While perusing information on the Occupy Movement's national "Shut Down the Corporations Day," I noticed a curious tagline on the event's website.

It reads, simply, "Think for yourself."

Now, that's interesting to me, coming from people who collectively repeat back every three words a speaker says in creepy chants. I suspect Occupiers fancy themselves as anti-establishment crusaders for democracy, who are more intellectual, more enlightened, and more independent-minded than the mindless right-wing zombies.

However, the newspapers are on the Occupy Movement's side. Network news is. Cable news is, with the exception of Fox News Channel. NPR is. Academia is. Hollywood is. Billionaire businessmen are. The United States government is, as well as several foreign countries.

When the president of the United States comes out on your side, how anti-establishment can you be? That would be like an Egyptian demonstrator in Tahrir Square demonstrating in 2011 for Hosni Mubarak and with his blessing while still calling himself a rebel.

The default ideology of United States institutions is politically correct progressivism. Anything else is "controversial". Teachers and professors are generally progressive--the outcasts will be the few right-of-center students who risk their grades to speak up. Most Hollywood actors have to hide their political ideology, unless their liberals in which case they win awards. The media cracks down on the peaceful Tea Party protests as "violent" and "angry", but refrain from labeling the Occupy Movement as such despite the thousands of arrests and frequent clashes with police. Do you think Disney/ABC/ESPN will tackle tough social issues when they are so afraid of "controversy" they knee-jerk fired a reporter for accidentally saying "chink-in-the-armor" in a story about Jeremy Lin?

A person on the right who questions the scientific consensus of man-made global warming stands alone. A person who asks, "our laws should be colorblind and so we shouldn't have ones that give preference to certain races" is himself called a racist. Someone who says our debt-problem is so out of control we need to cut spending on social programs goes against the federal government, the media, and various special interest groups.

Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians are the real free-thinkers. It doesn't take much thought to parrot what you see in movies, TV shows, or what you heard from your liberal professors or on NPR, or what you read in the NY Times or LA Times or Time or Newsweek, or what you saw on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC,  or the Daily Show. Or what the government tells you.

It takes real intellectual courage to challenge what everyone else has accepted as fact.