Occupy AstroTurf

The 'movement' faded as soon as the tents were removed.

• By L. GORDON CROVITZ

One of last year's biggest news stories was presented as protesters taking over a park in New York's financial district for two months. The Occupy Wall Street message was fuzzy, but many politicians picked up on the theme of dividing Americans by class into 99% versus 1%. They might want to be careful: The root cause of the appearance of strength by Occupy Wall Street was its photo-op occupation of a park, which now even protest organizers admit should never have happened.
Zuccotti Park became a tent city featuring health risks, violence against police and rapes, conditions that finally led the city to evict the group. A large team of Occupy Wall Street lawyers objected in court, claiming that erecting the tents was a constitutionally protected act of free speech. They argued that the "power of this symbolic speech is that it is a 24-hour occupation" and told the court they would "supplement the record with pleadings and other documents expeditiously."

But this month, Occupy Wall Street lawyers dropped the case. This admission of defeat, which has not been widely reported, is long overdue. Despite all the debate about speech rights during the occupation of the park, there was never a serious argument that the rules prohibiting the 24/7 occupation of a park were anything but a reasonable restriction of the time, place and manner of speech, permitted under decades of Supreme Court precedent.

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Associated Press

New York's Zuccotti Park after protesters were cleaned out, Nov. 15, 2011.

But the Occupy Wall Street admission that there was no right to turn a park into a tent city calls into question the true significance of the movement. Instead of calling it Occupy Wall Street, a more accurate term would be Occupy AstroTurf. The political term "AstroTurfing" refers to phony movements that appear to arise from the grass roots. Tobacco companies created the front group National Smokers Alliance to lobby on their behalf. MoveOn.org used automated emails to create the impression that a Michael Moore agitprop film was popular. China employs a huge army of "50 cent" bloggers who get paid for each Beijing-defending post.
Similarly, the Occupy Wall Street idea was launched by a magazine called Adbusters, based in Canada, which over the summer created a hashtag on Twitter called #OccupyWallStreet. This encouraged people to converge on Wall Street for a "leaderless resistance movement." A small group found its way to the half-acre Zuccotti Park, in a largely residential part of the financial district, when barricades blocked them from their top targets of the New York Stock Exchange and J.P. Morgan Chase Plaza. Their own blogs posts at the time expressed surprise that they were allowed to camp out.
The owner of the park, Brookfield Properties, was then strong-armed for weeks by liberal city politicians into letting the protesters stay. The park deteriorated into chaos, and after uncharacteristic dithering, Mayor Mike Bloomberg eventually decided enough was enough.
The anarchists and other extremists who camped out there loomed larger in the public imagination than other protests that also attracted a few hundred people because they were allowed to "occupy" space. The movement faded as soon as the tents were removed.
The occasional would-be occupiers now are reduced to pranks such as buying themselves yellow vests similar to those worn by Zuccotti Park's security guards. They occasionally post calls online for a reoccupation of the park, with one last week reading, "Hot lunch will be served at 11:30ish! Let us know you will be there and what you will be doing!" Earlier this month, the return of late-night shouting turned out to be not a demonstration but a fight between Occupy Wall Street protesters and a visiting group from Occupy Newark.
In this age, when social media can quickly unite alert like-minded people, it can be hard to know which movements are real. As House Speaker in 2009, Nancy Pelosi misinterpreted the tea party. "We call it AstroTurf, it's not really a grass-roots movement," she said. Then the tea party helped elect enough Republicans to make her minority leader.
Other cities are learning from New York's lesson. The National Park Service this week plans to enforce its rules against camping out in Washington's McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, where protesters have been living since October. In preparation for the Democratic National Convention, the city council of Charlotte, N.C., this month passed new laws prohibiting people from camping out on city property.
One lesson from Occupy Wall Street is that social media can help organize like-minded people—but another is that if local authorities allow people to camp out in parks, people will camp out in parks. The challenge for the rest of us is to avoid being fooled by the AstroTurf.