When Hate Consumes Reason:The Fox News “Hate-a-Thon” against Occupy Wall Street

Stacey Hessler is a 38-year-old mother of four from Florida who was so inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement she moved to Zuccotti to join the protestors.

I’m starting to think that Fox News hates the Occupy Wall Street movement almost as much as they hate President Barack Obama, and that’s really saying something.  One does not have to think hard to find examples of the anti-liberal vitriol that oozes from this cable news channel on a daily basis.  What amazes me is the lengths that the Fox News channel will go to,  just to discredit the fledgling Occupy Wall Street movement.  Their latest example came just this morning when they tried to demonize a woman from Florida named Stacey Hessler, who is participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest.  Stacey isn’t someone famous, she’s actually just a normal American citizen, exercising her right to Freedom of Speech.  The creepy thing is, Fox News did a background check, and research into their Expose’ of a normal American, in their overreaching effort to stigmatize the entire Occupy Wall Street movement.  Watch this Fox News segment entitled ” From Mom to Mob”.

As if the Fox News segment on Stacey Hessler wasn’t bad enough,  another Rupert Murdoch/NewsCorp entity, The New York Post, also jumped into the fray attacking Stacey Hessler in their own expose, calling her a “middle-aged flower child”.  The New York Post writes…….

The Florida mom who ditched her banker husband and four kids to live in Zuccotti Park squalor is a hippie homemaker whose neighbors are horrified by her latest antics — but are hardly surprised that she flew the coop.

New York Post:Neighbors ‘not surprised’ ‘hippie’ left family to join Wall Street protesters

The Village Voice ran a story regarding the attack on Hessler……..

​Stacey Hessler is a 38-year-old mother of four from Florida who was so inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement she moved to Zuccotti to join the protestors. Hessler made the trip almost two weeks ago and has been living in the park ever since. The New York Post reports she “ditched her banker husband and four kids, ” but would the paper turn Hessler into some sort of caricature? Why, they would never do that to the “Flower-power flake,” as she is described in the headline that graces the top band of the Post‘s website when you open the story.

The most incredible part of all of this, according to people who find all of this incredible, is that her husband is a banker. The odds! Fox News, who picked up the Post‘s story, says that Hessler is “keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn. ”

The following are a series of colorful terms and adjectives from the Post article used to describe Hessler, who will clearly inspire your wife to leave you and live in a park with a Brooklyn waiter:

• “Hippie homemaker”
• “Self-described ‘vegan freak'”
• “Into dreadlocks, roller derby and ‘unschooling’ her kids”
• “Acts like a self-obsessed college sophomore”
• “Middle-aged flower child”
• Boasted of “California-style beliefs.”

California-style beliefs, we assume, are beliefs about cucumber, crabmeat, and avocado.

The Post reports that Hessler describes herself on her Facebook page as a “radical unschooling mom of four, midwives assistant, roller-derby queen, rock-star musician, activist, dreadlock princess, African-bee keeper, organic vegan freak and a surrogate for the second time.”

“I’m not disgusted she took off [to protest] — because I’m not surprised,” a neighbor apparently “seethed” to the Post. “She’s very bizarre,” another unnamed neighbor added.

Should you have sympathy for Stacey Hessler, this roller-derby freak who “ditched” her kids to, as Fox News says, “become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park?”

Lauren Napoli, Hessler’s friend, told the Post that Hessler and her family are “one of the most amazing and beautiful and loving families that I’ve ever encountered.”

“She had been following this movement on her own through Facebook and YouTube and whatever, and she decided she wanted to come up to New York. And her family said, ‘Go, mom, go. This is what you want to do,'” Napoli said. “From what she said to me, she said, yeah, her family supports her.”

Hessler’s aforementioned Facebook page also features a post  from her on her wall dated October 15th:

I have a plea for my friends. I need your help and support. I want to stay occupying wall st. I feel my presence is very important in the support of non-violent communication and sanitation(keeping the park clean) I am willing to work tirelessly on these efforts. I need help with getting my kids to activities and stepping up with the things I help lead, such as one small village, jr roller derby, …

Friends responded to her request and offered help and assistance. She appears to have a network of support and, according to Napoli, Hessler’s husband and kids are fully behind her.

And that Brooklyn waiter who is supposedly “keeping her warm” at night? “It’s not like that,” Napoli says, “everyone who’s there, we’re trying to support each other, and when it rains you need to be under a structure.”

Typical ditch-prone hippie flake.

The scary thing about this is…everyone who is participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests, are part of a family.  They are your neighbors, your co-workers, brothers, sisters,  sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers.  Today it’s Stacey Hessler getting demonized, tomorrow……..it just might be you.

by Richard O. Emanuel Jr. (Occupy Cyberspace/Reclaim America from the Lunatic Fringe!)