If YAF Claims They Were Threatened at OccupySTL,They Owe Us a Full Video

There's a post up at Big Government claiming that OccupySTL sent email and voicemail "threats" to the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) of Principia College after YAF visited the Occupy camp in Kiener Plaza this past Sunday. Obviously, threats are serious business and I hope the school and police investigate as thoroughly as possible and figure out if they can file charges in this case if indeed it is confirmed as a threat. However, it's important to note that anyone can send emails or leave voice messages, and so far (despite the screetching at Big Government), there is no real evidence that the messages came from someone at OccupySTL. And given that the right wing has been desparately trying to discredit the Occupy movement from the begining, and the Loesch's tea party in particular has a history of inventing stories of violence, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

Anyway, just to review the timeline, a spokesperson for YAF was invited to call in to Dana Loesch's show last Thursday and announced they would be doing a protest of the Occupy group at Kiener Plaza. Other than that, there was virtually no promotion of the YAF action. Then, on Sunday, YAF (about 5 people, not all of whom were "young") went to the OccupySTL location with professional video equipment.



Rather than engaging in a "protest" where they held their signs for the public, YAF went to the center of Kiener Plaza and engaged in an argument with OccupySTL participants, filming the whole time. I was there at the beginning and it seemed like your average debate; not especially productive since both sides were to some extent talking past each other but certainly not overly agressive or confrontational. However, this is how it was described on Big Government:

Last Sunday a local chapter of YAF affiliated with Principia College organized a small and peaceful counter presence to the ongoing Occupy St. Louis demonstration at Keiner Plaza in downtown. According to the organizer, Mattson Wilcoxen, the group of mostly collegians and minors was met with violent language, intimidation, and death threats.

As noted above, this absolutely was not what I observed. I started recording but then quit because it was so uneventful; however, here's a good example of what the conversation was like:

The Occupy St. Louis Facebook page has a 10 minute clip of a discussion with one of the YAF members that shows the same thing.

Given that Big Government is quoting YAF as saying that they were threatened at the rally and that participants used "hostile language," and given we know they were recording the entire time, YAF has an obligation to provide full video of their encounter so that people can judge for themselves how each side was acting. This is the burden they impose on themselves by making the serious allegation that what looked like a normal debate was actually "hostile" and "threatening."

I should also note that the post at Big Government despicably tries to link the alleged threats to MORE, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment. The right-wing conspiracies theories about the group are funny in the abstract, but when they start making direct accusations about specific people based on zero evidence, it enters into a very nasty place, especially considering the mental stability of some of Breitbart and Loesch's followers. They can hate on MORE's politics all they want, but making ridiculous, unfounded allegations of "death threats" crosses the line of decency.

YAF and Big Government should make public the full video from the event. That way, we can see just how seriously they actually take the allegations of "threats" and "violence" they routinely make.

Breitbart and Loesch Attempt to Reanimate Zombie Lies About UMSL/UMKC

Now that their smear campaign against SEIU has embarrassingly fallen apart, Andrew Breitbart and Dana Loesch are attempting to revitalize another failed attempt to smear a St. Louis institution. If you recall, Loesch and Breitbart shamelessly pushed the idea that professors at UMSL and UMKC were "advocating violence" in their labor studies class. After Media Matters and Crooks and Liars exposed the fact that these videos were heavily edited, the student who leaked the videos, Phil, wrote a post at Big Government attempting to change the subject from the dishonest edits to his objections to the course content. Needless to say, downgrading from claiming that professors were "advocating violence" back to the standard right-wing attacks on academic freedom was not very impressive, and the whole thing was a huge blow to the credibility of Loesch, Breitbart, and the student.

Now Phil is back with new allegations, attempting to spin emails obtained in a freedom of information request into a grand conspiracy. The whole thing might just be an attempt to distract from the embarrassing Gladney verdict, but it can be fairly easily responded to, and I do so here.

First, Phil claimed that university officials were "conspiring to punish" him. He admitted leaking all 30 hours of video of the course to a number of his "friends" (whom he doesn't name, naturally). The video, including out-of-context clips of other students making comments in class, was later posted on youtube without the permission of any of the other students. This at least appeared to be a violation of the other students' privacy rights, since they had the expectation of being allowed to speak freely in class without their comments being broadcast to the world, as well as the course Acceptable Use Policy and copyright law. People pay tuition money to attend class; you obviously cannot just hand out 30 hours of video of the entire course for free. In other words, Phil sure appeared to violate the rules of UMSL and potentially the law, and the administrators were discussing the appropriate response to him violating the rules. Along those lines, they said such controversial things as:

Clearly the AUP was violated as was the copyright.

- UMKC Vice Provost Mary Lou Hines Fritts

If he has violated the policies,he should be barred from the use of our campus technology in the future.

- UMSL Provost Glen Cope

Also, do you know the name of the student who assisted ripping the videos? If he/she is a student registered at UMSL, then we would like to proceed with student conduct actions relative to the rules that have been broken (appropriate usage, etc).

- UMSL Provost Glen Cope

The administrators were discussing whether they should punish a student who appeared to have violated university rules. This is what Phil calls "conspiring to punish" him.

Phil also claims that the school "no longer wanted to talk" to him after he showed up with an attorney because "they discovered they couldn't bully a powerless student." In the absence of any evidence, Phil apparently decides to pretend that he can divine the motives and inner thoughts of university officials, and so completely invents a narrative via his imagination. I can't claim to know why they dropped the investigation either, but this was included in his documents:

As you are no longer a student at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, please disregard my latter dated May 5, 2011.

-UMSL Assistant to the Vice Provost D'Andre Braddix - June 9

Now it's my understanding that Phil's apparent violations of the rules would not affect his grade in the class, but rather his future privileges. But since he was no longer a student at UMSL (having graduated from Wash U with credits from the UMSL class), the other disciplinary actions against him would have been meaningless. So that's a perfectly good explanation for why they dropped the investigation that doesn't need to rely on any unfounded assumptions about secret, diabolical motivations of university officials.

Another allegation of Phil was that the university was "relying" on liberal blogs for their information. He also suggested that UMSL Provost Glen Cope didn't watch all of the videos. His evidence for that claim? The following:

I would not be sure of the veracity of what he says, given the video experience and my viewing of videos from the class. I've reviewed videos from the class, and so have people from UMKC. There is nothing in the content of the class, though quite controversial, that if[sic] inappropriate for a political science/labor studies class. People may object to many things that are taught and discussed in many classes if they had the opportunity to do so, since universities cover controversial subjects. this is truly an academic freedom issue.

- UMSL Provost Glen Cope

Breitbart flunky (and failed politician) Joel Pollak managed to squeeze this ridiculous interpretation out of the statement:

If she had seen all of the videos, Cope would have said so, and would have been certain whether Phil was telling the truth or not.

Actually, Phil said things in his blog post that were questions of interpretation and also referred to things said out of class, so the claim that "she would be certain" about Phil's testimony is false and lazy analysis.

Pollak further cites this quote as evidence that the university was getting their information from "liberal blogs:"

Media Matters did our work for us in showing how it's edited.

- UMSL Senior Vice Chancellor Ron Gossen

But this quote was not referring to reviewing the evidence, but rather the presentation of the evidence. Media Matters had done the work of producing a video that showed how the original quotes were taken out of context. The University did not need to rely on Media Matters to see whether the videos were misleadingly edited since anyone with a functioning brain could see that. However, even after knowing that, the videos had to be presented to show the evidence.

The other "evidence" that the university was "relying" on "liberal blogs" was simply that they had sent out links to posts at Crooks and Liars and Media Matters. But the university had also sent out links to articles at Big Journalism and Big Government, and there was no evidence that any of these blogs influenced how they approached the situation.

One last note: Phil took issue with one of the emails saying that he has a history of this kind of thing. He claims he doesn't. I don't know if he does or not, but I will say that he participated in the gulag display where James O'Keefe attempted to smear Washington University officials with secretly recorded and edited video.

But I'll agree that it would be a mistake to assume that Phil took the class for the sole purpose of sabotaging it. However, the real question is whether he broke the rules of the course or the law, and that is precisely what the officials were looking into.

And, furthermore, all of this is a distraction from the real issue that Breitbart and Loesch deceptively edited video and audio to put inflammatory words in the mouths of the course instructors, and that Phil allowed this dishonest information to fester until it was exposed as a hoax.

Kudos And Reflections on the Gladney Case

Eric Boehlert had very kind words today in an excellent summary of the Gladney debacle:

An additional media note about the sad Gladney chapter: The two-year tale ended up pitting St. Louis blogger Loesch against an upstart local, a liberal blogger named Adam Shriver who runs a site called St. Louis Activist Hub. By the time the not guilty verdict was read yesterday it had become clear to everyone who followed the story that Shriver had absolutely demolished Loesch and her weak Gladney conspiracies.

Right from the outset, Shriver was among the very first bloggers to dissect the Gladney video and raise all kinds of factualdoubts about the tall tale the Tea Party was telling about the “union thugs.” And it was Shriver who stayed on the case since 2009 and who, I think, was largely responsible for helping to reveal, yet again, the kind of serial fabricator that Dana Loesch is. Andrew Breitbart, too.

So in that sense, the Gladney story helped highlight the stark, well-established contrast between the liberal and conservative blogospheres, and how Loesch and Breitbart effortlessly trafficked in lies, while Shriver stuck to the facts and undertook meticulous reporting.

And in the end, his story prevailed.

I'll add as well that while there was a lot of questioning of the Gladney story on the left, and especially mockery of the fact that Gladney appeared in a wheelchair, Boehlert by far provided the most responsible coverage among national bloggers, digging into the details of the case and asking the right questions, even from the very beginning. He's stayed on this case for two years, and took a lot of abuse for it, so it's definitely as much of a vindication of his careful approach to the story as it is of my local coverage.

The Riverfront Times should also be commended for, as far as I know, being the only established media outlet in St. Louis to investigate this story and ask serious questions about the validity of Gladney's story. It was the Riverfront Times, in fact, that revealed that David Brown, the man who was originally selling the offensive buttons, who just happened to immediately decide to be Gladney's lawyer and spokesperson that night, had allegedly told another employee that Gladney was his "gravy train.' There were some other media outlets that seemed to buy the tea party story so much that they actually contributed to the pressure campaign against St. Louis County to press charges when, in reality, there was no solid evidence. But the tea party was young then, and still had an ounce of credibility for people who didn't bother to dig in to their statements.

The Gladney story was actually my first real blogging. Activist Hub at that time was used primarily for posting weekly event listings, but when I saw the crazy narrative being pushed by the Right about this story I had to write a post questioning that narrative. I was immediately challanged by tea party blogger Jim Durbin, someone who admitted lying on this story but was nevertheless probably the only tea party person who was actually familier with the full body of evidence (Lord knows Dana Loesch didn't have a clue what she was talking about). I then proved, using Durbin's challange, that Gladney's attorney was lying, kicking off a new stream of right-wing vitriol against me. That probably is the real origin of my acrimonious relationship with the St. Louis Tea Party, though I can't imagine us liking each other even if this hadn't happened. Durbin was the source of all kinds of lies about me, including idiotic claims like "I attack people's children" that still continue on in the fantasyland of the right wing to this day. They continue on, I should say, without a shred of supporting evidence or even an explanation of what they're talking about. That's how sad and pathetic this group is: when they're desperate enough, they'll make accusations and personal attacks without even telling you what they're accusing you of.

And ultimately, that's why I agree with Boehlert that this incident was a great illustration of the, "stark, well-established contrast between the liberal and conservative blogospheres." Even to this day, I never once claimed that I knew that McCowan and Molens were innocent, or that Gladney was guilty of starting the fight. Rather, I dug into the evidence, asked questions about how conclusive it was, and challanged people who claimed that they were certain about what happened. In contrast, the tea party from the very beginning of this mess claimed that they knew beyond all shadow of a doubt that Gladney was "assaulted by union thugs," and they were immune to any facts that didn't fit their narrative and immediately personally attacked anyone who even questioned if there really was conclusive evidence. Though I'm happy to rub the right-wingers face in this one, I think the real lesson is that one should keep an open mind to the facts and analytically evaluate the available evidence. That's what jurors are asked to do, and twelve jurors, including two with tea party affiliations, came to the only rational conclusion: there was not any substantial evidence showing how the fight was initiated.

Update A couple other important kudos: Brian Matthews was someone originally accused of "resisting arrest" at this same incident, and has been repeatedly smeared by the tea party ever since. Ironically, a tea party video intended to attack Brian actually proved that the police account was innacurate, and the charges against him were dropped. Since that time (and probably even before), Brian has been tirelessly advocating on behalf of McCowan and Molens.

Furthermore, the defense attorney Paul D'Agrosa was really good. There were a lot of things I would have included in the defense (like video of one of the tea party witnesses having to be held back from an altercation earlier) but D'Agrosa apparently had a strategy of keeping it simple and focusing on the lack of evidence, and it worked.

Democracy Now Exposes the Dishonest Smear Campaign of Loesch and Kinder

Democracy Now had Judy Ancel on as a guest in studio and did a great job laying bare the nasty smear campaign against UMSL and UMKC led by CNN contributor Dana Loesch:
Also of note: they criticized the Post-Dispatch for failing to call out the lies.