#OWLS Protester Discovers Free Speech Doesn't Cover Firebombing Macy's

Posted on | November 17, 2011

Man identified by police as Nkrumah Tinsley, 29

Not the sharpest tool in the shed:

A protester was arrested in Zuccotti Park Wednesday after he threatened to fire bomb the city — and his rant went viral on YouTube, police said.
Nkrumah Tinsley, 29, was busted after cops saw a video of him claiming he would torch the city during Thursday’s mass protest posted online, police said.
“On the 17th (of Nov.), we’re going to burn New York City to the f—ing ground,” an angry Tinsley told a crowd of demonstrators in the video posted on Tuesday.
“In a few days, you’re going to see what a Molotov cocktail can do to Macy’s.”
When officers from the NYPD’s intelligence division saw the video, they immediately began working on trying to identify the raging man, police said.

And now, the exclamation point on the sentence:

Tinsley’s parents described their son as mentally ill and [said he] recently started leaving the family’s University Heights, Bronx, home to support protesters downtown.
“I was really happy — he was going meeting people and talking to others, instead of sitting in his room talking to himself,” said his father, James Jacob, 66.

I’m sure the Occupy Wall Street leaders will seize on this datum to say, “Well, see, he really wasn’t one of us. He just showed up.” Except for the fact that, while Nkrumah was ranting, he was collecting high-fives from those around him:



What does it say about your movement when your protests attract 29-year-old schizophrenics who would otherwise be at their parents’ homes, sitting in their rooms, talking to themselves? Or perhaps sitting in Congress, talking to the media.

UPDATE: John at Verum Serum compiles a list of reported crimes involving the “Occupy” movement. Has it occurred to anyone — it has certainly occurred to me — that a movement which attacks capitalism and condemns profit as theft must necessarily, by its essential nature, be lawless?

To argue (or to chant) that private property is illegitimate, and that the rich should be viewed as predatory criminals, is a message guaranteed to attract the very worst sort of people with the worst sort of motives.