Occupiers, Meet the Resistance

I’ll never forget the day I thought I was wiser than Andrew Breitbart and that I could teach him a moral lesson. He and I were at CPAC last spring, where he had just given a powerful speech on social issues. It is grim for me to reflect that it was one of his last public addresses. He died just a few weeks later.

In a good mood, we walked out of the hotel to get a drink, only to find that the street was filled by a mob. Not a calm group of demonstrators, or even an impassioned crowd, but a raucous and ugly troop of surly, ill-clad activists. Occupy D.C. was marching on CPAC—and shouting obscenities at us.
Andrew was usually what I’d call a happy warrior, but this group provoked something different. He started to seethe. He turned a deep red, and seemed like he wanted to start yelling back. Here is where I got to play the “compassionate Catholic” card.
I patted him on the back. “Andrew, you and I both know they’re totally wrong. They’re completely misguided, and the solutions they want to impose would make things worse—not better—for the people they care about. But cut them some slack. They’re upset by poverty and injustice in our country, and they think this is what they can do to help. They’re convinced that they’re acting to promote real justice....”
Now Andrew was angry at me. “No, they are not. That is not what these people want at all, and you ought to know better. That,” he said, pointing a finger, “is a horde of brutes and thugs. They are anti-intellectual bullies, with totalitarian goals. Think of the mobs that cheered the guillotine while it fell, that rallied for the Bolsheviks. That is what those people remind me of, and they don’t deserve one speck of sympathy. They merit contempt.”

Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/16/Occupiers-Meet-the-Resistance