Conservative Filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney Explains Controversial Occupy Wall Street Video
Conservative filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney made waves a few weeks ago when a video of him allegedly passing out a bong and drug paraphernalia to Occupy Wall Street protesters went viral on the Internet. This week, Maloney released the full-length video and spoke with Mediaite about the message he was trying to send in his short film.
News of Maloney’s presence at the protest first came to light in late October when Howard Stern regular Joey Boots spotted him passing out the items. “From past experience, I wanted to see if he was asking baited questions to make the protesters look bad,” Boots said. “I thought it was a cheap stunt because I’m sure it would have been used in a mocking and disparaging way to make the OWS Movement look bad.” Maloney says that was not the intent of his video, and wanted to set the record straight that he was only trying to expose the hypocrisy of Democratic politicians championing the Occupy Wall Street movement while still receiving thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the banks.
RELATED: Conservative Filmmaker Allegedly Passes Out Bongs To Occupy Wall Street Protesters
“What inspired me to do the video was seeing Democratic politicians embracing the Occupy Wall Street protests,” explained Mahoney. “Democrats from Barack Obama on down have expressed support for Occupy Wall Street. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out fundraising letters citing the Occupy protests as a reason to donate to Democrats. I kept waiting to read news reports pointing out the hypocrisy: that Democrats were the top beneficiaries of political contributions from the very financial firms that the protesters were citing as the reason for their anger. But it seemed like a story the news media wasn’t touching. If I were a cynic, I might even conclude that the media was trying to shield Democrats from the political impact of the movement.”
Maloney said that the media “propagates this perception that Republicans are in bed with big business, and that Democrats are for “the little guy,” when in fact the establishment of both parties are corporatists.”
Interestingly, Maloney revealed that he shared the same anti-corporatist sentiment as protesters, and felt it would be a “failure if the effect of the movement was simply to drive votes to Democrats.”
Maloney also addressed the controversial “prizes” (the bongs) he passed out to the crowd during his video shoot and acknowledged they were meant to be provocative.
“I chose the prizes based on two factors: entertainment value, and the likelihood that the recipients would be enthusiastic about the prizes. Every person was given an option among several prizes, and every person winning a prize seemed pretty excited about what they received. So, apparently, I chose well: the quiz contestants loved the prizes I gave them,” Maloney said. “And let’s be honest: the controversy over the prizes led to a lot of attention for the video. Would Mediaite have picked up the video if not for that? Would my video have gotten the same coverage if I were handing out mittens and blankets as prizes?”
As far as Occupy Wall Street is concerned, Maloney doesn’t see the protest ending anytime soon and thinks the movement will remain a a major driving factor come next year.
“Personally, I think it continues in some form until the elections, because you now see public sector unions attempting to co-opt the movement for political gain,” he opined. “Public sector unions don’t care about corporatism the way the Occupy Wall Street protesters and Tea Party activists do. They have one goal: to elect Democrats, since that’s how they expand their power and money. So what I think you’ll see is the movement morphing from whatever it was in the beginning into another outlet for unions to influence the next election.”
Watch Maloney’s video below via Brain-Terminal.com:
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
