Omar Rivero Conversation • John Henry

Among the large-scale scammers, grifters, harassers, trolls, and losers who have been trying to drag me down, play me against my allies, and sabotage my work over the years is Omar Rivero, founder of Occupy Democrats. (Incidentally he had exactly nothing to do with the Occupy movement, he just co-opted the name as a marketing strategy.)

A few days ago another of these big pages ripped off some content from me, so I wrote about it – loudly. One of the things I wrote was this article on Medium. While doing my normal maintenance I noticed a new comment on that article, and of course it’s a newly-created sockpuppet account repeating the same old stupid lies trying to con people into believing that the guy whose annual income has been less than 10K for years is the grifter and it’s really the guy paying himself hundreds of thousands a year to clickbait the left who’s on the up-and-up.

I have been holding this conversation in an archive since 2015. I’ve mentioned it before and even posted a couple of screenshots with information redacted. And of course it gets ignored because by and large people (including you, and for that matter me) are egomaniacs and hate finding out they’ve been conned, so when faced with the evidence of the con they ignore it and get mad at whoever showed it to them. We probably ought to break that habit, since it’s literally killing us, but that’s a different article.

Anyway with all that backstory in mind and remembering that the latest sockpuppet’s claim was that “Omar Rivero doesn’t know who [I am],” here’s the ENTIRE conversation in which Rivero attempts to stir up contention, bait me into throwing popular leftist Manny Schewitz under the proverbial bus, and make all kinds of logically broken and entirely baseless accusations.

If Omar’s got a problem with that, he can sue me for defamation and we can go to court and he can tell the judge these screenies are fake, at which point I’ll just pull up the archived conversation on my FB account and win the countersuit. But he won’t do that. What he will do, on the off chance this gets any visibility, is make a bunch of excuses how it was 2015, he didn’t know any better, he’s not the same person he was then…but if that was true, he’d have ended the blackballing of my content, and he hasn’t. He’d have stopped the grift, and he hasn’t. What he has done is continue sucking up to the center-right power core of the DNC in the hopes of furthering his political “career.”

These people are lying, grifting scum – Occupy Dems, Other 98, Being Liberal, Addicting Info, and EVERYONE in their sphere. The only reason anyone would work with any of them is because either that person/entity is unaware of all this garbage, or they’re part of the problem. Either way, enough is enough. If we’re ever going to have a real left wing in this country, we must flush our commode and get these floaters down the drain so they stop stinking up the place.

Let me be clear: no genuine progressive, nobody who respects independent activism or progressive values or leftist values or anything else they’re pimping for bucks would ever have engaged in any of the behavior I’ve been subject to by them over the years. If you are following these people, if you are sharing their content, if you think they are in any way liberal (in the colloquial sense used as a synonym for “left wing,” the real definition is an entirely different matter), leftist, or progressive, you are the victim of a long, deep, con game that has extracted millions of dollars from the real left and deliberately neutered left-wing social media for the explicit purpose of co-opting grassroots leftist energy to direct it at fakes, frauds, sockpuppets, astroturfers, liars, and thieves. I know that’s hard to hear. I know plenty of folks will just hate me for saying it out loud, and frankly those people are no more “progressive” than the people they’re following – they’re pretending to be progressive for social approval and/or profit, and they will absolutely abandon any genuine leftist principle in a heartbeat if it becomes too inconvenient, expensive or socially challenging to uphold.

I thank you for your time. And yes, I’ve verified this is legitimate THAT Omar – not a sockpuppet, not a fake account, not a troll that’s pretending.

“A lot of people” = “nobody, I went googling a new site that was set up to be the antidote to my bullshit, now I’m gonna try to troll you with this random auto-scraped entry that means exactly nothing” First off, people working above board don’t play this backchannel crap.

The explanation is you don’t know how Zoominfo words and you’re a creepy little stalker.

Hahaha isn’t anti-Semitism funny? Your “leftist” hero. Your “liberal” standard-bearer. Your “progressive” warrior. Your buddy of Elizabeth Warren.

For the record, he never sent me jack shit. But ask yourselves what kind of progressive or leftist or liberal engages in poverty shaming and ridiculing people who have to eat ramen.

“If you have to cheat to win…” “We make mistakes.” See the gaslight there? Also the obviously backhanded, snotty remarks about “nobody watches” and “nobody reads.” “They hate me because I’m successful (defined as ‘making money by bullshitting people’)” – another common refrain of the plutocracy. The only thing left about this clown is he should’ve left the political activism to people who live their values and believe in progressive ideals.

Incidentally that article remained on the site, uncorrected until sometime between Sept 2020 and April 2022. At the time of writing this article AI appears to have gone 404. Ironically it was stolen from Raw Story, which is probably what Matt Desmond didn’t want people to notice and that’s what set him off like a coke freak on a four-day bender.

This me explaining to a guy I know is part of the problem why he’s part of the problem, while pretending I believe he’s acting in good faith. That’s my way of making sure “I didn’t know” isn’t a plausible excuse anymore. He knows. I told him. He doesn’t care because grifting makes him money.

“Just news blogs.” More gaslighting. This is also how they rationalize themselves. It’s “just a mistake.” Then they find someone like me making an *honest* mistake and scream SEE YOU DO IT TOO! Nobody is so stupid as to not understand the difference, but the pretense gives them plausible deniability. Now who else can I think of that’s staked the whole game on pretending they really believe their own bullshit? Clue, it rhymes with Trump.

How many progressives do you know who think maintaining ethics in their sphere is “beneath them?”

Another gaslight – diversion tactic. The fact we were exploiting a sensationalized story about a murder wasn’t really exploitation because there was a minor factual error in the website we copied and pasted the story from before applying a fourth-grade rewrite to avoid obvious copyright infringement. God these people are scum.

“Yeah dude I’m a nobody,” but a few panels up he’s bragging about five million visitors a month to his website. False modesty that he clearly doesn’t believe; it’s a show of ersatz humility leveraging the human tendency to feel bad about distrusting people who act humble. I’m not saying he’s not VERY GOOD at being a lying manipulator. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have made so much money doing it.

“So are you saying that…[insert attempt to go back to the narrative you’re trying to control]” Pure manipulation.

Just in case anyone thinks I’m afraid to “say that to his face,” this is me telling him to his face he’s a sleazy self-aggrandizing money-grubbing dick pretending to be a political activist, to his face. Small woncer the conversation ends immediately after.

That’s the entire conversation. The discerning reader will clearly see the attempts at manipulation, the plays to plausible deniability, the fake “oh I’m not important” modesty performance, etc. ad nauseam.

THIS is the attitude that has been “informing” left-wing politics for the last decade or so, I’ve told you and told you and told you what was happening, and nobody wants to hear it. I’ve resisted putting this out for nearly a decade because I just don’t need the BS, but you know what? I’ve got the BS anyway. I’ve spent the majority of the time since this conversation happened destitute, desperate, begging to survive, and STILL doing more in any give series of random grunts than these scamming pigs have done for the left in their entire lives, collectively.

I’m done playing.

https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/videos/805871634614882/ Livestream where I establish beyond question that these messages came from the real Omar. (Don’t forget to like my page – unlike Omar, I need an audience that appreciates being respected. You can also use the widget on this page if you don’t have it blocked somehow.) If it disappears I’ll upload the archive to YouTube…and if THAT disappears I’ll just host it myself.

I’ve been trying to tell people for over a decade that these bad actors were bad actors, and they’re damaging our hope for a progressive and successful future. I’ve been largely ignored. It’s time to stop hiding your heads in the sand and face reality: if you’re on board with these pages, you’ve been had, and it’s cost the left and by extension all of us far, far too much.

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