Jesse LaGreca is freeing minds.

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever. --The Terminator

But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. --The Matrix

Forgive the possibly overused quotes from popular science fiction movies, but in many ways, the current political climate feels just as surreal. Yes, it's true that the earth doesn't exactly face the prospect of a humanoid killing machine coming back from the future, nor are regular human beings actively fighting for the very machines that are keeping them captive for sustenance while feeding them a nonstop stream of false consciousness. Still, the combination of money-hungry big banks, the Fox News propaganda department, and their self-hating servants displaying their allegiance to their fellow 53 percent give off the impression that we are living in the political equivalent.

The occupation movement that started in Zucotti Park continues to spread and gain traction, despite the efforts late this week to attempt to evict the encampments. It is drawing support substantially from progressive and liberal quarters as labor unions, progressive groups and even Democratic Party groups have continued to add to the numbers of those supporting the protest. But given the opposition in some more conservative circles to the bank bailouts and the Federal Reserve, one might have expected some more support from conservative circles just as upset about the lack of transparency, morality and fair play that pervades Wall Street and the banking sector at large.

No such luck. But it's not just that the populists on the right aren't supporting the protests; they are in fact responding to them in a scared, even irrational fashion that demonstrates the absolute futility of attempting to compromise with them on any issues of policy or politics.

The obvious indicators of the right's lack of intellectual honesty on this issue is the frequent descriptions of the protests from Republican elected officials and other prominent conservatives. The dismissive stereotypes of liberal activists promulgated by conservatives come in two kinds: either they are unemployed, promiscuous hippies who are either too lazy to make a living or don't have to because of their wealthy liberal elite parents, or they are mean, aggressive union thugs who want to use violent tactics to intimidate their opposition. But with a movement like Occupy Wall Street that is twice as popular as the tea party they revere, the right wing is faced with a problem: how does one negatively stereotype a movement of regular people that has a net +31 approval rating?

Their answer so far has been to simply throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, no matter the inherent contradiction involved. Accordingly, Eric Cantor has called the Occupy movement a mob, while Rush Limbaugh has gone in the opposite direction and said that the movement is made of spoiled lazy trust fund kids, which not only sounds about as far from a mob as one could possibly get, but is a doubly odd assertion given the fact that the movement arose organically out of anger over the economic injustice currently pervading American society. Patrick Howley at the American Spectator, meanwhile, took it a step further: he attempted to discredit a nearby protest by inciting it to violence while simultaneously maligning the movement for lacking the nerve to engage in violence.

The lesson to be learned from this is that the Occupy movement is such a threat to conservatives that they are willing to engage in explicit logical contradictions in messaging—even a few sentences from each other—to discredit it. There is no reasoning and compromising with the ideologues in this movement any more than there is with the financial elite who stopped at nothing to prevent Elizabeth Warren from getting the chance to rein in their predations on the American middle class.

If those elites and their propagandists stood alone against the entire 99%, this fight would be more fair. Unfortunately, the 99% is not unified. Some—those self-styled 53% who have it just as bad as their fellows they mock—are so hopelessly inured that they will fight to defend the very system that limits their own opportunities for advancement. Both they and the financial tyrants they protect will brook no compromise. They will not cede power willingly. And only a sustained movement of visibility, protest and electoral activism will produce the change we need.