Student debt and the charge of hypocrisy
The Occupy movement enters the program as a comparison rather than a subject. In a discussion of student loan forgiveness, Bob Zadek says the flashpoint for the Occupy movement was the bailouts of the banks, and asks what greater hypocrisy there could be than protesters at the Occupy sites demanding bailouts of their student loans. He frames this as protesting bailouts while asking for one’s own, and describes a federal bailout mentality that he calls a cancer in the country America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Guest Arvin Vora responds that the students are seeking something like a quid pro quo — that others received a bailout, so they should too — and says that while he understands where that comes from, it misses the point. In his account the student loan itself is a type of bailout, and government policies have made college unaffordable; he cites the example that a student receiving 50% financial aid, a grant, which he says almost never happens, still pays more than someone paying full tuition out of pocket forty years earlier. Vora also notes a movement on the left, which he calls the student debt equals slavery movement, that is at least bringing attention to the problem America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Zadek and Vora extend the argument to the political incentives behind loan subsidies. Zadek says it is easy for a politician to promise guaranteed loans and subsidized interest because the decision does not hit the budget today, only when defaults arrive in the future; Vora agrees that the cost falls to a Congress ten years later. Zadek then plays a clip of Chuck Schumer, identified as a leading Democratic senator in Washington, arguing that the deficit will not increase and taxpayers will not be hurt because loopholes — perhaps for corporate jets — will be closed. Zadek responds skeptically, and Vora says he does not think there is a trillion dollars of corporate jet subsidies, that such savings are not on the same order of magnitude as the student loan debt America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Occupy as prehistory of street violence
Anthony L. Fisher, described by Zadek as an associate editor at Reason.com who first appeared on the show for his work on the Occupy movement, returns in a later episode to discuss confidential informants, where Zadek introduces him by that earlier work Anthony L. Fisher on Confidential Informants (2016). The reference is a greeting, not a discussion: the episode’s subject is the draft-like system of confidential informants, and the Occupy movement is mentioned only to identify the guest’s prior appearance.
The movement receives more substantive treatment in a later episode on Antifa violence. Asked by Zadek whether the cycle of violence between right and left can be traced to an event, Fisher answers that this iteration of Antifa was, before Trump was elected president, probably best known for occasional Black Bloc violence during the Occupy movement — a little in New York, much more on the West Coast, with Occupy Oakland specifically described as besieged. Fisher says he spoke with Occupy Oakland organizers who did not want the Black Bloc or Antifa co-opting their cause, and who had made a deliberate point of being peaceful protesters; when people came in torching police cars, breaking windows and attacking people, that threw the peaceful protest framing out the window Anthony L. Fisher on Antifa Violence & Neo-Reaction (2017).
Fisher places that violence in a longer sequence. He cites the 1999 riot in Seattle when the World Trade Organization was meeting, commemorated in the film The Battle in Seattle, as an earlier episode that did not catch on — Zadek calls such events flash riots — and contrasts them with the present, in which Fox News, in Fisher’s phrase, is heavy breathing daily that Antifa is about to bring about a Stalinist dictatorship, which he calls absurd, while center-left sites like Vox produce videos saying that focusing on Antifa violence misses the point, which he calls a cop-out Anthony L. Fisher on Antifa Violence & Neo-Reaction (2017).
Violence, government and the First Amendment
Zadek’s framing of the Antifa discussion is that violence begets violence begets violence, and he asks Fisher whether the cycle has a starting point and possibly an ending point. Fisher’s answer treats Occupy Oakland as one station on that line rather than its origin. He also credits Antifa with valuable work investigating and exposing Nazis, and says that in Charlottesville, on some message boards, Nazis who had been at the rally were talking about violence and about using cars as a means of violence, which is what happened; had Antifa focused on exposing such people, sunlight as the best disinfectant might have driven some fringe young men to bail on the movement. Instead, he says, lawless militias marauding and hitting everyone in their way — dissenting liberals, journalists, people of color who might be right-wing — draw in young people on the left as well as the right Anthony L. Fisher on Antifa Violence & Neo-Reaction (2017).
Zadek offers his own observation that implicit in the Antifa movement is a lack of faith in government, since in the United States there is no suggestion that alt-right violence will not be dealt with by the government’s police powers, whereas in Nazi Germany the government was passive or powerless. Fisher replies that it is absurd for a group calling for a radical socialist revolutionary alternative — which would mean government controlling everything — not to trust the government to police violence, and adds that in Weimar Germany there were speech laws, anti-hate speech laws and anti-Nazi laws that prevented Nazis from speaking and demonstrating in public, and that this did not work; if anything it made them martyrs and helped build up the radical right fringe Anthony L. Fisher on Antifa Violence & Neo-Reaction (2017).
Across episodes: no development
The excerpts do not show the same question about the Occupy movement argued across episodes. The 2012 episode uses Occupy as a foil in a debate about student loan bailouts and personal responsibility, with Bob Zadek and Arvin Vora; the 2016 episode mentions it only to identify Anthony L. Fisher’s earlier work; and the 2017 episode treats it as a phase in the prehistory of Antifa and Black Bloc violence, with Fisher as the guest. The topic is touched in three episodes, but the excerpts show no development of a shared question between the earlier and later treatment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Occupy movement’s origins beyond Zadek’s statement that the bank bailouts were its flashpoint, nor its demands, organization, duration or geography beyond the references to Occupy sites, New York, the West Coast and Occupy Oakland. They do not name any Occupy participants, spokespeople or organizations, and they give no dates for the movement or for the events in Seattle or Charlottesville beyond the speakers’ own references. Nothing in the excerpts states what became of the movement or how it ended.