Dozens of Republican protesters gathered in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on Sunday to pick up where the Occupy Wall Street movement left off.
The video: During the two-hour “Re-Occupy Wall Street” rally, about 50 members of the New York Young Republicans Club railed against the hedge fund managers who are trying to put down an online uprising on behalf of video-game retailer GameStop.
Gavin Wax, the Young Republicans Club president, hailed the GameStop rebellion — a “short squeeze” organized on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets — as having “done more to put a finger up to the establishment than anyone ever has before.”
- “So God bless the short squeezers. God bless WallStreetBets. Because they took a sledgehammer to the establishment this week,” Wax said.
- Wax also demanded the $2,000 coronavirus relief checks backed by former President Donald Trump, saying Wall Streets “guys take billions from us.”
- “Where’s our money?” he asked.
The realignment: In an interview with the New York Post on Saturday, Wax sought to distinguish his group’s rally from the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 — which ultimately failed in its goals of reducing economic inequality and reducing corporate influence.
- “We have jobs to go to on Monday,” Wax joked. “It will be nice and orderly. We will be bathing.”
However — as the relief checks and the GameStop controversy have shown — the GOP’s ascendant populist wing is no longer above demanding government intervention in the “free market.”
- As Fox News host Tucker Carlson put it last week following an interview with left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald, “there’s a realignment coming!”
