Air and Space Museum "Occupied," Closed

It seems that I lean more and more on DJ Redman, whose CDN article sets the stage for the latest “occupation” by a rather small group of smelly Marxist anti-capitalists. Now the occupation has spread to Washington D.C., where some 150 to 200 anti-war protestors tried to occupy the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to protest Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones like the one that killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Many who tried to occupy the Air and Space Museum said they were inspired to come to Washington D.C. by the Occupy Wall Street movement that began last month in New York and has spread across the country.

Smithsonian spokesman John Gibbons said a group of anti-war demonstrators arrived at the Air and Space Museum about 3 p.m. and tried to enter. When a security guard stopped demonstrators from entering, saying they could not bring in signs, he was held by the demonstrators. A second guard who arrived used pepper spray on at least one person. The crowd soon dispersed, and the museum closed at about 3:15 p.m. The protesters reportedly pushed a guard up against a wall, prompting another guard to intervene with pepper spray.

David Swanson of Charlottesville, Va., said he was among dozens of people sickened by the pepper spray even though he was outside the building when the spraying began. Swanson said, “I began choking and vomiting and got a headache.” He said the protesters were not trying to close the museum, but to make a point about the use of deadly drones.

The anti-war protesters included people from the October, 2011, “Stop the Machine” group and Occupy D.C., an offshoot of the larger Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. “Along with the Occupy Wall Street movement, it represents an upswell of people taking to the street around the country to demand social and economic justice as well as an end to the immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” occupation organizers said in an e-mail.

Support Conservative Daily News with a small donation via Paypal or credit card that will go towards supporting the news and commentary you've come to appreciate.

Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

Related Articles

One Comment

  1. “Social and economic justice” = Take hard earned wealth from the working class to give to the non-producing entitlement class, while demanding that the government do it for them. “Everyone is entitled to a living wage regardless of income. ” Foreclosing on a home is illegal because a company may have improperly filed the paperwork, and “everyone deserves a big house regardless of their ability to work and actually pay for it.”

    “Drones are illegal and it wasn’t the airplanes that brought down the twin towers and killed 3000 people as they crashed into them at 3 or 400 mph while full of highly volatile jet fuel.” The planes were flown by robotic crash dummies, (not Muslim terrorists) operated by the CIA in a secret bunker under G.W.Bush’s ranch.

    While the Liberal “everyone deserves a house” mathematically-challenged misfits at Fannie and Freddie created the housing bubble by using government mandates that forced banks to give mortgages to unqualified people with no proven ability to actually pay for those mortgages, it must be the evil bank’s fault, npt big government, which is still much beloved by the Occupiers. ( including the one person most responsible for more debt and big government expansion ( than 200 years of prior administrations) in all of U.S. history Barack Hussein Obama.)
    As they chant “Four more years, four more years” very much like the very mindless drones they protest in D.C.

  2. I’m glad these people got sprayed! That will, or rather, should teach them that you don’t get to just do whatever you want just because you are a leftist protester. A word of warning to any future protesters, take heed that you don’t go to far with your furvor, because you are threatening other people’s jobs and they will not tolerate you mischief. The security guards did their jobs as they were trained. And it’s an example of what will happen to the “let it all hang out” crowd that there are still some of us who believe that decent behavior begets decent treatment.

    There was a time in our society when there were rules of civility in public that you just didn’t want to violate. That meant that when you go out into “public”, you acted a certain way. You minded yourself, you obeyed the law, and you were mindful of others. That’s the way I was brought up, and I would go so far to say most all other American’ s were to. That means that America used to be a country where the average person could be expected to act certain ways under all circumstances, in public. There was order, law abiding, and criminals were definately uncomfortable when they were in public because they were the ones who didn’t like following the rules. Otherwise why else be a criminal if you liked minding yourself and obeying the rules set up by society. And who was it that established those societal rules that everyone followed when out in public? Rules that these kids and young people today don’t seem to recognize as something they are supposed to do. It was our Christian beliefs that taught us at home and at church which established the rules for how a person acted when out in public. And where in the Christian belief did those rules come from? They came from the Holy Bible. And in the Bible it teaches us that society is supposed to be “orderly”, and an order that comes from a people who are being responsible for their actions as is taught in the Bible as we are responsible for committing “sin” in our personal lives. We took that responsibility into our establishment of how we wanted our society to be. And that was a society that is decent, clean, lawful, and God fearing(which is a reference back to being responsible for our own sinfulness to Him). That’s why when you see how things were back in my day you didn’t see the kinds of behavior and action on the part of some kinds of people we see these days. You just didn’t see it. And it wasn’t that it was there and you just couldn’t see it, like some liberals believe, what I’m saying is IT WASN’T THERE. People knew how to act when it public and you didn’t protest or demonstrate unless it is like it is done by the Tea Party people. They are mostly from my generation and that is why when you encounter us on the street we are respectful and law abiding.

    When the left took over our society they said that even ciminals had the right to be in public and do what they want. Yeah, and does that include rapes and muggings in Central Park? Yeah, that is liberalism in plain view, or these filthy protesters.

  3. How did America end up this way? How did we get to a point in how our society was structured where we HAD to allow people to do what these people are doing? Where did the decentcy go? And is this the reason why so many people in other countries hate America now? And it is because it seems “we” have let our society go to “pot”? And the answer to all those questions is, this is the society that Liberalism created for America because their twisted belief in how America should be was what we see today. It started out that way back in the 60’s with the anti-war activists taking to the streets, taking over administration buildings on university campuses, and anti-establishment activists who were saying that American’s were racists, and discreminated against Blacks.

    All this so-called “activism” was what changed society. And it didn’t have to be that way, but if you wanted riots in your city or thousands of protesters and demonstators blocking your streets and causing trouble overtaxing your police department, then you got your Congressman and Senator to pass the laws that the protesters were demanding. And our society was changed rapidly where the way we used to be was outlawed, or made so intolerable by those around us who feared more protesters and riots coming to their town….again, that they got the cities to pass ordinances against certain kinds of behavior and freedoms/liberties were abandoned. It was just to much trouble to demand that your rights be observed as well as the rights of the liberals. Well, you could forget that, it just wasn’t going to happen anymore.

    And that’s how America was changed for the worse. We who are from the way America used to be are all but arrested everytime we open our mouths these days, are the only ones left who know how America was when Christian ethics and behavior was the norm, and open radicalism just wasn’t allowed….period. Liberals came along and said if we couldn’t prove that our way was right, and that their way wasn’t equally right, then we had to give way to their way taking an equal position of making or keeping America the way it was. Well, we had never been challenged like that before and we were caught off guard. We didn’t know how to “prove” our way of being an American was right, and liberals way was wrong. All we could do was explain to them the consequences of behavior like theirs. But when their behavior became “law” what could we do to say that it was still wrong, and ours was the way that was right. Their defence was, “Not any more!” And America went down from there.

  4. I miss those days when America was a moral nation of people who loved this nation and went about their business everyday believeing that they DID have the opportunity to work towards making themselves as rich as they could.

    During the depression in the 1930’s people would go to the theater to watch movies about wealthy people involved in situations that were exciting and adventuresome. It was thrilling to see their lives and the things they had. And I’ll bet there weren’t but a handful of people in that theater who was envyous of the characters on the screen. Most everyone watching that movie were dreaming of being that way themselves. People really envisioned themselves being rich and believed that it was possible, because they believed they did have a much right and freedom to become as rich as the characters they saw on the movie screen. And most did have that right and freedom.

    But when liberals came along their focus was on the poor and most of them were the Blacks. Liberals intent was to get White people to allow Black to have the same opportunities that most White people enjoyed. If that’s all it was, that would have been simple to correct. But that’s not all liberals wanted, and they kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And what were they pushing for? Liberalism was pushing for “Equal Outcome” of these poor and discreminated Blacks. Liberals believed that it was because of income “disperities” that were causing the level of poverty liberals saw Blacks in that was the cause of most poverty in America. Liberals were blind to the fact that there actually existed people who didn’t care about having a job they had to be at every day. There were people who just wanted to live like they had been living all this time. LIberals believed that something like that couldn’t exist unless their ambition had been stolen from them by White oppression. That was mostly a lie. Even though there were some Blacks who were being suppressed, but most all the rest were free to do whatever they wanted that they believed would provide them the income that would take care of them and their family.

    We cannot continue to allow the control of the message to remain in the hands of those who have such a twisted belief in how America should be that continues to keep what is wrong, made right by law. Those laws need to be changed, but changed in such a way that it gives time for those who will loose some rights given to them by the left, to find out that they can take care of themselves. Then we’ll start our way back to how America used to be, and how America should be.

  5. Dear Comment Censor,

    The article “Air and Space Museum “Occupied,” Closed” posted on this site is missing information important to that story. The intentional undermining of the OWS protest at the Museum on that day of protest, by a conservative blogger in DC, as reported by the Washington Post, IS relevant to this story.

    It is clear why you would not post a comment sharing it.

    I assume censorship of respectful, on topic, information contributed in comments here is testimony to the ideology of most conservative daily news (on whole.) Thoughtful exchange of information and ideas is hardly being the point of censorship. Take a minute to think about the underlying reasons why you’d censor powerful legit information from comments here. For me this validates that censorship of information is requisite for recruiting and maintaining conservative ranks. Accordingly, OWS is perfectly “on target” in its conciseness raising mission.

    When the fog of cognitive dissonance lifts in the minds of the brightest visitors here, when they are eventually exposed elsewhere to the other half of the half-truths available here, you can trust the thinking conservatives to proactively seek “accurate information” sourced elsewhere. The echo chamber of this conservative cocoon of half-truths and censored information is not more than what it makes itself to be.

        1. These “other half of the story” articles about the Museum can be found all over the internet:

          “Patrick Howley is an editor at the conservative blog, The American Spectator. He infiltrated Occupy DC to expose how radical they are, but ended up getting pepper sprayed himself for leading a charge into the Air and Space Museum.” […]

          “Howley’s account is here. We have some of the better tidbits for you below:

          After sneaking past the guard at the first entrance, I found myself trapped in a small entrance way outside the second interior door behind a muscle-bound left-wing fanatic and a heavyset guard. The fanatic shoved the guard and the guard shoved back, hard, sending this comrade  and, by domino effect, me  sprawling against the wall. After squeezing myself out from under him, I sprinted toward the door. Then I got hit….

          As I scrambled away from the scene of my crime, a police officer outside the museum gates pointed at my eyes, puffed out his chest, and shouted: “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.” He was proud that I had been pepper-sprayed, and, oddly, so was I. I deserved to get a face full of high-grade pepper, and the guards who sprayed me acted with more courage than I saw from any of the protesters. If you’re looking for something to commend these days in America, start with those guards.” […]

          “It might be interesting to find out more about someone who’s willing to get pepper sprayed for something they don’t believe in.” […]

          My take: It’s not so interesting that someone were willing to be pepper sprayed in an attempt to undermine something they did not believe in. It is also testimony to the inherent and intrinsic power of the OWS protest messaging. The protesters stand on their own merit in their right to freedom of peaceful assembly and speech. Their non-violent restraint in use of “civil disobedience” (by definition illegal) is commendable given “police violence” in response. More than 85% of New York residents polled agree OWS is exercising legal right to protest whether or not they agree with OWS protesters. Apparently the movement requires pro-active deception with intent to undermine, in the case of the Air and Space Museum to be able to effectively oppose….. food for thought.

Back to top button