Occupy Denver Infests Freedom Works Blogger Event

by: warner todd huston | published: 11 14, 2011

I am in Denver this weekend Blogcon 2011 being put on by Freedom Works, a Washington DC-based conservative activist organization. The event has been a great learning experience on dry issues such as improving your website SEO and how to more effectively use YouTube, but the big fun was when Occupy Denver cam a'calling.

In fact, the Occupiers hit us up twice during Friday's activities and, amusingly, there was more of us than of them. At one point there were two conservative bloggers with video cameras in hand to every one protester.

At around 3PM the first little wave of protesters infested the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Denver. Noisy, insistent, but ultimately unfocused and hazy these protesters disrupted out conference -- to our glee, I have to say -- and caused us all to spill out of our meeting room to join the fun.

It turns out that this first wave was peopled largest by a teacher and her students, sadly.

Along with the teenaged school children and their wacky, left-wing teacher was a gaggle of druggies hoping to convince us that legalizing drugs was the way to go.

There was arguing back and forth for a while but this group numbering no more than 25 or so dispersed after about a half an hour of protest. One young fellow got himself arrested for his breach of the peace, but really nothing big occurred.

Another protest was rumored to come at 5PM later that evening. This group was at least a half an hour late for their start time, though. There is nothing worse than protesters that just aren't punctual.

Again, more yelling, and some threats and, as earlier, epithets yelled at "the Koch Brothers."

The sad fact of it all is, though, that this was great fun for we few we happy few conservative bloggers but it didn't have much point to it. We aren't funded by the dreaded Koch Brothers, few of us here make much money from blogging -- and most make no money at all -- and none of us here are of the evil "one percent."

Further, we bloggers don't drive policy directly except when we are lucky enough to have a post we made get some traction. So, why exactly were these people protesting us?

In fact, we are just like them! We are activists struggling to push our ideas just like they are. Granted we are from the other side of the ideological spectrum, but we are not one percenters by any means.

Once again, what we see here is that this Occupy-Whatever "movement" is a pointless, unfocussed, silly venture that just has no real traction.

But we all had so much fun taunting them and then rushing back to write about it. So, it's all good for us.

For some photos and video of this little imbroglio, check out my post at PubliusForum.com.

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