you know the rise and fall of the zeitgeist movement and ad busters and the truly hysterical anti-capitalist you know narrative of that time i think you can see it today um in the support for alexandria ocasio-cortez aoc i think you can see it both in the support for bernie sanders and with what those people are moving on to next i would say the single biggest difference is that now in the year 2020 communism overt communism yes sometimes sometimes putting on the mask and presenting itself as socialism but today what i see is that it's the communists who are trying to co-opt this and explicitly brand this as revolutionary communism uh what's been going on whereas back in uh 2011. i think very broadly um people were not comfortable claiming um the history of the russian revolution or the history of the chinese revolution mao zedong like they were not they were not comfortable claiming figures like lenin and stalin and mao zedong as their intellectual uh forebearers or antecedents they were not given they were not comfortable saying that that was what they were gonna imitate instead significantly they were basing their claims on really vague positive associations with the arab spring whatever that means to you now and whatever that meant nine years ago like think about how vague that was nine years ago to be basing an anti-capitalist pro-ecology radical movement in the streets of los angeles on the arab spring and a lot of really vague like spiritual claims to figures like uh mahatma gandhi mohandas gandhi like these kinds of these kinds of leaders right now okay the greatest counter-argument to what i've said out here in this video really only makes it more important for somebody put the money together and do a documentary film looking at this occupy wall street uh 10 years later because the greatest counter argument is to say it never was centralized it never was organized in a way where we can you know we can pin down what this what this meant to people right but that very malleable porous nature of what happened nine years ago i think makes it all the more important to study now i mean you know how is it possible that nine years ago all of these people thought that abolishing you know the stock market abolishing the whole banking system as we know it abolishing the economy as such that this was the future for what the left should advocate for that we should revert to a form of frankly fascistic command economy based on these so-called life regenerating principles of how ecology works and organic farming works and and and what have you this is the most laughable fringe ideology imaginable um but the conditions were right you know nine years ago for this to come out in the open and i mean i've had so much to do with the vegan movement and the animal rights movement in the last five years i mean look it's very very difficult for an outsider to appreciate for example the power and significance of anti-semitism within the mainstream modern level it's just very difficult if you aren't left-wing yourself or if you grew up in a conservative household or if you grew up muslim you may think that anti-semitism is only a problem on your side of the aisle like you might think anti-semitism is a big deal within the right-wing and conservatives or within islam but you just can't imagine how it is that people who grow up with supporting palestinian independence as this major lodestone of their politics and then move on to staying in a tent in zuccotti park and hearing about this global conspiracy of bankers right and hear about this worldwide globalization conspiracy and then start to believe that that's connected to israel and connected to all right there is a path to anti-semitism within the far left that's been incredibly powerful and incredibly influential and you know i've i've met those people face to face and and dealt with it i've felt it in that in that sense um and to be honest i feel like this has really become more dangerous because of the extent to which it's been pushed underground by internet censorship right like i'm still able to go back and find these outrageously stupid conspiracy theory videos that in some cases got hundreds of thousands of views in some cases got many millions of views from nine years ago and i can engage in a critique of that or i can expose what's wrong with it and we all know if you're a regular user of youtube we all know that today that stuff would either not be on youtube it would be banned on youtube it would be worried it'd be hard to find right those discussions are no longer happening in the open they're happening covertly and you know talent is scarce i think there probably are people and someone making a documentary we could get out and interview those people i think there probably are people who participated in occupy wall street and saw through the [ __ ] of it right i think you know the same the the bare fact that today ad busters only got 264 views on that video the fact there's so little support in sympathy for adventures there probably are people who 10 years ago 11 years ago 12 years ago were uncritically kind of waving the flag for ad busters and then got involved in the zeitgeist movement or other hippie spiritual movements like it and got pulled into these you know radical elements connected to ecology in the left lane i think there are people who woke up and realized this is all [ __ ] these people do not know what they're talking about both factually and morally this is wrong there are some people it'd be great to get out and interview them and get their view of the last 10 years okay but there are also people who believed in this profoundly had their worldview shaped by it and they're working within the bernie sanders camp they are self-evidently working within movements like extinction rebellion the groups preaching that the sky is falling that climate change is coming and that the solution to climate change is to abolish capitalism supposedly right it's really again the same eco-fascist uh impulse that is a drama that's still going on today [Music] and let's face it the mainstream media has exist now journalism is not going to investigate this stuff right academia people with phds in departments of political science they're not going to investigate this stuff there's no kind of ostensibly respectable source of information that's going to investigate and pin down these movements and if you can really be honest with yourself there is much less critical interest there is much less analysis and evaluation of what's going on below the surface on the left than there is on the right okay every week or every month i hear about investigative journalists disguising themselves as neo-nazis and going into these right-wing groups really i hear about that all the time i read i read that kind of thing all the time there is sincere concern and sincere criticism even like kind of moderate conservative groups that dare to start making some peeps that they're against illegal immigration or they're morally opposed to mass immigration there's a lot of critical attention directed towards that and obviously i'm fundamentally a kind of pro-democracy pro-freedom of speech person i think steel sharp and steel i think the investigation and analysis it's going to benefit everyone like i think that i think that that benefits the left or right the center but great let's have analysis for everyone all right and now you turn to jank wieger and the young turks and all those other left-of-center organizations that took the leaders of the zeitgeist movement and put them on and made them famous and promoted this and i mean unlike adbusters the zeitgeist movement hasn't completely fizzled out and for at least five years it was a huge you know influential movement right whether you're talking about the zeitgeist movement or marianne williams or other overtly cultic like supernatural you know religious movements within the far left whether you're talking about the anti-semitism the insane conspiracy theories but the economy whatever you will now look in vain for the young turks jank weaker for any evidence that they've ever engaged in that kind of investigation that kind of analysis or that kind of reflection of themselves that they look back and said hey what was i thinking you know and um look i say this as someone who at that time nine years ago from day one of the occupy wall street movement saw everything wrong with it yeah like it's not a boast i was you know i feel lucky you know what i mean like i feel fortunate that i was living in a situation and i had the educational background i had the experience already at that stage to just see through all of the lies jake wieger didn't you know the guy who still to this day sitting on the youngsters and there were all these people obviously you know i have to wonder what if i'd been 10 years younger at that time what if i mean sorry i'm cursed with a very accurate memory i remember how stupid i was at 16. i remember how stupid i was at 18. a lot of people were taken into this a lot of people took the first step of thinking well they're opposed to corporate power they're opposed to corporate corruption and then they're offered this next step and they come out and they sleep in a tent and they participate in this thing and they're laid in down with a lot of these heavy ideological messages that i think those people today nine years later 10 years later you know those people went from age 18 to age 28 right i think they're still carrying that with them now i think this is one of the most influential failures in 21st century political history and i think that it's going unexamined i think it is begging for analysis and critique not even from the perspective of conservatives or the right wing i think the most important critique of all is for the left to look at this and ask really hard questions about who we are and what our future is supposed to be all of that i totally agree with right and i want to change that system i'm just trying to find a way that i can wrap my mind around it where i think that it's to be honest realistic food creation can exist in much higher states than they can now and they can be localized removing economic consequences that we have with the current market economy such as globalization which is very destructive high energy completely wasteful exploiting labor okay the people who are going to make that food they have to be incentivized to make it they do okay so how do you pay them how do you incentivize them to produce more food in a transitional system so i'm speaking transitioning right now you would pay them just like anyone else to be paid you'd subsidize this one this would be subsidized or you get corporate influence to agree to do it which would be hard to press hard-pressed to do but you'd have to change a lot of things without that well we're talking about changing everything here okay if people want to see these resolutions and they won't have change we could do it we are one big human family so put the corporations aside you can subsidize it okay but if you remember the market about the economy what is the incentive yeah what is the incentive yes the incentive is that your well-being is directly related to everything that happens so that means you are incentivized to actually contribute because it comes back to you i don't want to go this angle because it's really complicated to include the market economy that's why i advocate the removal of it