Dan Rather on this weekend's "The Chris Matthews Show" exposed the person that is believed to be behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"The real moving force behind this, what's happening in the Wall Street protesters and the efforts to spread it around the country, is a woman operating out of her apartment in New York" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Welcome back. Dan, tell me something I don't know.
DAN RATHER: The real moving force behind this, what's happening in the Wall Street protesters and the efforts to spread it around the country, is a woman operating out of her apartment in New York. She's brilliant with the internet. She goes under the nom de plume of Grim. And Grim is the real leader of this movement operating out of her apartment. She is internet savvy and whether it succeeds or fails she's the key.
MATTHEWS: She’s Madame Defarge.
MATTHEWS: Katty, from “Tale of Two Cities.”
What Rather chose not to share is that Grim is "an independent media maven." As Mother Jones reported Friday:
This week, Mother Jones tracked down and spoke with the two activists behind the 99 Percent sensation, whose identities have remained unknown until now. The blog is the creation of a tenacious 28-year-old New York activist named Chris. (He asked that his last name not be published because he works full time for a small media outlet.) Chris has also been busy managing logistics, including food drives, for Occupy Wall Street in Lower Manhattan—so about two weeks ago, he started sharing the blog's increasingly demanding curation duties with a friend in the cause, Brooklyn-based nonprofit worker and independent media maven Priscilla Grim.
Here's how Grim described herself:
Priscilla Grim: I worked for nonprofits for 10 years, have studied online media in school, and I am currently in grad school studying information science. I helped to organize online actions pre-MoveOn.
Here's how Chris described himself:
I am 28 years old, college educated, full-time job, part-time freelance job, and I volunteer to feed the hungry and needy every Sunday. I live in New York City. I wear a tie to work, unless it's Friday. I am an anarchist, though my belief is that anarchism should be more about building things up than tearing things down.
Now that Rather has given this more attention, it will be fascinating to see if the rest of the Occupy Wall Street-loving press reports that the two people behind this movement are an anarchist and an "independent media maven."
Stay tuned.
