The Occupy Wall Street protesters are a mindless rabble of envious deadbeats. When they aren’t doing drugs and breaking laws, they’re busy defecating on police cars and marching on the private homes of businessmen, who dedicate their lives to hard work, entrepreneurship and lawful citizenship. They exude hatred for and jealousy of the most honest and responsible members of our society. They wish to punish those who have done nothing but obey the law and plunder the wealth of those who have done nothing but skillfully utilize their talents.

These rabble-rousers hate the businessman, the man who wakes up at 5 a.m. every morning and works until 9 p.m. six days a week, and only gets to see his lonely wife and precious son and daughter before sunrise as they sleep in bed. The man who risks his very livelihood and the livelihood of his family — his private savings and property, — putting it on the line every day to explore new business ventures. The man who is personally responsible for the success of a firm more complex and efficient than a government agency.

This man’s heart aches over how to ensure that the actions of his company always honor his town, his country, his planet and his God. He provides jobs to thousands of men and women — employees who work half the time, face no personal economic risk, have no responsibility over other men, face no moral dilemmas in their economic decisions and get to come home at 5 p.m. to a smiling family.

He is proud of the wealth of his firm because he knows that his employees, his shareholders and the consumers of his ideas and products have all shared richly in his wealth. Indeed, he is certain that, by the sweat of his brow, he’s brought far more wealth to the world than what he receives in the measly bonus check sitting on his desk at home.

He doesn’t think about that check much, other than what philanthropies, private schools, homeless shelters and local parishes he can give it away to, lest he dishonor his accomplishments by selfishly keeping it all to himself. And what he does have left he spends on his family, the education of his children and the health care of his elderly parents — the immigrant father who worked three menial jobs just to send him to college and the caring mother who taught him to always love God and love his neighbor as himself.

When he comes home, his mind swirling over how to cut costs to avoid laying off more employees — one of whom he knows has cancer and can barely pay his home mortgage — he sees a mob of dirty, drugged-out youths climbing over the fence of his home, frightening his family and threatening to destroy his property.

He notices that one of the kids is a college student at Harvard University and a beneficiary of a private scholarship that he funded through his firm’s unexpectedly high profits last year. He thought he saw potential in that kid. He was polite, went to church, obeyed his parents and wanted to start a business right out of college. Now reeking of alcohol and looking like a vagrant, the kid acts like a common criminal, demanding even more money for less work. What the businessman doesn’t know is that the kid’s professor is giving the kid extra credit for his participation in the protests.

These wastrels stand against everything we treasure as Americans. They seek to destroy the very society that puts clothes on their back and food in their stomachs. They wield the very freedoms that their government protects in order to demand that the government rob the honest, hardworking man of his freedom. They seek to legalize theft in order to subsidize their loathsome behavior.

They are counterrevolutionaries against the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and they must be discredited as such. The Occupy Wall Street crowd, and all the media and academic elites that support them, ought to be shunned by all decent Americans so that they may suffer the shame and stigmatization that their destructive ideology deserves. We must never allow their vision of an America divided by envious hatred to become a reality.

Steven Begakis is a fourth-year political science major and president of UCSB’s College Republicans club.

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