TEAPARTY2
<h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">oldest content in Tea Party node; oops, see also "TPnotes"</font></h2><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see AFP</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see bus tour hot air</font></div><h2><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bak 430 last word liabilities
=</font></h2><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--> trumpista/qanon?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">REVIVED BY COVID?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">= </font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">context: see frontline pwr of big oil on BO blindsided on cap & trade wonky issue, signs commie</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">campaign event mod rw radio xian asked bob inglis climate, trey gowdy smacked him down 12 yr incumb 29% cap & trade?</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">note no mention of KOCH</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/politics/21climate.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/politics/21climate.html</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">JASPER, Ind. — <b>At a candidate forum here last week, Representative Baron P. Hill, a threatened Democratic incumbent in a largely conservative southern Indiana district, was endeavoring to explain his unpopular vote for the House cap-and-trade energy bill.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It will create jobs in Indiana, reduce foreign oil imports and address global warming, Mr. Hill said at a debate with Todd Young, a novice Republican candidate who is supported by an array of Indiana Tea Party groups and is a climate change skeptic.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” Mr. Hill said, echoing most climate scientists. “That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Skepticism and outright denial of global warming are among the articles of faith of the Tea Party movement</b>, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">here in Indiana and across the country. For some, it is a matter of religious conviction; for others, it is driven by distrust of those they call the elites. And for others still, efforts to address climate change are seen as a conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth. But all are wary of the Obama administration’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas, which will require the expansion of government authority into nearly every corner of the economy</span>.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“This so-called climate science is just ridiculous,” said Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. “I think it’s all cyclical.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the<b> John Birch Society</b> was extreme, too.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Whatever the party composition of the next Congress, cap and trade is likely dead for the foreseeable future</span>. If dozens of new Republican climate skeptics are swept into Congress, the prospects for assertive federal action to control global warming gases, including regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, will grow dimmer than they already are.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Those who support the Tea Party movement are considerably more dubious about the existence and effects of global warming than the American public at large</b>, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted this month. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The survey found that only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of the rest of the public believes that it is</span>. More than half of Tea Party supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any time in the future, while only 15 percent of other Americans share that view, the poll found.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>And 8 percent of Tea Party adherents volunteered that they did not believe global warming exists at all, while only 1 percent of other respondents agreed.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Those views in general align with those of the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They have created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Image</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Their views are spread by a number of widely followed conservative opinion leaders, including Mr. Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, George Will and Sarah Palin, who oppose government programs to address climate change and who question the credibility and motives of the scientists who have raised alarms about it.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Groups that help support Tea Party candidates include climate change skepticism in their core message. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests, has sponsored what it calls a Regulation Reality Tour to stir up opposition to climate change legislation and federal regulation of carbon emissions. Its Tea Party talking points describe a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions as “the largest excise tax in history.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">FreedomWorks, another group supported by the oil industry, helps organize Tea Party rallies and distributes fliers urging opposition to federal climate policy, which it calls a<b> “power grab.</b>”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Any effort to make electricity and fuel more expensive or to cap or regulate CO2 will only exacerbate an already critical situation and cause tremendous economic damage,” FreedomWorks says on its Web site.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The oil, coal and utility industries have collectively spent $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates, like Mr. Hill, who support it, according to a new analysis from th<b>e Center for American Progress</b> Action Fund, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Their message appears to have fallen on receptive ears. Of the 20 Republican Senate candidates in contested races, 19 question the science of global warming and oppose any comprehensive legislation to deal with it, according to a National Journal survey.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The only exception is Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican Senate nominee in Illinois, who was one of only eight Republicans to vote for the House cap-and-trade bill sponsored by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats.</span> (<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">One of the other Republican “yes” votes was cast by Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware, who blames that vote in part for his primary election defeat by Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate and a global warming skeptic.)</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A large majority of Tea Party-supported House candidates also doubt global warming science and oppose energy legislation designed to address it.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Mr. Young, the Indiana Republican nominee trying to unseat Mr. Hill for the Ninth Congressional District seat, strongly opposes cap and trade and other unilateral measures to combat global warming. </b>He says he is uncertain what is causing the observed heating of the planet, adding that it could be caused by sunspots or the normal cycles of nature.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“The science is not settled,” he said in an interview in his headquarters in Bloomington, Ind. And he said that given the scientific uncertainty, it was not wise to make major changes in the nation’s energy economy to reduce carbon emissions.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A third candidate in the Indiana Congressional race, Greg Knott, a libertarian, said he accepted the scientific consensus on climate change but opposed a nationwide cap-and-trade system as the answer.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lisa Deaton, a small-business owner in Columbus, Ind., who started We the People Indiana, a Tea Party affiliate, is supporting Mr. Young in part because of his stand against climate change legislation.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“They’re trying to use global warming against the people,” Ms. Deaton said. “It takes away our liberty.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Being a strong Christian,” she added, “I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div><div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ORIGIN OF GUBMINT?: KOCH, FOX, NORQUIST?</font></div><div style=""><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/koch/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/koch/</a></font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report</font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 14, 2022</div><div> </div><div>Award-winning journalist Jane Mayer, who literally wrote the book on the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries, pointed to a report published Monday stating, “Koch Industries continues doing business in Russia.” Despite major U.S. corporations shutting down operations after Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine, major U.S.-based multinational corporations, from Apple to Disney to McDonald’s, have responded by pulling out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.</div><div>
</div><div>Mayer’s 2016 book “Dark Money” focuses on Charles Koch and (the now late) David Koch, the powerful conservative billionaire Koch Brothers.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Monday morning is his widely-read newsletter Popular Information Judd Legum reported Koch Industries doesn’t seem to be joining the American movement to isolate Putin and Russia – even after his forces have slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians in Ukraine.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>“Guardian Industries,” writes Legum, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, acquired in 2017. Guardian, a manufacturer of industrial glass and other products, is based in Auburn Hills, Michigan but has production facilities around the world.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>Guardian has two glass production plants that operate in Russia. One facility is in Ryazan, Russia, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The company added “a new jumbo laminated glass production line” to that facility in August 2021. Another facility is located in Rostov, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. The Rostov plant, which began operations about a decade ago, cost $220 million to build and produces “Guardian’s high-performance, energy-efficient ClimaGuard(R) (residential) and SunGuard(R) (commercial) glass products for construction of homes, offices, retail, health-care and other facilities.” It is capable of producing “900 tons of glass per day.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Mayer, an investigative journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, also wrote an article about the Koch Brothers, in 2010: “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”</b></div><div>
</div><div>Mayer’s piece suggests the Koch Brothers had funded and fueled the Tea Party almost since its inception.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”</span></div><div>
</div><div>And it paid off.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</span></div><div><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“The anti-government fervor</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> By giving money to ‘educate,’ fund, and organize Tea Party protesters<b>, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.”</b></span></div><div>
</div><div>So where did the Koch money originally come from?</div><div>
</div><div>Mayer on Monday reminded America:</div><div>
</div><div>For those who would like more information, here’s The New York Times on Mayer’s 2016 book:</div><div>
</div><div>The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.</div><div>
</div><div>Mayer’s “book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.”</div></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tea Party leader in Ohio took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times with a message to President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/12/ohio-tea-party-leader-urges-trump-to-suspend-the-constitution-declare-martial-law-to-hold-new-vote.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">urging him to take unprecedented action to force states to conduct a new vote in an effort to overturn the presidential election</a>.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Cleveland.com, the man responsible for placing the ad is Tom Zawistowski, the executive director of the Portage County Tea Party and member of the We the People Convention. The text was also published to the party's "We the People" website.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the ad, Zawistowski echoed a number of Trump's unfounded voter fraud claims as he suggested "when Democrat Joe Biden is formally elected the next president, as is expected, Trump should order the U.S. military to oversee a new election for federal candidates using only paper ballots," per the publication.
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Without a fair vote, we fear, with good reason, the threat of a shooting civil war is imminent," the ad states, which also included subtle warning that if the president opts not to declare martial law, "we will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and defend our rights on our own."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zawistowski also wrote, "we wanted to express our concerns to the President, to the legislators, courts and Congress that We the People will NOT cede our exclusive Constitutional right to elect our Representatives to judges, lawyers, courts, Governors, Secretary's of State, Congress, corrupt election officials and local politicians, the corrupt media - or Leftist threats of violence! It is OUR EXCLUSIVE RIGHT to elect our President and that sacred right has been infringed by the massive, planned, illegal election fraud conducted by corrupt Democrat/Socialist Party operatives across our nation to steal our vote. We will NOT stand for it."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party leader's latest remarks come as Trump and his campaign continue to scramble for evidence to support their voter fraud claims, many of which have been perpetuated by the president, himself.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite Zawistowski's call for Trump to take action against the election results, there does not appear to be a clear path Trump can take to achieve the outcome he desires. In addition to the dozens of lawsuits that have been dismissed in several different states, even U.S. Attorney Bill Barr has admitted there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.</font></p></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.the GUK .com/us-news/2020/apr/18/coronavirus-americans-protest-stay-at-home</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx many pix</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Thousands of Americans backed by rightwing donors gear up for protests</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative activists to demand governors lift stay-home orders – and movement has been driven by wealthy conservative groups</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adam Gabbatt</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> @adamgabbatt</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Sat 18 Apr</b> 2020 06.00 EDT...</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of the rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Many of the rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol. Photograph: Matthew Dae Smith/AP</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thousands of people are preparing to attend protests across the US in the coming days, as a rightwing movement against stay-at-home orders, backed by wealthy conservative groups and promoted by Donald Trump, continues to take hold.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservative activists are demanding governors lift orders designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, despite the recommendations of public health officials. Trump, who has clashed with Democratic governors over how soon to reopen the US economy, tweeted his support on Friday, in an unprecedented endorsement of civil disobedience by a sitting president.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of the planned rallies have been inspired by a protest at the Michigan state capitol on Wednesday, which was attended by thousands.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2:09</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Armed protesters demand an end to Michigan's coronavirus lockdown orders – video</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama and was driven in part by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by rightwing donors Charles and David Koch.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As with the Tea Party, the anti-stay-at-home movement has been promoted by a rightwing media eager for the economy to reopen, including Fox News which on Friday aired a segment on protests in Virginia, Michigan and Minnesota. Two minutes later, Trump tweeted to his 77.4 million followers the need to “liberate” those states.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1:40</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b> 'They seem very responsible to me': Trump defends anti-lockdown protesters </b>- video</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A majority of Americans support the lockdowns, with a Pew Research Center poll finding that 66% are concerned state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly. But protests, helped by media coverage, have spread around the country.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The two groups behind the “operation gridlock” rally in Michigan on Wednesday have ties to the Republican party and the Trump administration.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Michigan Freedom Fund, which said it was a co-host of the rally, has received more than $500,000 from the DeVos family, regular donors to rightwing groups.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The other host, the Michigan Conservative Coalition, was founded by Matt Maddock, now a Republican member of the state house of representatives. The MCC also operates under the name Michigan Trump Republicans, and in January held an event featuring several members of the Trump campaign.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Absolutely the Michigan event was a huge inspiration and it was a huge success,” said Evie Harris, organizer of a ReOpen Maryland protest planned for the state capitol on Saturday.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“That was the model for our event.”</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thousands drove to the Michigan state capitol in Lansing, while the Michigan Freedom Fund purchased Facebook advertising to promote the rally. Protesters, many waving Trump campaign signs, honked their horns and chanted for Governor Gretchen Whitmer to end the stay-at-home rules.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The protest was covered exhaustively by the rightwing media.<b> Harris said her Facebook following grew from “700-800 people” to more than 15,000 members following the Michigan rally, inspiring her to organize “Operation Gridlock Annapolis” for Saturday.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harris said her group had support from some elected officials in Maryland, but declined to name them.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While ReOpen Maryland might not have funding from rightwing advocacy groups, it appears to be linked to at least four other “reopen” organizations.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Government mandating sick people to stay home is called quarantine,” ReOpen Maryland said. “However, the government mandating healthy citizens to stay home, forcing businesses and churches to close is called tyranny.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That text is identical to text on Facebook pages calling for rallies in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia. ReOpen Virginia aims to hold its own “gridlock” rally on Wednesday – again inspired by the conservative-funded Michigan event.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Despite ReOpen Virginia billing itself as a “grassroots group of people and small business owners”, founder Kristen Lynne Hall said the idea for the protest came from the organizers of the “Lobby Day” demonstration earlier this year.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That demonstration was organized by the <b>Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group</b> that has donated tens of thousands of dollars to politicians.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hall, who said Candace Owens, a rightwing activist and favorite of Trump, had been in touch to discuss the event, said the president’s tweet about “liberating” Virginia was “great”.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It could be spreading the movement,” she said. “Any support is appreciated right now.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">A decade ago, the Tea Party movement billed itself as “grass roots”, despite receiving money from the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the conservative organization FreedomWorks.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Jenny Beth Martin</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, who founded the Tea Party Patriots group, promoted this week’s Michigan protest. The Tea Party Patriots also supported the protest, in messages to its 200,000 Twitter followers.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said the similarities between the Tea Party and ReOpen movements went further, with rightwing media boosting both.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Fox News ran favorable coverage of the Michigan rally and hosts including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro endorsed the protest.</b></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Fox gave the Tea Party a phenomenal amount of attention and promotion,” Gertz said. “It really sort of boot-strapped it to another level, and made it a political force, and we see something similar happening with these anti-stay-at-home order movements.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gertz said he was not “simply” concerned with “the conservatives having a strong election the next time out”.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s a real chance for devastating consequences with regard to the coronavirus,” he said.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-aggressive-promotion-protests-against-social-distancing-mirrors-its-tea-party"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-aggressive-promotion-protests-against-social-distancing-mirrors-its-tea-party</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Following President Barack Obama’s election in November 2008, Fox transitioned from its longtime role as a megaphone for conservative misinformation and conspiracy theories to a new one as an <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2009-year-fox-news-political-activism" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">explicitly political actor</a> working to benefit the Republican Party. This <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/voice-opposition-how-fox-news-won-2010-election" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">was no secret</a> -- top Fox executives referred to the network as “the Alamo” and a “voice of opposition” to the new administration, and the network’s parent company handed over more than $2 million to GOP-linked political groups. </font></div><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As part of this shift, Fox hosts began driving their audiences to support anti-Obama protests, beginning with those associated with the tea party. </font></p><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">tea party movement</a> was an effort by conservatives to rebrand after the faltering Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis shattered public confidence in the Republican Party. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Revolutionary era, tea party activists organized protests beginning as early as February 2009. Their demonstrations targeted Obama and his efforts to trigger economic recovery, particularly policies that benefited people the tea party activists considered “undeserving.” An array of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/09/26/GR2010092600175.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">deep-pocketed national conservative organizations</a> like FreedomWorks and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity plowed money into the movement, turning it into a significant political player with a major influence on the 2010 elections and the GOP of the era.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox played a preeminent role in the movement’s growth. An <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">analysis</a> of the tea party’s membership and emergence as a political force by Harvard University scholars describes Fox not only as a key information source for tea partiers, but also as a “national social movement organization” that spurred viewers to join it. The network, they write, thus “helped to create and sustain the Tea Party mobilization in the first place.”</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/hosting-party-fox-aired-least-20-segments-73-promos-tea-party-protests-just-8-days?redirect_source=/research/2009/04/15/hosting-the-party-fox-aired-at-least-20-segment/149199" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; transition: box-shadow 0.15s ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none; box-shadow: rgba(25, 118, 210, 0.5) 0px -1px 0px inset;">heavily promoted</a> the tea party in the days leading up to its high-profile Tax Day demonstrations on April 15, 2009, airing numerous reports, frequent interviews with tea party activists, and dozens of promos.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> MATT GERTZ</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>PUBLISHED 04/21/20 </div><div>
</div><div><b>Fox News is aggressively promoting protests by right-wing activists calling for the removal of social distancing measures that states have instituted to fight the novel coronavirus outbreak. </b></div><div>
</div><div>Experts warn that if protesters succeed in forcing an economic reopening before the virus is under control, it will trigger a second wave of COVID-19 deaths while failing to revive employment. But that hasn’t stopped Fox hosts from encouraging the activists and spreading their message to millions of viewers -- the same playbook the network deployed in 2009 to bolster the tea party movement’s protests against the Obama administration.</div><div>
</div><div>These new protests share “the same DNA” as the tea party movement, according to leaders of groups that supported it. But for the anti-social distancing activists to have the same political success as their predecessors, they need a helping hand from Fox to validate their efforts and swell their ranks. So far, they are getting it.</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, Fox’s coverage of the demonstrations at times resembles a shot-by-shot remake of its tea party programming from a decade ago.</div><div>
</div><div>Fox's tea party promotion was a key point in its evolution from right-wing media outlet to GOP political organization. Its support for the social distancing protests shows the logical endpoint of that worldview. The network is risking the lives of its viewers and the broader public health for the political benefit of President Donald Trump, who has pushed for a hasty reopening of the economy.</div><div>
</div><div><b>How Fox helped create the tea party movement in 2009</b></div><div>
</div><div>Following President Barack Obama’s election in November 2008, Fox transitioned from its longtime role as a megaphone for conservative misinformation and conspiracy theories to a new one as an explicitly political actor working to benefit the Republican Party. This was no secret -- top Fox executives referred to the network as “the Alamo” and a “voice of opposition” to the new administration, and the network’s parent company handed over more than $2 million to GOP-linked political groups. </div><div>
</div><div>As part of this shift, Fox hosts began driving their audiences to support anti-Obama protests, beginning with those associated with the tea party. </div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The tea party movement was an effort by conservatives to rebrand after the faltering Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis shattered public confidence in the Republican Party.</b> Wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Revolutionary era, tea party activists organized protests beginning as early as February 2009.</span> Their demonstrations targeted Obama and his efforts to trigger economic recovery, particularly policies that benefited people the tea party activists considered “undeserving.” An array of deep-pocketed national conservative organizations like FreedomWorks and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity plowed money into the movement, turning it into a significant political player with a major influence on the 2010 elections and the GOP of the era.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Fox played a preeminent role in the movement’s growth.</b> An analysis of the tea party’s membership and emergence as a political force by Harvard University scholars describes Fox not only as a key information source for tea partiers, but also as a “national social movement organization” that spurred viewers to join it. The network, they write, thus “helped to create and sustain the Tea Party mobilization in the first place.”</div><div>
</div><div>Fox heavily promoted the tea party in the days leading up to its high-profile Tax Day demonstrations on April 15, 2009, airing numerous reports, frequent interviews with tea party activists, and dozens of promos.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The network’s hosts and anchors didn’t simply cover the story as a news event; they also encouraged viewers to participate, providing attendance and organizing information during on-air segments and directing their audience to a list of upcoming protests posted on Fox websites. </div><div>
</div><div>Fox personalities participated in more than a dozen events, including four Fox hosts who aired their April 15 shows live from what the network billed as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” </div><div>
</div><div>FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES</div><div>
</div><div>This was not subtle -- then-host Glenn Beck promoted the network’s live shows from the demonstrations by urging his viewers to “celebrate with Fox News.”</div><div>
</div><div>The effort succeeded. Dozens of national and local news reports detailed the role Fox played in amplifying the movement, with numerous tea party attendees telling journalists that they had come out to the demonstrations because they heard about them on the network. </div><div>
</div><div><b>“I don't think I've ever seen a news network throw its weight behind a protest like we are seeing in the past few weeks with Fox and these tea parties,” said media critic Howard Kurtz, then at CNN (he joined Fox four years later). </b></div><div>
</div><div>Fox’s tea party promotion didn’t stop on 2009’s Tax Day. Whenever the movement generated new rallies over the following years, Fox was there to provide them with the promotion they needed to succeed.</div><div>
</div><div>As one tea party leader put it, “There would not have been a tea party without Fox.”</div><div>
</div><div><b>Fox is now championing protests against social distancing</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">More than a decade later, we may be seeing history repeat itself. Fox spent the years following Trump’s election merging with his administration, with network hosts doubling as presidential advisers, former Fox personalities filling the White House and federal agencies, and former Trump aides taking top roles with Fox’s corporate parent. The network is utterly devoted to supporting Trump in his every position and utterance -- including the constant failures of his coronavirus response. And now, that devotion to the president has Fox supporting a new movement with potentially dire consequences for public health.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Governors across the country have slowed the spread of the coronavirus by implementing a wide range of orders to limit face-to-face contact, including banning large gatherings, closing many businesses, and requiring residents to shelter in place. That strategy has drastically reduced the projected death toll from COVID-19, even as tens of thousands have been killed. But as Americans have receded from public spaces, the resulting economic decline has triggered widespread unemployment -- and a backlash from conservatives.</div><div>
</div><div>President Donald Trump, his political allies, and Fox hosts have been pushing for a swift end to the lockdowns. And now conservative activists have begun launching protests calling for the repeal of social distancing measures, with attendees often wearing “Make America Great Again” caps or otherwise indicating their support for the president. </div><div>
</div><div>This is currently a fringe view, with polls showing that the vast majority of Americans are more concerned that governments will lift restrictions too quickly rather than too slowly. </div><div>
</div><div>But the protests are nonetheless spreading across the country, thanks in part to the same elements that fueled the tea party -- support from national conservative organizations, Republican politicians, and Fox, which has gone into overdrive to promote the demonstrations.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Fox ran 91 segments on the protests from April 13 to April 20, and spent 6 hours of time covering the story, according to a Media Matters study. That coverage includes seven interviews with protest organizers and four more with sheriffs who say they will refuse to enforce stay-at-home orders.</div><div>
</div><div>As it did with the tea party, the network isn’t just covering these protests as newsworthy events -- it is actively encouraging its viewers to support and even join them.</div><div>
</div><div>Fox segments have advertised upcoming protests in on-screen graphics.</div><div>
</div><div>Video file</div><div>
</div><div>CitationFrom the April 18, 2020, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Saturday</div><div>
</div><div>The network’s hosts are lavishing the protesters with praise and thanking the organizers for what they are doing. </div><div>
</div><div>They are dishonestly slamming Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a main target of the protesters, for criticizing the demonstrations.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>And they are playing down the extremism of some rallygoers, featuring Infowars conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer in b-roll footage of the events<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> without identifying them.</span></b></div><div>
</div><div>If the reaction of the network’s most devoted viewer is any guide, the coverage is having an impact on its audience. In a series of apparent live tweets, Trump himself endorsed the protests on Friday just minutes after Fox aired a segment on them with a flurry of apparent live tweets.</div><div>
</div><div>The anti-social distancing protests are still in their early stages, and we don’t yet know if Fox will be as successful in empowering them as it was for the tea party. But Dr. Anthony Fauci offered a dire warning of what might happen if the demonstrators get their way and force a premature end to the measures. </div><div>
</div><div>“Unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not going to happen, so what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you're going to set yourself back,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said on ABC News. “So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it's going to backfire. That's the problem.” </div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma? 420 fox boosterism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx5sK4uPKp8&t=1s"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx5sK4uPKp8&t=1s</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">vid</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">420 the conv</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">seeking authentic feelings</font></h2><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dissent – and the freedom to do it – is a crucial element of democracy. Political leaders are rightly influenced by public opinion. But it’s important to know when protests are sparked by special-interest groups seeking to manipulate <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417690325" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">officials’ perception of public sentiment</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a journalist who has covered politics for 20 years and now studies how people process uncertainty, I note that the questions about the current protests raise echoes of the Tea Party movement a decade ago.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In February 2009, the Obama administration was grappling with a severe economic crisis caused by a collapse in the mortgage market. A reporter on CNBC, Rick Santelli, <a href="http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/10/30/tea-party-history" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">began to complain</a> that one part of the federal bailout plan, the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, might let people out of their mortgage obligations even if they should have anticipated they wouldn’t be able to afford them and would face foreclosure.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Santelli made this point on TV while standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">surrounded by very wealthy traders who egged him on</a>. It was compelling entertainment, and the speech spread rapidly through conservative media. Radio host Rush Limbaugh replayed it on his show; conservative strategists admired it, and millions of conservatives heard it.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Santelli called for a modern-day “tea party” to object to unfair government rules.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within months, a coalition of anti-immigration reform activists, fiscal hawks, regulation opponents and social conservatives pulled together behind a common set of grievances: Barack Obama’s alleged profligate spending, his willingness to let certain groups get ahead in the economy over other groups – policies that many of them viewed as <a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/0731121415593275" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">putting racial minorities at a perceived advantage</a> to white people.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Calling themselves the Tea Party movement, most members were Republicans – but the Republican Party wasn’t speaking for them, so the nation’s two-party structure itself became a common enemy, too. When the Tea Party held its first protests, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tea-party-protesters-rally-against-gangster-government/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">thousands of people</a> showed up. As the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-apr-16-me-tea-party16-story.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">protests spread</a>, motivated partisans who <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=1940196" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">look for opportunities</a> to change attitudes and behaviors, <a href="https://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">backed by a conservative political funding machine</a>, developed a way to capture the protest energy and channel it effectively.</font></p><figure class="align-center zoomable" style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><figcaption style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); line-height: 18px; cursor: default;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="caption" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);">Authentic protest – like how the Tea Party movement began – is a longstanding American tradition.</span> <span class="attribution" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Obama/52b9365b811044239c20d453e5021a0e/15/0" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word; display: inline; max-width: 100%;">AP Photo/Matt Rourke</a>]</span></font></figcaption></figure><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enduring sentiments, new moments</font></h2><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Social scientists who <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2782114" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">study new movements in politics</a> find that the underlying sentiments are as old as civilization itself: Who gets the stuff that the government gives out? What’s fair? Who’s jumped the line?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What, then, makes a movement into something real?</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It starts with a galvanizing event, like the Tea Party’s public protest gatherings, when hundreds of thousands of people <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-tea-party-and-the-remaking-of-republican-conservatism-9780190633660?cc=us&lang=en&" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">saw that other people were willing to work together for a cause</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The movement needs a common enemy – in that case, Obama, his policies and a political structure that permitted them – and the potential for real change, not just politically but <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/ir/files/ir/imce/honors/Bid%C3%A9_Final2015.pdf" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">socially as well</a>. For those joining the Tea Party, the goal became clear: They could take over the Republican Party.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fairly quickly, the Tea Party was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/politics/tea-party-trump.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">co-opted by wealthier interests</a> hoping to channel its energy toward slightly different ends – although much of the movement resisted the corporate takeover of its message. Public opinion surveys <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-apr-16-me-tea-party16-story.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">backed up the intuition</a> that the movement had force.</font></p><figure class="align-center zoomable" style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><figcaption style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); line-height: 18px; cursor: default;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="caption" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);">[pix A North Carolina protest was ostensibly coordinated by ReopenNC, whose website was registered by a Florida resident and focuses on selling T-shirts and stickers.</span> <span class="attribution" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-North-Carolina/6f1a91fd730246c9a8a77db03ef8e161/66/0" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word; display: inline; max-width: 100%;">AP Photo/Gerry Broome</a></span></font></figcaption></figure><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A viral ideology</font></h2><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In mid-April 2020, it appeared, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/16/coronavirus-arrests-rise-police-enforce-stay-home-orders-states/5142415002/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">a new movement was rising</a> to express frustration with the restrictions and uncertain endpoint to the pandemic, and the economic toll the lockdown has caused.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the space of several days, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52359100" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">there were protests in a dozen states</a>, ranging from a crowd of more than 2,000 who gathered in Olympia, Washington, to several dozen in Annapolis, Maryland.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The available evidence suggests that the demonstrations were organized by paid <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/whos-behind-the-reopen-domain-surge/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">political operatives using Facebook and new websites</a> to encourage conservatives to protest in specific places against specific governors who had imposed strong public health restrictions on economic activity. This context <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/19/pro-gun-activists-using-facebook-groups-push-anti-quarantine-protests/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">indicates that one real intention</a> of the protests was to create the illusion of an organic movement that had arisen to object to the restrictions. Evidence is to the contrary: Polling shows that <a href="https://www.thepublicopinion.com/ap/politics/ap-norc-poll-few-americans-support-easing-virus-protections/article_48fbd75b-8602-5bf1-8993-d7ea1bde6403.html" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">just 12% of Americans</a> think their local restrictions have gone too far – and 26% think they don’t go far enough.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sparked by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/maryland/comments/g3niq3/i_simply_cannot_believe_that_people_are/fnstpyl/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">citizen inquiries first posted on Reddit</a>, independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs has confirmed that most of the web domains that had been registered around the idea of “reopening” the economy <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/whos-behind-the-reopen-domain-surge/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">belonged to a very small number of people</a>. He used <a href="https://research.domaintools.com/research/domain-search/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">a cybersecurity search tool</a> to search for “any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with "reopen” and end in “.com.” He <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HQnx-RvMM7BrpX1ysgjqzu8XkaDeu0w4gJgTtzB3dfk/edit" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">found that many of them were created on the same day</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He found that many of these websites, whose registration records you can see yourself at Whois.com, were owned by anti-gun-control groups that are run by the same family of brothers that <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/conservative-activist-family-behind-grassroots-anti-quarantine-facebook-events-n1188021" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">organized the demonstrations through Facebook groups they run</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several others of the “reopen” websites were registered with addresses or phone numbers used by <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/freedomworks-rich-donors-armey-kibbe-super-pac/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">longstanding conservative enterprises</a> like Freedom Works. A <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/reopen-liberate-urls/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">surprising number</a> belonged to an activist who told Mother Jones that he registered the domains to keep conservatives from using them to counter the recommendation of public health officials.</font></p><figure class="align-center zoomable" style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[pix
</font><figcaption style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); line-height: 18px; cursor: default;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="caption" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);">The ‘Reopen North Carolina’ website focuses on selling merchandise.</span> <span class="attribution" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);"><a class="source" href="https://reopennc.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word; display: inline; max-width: 100%;">Screenshot of ReopenNC.com by The Conversation</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word; display: inline; max-width: 100%;">CC BY-ND</a>]</span></font></figcaption></figure><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The threat of fake grassroots</font></h2><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the people who took part, the protests were no doubt real.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But media coverage can <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/22/21227928/coronavirus-social-distancing-lockdown-trump-tea-party" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">inflate or distort their size and meaning</a>. On its main protest story, ABC News put a headline suggesting protests had “<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/protests-coronavirus-stay-home-orders-spread-country/story?id=70242988" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">spread</a>” to new places.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But that creates a sense that these protests grew quickly, spontaneously, and organically. The fact that protests happened in different places at different times doesn’t actually mean they’re spreading. When organized by the same small group of political operatives, sequential protests reflect the creators’ skill at mobilizing people – not a naturally rising level of frustration that ultimately pushes people to act.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many political movements use these tactics. The problem comes from how the media presents the resulting events. On April 21, a <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/04/21/us-nurses-who-died-coronavirus-honored-white-house-protest/2996839001" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">labor union organized a protest by nurses</a> at the White House – and media reports noted the event was created by a particular group with a specific purpose. That’s different from how the media treated the “reopen” gatherings.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By covering a contrived protest as though it is an organic movement, the media could, even unintentionally, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2015.07.003" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">create the illusion</a> of a <a href="https://qz.com/901411/political-protests-are-effective-but-not-for-the-reason-you-think/" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">popular force</a> that <a href="https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&context=joursp" style="outline: none; white-space: pre-wrap; overflow-wrap: break-word;">doesn’t really exist</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That could result in politicians feeling nonexistent or exaggerated pressure to make decisions that threaten Americans’ public health.</font></p><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p></div></div><div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-margin-cell" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">420 mma
</font><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: transparent; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px;"><h2 style="line-height: 1;"><u><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fox News promotes protests against social distancing</font></u></h2></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="line-height: 31px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the last few days, Fox News has <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=946c24a6dfc04f40f7bc8c6c068d4588ae9ede239fcac564e4ca7109a5a539c8834201c613fba830e181a2f1d110c632bc68c6e535018470" title="enthusiastically promoted">enthusiastically promoted</a> protests against social distancing orders. Hosts and other network figures have promoted and encouraged viewers to join in.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Saturday, Fox <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=946c24a6dfc04f40f13fc16bc2cb9999098ec531e8b5882f8ec714d50d5901799dd98d6137346346514d3b20f8f51b28da5f7c52679ab220" title="aired">aired</a> the above map of planned protests. The entire affair is very similar to how the network promoted Tea Party protests in 2009. In fact, the map was even similar.</font></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="line-height: 31px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=946c24a6dfc04f407631c61f70b5d26eb9069f5fc3520da97ad351f66571b9378e6941a776f37574872d5faf8653b60b7185d126150e348d" title="substantial">substantial</a> <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d045023880c253bd1e4f298f18029121ff273203b6c1ef9a16042268edd276137169c4910cdcb05fb514bfcf0a68cbe500a4403fb" title="evidence">evidence</a> that some of these protests are astro-turfed. But even taking into account that some people really do feel this way, the fact is that polls show that the vast majority of Americans are <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388de759a41120aeca9f761c8f32cd438f34893bb7d2a745f694cff8cf3cf5fefc6902b22181f4409e694d291a4202d5738" title="more worried">more worried</a> about governments opening things too quickly.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Media Matters president <b>Angelo Carusone</b> <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388e3e9247f87ff9af29f00ff7c4bb4c274b9a8911a27c3d631bf5f4df33df60fa0b3ff217c3463f1f8f8a42a4604a864a2" title="told Vox">told Vox</a>, Fox News and right-wing media didn't create these protests, but they are legitimizing them, whitewashing extremist ties, and bringing them to a larger audience, both in terms of pushing people to participate and pushing other media outlets to cover them. The goal is to <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d0450238812296e1405aafc012299a6ee6c0133aa287a13a571cb2134c1b2763dd99aff7d64e418c6b13d0d1ca36064822edd691b" title="change public opinion">change public opinion</a> about the pandemic.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The difference this time is that this is about science, not politics. And these protests -- and those like Fox that promote them -- only help spread the virus.</font></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-margin-cell" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: transparent; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px;"><h2 style="line-height: 1;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388e5d762a6e598c9e51f4dd9534ff4c835662adc8093cb68ad9dd339eebcfc926ef6a740179f7430fe8cc396a4dc2c0de2" title="Fox News triggered Trump's all-caps endorsement of protests against his own guidelines for re-opening the economy">Fox News triggered Trump's all-caps endorsement of protests against his own guidelines for re-opening the economy</a></font></h2></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;" /><div style="line-height: 31px;"><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President <b>Donald Trump</b> <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388d468b156cfbedcb672609522d96c8b4ac4b3cd565f92be2892fc5c746e649b6a3c1db718f594bef6acb6c6b99dd3e56f" title="endorsed">endorsed</a> conservative protests against social distancing measures in three states immediately after Fox News aired a segment on the efforts. Trump, who was apparently watching the segment, responded to it in real-time by expressing support for the protests, sending multiple tweets saying, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this week, Fox hosts cheered on protests by conservative activists against Michigan’s stay-at-home order. As <b>Matt Gertz</b> <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388efe2843f88e57912665f2baf0c25d54185aaac6c228f262fb835938cc9dd1e1394b5f448e4905564a0e2cbd6c6df6cc8" title="noted at the time">noted at the time</a>: “If Trump sees Fox’s protest coverage and endorses the effort, social distancing will become even more politically polarized. The hard-won progress in the fight against the virus could evaporate in an instant, leaving behind a shattered economy and an influx of COVID-19 deaths.”</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is not hyperbole. We've already seen data indicate that there <a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d0450238898b1933384da0068da5470247019d0796c1921bc3c61819995173cbce96b935e3061a940143a9c1ba42a623109f28199" title="may be a surge">may be a surge</a> in COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin after Republicans and the Supreme Court forced that state's voters to go to the polls.</font></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-margin-cell" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px 10px;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper" style="background-color: transparent; min-width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td class="yiv7501852295stylingblock-content-wrapper yiv7501852295camarker-inner" style="border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0px;"><h2 style="line-height: 1;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=c8e7425d04502388ad69e6d1c634bf708c2b1eb812dd47fbe339d6c75bbfb042b070c510cdb9838269085e40697bd3ac72eb21ccba9c1e76" title="Fox’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine">Fox’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine</a>...</font></h2></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/some-trump-supporters-say-theyre-willing-to-die-to-reopen-economy-when-its-my-time-to-go-gods-going-to-call-me-home/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/some-trump-supporters-say-theyre-willing-to-die-to-reopen-economy-when-its-my-time-to-go-gods-going-to-call-me-home/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">basically TP?</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some Trump supporters say they’re willing to die to reopen economy: ‘When it’s my time to go, God’s going to call me home”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story April 15, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Supporters of President Donald Trump are getting antsy about stay-at-home orders — and they’re encouraging one another to openly rebel against strict measures aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Daily Beast reports that Trump supporters are sparking a “protest movement” against social distancing restrictions aimed at forcing governors to reopen their economies at a time when tens of thousands of Americans have died from the virus in the span of just one month.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">North Carolina-based conservative activist Ashley Smith, who founded an anti-social distancing group called “ReopenNC,” said that she wasn’t worried about dying as long as it means the economy can reopen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When it’s my time to go, God’s going to call me home,” she tells the publication. “I think that to live is inherently to take risks. I’m not concerned about this virus any more than I am about the flu.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michigan activist Rosanne Ponkowski, meanwhile, said that the lower-than-expected projected death toll from COVID-19 justifies reopening the economy, despite the fact that the death toll has only been lowered due to social distancing restrictions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They were predicting huge numbers of people falling ill and dying, and that wasn’t the case,” she said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston, a longtime ally of Trump, summed up conservative anger over the restrictions like this: “The liquor stores and dispensaries are open but I can’t buy gun!”</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">TEA PARTY LEGACY CLIMATE ZOMBIES AND COVID PANDEMIC?</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tea-party-budget-battles-left-the-national-emergency-medical-stockpile-unprepared/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tea-party-budget-battles-left-the-national-emergency-medical-stockpile-unprepared/</font></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Tea Party budget battles left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile unprepared</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by ProPublica April 4, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Among the victims of those partisan fights was the effort to keep adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment on hand to respond to a public health crisis. Lawmakers in both parties raised the specter of shortchanging future disaster response even as they voted to approve the cuts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There are always more needs for financial support from our hardworking taxpayers than we have the ability to pay,” sai<b>d Denny Rehberg, a retired Republican</b> congressman from Montana who chaired the appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing the stockpile in 2011. Rehberg said it would have been impossible to predict a public health crisis requiring a more robust stockpile, just as it would have been to predict the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s really easy to second-guess and suggest we didn’t do as much,” he said. “Why didn’t we have a protocol to protect the Twin Towers? Whoever thought that was going to happen? Whoever thought Hurricane Katrina was going to occur? You tell me what’s going to happen in 2030, and I will communicate that to congressmen and senators.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There were, in fact, warnings at the time: [FOR ALL THE ABOVE ?!] <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A 2010 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded report by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials urged the federal government to treat public health preparedness “on par with federal and state funding for other national security response capabilities,” and said that its store of N95 masks should be “replenished for future events.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">But efforts to bulk up the stockpile fell apart in tense standoffs between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans, according to administration and congressional officials involved in the negotiations. Had Congress kept funding at the 2010 level through the end of the Obama administration, the stockpile would have benefited from $321 million more than it ended up getting, according to budget documents reviewed by ProPublica. During the Trump administration, Congress started giving the stockpile more than the White House requested.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>By late February, the stockpile held just 12 million N95 respirator masks, a small fraction of what government officials say is needed for a severe pandemic. Now the emergency stash is running out of critical supplies and governors are struggling to understand the unclear procedures for how the administration is distributing the equipment.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The stockpile received a $17 billion influx in the first and third coronavirus stimulus bills that Congress passed in March. But there had not been a big boost in stockpile funding since 2009, in response to the H1N1 pandemic, commonly called swine flu.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million.</b> Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. <b>“That was rejected by the Republican House.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Republicans took over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms on the </b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Tea Party wave of opposition to the landmark 2010 health care reform law, </b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The new House majority was intent on curbing government spending, especially at HHS, which administered Obamacare.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Congressional Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell in the Senate and House Speaker John Boehner, leveraged the debt ceiling — a limit on the government’s borrowing ability that had to be raised — to insist that the Obama administration accept federal spending curbs. The compromise, codified in the 2011 Budget Control Act, required a bipartisan “super committee” to find additional ways to reduce the deficit, or else it would trigger automatic across-the-board cuts known as “sequestration.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Even in the aftermath of the swine flu pandemic, the stockpile wasn’t a priority then. Without a full committee markup, Rehberg introduced a bill that provided $522.5 million to the stockpile, about 12% less than the previous year and $132 million less than the administration wanted. “Nobody got everything they wanted,” Rehberg said.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Senate version of the funding bill offered $561 million for stockpile funding. Senators said they regretted the cuts even as they voted for the bill.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“In this bill we’re now getting into the bone marrow,” Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who then chaired the Senate appropriations committee, said at the markup. “Some of these cuts will be painful and unpopular.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the bill’s final version, Congress allocated a compromise $534 million for the 2012 fiscal year, a 10% budget cut from the prior year and $121 million less than the Obama administration had requested.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The next year, the “super committee” failed to secure additional savings demanded by the Budget Control Act, triggering the automatic, across-the-board cuts. This “sequestration” was an outcome that the leaders of both parties disliked — and blamed one another for.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Did either party ever indicate sequestration was welcome, positive or desirable?” Dave Schnittger, Boehner’s deputy chief of staff at the time, told ProPublica. “Sequestration was conceived — not by Republicans, but by a Democratic White House — as a crude mechanism to compel the super committee to do its job. Republicans consistently advocated for reductions in mandatory spending programs that would have prevented sequestration from ever happening.” (Mandatory spending refers to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">McConnell’s office did not respond to requests for comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Katie Hill, a spokeswoman for Obama, pointed to numerous statements he made in 2013 urging Republicans to compromise, warning that the sequester would weaken economic recovery, military readiness and basic public services.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Gene Sperling, then a top Obama economic adviser, said Republicans focused attacks on the HHS budget, along with the Departments of Labor and Education, which are grouped under the same appropriations subcommittee.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Labor/HHS budget is where a significant number of progressive priorities are, from Head Start to (the National Institutes of Health) to the Education Department,” Sperling said. “There’s just so much in there, so it is often the hot spot for where conservative budget hawks who don’t believe in public investment go hardest.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U<b>nder sequestration, the CDC, which managed the stockpile at the time, faced a 5% budget cut. In its 2013 budget submission, HHS decreased its stockpile funding request from the previous year, asking for $486 million, a cut of nearly $48 million. “</b>The SNS is a key resource in maintaining public health preparedness and response,” the administration said. “However, the current fiscal climate necessitates scaling back.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decrease caught Rehberg’s attention at a budget hearing to review the request.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Disaster preparedness is something that has been very important to me,” he said at the hearing. “I just would like to have you explain how such a large reduction can possibly not impact the national preparedness posture.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius </b>answered that the CDC would prioritize replacing expiring drugs such as smallpox vaccines and anthrax treatments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The next year, the administration again proposed cutting the stockpile’s funding from the 2012 funding level, but it warned that reduced funding could result in “fewer people receiving treatment during an influenza pandemic.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Congress did grant extra funding in response to emergencies, but even then, the stockpile was a small-ticket item. In 2014, the Obama administration asked for and received billions of dollars to respond to the Ebola outbreak, but only $165 million went to the CDC’s public health emergency preparedness programs, including the stockpile. And in 2016, Congress granted emergency funding to respond to the Zika virus, but it gave the CDC less than half of what the Obama administration requested</span>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s clear that the administration prioritized the SNS in this (Zika) request and in the Ebola supplemental,” said Ned Price, who was a spokesman for the National Security Council in the Obama White House. “In the case of Zika, congressional Republicans sat on the request for the better part of a year.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The stockpile’s mission has steadily expanded as it confronts new public health emergencies. With limited resources, officials in charge of the stockpile tend to focus on buying lifesaving drugs from small biotechnology firms that would, in the absence of a government buyer, have no other market for their products,</b> experts said. Masks and other protective equipment are in normal times widely available and thus may not have been prioritized for purchase, they said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products</b>,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The sequestration and strict budget caps ended with budget deals in 2018 and 2019 — a bipartisan rebuke to the earlier restraints. “It’s a burden off our shoulders,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters at the time. “In a troubled world, I think that was the wrong message.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet non-defense spending still hasn’t fully recovered.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“One of the things that happened to public health preparedness was just the result of the general budget stringency we had,” said David Reich, a consultant working on federal appropriations issues for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We’re still seeing the results of that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">During the Trump administration, the White House has consistently proposed cutting the CDC and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which took over stockpile management from the CDC. Congress approved more stockpile funding than Trump’s budget requested in every year of his administration, for a combined $1.93 billion instead of $1.77 billion, according to budget documents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The White House budget request for 2021, delivered in February as officials were already warning about the dangerous new coronavirus</span>, proposed holding the stockpile’s <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">funding flat at $705 million and cutting resources for the office that oversees it.</span></b></font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AN cody f</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">W<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">hen the Tea Party movement arose in response to President Barack Obama’s presidency, it represented a loose coalition of activists, conservative leaders, and Republicans who voiced furious opposition to the federal government and the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. But as the movement coalesced into a group with actual power, it promoted politicians to Congress who primarily committed themselves to cutting government spending and reducing deficits as their primary raison d’être...wrote, President Donald Trump has thoroughly given up on that central tenet of the movement.
“President Trump once vowed to drain the swamp, but by joining with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the latest budget deal, he has merely drained it of the Tea Party,” Klain wrote.</span></font><div class="p3_8" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new deal doesn’t cut spending at all, and puts the country on track for a trillion-dollar deficit, as Politico <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/22/deficit-don-budget-red-ink-trump-1426696" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a>. There were previous signs, of course, that Trump had no real interest in reducing deficits, despite his contrary promises. The 2017 GOP tax cut was itself a deficit-buster, and its Republican defenders only made half-hearted efforts to pretend that it would create so much growth that it would pay for itself. But the hypocrisy of not counting tax cuts toward the deficit was actually a feature of the Tea Party’s double-talk, too. <b>By agreeing to a budget with a large spending increase, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to give up even this thinnest of pretenses.</b></font></p><div class="p4_8" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is particularly ironic, given that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a prominent member of the Tea Party and opponent of spending in the House of Representatives.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Politico suggests that Mulvaney pushed back against the increase in spending, but his views didn’t prevail. The fact reveals that, as many have argued, the “Tea Party” as it was conceived of by the rank and file — who never really care about deficits — was quite different from the way politicians in Congress portrayed it.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And ultimately, almost no one but handwringing D.C. pundits will care. There’s little sign that the deficit poses a major burden to the country at the moment.</font></p><div class="p6_8" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Klein wrote that “Trump’s Republican Party may want to dismiss the importance of the debt, but the numbers don’t lie.” But the “numbers” he cites are just the high debt and deficit, which in themselves don’t prove that there’s anything worth worrying about. It’s possible at some point that interest rates will spike and the American debt burden will get drastically more serious, but deficit hawks have been screaming about this risk for a decade, and it hasn’t happened yet.</font></p><div class="p7_8" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The biggest worry, though, is that Republican hypocrisy hasn’t gone away for good. As soon as a Democrat is in control of the White House again, deficit paranoia is certain to overcome the GOP once again. They’ll fight tooth and nail about every minor spending increase the Democratic Party wants, to say nothing of how they’ll react to ambitious spending programs like a Medicare for All proposal. Worst of all, if the next Democratic presidency happens to coincide with another recession, Republicans are guaranteed to point to the deficits that Trump himself expanded as a reason to do nothing to ameliorate the harm. They’ll likely even call for austerity, which would exacerbate the crisis.</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-republican-suicide-machine-20131009">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-republican-suicide-machine-20131009</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">very few house swing distr</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="inStoryLink" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-people-vs-goldman-sachs-20110511" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The People vs. Goldman Sachs</font></a></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Members from these über-safe districts don't fear the challenge posed by a mainstream Democrat in the general election. They dread a well-funded primary opponent running to their right. "You've got very small numbers of people who vote in GOP primaries," says Bartlett, who served in the Reagan administration. "It doesn't take very many of these Tea Party people to show up to find out you're on your ass."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To keep this threat fresh in members' minds, the Club for Growth recently launched a campaign called "Primary My Congressman!" that seeks to oust centrist Republicans from safe seats – and replace them with the hardest of the hardcore. "The Club for Growth is a cancer on the Republican Party," said Steve LaTourette, a recently retired moderate House Republican from Ohio. "The only thing that grows when the Club for Growth gets involved is the number of Democrats in office."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republicans were also ecstatic when the Supreme Court's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Citizens United</em>decision undermined the system of regulated campaign finance. But this boon to the wealthy donor class has become the bane of those trying to forge party unity. Now donors can microtarget the faction of Republicanism that suits them best. "There's a difference between rich Republicans used to working through K Street and the guy who just sold his plumbing business and happens to be a total libertarian winger," says the think-tank fellow. The rise of outside money has made a mockery of what used to be the leadership's biggest stick: "If leadership says, 'We're not going to fund you if you don't vote with us,' the members laugh," the strategist says. "'Keep your $10,000. I'm going to take $200,000 from an outside group.' Or better yet, 'I'm going to start my own Super PAC and send out e-mails about how John Boehner is standing in the way of our shared values.'"</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the last election, for instance, John Ramsey, a 21-year-old Ron Paul fan from Texas, used money he inherited from his grandparents to create the Liberty for All Super PAC. He funded the winning campaign of libertarian Kentucky freshman Massie with more than $629,000 in independent expenditures. As a result, Massie – a gregarious, MIT-educated 42-year-old – is a party of one, free to buck GOP leadership. Indeed, in his very first week in office, Massie joined in the coup effort that nearly stripped Boehner of his speakership.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">T</font></span><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">he chaos now roiling the House is, in many ways, a battle between the two most powerful GOP party bosses – Karl Rove and Jim DeMint. For Rove, the activists of the Republican base have always been useful rubes. Republicans in the Rove school campaign on wedge issues that rally grassroots Republicans to the polls. But once these politicians get to Washington, they shift to fight for the interests of the party's financial backers. In the emerging party of DeMint, however, the base that Rove scorns is everything. Only the daily pressure of grassroots activists, DeMint believes, can force Republicans to deliver in Washington on the smallgovernment promises they make to their constituents back home.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These two schools of governing can't, ultimately, be reconciled. The DeMint school believes in combat, and in turning every possible government choke point into a high-stakes confrontation: You win by standing on principle, refusing to yield and letting the chips fall where they may. As Cruz put it to activists in Dallas, "If you have an impasse, one side or the other has to blink. How do we win? <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Don't blink.</em>"</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The elites have different agendas than the rank and file," says Bartlett, the former Reagan official. "Your average Tea Party people may be content to have gridlock forever, but the money people – the corporations, the lobbyists – they need stuff." And people in that camp have a lot riding on John Boehner and Eric Cantor.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boehner and Cantor have learned to speak the language of the Tea Party – the majority leader more fluently than the speaker – but their real job is to keep the old Republican-patronage machine humming. In their political bloodlines and in their donor networks, both Boehner and Cantor are deeply connected to the politics of Rove. Boehner's signature accomplishment was steering George W. Bush's education initiative No Child Left Behind to passage – a law that Needham decries as "a gargantuan federalization of education" and "an anathema to conservatives." For his part, Cantor was a key member of the 2003 Tom DeLay whip team that twisted arms in an infamous all-night session required to pass the deficit-financed Medicare prescription-drug plan, a Rove-driven gift to Big Pharma and the most sweeping expansion of the program since the days of Lyndon Johnson.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="inStoryLink" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-main-street-20100331" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Looting Main Street</font></a></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 0.9em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boehner is renowned as a "Chamber of Commerce Republican" – and the campaign-finance data are unambiguous: In the 2012 election cycle, Boehner was the House's top recipient of campaign cash from 34 different industries, from hedge funds and investment firms to coal mining, studentloan companies, hospitals, nursing homes and Big Tobacco. He was also the top recipient of campaign cash from lobbyists themselves, raking in $393,000 according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. In D.C., the speaker's clubby network of staffers and lobbyists is known as "Boehnerland," and its members include heavy hitters for Citigroup, UPS, Altria, AmEx, Akin Gump and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. "The Boehner folks barbecue on Sunday together, they go on vacations together, they name their kids after each other," says the former leadership aide....</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no links</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Incredible True Story of the Tea Party's Rise to Power</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>
</div><div>Authentic grassroots movement or corporate conspiracy? The answer: Both and neither.</div><div>
</div><div>OCT 30, <b>2015·</b> 29 MIN READ Kevin Baker is a journalist, novelist, and historian. He has contributed to Harper's Magazine for more than 20 years, and he is a winner of the American Book Award.</div><div>Bio</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>It started out on the prairie, just as the first populist movement did. Or, at least, in a city on the plain.</div><div>
</div><div>On the morning of Feb. 19, 2009, Rick Santelli, a former commodities trader and V.P. at Drexel Burnham Lambert, was feeling provoked by the Obama administration’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, a $75 billion proposal to reduce the monthly payments of the 9 million homeowners then facing foreclosure. It was Santelli’s job to get provoked; he had been working the same shtick at CNBC for 10 years, pumping himself into a high dudgeon over one thing or another.</div><div>
</div><div>Prompted by the CNBC anchors in New Jersey, Santelli, on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, looked up at the camera zooming in on him and accused the government of “promoting bad behavior” with the program. Then he sputtered out his belief that, instead of having to “subsidize the losers’ mortgages,” we should have a national referendum to ask if we should “buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to prosper down the road, and reward people that carry the water instead of drink the water.”</div><div>
</div><div>One of the traders at work next to Santelli, no doubt considering himself a “water carrier,” chimed in sardonically, “That’s a novel idea.” The remark was followed by a few scattered claps and whistles, leading one of the vastly amused studio hosts at CNBC to declare, “They’re like putty in your hands!”</div><div>
</div><div>Santelli then declared of the nearly empty trading floor, “This is America! These guys are…my guess is, a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority!” He “poll[ed]” the traders, most of whom didn’t appear to be listening: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” Rewarded with a smattering of boos, Santelli asked triumphantly, “President Obama, are you listening?”</div><div>
</div><div>He then informed viewers that the country was fast moving toward Cuba, where they “used to have mansions and a pretty good economy” but where “they moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.”</div><div>
</div><div>Told by a CNBC commentator he sounded like “a revolutionary leader,” Santelli embraced the role: “Somebody needs one. I’ll tell you what: If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson…what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.”</div><div>
</div><div>His call to arms, in the end, was the vague suggestion that “all you capitalists” have “a Chicago Tea Party in July,” where, he promised, “we’re going to be dumping in [to Lake Michigan] some derivative securities.”</div><div>
</div><div>Santelli’s rant, as it came to be known, like Paul Revere’s ride or Pickett’s charge, is almost baffling in how slight it really was relative to the influence it would project on history. It was the same old, same old toxic brew of downward class hatred, schadenfreude, and free-floating anger that has been a regular trope in right-wing politics for decades, combined with a willful naïveté about how the world works. It was standard, even comical, hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn stuff, little more than a checklist of your uncle’s post-Thanksgiving-dinner, fourth-Scotch tirade, right down to the bit about how Detroit hasn’t made a great car in 60 years (and what was the Mustang, Rick, chopped liver?).</div><div>
</div><div>But the rant’s timing was perfect: Fearmongering over the election of Barack Obama, who had been sworn in as president barely a month before, it was also a lightning bolt fired into a primordial soup of unprecedented economic anxiety. It turned out the revolution was televised, and it was about to go viral. Santelli’s rant would launch the movement that dominates American politics today: the Tea Party.</div><div>
</div><div>When Santelli did his thing, I thought…, ‘Wow, I gotta get in.’ It was kind of like the big bang.</div><div>
</div><div>MARK KEVIN LLOYD, FORMER SMALL BUSINESS OWNER AND EARLY TEA PARTY ORGANIZER</div><div>
</div><div>“When Santelli did his thing in February, I thought…, ‘Wow, I gotta get in,’ ” said Mark Kevin Lloyd, then a small businessman watching his firm dissolve. “It was kind of like the big bang. Once it came together, it started to take on a life of its own.”</div><div>
</div><div>“What set off what we now consider the Tea Party movement was certainly the Rick Santelli rant,” said <b>Sal Russo, </b>a longtime conservative political consultant in Washington and a former aide to Ronald Reagan.</div><div>
</div><div>Six years into its existence, the Tea Party continues to score tremendous and wholly unexpected victories, <b>ripping apart the leadership of the Republican House </b>majority and<b> hijacking the party’s presidential nominating process. </b>The Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives hastened the departure of Speaker John Boehner (after whipping his former No. 2, Eric Cantor, in a primary last year), and arrested the ascension of the next Republican in line, Rep. Kevin McCarthy—who had been considered a right-wing radical himself just a few short years ago.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The new speaker, Paul Ryan, granted the Freedom Caucus what was essentially veto power over his own election.</span></div><div>
</div><div>In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, meanwhile, Tea Party darlings such as Sen. Rand Paul and Gov. Scott Walker have floundered. But other Tea Party favorites, including Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and lately Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have been dominating the field and the conversation. They have—particularly Cruz—by and large championed the Tea Party’s desire to slash most or all discretionary federal spending; defund, repeal, and replace the Affordable Care Act; abolish most taxes and nearly all government regulations on business; end “corporate welfare”; move toward privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and not least, use whatever legal means necessary to achieve these goals, including shutting down the federal government.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>A look at the origins of the movement and its early leaders reveals it to be one of the most complex and obdurate political phenomena in our history. Whatever America’s future is to be in the 21st century, it will have to go through the Tea Party.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Tea Party adherents, and there are plenty of them—at least one-fifth and sometimes one-third of the electorate tell pollsters they support the Tea Party and/or its goals</span>—say that it has changed their lives and dismiss the idea that they joined up because of what any news network or billionaire had to say. They trace their conversions not from right-wing media, or some clever Washington lobbyist, but from the ideas promulgated by figures as diverse as Ron Paul and Glenn Greenwald, Frédéric Bastiat and Ronald Reagan. The Tea Party is a genuine grassroots movement, started and perpetuated by aroused citizens convinced that something has gone terribly wrong with their country. They have joined with like-minded friends and neighbors to set things right, just as the framers of our Constitution intended.</div><div>
</div><div><b>At the same time, the Tea Party is also a manufactured right-wing conspiracy, right down to its name; conceived, test-driven, and funded by the Koch brothers and their fellow plutocrats.</b></div><div>
</div><div>The Tea Party is both these things and neither. The Tea Party is an impulse. It is a reaction, a sentiment. It is an amazingly effective electoral tool. It is a diversion, a hobby, a reason to get up in the morning—just as politics has always been a pastime for a portion of the American people. It is a calling, it is a vocation, it is great good fun, and it is the long con.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Tea Party’s refusal ever to coalesce into an actual party, or even a single coherent movement, is the key to its power. Right now, the Tea Party sits on the political system like a giant ganglion, able to check its every movement without ever directly taking power. It is a brilliant political strategy, through which it has pushed American politics farther right than it has ever been.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It is also an incredible abrogation of responsibility. Refusal to become a formal political party enables the Tea Party to avoid dealing with the full multitude of issues party leaders must address, or making hard choices. The Tea Party never governs; it simply demands. The Tea Party is the politics of rejection, of the refusal to trust anyone or any institution. It is the politics America has been moving toward haltingly but continually, on both the left and the right, for more than half a century—a politics of purity, of fantasy, a politics of disgust and rejection.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The question this forces is how any republic, any modern democracy, can function when such a movement is driving the bus. We may be about to find out.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>A Shot Heard Round the Country</div><div>
</div><div>It is easy to see how the Tea Party’s birth spasms presaged the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the host of similar “outsiders” contending for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. (Santelli’s evocation of the Nixonian “silent majority” in his rant would even become a staple of Trump’s stump speeches.) Over the last month this Maoist guerrilla of a political movement—always eluding and counterpunching, refusing to be pinned down or cornered—has reduced the House of Representatives to something from “a banana republic,” according to one of its leaders, and is threatening to shut down the federal government for the second time in three years.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Rick Santelli, when he had his rant, he let it rip,” remembered Lloyd. “Which is the same thing Donald Trump does.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Lloyd had watched his well-drilling business, which employed 12 people, unwind with the housing market, and he was apprehensive about the size of President Obama’s proposed stimulus package.</div><div>
</div><div>“You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but you knew. All of a sudden there was this incredible clarity,” he said.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Calls to hold an actual tea party protest were soon ringing out all over the country—or at least the right-wing media. A clip of Santelli’s rant appeared almost immediately on The Drudge Report, and before the day was out, the libertarian lobbyist Eric Odom had registered the domain name officialchicagoteaparty.com. By the next day, the rant was all over Fox News, and<b> Odom had joined with FreedomWorks, an oil-funded lobbying group, and Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers, </b>to put up a Facebook page calling for nationwide demonstrations:</span></div><div>
</div><div>“Rick Santelli is dead right! Enough bailouts of everyone who acted recklessly! It’s time to stand up for all the regular people who play by the rules! Taxpayer Tea Party!”</div><div>
</div><div>So when critics say the Tea Party was hijacked by corporate money, it’s not exactly true—corporate money was there from day one.</div><div>
</div><div>People around the country heard the call. As chronicled by Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake, protests soon broke out in Cincinnati; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Feb. 27 saw tea parties outside the White House and in<b> eight</b> more cities<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, coordinated by John O’Hara of The Heartland Institute and J.P. Freire, then with The American Spectator, and apparently suggested by Tom Gaithens, a FreedomWorks “Minuteman</span>.” (Although, tellingly, Fox News would report that more than 40 cities held similar rallies that day, relying on a Tea Party source.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The claim lives on at Wikipedia.</span>)</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>(Map: TakePart)</div><div>
</div><div>“Folks rose up and came together and said, ‘OK, if we want to make a greater impact, we need a large, nationwide movement,’ ” remembered Matthew Hurtt, then a 22-year-old Republican Party activist in Nashville, Tennessee.</div><div>
</div><div>“It exploded the next weekend,” recalled Russo. April 15 brought a “Tax Day Tea Party” to an estimated 750 towns and cities across America, from East Hampton, New York, to Yakima, Washington. The event had been promoted robustly online, again by FreedomWorks but also by RFCRadio.com, assorted right-wing leaders, and Fox News, which dispatched hosts and commentators to rallies. Newt Gingrich told a crowd in New York to throw the bums out of Congress, while Gov. Rick Perry entertained a thousand protesters gathered in Dallas.</div><div>
</div><div>The biggest crowd seems to have been some 2,000 people who gathered in Houston, while most assemblies drew 200 to 500 individuals at most (though attendance figures for any Tea Party event are always a matter of fevered dispute). What they lacked in numbers, the Tea Partyers made up in media-friendly enthusiasm. They dressed in what would soon become familiar Revolutionary War reenactor outfits, draped tea bags from eyeglasses and umbrellas, carried “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and dumped a box of tea on the White House lawn (an anti-bomb robot had to be summoned to retrieve it).</div><div>
</div><div>Chronicle of a Tea Party Foretold</div><div>
</div><div>What Santelli had tapped into, whether he intended it or not, was a chronicle of a populist uprising foretold. The term “tea party,” and the idea of leveraging corporate money to get its interests reflected in the public discourse that FreedomWorks and AFP represented, went back much farther.</div><div>
</div><div>It may have begun with a once obscure, now underground legend of a document written by Lewis Powell in 1971, just before his nomination to the Supreme Court, as Jane Mayer noted in a 2010 article in The New Yorker exposing the Tea Party’s ties to the Koch brothers.</div><div>
</div><div>The Powell Memo, as it came to be known, was sort of Santelli’s rant on paper. Written for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Education Committee, it called on American business to mobilize politically and reassert its power, “aggressively and with determination…without the reluctance that has been so characteristic of American business.”</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>A man at a Tea Party rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House, April 15, 2009. (Photo: Jim Young/Reuters)</div><div>
</div><div><a href="http://law2.wlu.edu/powellarchives/page.asp?pageid=1251">http://law2.wlu.edu/powellarchives/page.asp?pageid=1251</a></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The memo was leaked to columnist Jack Anderson in 1972,</b> but corporate America had already got the message. From 1968 to 1978, the number of corporate public affairs offices in Washington, D.C., rose from 100 to more than 500, according to author David Vogel. The number of registered lobbyists grew from 175 in 1971 to almost 2,500 in 1982. Corporate PACs increased from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by 1980. Most important,<b> corporate lobbying money exploded,</b> increasing from an estimated $100 million in 1971 to more than $3.5 billion a year today.</span></div><div>
</div><div>In the vanguard of the rush to the barricades were the Koch brothers. In 1977, they began spending what would grow to more than $100 million—and perhaps three or four times that amount over the years since—on winning the ideas war through contributions to right-wing lobbying groups and think tanks.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The term “tea party” also has its origin with the Kochs. Mayer traced how, in 1980, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president, Ed Clark, announced that people of his political ilk would soon hold “a very big tea party” because they were so fed up with paying taxes. The vice president on Clark’s ticket: David Koch, who poured $2 million into the Libertarian effort that year.[ron paul 1988]</span></div><div>
</div><div>The Kochs tired of direct participation in electoral politics soon after but not of the Libertarian Party’s extreme laissez-faire vision for America (particularly as it affected Koch Industries). The Kochs went back, Mayer wrote, to funding “seemingly independent organizations.” These rapidly metastasized.</div><div>
</div><div>It was the Kochs who, in 1984, begat Citizens for a Sound Economy, which begat FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the leading sponsors and organizers of countless early Tea Party events.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">CSE opposed pretty much all taxes and government regulations on the industries that underwrote it. It received $7.9 million from the Kochs alone between 1986 and 1993, along with other considerable contributions from the oil, sugar, and tobacco industries. Big tobacco contributed at least $5.3 million to CSE between 1991 and 2002; individual corporate donors included General Electric, Exxon, Hertz, and Philip Morris.</span></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Appointed the first chairman of CSE was a 49-year-old former Libertarian and once and future Texas congressman named Ron Paul.</b></div><div>
</div><div>By 2002, although Paul had moved on, CSE had another idea for pushing its program: a “U.S. Tea Party project.” Its website featured a page that called for “another symbolic protest in the best tradition of our Founding Fathers.” It claimed that “our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.”</div><div>
</div><div>Then, on Dec. 16, 2007, the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Paul’s presidential campaign held a fund-raiser in Boston. The rally was replete with protesters in full Minuteman garb and even a fife and drum corps. Some 400 supporters of the candidate met on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston, then marched through the snow to Faneuil Hall, where they listened to speeches from Paul’s son Rand, and similar speakers. Out of respect for environmental regulations, the revolutionaries did not dump any tea in Boston Harbor but, The Boston Globe reported, tossed “banners that read ‘tyranny’ and ‘no taxation without representation’ into boxes that were placed in front of an image of the harbor.’ ”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>(Map: TakePart)</div><div>
</div><div>The Grassroots Movement</div><div>
</div><div>The Boston march attracted the attention of Patrick Bailey, then a student at Georgia Tech. Bailey would be one of many younger recruits to the Tea Party from what he described as the “left,” or at least a sort of lefty libertarianism. He had begun to question, as a summer student in Barcelona, Spain, in 2006, the traditional conservative views he’d been brought up with. He started “reading a lot of Glenn Greenwald,” he said, but was attracted to the “ideological consistency” of Ron Paul.</div><div>
</div><div>As conservative columnist and Fox News contributor <b>Michelle Malkin </b>would point out, the Tea Party was far from being a bunch of Koch brothers drones, no matter how much money the billionaires spent. It had its own grassroots appeal, drawing thousands of regular Americans into political activism for the first time and building its own political culture. But it didn’t take long for the Koch brothers’ Astroturf organizations to recognize their low-tax, lax-regulation agenda in the new movement and see an opportunity to leverage it. Perhaps aware that people were becoming hip to their earlier methods of buying influence, the Kochs and their spokespeople made a pro forma denial that they “in any way direct [the Tea Party’s] activities” or fund them. David Koch told New York magazine, “I’ve never been to a tea party event. No one representing the tea party has ever approached me.”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet it was easy for Jane Mayer to demonstrate that the Kochs’ fingerprints were all over it. Verification came willingly, even gleefully, from their own employees: Peggy Venable</span>, a paid operative for the Koch-created Americans for Prosperity, announced at a training session for the Tea Party in 2010, “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” She went on to spell out how AFP intended to train and educate Tea Partyers and had provided them with lists of public officials to be targeted for defeat that November.</div><div>
</div><div>The movement was made a reality by, among others, an obscure Kentucky radio host who got listeners to ship 1,500 bags of pork rinds to Sen. Chuck Schumer. Then there was the plucky, decidedly un-corporate Keli Carender, aka “Liberty Belle”—a young Seattle schoolteacher and former actor whom Malkin described not inaccurately as “a young conservative mom who blogs” and who had begun organizing her own antitax “Porkulus Protests” weeks before Santelli’s rant.</div><div>
</div><div>Down in the trenches—or down in your neighborhood—the Tea Party wasn’t a hired congressman or a Washington lobbyist but your friend and neighbor, other “liberty-minded people,” as Waverly Woods, at the time the owner of three tanning salons in Virginia Beach, Virginia, described them to TakePart.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>Adam Brandon is president and CEO of FreedomWorks, an oil industry–funded lobbying group founded by former House Speaker Dick Armey that called for demonstrations against a 2009 Obama administration program intended to help people stay in their homes. Sal Russo, a longtime Republican political consultant, helped organized such rallies. Mark Kevin Lloyd's business was a victim of the housing bust; Lloyd got involved in the Tea Party after seeing Rick Santelli's rant. Today he is chair of the Virginia Tea Party Federation. Matthew Hurtt was a Republican Party activist in Tennessee in 2009 who organized disruptions of town halls held that year by Democratic members of Congress; he now works for a political data provider in Washington, D.C. Waverly Woods, whose tanning salon business was hit hard by an Affordable Care Act tax on such establishments, chaired two Tea Party chapters in Virginia before taking a job at The Leadership Institute, which trains conservative activists. (Photos: Twitter; Getty Images; YouTube; Twitter; Reuters)</div><div>
</div><div>“How do I get my legislator on the phone? The Tea Party tells you how,” explained Woods, an exuberant single mother in her mid-40s who tried the Republican Party and Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Patriots before discovering the Tea Party. “It teaches you how to find your legislator and how to get him on the phone. Here’s how you write an e-mail to him, and here’s what you say. You know, here are the talking points. Put it in your own words. We don’t feed people their opinions, we give everybody the facts, so that you can make your own opinion.”</div><div>
</div><div>Woods, who served as chair of both the Virginia Beach and the Hampton Roads chapters of the Tea Party before becoming a member of the board of the statewide Virginia Tea Party Federation, claimed to have helped bring out “thousands of people” for a Tea Party rally but mostly enjoyed the regular meetings of her local organizations, which drew “at least 70 people” every month. As Woods’ tanning salons succumbed to the Affordable Care Act’s tax on such facilities (as nearly 10,000 such businesses have, nationwide) the Tea Party offered a new venue of activity, a place to debate, to meet others. To organize.</div><div>
</div><div>Tea Party activists come across as affable, friendly individuals, even over the phone. Their fervor and their love of country are palpable. They are engaged and committed in an increasingly cynical and indifferent political landscape.</div><div>
</div><div>The local chapters would become one of the two enduring bonds that keep the Tea Party together. There are more than 40 of them in Virginia today, with roughly 75 to 100 members apiece. “The only requirement is that [attendees] have to be more than “a complaint coffee club,” according to Lloyd, now 55, who has served as chairman of his local Lynchburg chapter and is in his second tour as chairman of the Virginia federation.</div><div>
</div><div>The other bond is the Internet. “I would probably say [the Tea Party] was the first major social movement that happened on Facebook and Twitter,” said Adam Brandon, communications director of FreedomWorks at the start of the Tea Party movement. Lloyd concurred: “If Facebook went away, I do believe the Tea Party movement would disappear.”</div><div>
</div><div>Just whom one is likely to meet at a Tea Party meeting tends to confirm the suspicions of those who see the movement as simply a rebranding of the right wing of your already right-wing Republican Party. Numerous polls and surveys have found that Tea Partyers tend to be men 50 or older. Unlike the starving farmers of Texas or Kansas who made up the original Populist movement 140 years ago, they are likely to have above-average incomes and educations. They are also overwhelmingly white Republicans from suburban or rural communities who are much more conservative, much more pessimistic about the future of this country, and much more angry at Barack Obama than the rest of their party.</div><div>
</div><div>Lloyd concedes most of this but insists that in Virginia, at least, a chapter leader is most likely to be “a 60-year-old woman, who is probably still working.” The idea that the Tea Party is mostly white, he claims in the face of all available evidence, is “the biggest misnomer out there.” If “you go to Texas, you have whole Tea Parties that are Hispanic…. Here in Virginia, we have some great Hispanic folks.”</div><div>
</div><div>“We have black people; we have Asian people,” said Woods. Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians are all represented at Tea Party gatherings, she claimed.</div><div>
</div><div>Ideologically, most Tea Partyers are hard right on issues of defense, foreign policy, and most social issues. But after some bruising early fights with some whom Lloyd characterized as “hard-core libertarians,” Tea Partyers have tended to narrow their official positions to issues of “big government” alone. This has become one of the keys to their power.</div><div>
</div><div>“As long as they’re for limited government, fiscal responsibility, constitutional adherence, and holding our elected officials accountable,” anyone is welcome at a chapter meeting, according to Lloyd.</div><div>
</div><div>“[A Tea Partyer is] just your average citizen that is tired of the egregious intrusion of government. And they are very strong constitutionalists,” said Woods. “They definitely believe if it’s not in the Constitution, you shouldn’t be doing it.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>(Map: TakePart)</div><div>
</div><div>What this means is that TARP is the government “picking winners” and “corporate welfare,” Lloyd said. It would have been better for the federal government to let the world’s financial system collapse than prop up Wall Street in 2008. The stimulus was a wasteful mistake that did nothing to help end the recession. Obamacare was an egregious overstepping of government’s proper role, “unelected bureaucrats” running amok, according to Matthew Hurtt. His main intellectual influence, the 19th-century French free trade absolutist Frédéric Bastiat, wrote that a government engaged in anything beyond protecting each individual’s “person, his liberty, and his property” was taking part in “legalized plunder”—which Hurtt also believes to his core. Some of the other things Tea Partyers told me were that the 2008 financial crisis occurred because of “the government saying, ‘You must lend money to individuals who definitely will not be able to pay it back’ ” (Hurtt). Also that the military has been dangerously hollowed out because the “president wants to make us a third world country” (Woods). Social Security is telling “people the year they should be retiring” (Bailey), and “there are thousands” of Muslim refugees who have been brought to the U.S., so many that at the Mall of America, “if you are not a Muslim…, it’s dangerous for you” (Lloyd).</div><div>
</div><div>This is not a movement prone to mincing words.</div><div>
</div><div>First Actions</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the summer of 2009, the Tea Party would test its strength voicing opposition to <b>Obamacare. Supporters flooded town hall </b>meetings called by Democratic Congress members to explain the plan. This was, again, hardly spontaneous. Their appearances and tactics were coordinated by websites such as that of Tea Party Patriots, another somewhat mysterious, supposedly grassroots group inspired by Santelli’s rant (though funded by a $1 million anonymous gift), </span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-09-21/tea-party-patriots-to-hand-out-1-million-for-november-election-spending</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">which urged them, ThinkProgress reported, to “pack the hall” and to make “short intermittent shout outs. The purpose is to make [the representative] uneasy early on.… The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout and sit right down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Tea Partyers took these directions to heart, disrupting proceedings again and again by standing suddenly to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, sing patriotic songs, scream, boo, and shout down representatives with denunciations of “socialized medicine” or the infamous “death panels.”</div><div>
</div><div>Hurtt, who had just moved to northern Virginia to become a full-time conservative activist, went to a town hall deliberately trying to provoke his new Democratic representative, Jim Moran, who, Hurtt said, “was very well known in this area as a short-tempered hothead.” Hurtt was “honestly shocked that members of Congress were still taking part in [the town hall meetings]” because it was so easy to disrupt them.</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s the first time conservatives realized they could go out and be in your face,” said Hurtt. “You know, the left is…good at this sort of activism.” He took many of his cues from Confrontational Politics, a manual of disruption penned by Gun Owners of America founder and former California state Sen. L. “Bill” Richardson. “Conservatives—what I’ve seen and what I’ve been told, and what I’ve noticed is—are largely uncomfortable with that sort of thing.… And this was their first opportunity to do that. So, it was disruptive and loud.”</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>These Democratic members of Congress all saw town hall events, which they called in 2009 to answer questions from constituents, disrupted by Tea Party activists. All five were voted out by 2014. (Photos: Wikipedia; Wikipedia; Getty Images; Wikipedia; Wikipedia)</div><div>
</div><div>When Moran and his guest, 2004 presidential candidate and onetime Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, attempted to answer written questions from the audience, Hurtt and his companions shouted them down. When asked if this didn’t make for an ugly scene, Hurtt, who can be almost achingly earnest talking about the need to take care of poor and outcast Americans of all kinds, talked about the Chicago community organizer who was an early influence on Barack Obama.</div><div>
</div><div>“Saul Alinsky talks about the haves and have-nots. So the have-nots must insert themselves in a way that tends to be more aggressive than the haves,” said Hurtt, redefining Alinsky’s have-nots as “the people who want to limit government.”</div><div>
</div><div>Elsewhere, dozens of raging sign-carrying protesters confronted Democrats such as Bruce Braley of Iowa and longtime Florida incumbent Allen Boyd. Tim Bishop, a veteran incumbent from Long Island, canceled his town halls—which he had been holding since 2002—after Tea Party protesters broke up his public meetings, shouting insults at him over not only Obamacare but also his positions on matters from energy policy to the bailout of the auto industry. In the end, Bishop had to be escorted to his car by police past the furious demonstrators. Rep. Dan Maffei, a freshman Democrat, also needed police intervention to restore order when his town hall meeting at a Syracuse middle school was broken up by a Tea Party mob.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lloyd, by summer 2009 fully engaged in electoral politics, led his own mob to disrupt the town meetings of freshman Democratic Rep. Thomas Perriello, whom Lloyd still delights in calling “Little Tommy the commie.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Mike Troxel, a Tea Party organizer in Lynchburg, posted what he thought was Perriello’s address on his blog, “just in case any of his friends and neighbors want to drop by and say hi and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Troxel, a 2005 graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, said of the posting, “I was a journalism major in college, so I have every reason to believe my research is accurate.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>Troxel had mistakenly posted the address of Perriello’s brother, where he lived with his four children, all under the age of eight, and his wife. Someone cut the line of the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">house’s propane tank under cover of night.</span> Troxel was nonetheless largely supported by the Lynchburg Tea Party, which subsequently made him its vice president.</div><div>
</div><div>The violent intimidation that occurred at the 2009 town halls was reminiscent of the melee in Miami when authorities were trying to count votes in the 2000 presidential election. GOP operatives, many of them congressional staffers, were bused down from Washington; “several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections,” The New York Times reported, and the canvassing board subsequently decided to halt the count.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Perriello lost his congressional sea in 2010. Maffei lost his reelection bid by nearly 20 points. By 2014, all of the Tea Party targets mentioned above had been voted out of Congress, save for Moran, who retired, and Braley, who ran for Senate and was trounced by Tea Partyer Joni Ernst, best known for her ads trumpeting her skill at castrating hogs.</span></div><div>
</div><div>No way, shape, or form do I believe [President Obama] loves this country. Or Americans. He sabotages this country at every turn. Every opportunity.</div><div>
</div><div>WAVERLY WOODS, AN EARLY TEA PARTY ACTIVIST WHO NOW WORKS AT THE <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE</span></div><div>
</div><div>The Tea Party Goes to Washington</div><div>
</div><div>After shutting down the town halls, it was time for the Tea Party to find its way to Washington, the signal that any political movement has arrived. On Sept. 12, 2009, an estimated 75,000 thousand supporters gathered at the National Mall, the culmination of a Taxpayer March on Washington.</div><div>
</div><div>Bringing the movement to the capital is a long tradition in American populist politics, beginning with Coxey’s Army, a Populist offshoot that managed to wrangle maybe 2,000 unemployed men to Washington in 1894. They started a legacy of meeting in the capital that would come to include every sort of popular movement, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Nation of Islam and most famously the Bonus Army of 1932 and the civil rights March on Washington of 1963.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>T<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">he Taxpayer March on Washington was organized by Matt Kibbe, a former CSE activist who would move on to FreedomWorks. </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Many participants were attracted by a 34-city, 7,000-mile promotional bus tour put together by Sal Russo’s Tea Party Express PAC. Other Tea Party groups backed by major political players and corporate money played major roles in sponsoring the rallies, including the 9/12 Project; the National Taxpayers Union, an antitax lobby group founded in 1969 by a private investor; The Heartland Institute, today the primary vehicle for oil-industry-funded climate change denial; Americans for Tax Reform; ResistNet (soon to become the Patriot Action Network); and Americans for Prosperity.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">For a rally held by a populist uprising, the Taxpayer March featured a surprising number of incumbent members of Congress—all of them Republicans—including Mike <b>Pence, </b>Marsha Blackburn,<b> Tom Price, and Jim DeMint.</b></span><b> The grand convocation—and other, smaller Tea Party rallies around the country—received lavish coverage from Fox News and right-wing radio-talk-show hosts.</b></div><div>
</div><div><b>Also addressing the crowd was former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, </b>whose presence seemed to embody all the contradictions of the Tea Party. Armey served 18 years in the House, including eight as majority leader. He resigned in 2003 to take a lucrative position with the multinational law firm and Washington influence shop DLA Piper—currently the third-largest law firm by revenue in the United States and a major inside-the-beltway player, just the sort of wheeling-and-dealing establishment entity the Tea Party claims to detest. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Armey became cochair of CSE, from which he promptly spun off FreedomWorks the next year, giving himself the top job. That paid him $500,000 a year along with first-class air travel around the United States, over and above his lobbying salary</span>. (Adam Brandon insisted to TakePart that FreedomWorks was always “a grassroots group.”)</div><div>
</div><div>Lloyd remembered that first Washington rally fondly: “We all got along. Everybody was kind to everybody else. The anger and frustration had a target.”</div><div>
</div><div>That target tended to be, for the most part, the president of the United States, depicted in the now infamous posters as Hitler or the Joker. It was an early manifestation of the highly personalized contempt and loathing most Tea Partyers hold for President Obama. Tea Partyers don’t much like high-spending, deficit-running George W. Bush, but Barack Obama, many are convinced, is simply not a legitimate president and more likely a malevolent Islamic agent of some sort.</div><div>
</div><div>“No way, shape, or form do I believe that man loves this country. Or Americans. He sabotages this country at every turn. Every opportunity,” said Waverly Woods.</div><div>
</div><div>Lloyd thinks the 2008 election was celebrated by “the bad guys” in Iraq because they believed “[President Obama] was sympathetic to the extremist Muslim convictions, which he has turned out to be” by “allowing” some “nefarious things going on with Islamic groups,” such as getting money and arms to Hamas.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Even Sal Russo was disappointed when John McCain, in his 2008 campaign, corrected those supporters who told him that President Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist: “He kept chastising people, saying, ‘Oh, don’t say that; he’s a fine person.’ All that might be true, but in a campaign you gotta paint a contrast. You gotta be talking about all your differences.…”</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>A few months after the Washington march, the Tea Party would score its first great electoral victory, in a special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts left open by the death of<b> Ted Kennedy.</b> There could hardly have been a less likely venue for the insurgent movement than a statewide race in deep blue Massachusetts, which had given Barack Obama nearly 62 percent of its vote just the year before and which did not have a single Republican in its congressional delegation. But once again, the Tea Party’s elite, establishment advisers rallied: Sal Russo was struck by the polls showing an obscure but charismatic state legislator named Scott Brown in striking distance of Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley, who was running a campaign Homeric in its ineptitude.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Tea Party Express poured ads into national cable TV in support of <b>Brown.</b> The ads, Russo said, “created a spontaneous explosion of interest in the race.” The cash and the Tea Party volunteers who followed led to Brown’s upset in January 2010. The victory deprived Democrats of their 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority and seriously threatened passage of President Obama’s health care plan.</span></div><div>
</div><div>“It motivated people to say, ‘OK, enough of this protest stuff—let’s get busy and get working,’ ” recounted Russo.</div><div>
</div><div>Democrats should have seen what was coming. All through 2010, insurgent Tea Party Republican candidates scored one stunning upset after another. They took the party nomination away from such prominent Senate incumbents as Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, and Bob Bennett in Utah; drove establishment Republican Gov. Charlie Crist right out of the party in Florida; and nominated outsiders in their place.</div><div>
</div><div>Some liberal commentators took this as evidence that the Tea Party would soon break apart the Republicans. It was, instead, proof that Tea Partyers, for all that they claimed to despise the wicked Washington ways of both major parties, had committed themselves exclusively to the GOP. Far from becoming a third-party splinter, the Tea Party had decided, as Hurtt put it, to serve “as the conscience of the conservative wing of the Republican party primarily.”</div><div>
</div><div>“No matter how you feel about third parties in America, the infrastructure is so deep that…it’s actually easier to move this agenda and our value system by taking over the Republican Party,” said Adam Brandon. Or as Woods put it, “Our mission is not to destroy the Republican Party but to redeem it.”</div><div>
</div><div>“I think we have a system where…it’s a two-party system. It rarely allows for other parties to get much coverage or to get into the debate,” Hurtt explained. “I encourage grassroots, conservative activists to hold Republicans accountable. I think that’s where they can be the most effective.”</div><div>
</div><div>The lack of a formal party structure and leaders allowed Tea Partyers to avoid having to take a stand on any of the issues that promised to split them.</div><div>
</div><div>“When you start getting into whether we should have invaded Iraq or not, what should we do about gay marriage, that’s where it starts to splinter,” Brandon candidly admitted.</div><div>
</div><div>“I’m a door-to-door vacuum salesman; why would I also try to sell you knives?” asked Hurtt. “We’re not talking about issues that are not relative, or not related to spending.”</div><div>
</div><div>The question arises of how a political party primarily concerned with the trespasses of intrusive government could avoid the issues of, say, gay marriage or abortion rights or marijuana use. Or how a party so concerned with spending could avoid talking about a military budget that constitutes more than half of all federal discretionary spending.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet it proved a winning strategy. Powered by Tea Party passion and participation, in November 2010, Republicans swept to one of the greatest midterm election victories in U.S. history. Any remaining agenda President Obama might have had was deep-sixed.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The well-organized Republicans, in their hundreds of Tea Party chapters, also won races on levels the disenchanted or indifferent Democratic base didn’t bother to pay attention to. They captured six governorships, giving Republicans a total of 29 nationwide, and took control of 26 state legislatures. In all, Republicans took 680 state legislative seats, the largest number ever gained by an American political party in a midterm election, breaking the record of 628 set by the Democrats right after Watergate.</div><div>
</div><div>(Somewhere, Lewis Powell was smiling.)</div><div>
</div><div>It was the end of the beginning. A “euphoric” Brandon, celebrating in the wee small hours after the great victory, told reporters, “The Tea Party is done with street protests. We’re done—that’s it. Now we’ve got Congress.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>(Map: TakePart)</div><div>
</div><div>He would prove prophetic. Except for occasional, limited rallies, the Tea Party would mostly disappear from the street. Its professionalization proceeded at a rapid pace. Unlike any national institutions on the liberal side, the Tea Party followed a long right-wing tradition in erecting a vocational infrastructure that its members could climb as surely as ward heelers had climbed the old political machines of American urban yore. One by one, the insurgents moved into the sorts of full-time political positions—often remunerative ones—that they had once claimed to despise.</div><div>
</div><div>Lloyd became a full-time political consultant, “doing grassroots efforts to push state and federal legislation.” Waverly Woods would become a Ron Paul delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention. Though enraged by the unfair treatment she felt that Paul delegates received at the convention, she took a job as a donor relations officer at the right-wing Leadership Institute, from which over the years have graduated the likes of Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Mitch McConnell. Matthew Hurtt, after rejecting ideas of becoming a teacher or a lawyer, also went to The Leadership Institute, and worked for four years at Response America, a political direct marketing firm. Patrick Bailey, just 30, would leave a job crunching financial figures for S&P Capital IQ on Wall Street to happily crunch numbers in Washington for “a large political data provider.” Brandon became president and CEO of FreedomWorks.</div><div>
</div><div>Thanks to their 2010 victories in so many state races that Democrats ignored, Republicans were able to pass the voter suppression laws and draw the gerrymandered districts that contributed to their winning in 2014 their largest House majority since 1928 and capturing the Senate as well. On the state level, Republicans flipped 11 more state legislative chambers to the GOP, for control of 69 of the 99 in the country.</div><div>
</div><div>The results gave the Republicans far and away more state legislators and more control over state governments than at anytime since the 1920s. But the Republican Party of the ’20s included plenty of establishment moderates and Bull Moose Progressives—often more liberal than anyone in American politics today.</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, the Tea Party and its confederates have succeeded in electing the most right-wing governments in American state and congressional history. This renders mostly moot the debate over whether or not it is a grassroots phenomenon. It is the grassroots now—the culture out of which America’s future leaders will come.</div><div>
</div><div><b>“You’re starting to see that farm team [in the state legislatures] grow to a point where even if we lose individual battles, I really feel we’re winning the long war,”</b> said Brandon.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>(Map: TakePart)</div><div>
</div><div>What the Future Holds</div><div>
</div><div>To the Tea Party mind, there is nothing that cannot be solved by economic growth or government deregulation. This single-minded conviction is reflected in how the Tea Partyers assert their will through the Congress they largely control.</div><div>
</div><div>No Tea Party leader will admit that government has any role to play in almost any sphere save the military or law enforcement—a belief that has not existed in such numbers in the United States since probably at least the 1890s and perhaps not since before the Civil War. Brandon, asked about Tea Party stances on social and foreign policy issues, replied, “A strong domestic U.S. economy is critical to being strong in the world. A healthy economy—statistics show, when the economy is growing and it’s healthy, you’re going to have, say, less abortions, and it’s going to be easier to have a family.… The economy is good for just about every one of these social issues. No matter where you stand.”</div><div>
</div><div>Bailey expects to see Republicans make major gains across the country in 2016. “People are tired of the government interfering in their lives in completely arbitrary, inappropriate, and unnecessary manners,” he said. “If people are moving toward a more progressive direction, it’s in those areas where they overlap with libertarian goals, such as marriage, marijuana, and criminal justice reform, etc.”</div><div>
</div><div>Hurtt speaks movingly of micro-lending and conservative programs to avert prison time for nonviolent offenders, of trying to build up small black- owned businesses and going “into communities who haven’t heard the message or may have been scared by the left of our message, and go in with a message of compassion and limited government, and talk to people, and listen.” He speaks of the drive people have to emigrate and make a better life for their families in America—even if they do so illegally—as “awesome” and something he “want[s] to champion.” He talks of caring for the sick as “a moral obligation” for conservatives.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Unable to break through as a third party, the original Populists let themselves be pulled into the Democratic Party by William Jennings Bryan</b>, with his promises of a reform crusade. That ensured that the Populists’ DNA was preserved in the body politic and committed them to dealing with the whole messy business of the world. From their willingness to take on that reality would flow the reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society—the creation of modern America with all of its widespread prosperity, its benefits and rights that we have come to take for granted.</div><div>
</div><div>All those efforts are what the Tea Party insists on repealing. The heart of the Tea Party is not just in the Revolutionary War uniforms but the actual revolution. The Tea Partyers claim to hold the highest admiration for the Constitution it brought into being, which is entirely admirable. The American Revolution was indeed a seminal event in human history, and the experiment in democracy it birthed changed the world in all sorts of positive ways.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>What Tea Partyers will not see is what a messy, compromised business the creation of the country, and the Constitution itself, was. Or how flexible a document that Constitution proved to be—had to be to accommodate our incredibly complex, modern, powerful nation of more than 320 million souls, as opposed to the 3 million or so, mostly English colonists and their slaves, clutching the eastern rim of the continent.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet the Tea Party’s single-mindedness has proved to be enormously effective. At the moment, there does not seem to be a countervailing force anywhere in our society with the conviction or the ability to stop it.</div><div>
</div><div>The Democratic Party may be able to retain the presidency next year, but because the Democrats have no chance of winning back Congress, said president will be unable to deliver any agenda—and a political party that cannot deliver anything is one in serious trouble. As Matthew Yglesias wrote recently for Vox—and as I wrote in The New York Times last fall—the Democratic Party is already listing badly. In large swaths of the country, it is simply ceasing to exist, on every level.</div><div>
</div><div>In part this is because the Democrats’ activist base today is a farce, when compared with the well-organized clubs of the Tea Party. Black Lives Matter shoved around the most liberal presidential candidate in a generation. Occupy Wall Street invented the human microphone. The Tea Party took Congress. Who would you put your money on?</div><div>
</div><div>In part it’s also because the establishment, in both parties, now makes about as much sense as the Tea Party. Faced with decades of declining wages and opportunities for most Americans, an increasingly lawless corporate and financial elite, and a potential environmental catastrophe, all that the “responsible” people in power can muster is more mumblings about the importance of education—the cost of which is bankrupting college grads everywhere.</div><div>
</div><div>If this is all the establishment can come up with, it’s no wonder that the Tea Party’s solution has such appeal: Stay away from our money, and leave us alone.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet every American political coalition contains the seeds of its own demise, and the greatest threat to the Tea Party may well come from its closest allies. While the Tea Partyers may have agreed not to talk about social issues amongst themselves, it’s not at all clear that the Republican Party’s evangelicals are willing to do the same. We may be at the start of a presidential race in which Ben Carson and Donald Trump, or maybe Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, square off as surrogates for, respectively, the fundamentalist Christian and Tea Party wings of the GOP.</div><div>
</div><div>Already, the House Freedom Caucus is facing considerable pushback from establishment Republicans and their moneyed supporters. If it is to retain its power, the Tea Party will probably not be able to avoid choosing a foreign policy, a process that will be immediately divisive. And if history is any guide, it’s likely to find enormous general resistance to its ideas about privatizing entitlements.</div><div>
</div><div>Like the Founding Fathers, Tea Partyers are liable to discover that in many ways, the revolution was the easy part.</div><div>
</div><div>“The people in those crowds, they’re not bad people. They’re everyday Americans,” Lloyd said, remembering the Tea Partyers who first crashed the town hall meetings and gathered on the Washington Mall. “They love this country, and they have that fear and anxiety that what’s happening to this country is wrong. It’s destroying everything that we love about it. And…that fear and anxiety creates a real negative thing. It’s destructive.”</div><div>
</div><div><a href="http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/10/30/tea-party-history">http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/10/30/tea-party-history</a></div></div><div><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://news.vice.com/story/the-tea-party-is-now-the-trump-party</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Goodbye, Tea <span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">Party</span></font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hello, Trump Party</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party is now the Trump Party</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Alex Thompson on Nov 1, 2016 </font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the tea party movement came to prominence in the summer of 2009, adherents proclaimed they were guided by conservative principles forgotten in the big-spending years of George W. Bush. Republicans who didn’t adhere to their strict ideological interpretation of the Constitution were labeled RINOs (Republicans in name only). The tea partiers’ stubborn demands and obstructionism so exasperated President Obama in 2011 that he snapped, “Can they say yes to anything?”</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In 2016 after a divisive GOP primary, the tea party vote has unified behind nominee Donald Trump, even though he in many ways defies the ideological purity that once defined the movement. But Trump and his big-government populism isn’t just winning their votes; he’s also winning their donations, a sign that the money behind the movement will remain a force in American politics long after Election Day.</b></font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new analysis provided exclusively to VICE News confirms that<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> since Trump began soliciting donations in May, tea party donors have been propelling his campaign. According to Crowdpac, a nonpartisan political crowdfunding startup,<b> more than 6,400 of Trump’s financial backers previously gave to one of the six main tea party PACs since 2009, more than any other candidate in the race including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a favorite of the movement.</b></span></font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since Trump was initially self-funding his campaign, he did not start raising money until nearly a year after declaring his candidacy. Despite the late start, Trump has raised more money overall from more tea party donors than any other candidate. Over 20 percent of donors to the tea party PACs have given to Trump, pouring $8.3 million into his campaign through the end of September, besting his 2016 rivals.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party has now officially become the Trump Party</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s financial backers are also the most partisan major-party donors in recent history. Crowdpac quantifies where the candidate falls along the ideological spectrum by sorting through the donors’ past political-giving practices. If a candidate mostly receives donations from people who give money to both parties, the candidate’s score will reflect a moderate ideology (about a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10).</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Most presidential candidates expand their donor base after clinching the nomination, but Trump’s donor base has instead gone further to the right.</b> On a 1-10 scale with 1 being most liberal and 10 being most conservative, Trump currently is at 8.3. By contrast, Ronald Reagan measured 7.3.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Based on the flow of campaign dollars, what mattered to the conservative movement in 2009 may no longer apply. The Tea Party has now officially become the Trump Party.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s ability to galvanize these grassroots donors extends beyond his own candidacy. Surveying all of the country’s congressional races, the candidate with donors most like Trump’s was Paul Nehlen, last summer’s conservative challenger to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The money devoted to oust Ryan reflects how much Trump has changed the tea party. In 2010, Ryan was a rising star in the conservative movement, proposing an ambitious and controversial overhaul of the government program Medicare and repeatedly criticizing the Obama administration for the ballooning debt.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now the tea party is supporting a candidate who says Medicare and Social Security should not be reformed or overhauled. Trump doesn’t specify how he would pay for his expensive policy proposals. When Trump and Ryan clashed this election year over everything from policy proposals to a video featuring Trump bragging about groping women, the grassroots often sided with Trump. At an event in his home state of Wisconsin, Ryan was booed for disinviting Trump after the video leaked to the press. And a crowd at a recent Trump rally in Green Bay chanted “Paul Ryan sucks.”</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given Trump’s takeover of the tea party, how will the GOP move forward after Election Day if he loses? A much-buzzed-about article in the conservative magazine Commentary in October laid out one path. “Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed,” Noah Rothman argued, adding, “Trumpism exists at odds with conservatism.” It would seem that many conservatives disagree.</font></p><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" line-height="line-height" em="em" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 344.859px 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/books/strangers-their-own-land-anger-and-loss-among-tea-partiers-and-trump-supporters">http://www.alternet.org/books/strangers-their-own-land-anger-and-loss-among-tea-partiers-and-trump-supporters</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">... I</font><span style="line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">d first seen Mike Schaff months earlier standing at the microphone at an environmental rally on the steps of the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge, his voice cracking with emotion. He had been a victim of one of the strangest, literally earth-shaking environmental disasters in the nation, one that robbed him of his home and community—a sinkhole that devoured hundred-foot-tall trees and turned forty acres of swamp upside down, as I shall describe. That raised a big question in my mind. The disaster had been caused by a lightly regulated drilling company. But as a Tea Party advocate, Mike had hailed government deregulation of all sorts, as well as drastic cuts in government spending—including that for environmental protection. How could he be both near tears to recall his lost home and also call for a world stripped of most government beyond the military and hurricane relief? I was puzzled. I sensed a wall between us.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Empathy Walls</font></strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You might say I’d come to Louisiana with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me. An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’d asked Mike Schaff to show me where he’d grown up because I wanted to understand, if I could, how he saw the world. By way of introduction, I’d told him, “I’m from Berkeley, California, a sociologist, and I am trying to understand the deepening divide in our country. So I’m trying to get out of my political bubble and get to know people in yours.” Mike nodded at the word “divide,” then quipped, “Berkeley? So y’all must be <em>communist</em>!” He grinned as if to say, “We Cajuns can laugh, hope you can.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He wasn’t making it hard. A tall, strongly built man in tan-rimmed glasses, he spoke succinctly, in a low near mumble, and was given both to soulful, sometimes self-deprecating, reflection and stalwart Facebook proclamations. Explaining his background, he said, “My mom was Cajun and my dad was German. We Cajuns call ourselves coon asses. So since I was half Cajun, and half German, my mom called me half-ass.” We laughed. Mike was one of seven children his dad had raised on a plumber’s wage. “We didn’t know we were poor,” he said, a refrain I would hear often among those I came to know on the far right, speaking of their own or their parents’ childhoods. Mike had an engineer’s eye, a sportsman’s love of fish and game, and a naturalist’s ear for the call of a tree frog. I didn’t know any members of the Tea Party, not to really talk to, and he didn’t know many people like me. “I’m pro-life, pro-gun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit so long as we don’t hurt others. And I’m anti–big government,” Mike said. “Our government is way too big, too greedy, too incompetent, too bought, and it’s not ours anymore. We need to get back to our local communities, like we had at Armelise. Honestly, we’d be better off.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not only have the country’s two main political parties split further apart on such issues, but political feeling also runs deeper than it did in the past. In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, <em>partyism</em>, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When Americans moved in the past, they left in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, or milder weather. But according to <b><em>The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart</em> by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing</b>, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust there. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A group of libertarian Texans have bought land in the salt flats east of El Paso, named it Paulville, and reserved it for enthusiastic “freedom-loving” followers of Ron Paul. And the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become. According to a 2014 Pew study of over 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the “other party” not just as wrong, but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Compared to the past, each side also increasingly gets its news from its own television channel— the right from Fox News, the left from MSNBC. And so the divide widens. We live in what the </span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Yorker</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> has called the “Tea Party era.” Some 350,000 people are active members, but, according to another Pew poll, some 20 percent of Americans—45 million people—support it. And the divide cuts through a striking variety of issues. Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced “free collective bargaining” between management and labor. Republicans boasted of “extending the minimum wage to several million more workers” and “strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits.” Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1964 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive investment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to “open carry” loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The far right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government—the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In January 2015, fifty-eight House Republicans voted to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Some Republican congressional candidates call for abolishing all public schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. In 1970, not a single U.S. senator opposed the Clean Air Act. Joined by ninety-five Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the Tea Party’s turn away from government may signal a broader trend. During the depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic recovery. But in response to the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans turned away from it. As the political divide widens and opinions harden, the stakes have grown vastly higher. Neither ordinary citizens nor leaders are talking much “across the aisle,” damaging the surprisingly delicate process of governance itself. The United States has been divided before, of course. During the Civil War, a difference in belief led to some 750,000 deaths. During the stormy 1960s, too, clashes arose over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s rights. But in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s going on—especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Poison-Tea-Tobacco-Invented-Captured/dp/1250076102">https://www.amazon.com/Poison-Tea-Tobacco-Invented-Captured/dp/1250076102</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; font-weight: 700;">The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C.</span> Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That included me. I’d worked at the White House as the director of communications for Vice President Dan Quayle, an Indiana Republican, during the second half of the elder Bush’s term as president. In 1993 D.C. had few open doors for refugees of the losing Bush White House. Defeat had been sudden and unexpected, and plenty of folks like me found themselves on the street with bleak job prospects in a place that had become a one-party town.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.</font></p><figure class="image-wrapper" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 1200px; line-height: 26.88px;"><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/politico50/2014/charles-kochs-brain.html" target="blank" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(24, 12, 12, 0.247); text-decoration: none;">Rich Fink</a>, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the <a href="http://content.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,67496434001_1966760,00.html" target="blank" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(24, 12, 12, 0.247); text-decoration: none;">Tea Party movement</a> was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of my first assignments as a consultant for CSE was to join the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">CSE leadership on a New York fund-raising trip to meet with a huge corporate partner<span class="marker" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;"> with vast experience in building real political muscle who could help CSE reach beyond Koch oil money for their new grassroots efforts. We visited <b>Philip Morris</b>’ headquarters in New York.</span></span></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We were met by several of Philip Morris’s state-based government affairs experts, all of whom had significant experience in building coalitions with an eye toward blocking regulations they didn’t like at the state level. The concept that CSE put on the conference table, which was quickly taken up by the Philip Morris staff, was a bit shocking to me. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They proposed an unholy alliance—Philip Morris money commingled with Koch money to create anti-tax front groups in a handful of states that would battle any tax that moved. It would make no difference what kind of tax—the front groups could battle cigarette excise taxes in the Northeast and refined-oil fees at the coasts. Any tax, for any purpose, was bad—and these front groups would tackle them all, with Philip Morris and the Kochs behind them.</span></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It made good business sense—and good political sense as well. You could relabel just about anything as a tax, and heaven knows the American public hates taxes. This, at its core, was the beginning of the <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037118_2037102,00.html?iid=sr-link2" target="blank" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(24, 12, 12, 0.247); text-decoration: none;">American Tea Party revolt</a> against the power of the government to pay for its programs. They could recruit average citizens from a variety of ideological groups to their cause. They would work side by side with corporate-directed workers and employees, providing real boots on the ground when enough activists weren’t readily available. And no one would be the wiser—or even care— that these “grassroots” anti-tax groups would be jointly created and funded by the largest private oil company and the largest cigarette company in the world.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What didn’t become public until nearly 20 years later was that these themes of a Tea Party anti-tax, anti-regulation, and antigovernment revolt were then developed almost simultaneously by two of the largest tobacco companies—Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds—under the guise of political and business coalitions to fight excise taxes of all sorts, including cigarette taxes. In successive phases in the 1990s, with the Kochs’ CSE as its core mobilization network partner</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, Philip Morris and RJR helped create state-based anti-tax and anti-regulation propaganda campaigns such as Get Government Off Our Back, Enough is Enough, and Citizens Against Regressive Taxation.</span></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the years, Rich Fink, Charles Koch’s political adviser, and his various Koch protégés have occasionally talked publicly about what would be needed to take over one of the two national political parties from the outside and place Libertarian, free-market principles at its center. It would take:</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">• an extensive academic network to support it intellectually;<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />• policy networks in every state to draw on that intellectual underpinning from hundreds of American universities;<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />• a true political grassroots alliance that extended to all of those state capitals and worked closely with the academic and policy network;<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />• a propaganda arm that could bring tightly controlled messaging and narratives to the fore in the state networks in a way that looked<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />like in- dependent journalism;<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />• and<span class="marker" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;"> a national coordinating group that could enforce discipline in what would otherwise be a chaotic, unruly, wildly disconnected political<br style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;" />network that ran the gamut from the patriot movement to American exceptionalism.</span></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As luck—or careful, strategic planning—would have it, just such a highly leveraged network with these very pillars was in place as the Tea Party movement appeared to emerge from nowhere at the start of President Obama’s first term in office. That Tea Party movement looked an awful lot like the efforts the Kochs’ CSE had led in the Clinton and Bush years—just with more money, broad state-based causes, better-trained leaders, and a willingness to integrate and coordinate more efficiently with each other.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to publicly available IRS records, the</span><b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">—the Sam Adams Alliance to direct grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to direct propaganda efforts in state capitals across the United States; the State Policy Network to coordinate funding and free-market policies at state-based think tanks; hundreds of grants from the Koch foundations to American universities that were linked in through SPN; and, of course, CSE’s successor, Americans for Prosperity, built to coordinate the effort nationally.</span></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of them saw their budgets expand significantly as Obama ran for the White House and then took office—months or even a full year before the Tea Party movement erupted into public view. This explains why the Tea Party movement was able to mobilize, spread, and network so rapidly, as if by magic.</font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;">Adapted from </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1250076102/?tag=timecom-20" target="blank" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(24, 12, 12, 0.247); text-decoration: none;">Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP</a><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;">, copyright © 2016 by Jeff Nesbit. First hardcover edition published April 5, 2016, by St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.</em></font></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; margin: 0px auto 1.75em; max-width: 790px; padding: 0px 15px; width: auto; word-spacing: -0.025em; letter-spacing: 0.015em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><i style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeff Nesbit is the executive director of Climate Nexus and former communications official at the FDA and George H.W. Bush White House.</font></i></p></figure></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ever wonder why all those folks in rural, “red” America still vote in droves for the same Republicans who brag about gutting the very social programs keeping them alive? How someone like Matt Bevin can run a winning campaign in Kentucky based on cutting people’s access to affordable health care? How Republican governors can get away with refusing free Medicaid for their own citizens? Every election it seems that Democrats end up shaking their heads in dismay as yet another mean-spirited red-state Republican manages to defeat the Democrat by essentially promising to make his own constituents’ lives more miserable. Afterwards we all intone the familiar refrain which boils down to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">“these people don’t know any better.” </em>If only the Democrats had a more effective “message” on the issues, we could<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">surely reach </em>those people who by all strands of logic ought to vote blue, and convince them that Republicans don’t have their interests at heart.</font></p><p class="is-empty-p" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one of the<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/who-turned-my-blue-state-red.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;"> more insightful articles ever written </a>about what motivates the rural poor to vote Republican, Alec MacGillis, who covers politics for<em style="box-sizing: border-box;"> ProPublica, </em>took a tour through deep red America, asking the same questions. In an Op-Ed for today’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</em>, MacGillis explains that it’s not all about guns and abortion that drives people in economically-depressed areas to vote Republican. In fact it’s something very basic to human nature, which the GOP exploits at every turn. And Democrats ignore it at their peril. </font></p><p class="is-empty-p" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MacGillis’ first observation is that many people living in the nations’ more downtrodden areas—and specifically, the ones who benefit the most from programs such as Medicaid and Social Security Disability— are completely disconnected from the political process. They simply choose not to vote. Visiting a free medical clinic in Tennessee, MacGillis asked the people lined up how they felt about Obama. Contrary to his expectations he didn’t encounter hostility, Many people expressed support for the President. But practically none of them had bothered to vote:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 30px 60px; margin: 20px 0px; border: 0px; width: 763.188px; line-height: 24px; z-index: -1; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">[T</strong>]<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">he people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. </strong>They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">profoundly disconnected from the political process.</strong></font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">West Virginia, for example, ranked 50th out of all the states in voter turnout in 2012. Other states near the bottom in terms of turnout include Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee, largely rural states that have significant populations of poor people, including large percentages of working-class whites.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, the resulting vacuum left by huge swaths of Americans who don’t vote at all ensures that elections in these downtrodden areas will be won by those who do. Why, then, are the folks who choose to vote in these locales so overwhelmingly predisposed to vote Republican? MacGillis finds that the<em style="box-sizing: border-box;"> operative motivation is a strong sense of resentment</em> among those who are just getting by towards those who have completely fallen off the economic grid:</font></p><p class="is-empty-p" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 30px 60px; margin: 20px 0px; border: 0px; width: 763.188px; line-height: 24px; z-index: -1; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is,<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/even-critics-of-safety-net-increasingly-depend-on-it.html?pagewanted=all" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;">growing dependency on the safety net, </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/even-critics-of-safety-net-increasingly-depend-on-it.html?pagewanted=all" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;">the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.</a></strong></font></p></blockquote><p class="is-empty-p" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his article MacGillis cites many specific examples of how this resentment operates in practice:</font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 30px 60px; margin: 20px 0px; border: 0px; width: 763.188px; line-height: 24px; z-index: -1; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[T]hese voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients who live nearby.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I’ve heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state’s deeply depressed southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area’s reliance on government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator Manchin declared, “If you’re on a public check, you should be subjected to a random check.”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The belief that those who receive government assistance are somehow “undeserving” and “getting a free ride” is not only a phenomenon of rural areas, but is borne out in surveys nationwide. </font></p><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; padding: 30px 60px; margin: 20px 0px; border: 0px; width: 763.188px; line-height: 24px; z-index: -1; letter-spacing: 0.125px; background-color: rgb(247, 247, 247);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/opinion/has-obamacare-turned-voters-against-sharing-the-wealth.html?r=0" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;">Tha pattern is right in line with surveys, which</a> show a<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> decades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. </strong>There has been a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/opinion/obamacare-hands-off-my-medicare.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;">particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans</a>, who perhaps see it as a threat to their own Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, found a tendency by many Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class —<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520275355" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;">to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom</a>, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Professor Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">those</em> people.’ ”</font></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The unfortunate human tendency to think yourself as better than your ”undeserving” neighbor is what drives these people, even as their own lives are diminished by the very policies they vote to impose on others. To call this a vicious circle would be an understatement. Republican politicians thrive on and exploit these very real resentments, which are not by any means limited to “red” states. That’s how people like Paul Le Page can be elected governor on an anti-welfare platform in relatively “liberal” states like Maine, where reliance on social programs, particular in rural areas, has increased. Meanwhile, those at the top of the economic ladder become more and more aggressive in securing all of the wealth for themselves, while the poor are played off against one another. Democrats can call it out for the ugliness that it surely is, but it is a reality seized upon in every Republican pronouncement from immigration to taxes. If you can get people to think they’re somehow being taken advantage of by an undeserving “other” (especially if that “other” is a different color than they are), you can motivate them to vote any way you want. </font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> There are no easy answers for Democrats to deal with and change these attitudes. The most obvious solution—getting people to actually vote-- has become more difficult, particularly with the decline of unions, Democrats’ traditional mechanism for mobilizing voters. There is also an obvious and intractable racial component driving this “politics of envy” that MacGillis, somewhat surprisingly, never addresses. He might also have mentioned that the tendency of the national party apparatus to discount and effectively cede these rural voters doesn’t help matters, but instead exacerbates the problem. People aren’t going to respond enthusiastically to a party that apparently doesn’t even want to acknowledge their existence. </font></p><p class="is-empty-p" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-bottom: 22px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px; letter-spacing: 0.125px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MacGillis also suggests that the resentment people feel towards others they consider “dependent” can be addressed head-on if the Democratic Party decides to make the effort:</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/21/1452751/-The-Most-Important-Article-You-ll-Read-Today-About-The-Democratic-Party?">http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/21/1452751/-The-Most-Important-Article-You-ll-Read-Today-About-The-Democratic-Party?</a></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">oct 2010 guardian</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tea Party movement has extensive links to white supremacist groups, a<a href="http://www.teapartynationalism.com/" title="" data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link" class=" u-underline" style="cursor: pointer; border-bottom: 0.0625rem solid rgb(220, 220, 220); transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out; background: transparent; text-decoration: none !important;">report</a> published by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights today has alleged.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report lists incidents, individuals and websites it claims demonstrate the links, and also expresses concern that Tea Party meetings are used as recruiting grounds for racist groups. The movement has repeatedly denied it is racist.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the foreword to the report, Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), said: "We know the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of good will."</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But he added that the report "exposes the links between certain Tea Party factions and acknowledged racist hate groups in the United States. These links should give all patriotic Americans pause".</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He called on the leadership and members of the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/tea-party-movement" data-link-name="auto-linked-tag" data-component="auto-linked-tag" class=" u-underline" style="cursor: pointer; border-bottom: 0.0625rem solid rgb(220, 220, 220); transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out; background: transparent; text-decoration: none !important;">Tea Party movement</a> to take more steps "to distance themselves from those Tea Party leaders who espouse racist ideas, advocate violence or are formally affiliated with white supremacist organisations."</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The NAACP and other organisations such as La Raza, which represents Latinos in the US, were present for the report's launch.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The document comes after the NAACP national convention, in July, passed a resolution condemning what it said were outspoken racist elements within the Tea Party.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the concerns in the report is the portrayal of Barack Obama as non-American. "Consider, for example, the incessant depiction of President Obama as a non-American," it says.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The permutations go on from there: Islamic terrorist, socialist, African witch doctor, lying African etc. If he is not properly American, then he becomes the 'other' that is not 'us.'"</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prominent Tea Party organisers said the report was a politically-motivated distortion of the truth.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
He said the Tea Party had brought millions of people into the political process because of their worries about what was happening economically to the US....guardian.com/world/2010/oct/20/report-links-tea-party-to-white-supremacist-groupsSal Russo, a Sacramento-based Republican political consultant who created the Tea Party Express, described the report "patently ridiculous".</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://archive.adl.org/main_extremism/white_supremacists_july_4_tea_parties.html#.VlX7QnarTmd">http://archive.adl.org/main_extremism/white_supremacists_july_4_tea_parties.html#.VlX7QnarTmd</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10'15 carl pope:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...<span style="line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s easy to blame the ideology, or the temperament, of the Freedom Caucus, for the melt-down, or even the overall competence of the Republican party, as conservative columnist David Brooks </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/opinion/the-republicans-incompetence-caucus.html?r=0" target="blank" style="line-height: 25.2px; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">has done</a><span style="line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. “This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence. Running a government is a craft, like carpentry. But the new Republican officials did not believe in government and so did not respect its traditions, its disciplines and its craftsmanship.”</span></font></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there are also deep structural sources of the malady. Consider the primary election that gives the Freedom Caucus its leverage over the more mainstream majority of the House Republicans; the defeat of Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Cantor’s successful Tea Party opponent, Eric Brat, received only 36,000 votes, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/06/11/the-remarkably-small-percentage-of-people-it-took-to-oust-eric-cantor/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">just 8 percent of the registered electorate in Virginia’s 7th district.</a> That’s less than a quarter of the registered Republicans. Indeed, in that fall’s general election, the Democratic candidate for Congress who Brat faced, Jack Trammel, received 91,000 votes, almost three times as many as Brat received in unseating Cantor, even though in the General Election Brat crushed Trammel.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So it’s almost certain that if Virginia, like California and Louisiana, let the two biggest vote getters in the primary contest the general even if they are of the same party, that in Round 2 Cantor would have gotten more than enough votes to keep his seat.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And Cantor’s defeat is no anomaly. Consider South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, in which Trey Gowdy, the Chair of the Banghazi Frenzy Committee, defeated four term conservative Republican Bob Inglis. Gowdy charged that Inglis, by conceding the existence of<a href="http://ecowatch.com/climate-change-news/" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">global warming</a>, had forfeited his conservative credentials in spite of a 93.5 percent American Conservative Union rating. Gowdy stomped Inglis in the primary—but again, look at the numbers. Gowdy got only 54,000 votes, a tiny fraction of the registered voters. Once again in the general election the Democratic congressional candidate, in an overwhelmingly Republican district, received more votes than Gowdy in the primary. There are enough other examples that most House Republicans now live in fear of such a primary defeat—which is why mainstream Republicans couldn’t stand up Boehner against the <a href="http://ecowatch.com/?s=tea+party" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">Tea Party</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Applying this 40,000 votes needed to win a contested Republican primary, and considering that the average Congressional district has 330,000 registered voters, a determined and disciplined “faction” (as Madison would have put it) of far fewer than 5 percent of the American public could dominate the nominating process of the Republican party and capture it. (The same math holds true for the Democrats—it’s just harder to imagine such a disciplined faction of Democrats).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Effectively, an even tinier group now exercises dominating power of intimidation over the Republican caucus in the House.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How did this happen? Low turn-out primaries are nothing new—they are standard fare, and over the decades hundreds of primary victors have been chosen by even smaller segments of the electorate than Brat. It didn’t threaten to shut-down the government. Nor is the presence within one or both parties of small caucuses of members of Congress with view strikingly out of step with the <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/the-freedom-caucus-historic-rebellion-213256?o=1" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">American majority</a>. During the Civil Rights era, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was opposed by 65 House Democrats, a much larger number than the Freedom Caucus.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But three basic changes in American politics, blended with low turn-outs created this toxic brew.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, American political parties were traditionally ideological grab-bags of regional factions. The Democrats lumped Northern urban liberals with rural Southern conservatives, and rural Protestant Conservatives caucused with up-scale suburban moderates among Republicans. After Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 conservatives decided that they needed a “pure” conservative party, one with a clear and conservative ideology. They chose the Republican party. Aided by the civil rights induced migration of southern whites out of the Democratic party, this project proved fabulously successful. With the 2010 defeat of most of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, and the loss of most of the remaining conservative Democratic Senators in 2014, both parties now stand solidly on either the right or the left.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second, having created European style ideological parties, Congressional Republicans then embraced European style parliamentary politics, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/06/weekinreview/the-nation-with-political-discipline-it-works-like-parliament.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">imposing discipline</a> on individual Senators and Congressman with strong sanctions if they voted their districts or their consciences on key legislation. This trend culminated in the 1995 promulgation of the Hastert rule, that the Speaker would schedule only legislation which enjoyed majority support in the Republican caucus, and its corollary, that Republicans would uniformly provide such legislation with enough votes to pass.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Supreme Court provided the third kicker. One of the main barriers to a broadly unpopular ideology successfully plucking off 30-40 Congressional seats was that fringe factions lack an obvious mass funding base. But by repealing all of the legal limits on how much money the super-rich and corporations could pump into campaigns, the Court allowed a single patron to turbocharge policy objective held by a tiny minority of Americans and enable them to black-mail the entire national political system by shutting down Congress.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And how does the U.S. political system get out of this hostage taking dynamic? A few years ago many main-stream Republicans <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/davids-awesome-tie-story/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">(David Brooks among them)</a> argued that the nomination of a genuinely extremist Presidential nominee followed by a decisive drubbing in the general election would “break the fever” which had taken hold of the party. But that strategy assumed that business elites and the Republican establishment still held the loyalty of hierarchical Republican voters. <a href="http://ecowatch.com/?s=donald+trump" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">Donald Trump</a> and Ben Carson’s domination of the Presidential polls seems to have illustrated <a href="http://www.conservativecrusader.com/articles/it-s-time-to-make-the-republican-party-elite-go-away" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">that this loyalty can no longer be counted on</a>, and that the Tea Party, until it enacts its widely unpopular agenda, may well refuse to bow to the pragmatic counsels of “we need to win the Presidency.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is another pathway—it’s what Madison would have wanted—and if I had to bet, it’s the likely outcome. Mainstream Republicans will realize that if a relatively small number of them form cross-aisle alliances with the Democrats on those issues on which everyone except the Tea Party agrees (highway funding for example), they can govern, even if minimally because President Obama will eagerly sign such legislation. The business community will have to provide those who cross the aisle with protection in their primaries—which means that only bills with strong conservative and business credentials will be viable. But if Speaker Ryan is forced into such a strategy, and his consent would be essential, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/the-freedom-caucus-historic-rebellion-213256?o=1" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">the fury of the hard core of the extreme right</a> will make Catherine de Medici look like a pussycat.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 25.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So I don’t think it ends well for Speaker Ryan. But perhaps I am misreading the Tea Party. I hope so.</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><div class="print-content"><article class="node-9551 node node-blog node-promoted view-mode-print clearfix"><header><h2 class="node__title node-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/22/american-tea-party-supporters-base-climate-claims-ideology-not-science-study-confirms">American Tea Party Supporters Base Climate Claims on Ideology not Science, Study Confirms</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></font></h2><p class="submitted mobile-only"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/user/25741">Kyla Mandel</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span> | June 22, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2015</span></font></p><p class="submitted desktop-only"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By <a href="http://www.desmog.uk/user/25741">Kyla Mandel</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span> • Monday, June 22, 2015 - 00:01</font></p></header><div class="field field-name-field-bimage field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The image of polar ice caps is being used by both sides of the climate debate, but in the United States there’s one political faction whose claims may be more ideologically driven than others.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a new study by the University of New Hampshire, American right-wing<b> Tea Party supporters are most likely to base their understanding of climate change on political ideology rather than science.</b></font></span></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The survey, published in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1088937X.2015.1051158"><em>Polar Geography</em></a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>, shows that Tea Partiers – who call for minimal government intervention and are known for their climate scepticism – exhibit a high level of self-assessed understanding of climate science, combined with a low level of knowledge on polar facts.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dquo" style="margin-left: -0.5em;">“</span>These results support the conclusion that Tea Party supporters’ sense of understanding about climate change disproportionately reflects ideology rather than science knowledge,” the report concludes.</font></p><p><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Basic Polar Facts</font></strong></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study examined a series of New Hampshire state surveys, conducted between 2011 and 2015, ranking public knowledge on basic polar facts.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Questions included whether the respondent thought Arctic sea ice area had declined in the past 30 years and whether the melting of Greenland and Antarctic land ice – or Arctic sea ice – could potentially raise sea levels the most. Respondents also had to rank their perceived level of knowledge on the issue.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study found that climate change understanding, more often than not, has an ideological basis.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Almost half of those surveyed (47 percent) scored low on factual knowledge but high on self-assessed understanding of the issue. This is most prevalent among Tea Party supporters (61 percent) while Democrats, Republicans and Independents appeared roughly similar (between 41–47 per cent).</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the study explains, while a higher self-assessed understanding of climate change among Democrats, Independents and, to some degree, Republicans is more likely to correlate with knowledge that, for example, sea ice has declined, the opposite holds true for Tea Party supporters.</font></p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dquo" style="margin-left: -0.5em;">“</span>Our surveys find a paradoxical combination of high self-assessed understanding of climate change with generally low knowledge of basic facts.”</font></span></p><p><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rejecting Science</font></strong></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Early rounds of the survey asked three questions: two with political implications and one without. </font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Data shows that Arctic summer <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/arctic-sea-ice-disappearing-record-rate-150524091720040.html">sea ice coverage has been declining</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span>. But, when asked whether or not they thought summer sea ice covered a larger or smaller area than 30 years ago, seven out of 10 respondents got it right while just 40 percent of Tea Partiers answered correctly.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span class="dquo" style="margin-left: -0.5em;">“</span>We see some people rejecting scientific reports about melting Arctic sea ice,” the researchers commented, “and eager to accept weakly founded claims of recovery.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Later surveys added two more uncontentious questions about the geography of the North and South Poles. Only eight percent of respondents answered correctly that the North Pole is characterised by floating ice while the South Pole is a landmass covered in thick ice. Less than half (between 38–46 percent) got one of these two questions correct.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dquo" style="margin-left: -0.5em;">“</span>Polar questions are by no means a broad test of climate knowledge, but they involve background information that anyone moderately well informed about climate should know,” the study explains.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="dquo" style="margin-left: -0.5em;">“</span>Unfortunately, climate change has emerged as one of the most politically disputed issues among <span class="caps">US</span> political leaders and [the] public,” the report states. “Climate change beliefs correlate so strongly with ideology that some analysts view both as indicators of the same thing… Concern about polar problems generally increases with science literacy, but political orientation can modify this science-literacy effect.”
<a href="https://twitter.com/kylamandel?lang=en-gb">@kylamandel</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photo: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgeologicalsurvey/4370258605"><span class="caps">US</span> Geological Survey</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span> via Flickr</font></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-14 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label" style="font-weight: bold;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tags: </font></div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/5203">Tea Party America</a> <span class="print-footnote">[7]</span></font></div><div class="field-item odd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/4512">polar</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span></font></div><div class="field-item even"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/1446">anarctic ice melt</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span></font></div><div class="field-item odd"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/946">arctic</a> <span class="print-footnote">[10]</span></font></div><div class="field-item even"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/2191">arctic sea ice</a> <span class="print-footnote">[11]</span></font></div></div></div><div id="whatsnext"><div id="customlinks" class="clearfix" style="line-height: 1em;"><div id="fblike"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><fb:like href="http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/22/american-tea-party-supporters-base-climate-claims-ideology-not-science-study-confirms" layout="button" action="recommend" width="55" xmlns:fb="fb" /></font></div><div id="tweetbutton"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> 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href="http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/22/american-tea-party-supporters-base-climate-claims-ideology-not-science-study-confirms">http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/22/american-tea-party-supporters-base-climate-claims-ideology-not-science-study-confirms</a></font></div><div class="print-links"><p /><div style="text-align: left;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Links:</font></strong></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[1] http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/22/american-tea-party-supporters-base-climate-claims-ideology-not-science-study-confirms</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="text-align: left;">[2] http://www.desmog.uk/user/25741</div><div style="text-align: left;">[3] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1088937X.2015.1051158</div><div style="text-align: left;">[4] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/arctic-sea-ice-disappearing-record-rate-150524091720040.html</div><div style="text-align: left;">[5] https://twitter.com/kylamandel?lang=en-gb</div><div style="text-align: left;">[6] https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgeologicalsurvey/4370258605</div><div style="text-align: left;">[7] http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/5203</div><div style="text-align: left;">[8] http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/4512</div><div style="text-align: left;">[9] http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/1446</div><div style="text-align: left;">[10] http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/946</div><div style="text-align: left;">[11] http://www.desmog.uk/directory/vocabulary/2191</div><div style="text-align: left;">[12] http://twitter.com/share</div><div style="text-align: left;">[13] http://www.desmog.uk/printmail/9551</div><div style="text-align: left;">[14] http://www.desmog.uk/print/9551</div><div style="text-align: left;">[15] http://www.desmog.uk/subscribe-newsletter</div></div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-top: 10px; display: inline; line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More than 50 actors from a Broward County acting group were paid $75 each to protest outside the South Florida Water Management District on Thursday about a controversial land deal they knew little about.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding-top: 10px; line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The protest was called by the <a href="http://www.teaparty-miami.org/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Tea Party of Miami</a> and Florida Citizens Against Waste, a recently formed group that has no contact information on its website and is not registered to do business in Florida.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">astroturf:</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Palm Beach Post‘s Christine Stapleton <a href="http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/actors-hired-to-protest-at-water-district-know-lit/nkkkb/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">reports</a> that the “Tea Party” protesters outside of the South Florida Water Management District on Thursday were, by and large, actors hired by the <a href="http://www.teaparty-miami.org/about-1.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none;">Tea Party of Miami</a> and U.S. Sugar.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The district is currently considering buying land owned by </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">U.S. Sugar, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">which it would use for the treatment and storage of lake flood water. Environmentalist </span><a href="http://florida.newszap.com/clewiston/138821-113/can-purchasing-us-sugars-land-fix-south-floridas-water-problems" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">believe</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> that using the land in this way will allow them to divert more water into the Everglades without harming coastal estuaries. The water would not only help replenish the Everglades, it would also provide an emergency reserve drinking supply for South Florida.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But U.S. Sugar wants to keep the land, arguing that as one of the area’s largest employers, it is in the district’s best interests not to exercise the $350 million buy-out option in its contract. Tea Party Miami:</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">...</font></a></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 32px;"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar">http://www.alternet.org/environment/tea-party-protesters-opposed-florida-land-deal-were-mostly-actors-hired-big-sugar</a></span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1.4; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tea-party-pacs-reap-money-for-midterms-but-spend-little-on-candidates/2014/04/26/0e52919a-cbd6-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1; text-decoration: none; background: transparent;"><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1; background: transparent;">Tea Party PACs Reap Money for Midterms But Spend Little on Candidates</strong></a><strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1; background: transparent;">, The Washington Post, April 2014</strong></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; line-height: 1.4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Cutting wasteful government spending is a core tenet of the Tea Party movement. A Washington Post analysis, however, "found that some of the top national tea party groups engaged in this year's midterm elections have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they've endorsed," the Post's Matea Gold wrote.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The Senate Conservatives Fund, for instance, "paid a luxury interior design firm more than $52,000 last year to paint and decorate its Capitol Hill townhouse office."</span></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><p class="print-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">----</font></p><p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin-top: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Media consultant Holland Cooke highlighted the deceptive advocacy of right-wing talk radio hosts on behalf of sponsors such as tea party groups, arguing that listeners "might not understand that free speech had a price tag."</font></p><p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin-top: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a piece <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/tea-party-radio-network-105774_Page2.html" style="outline: none; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">titled</a> "The tea party radio network,<b>" <em>Politico</em> highlighted the relationship between conservative talk radio shows and tea party non-profit groups who often act as sponsors of the shows.</b> The report "found that conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012."</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span></font></p><p style="line-height: 1.5em; margin-top: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the April 17 segment on MSNBC's <em>The Ed Show</em>, Ed Schultz hosted talk radio consultant Holland Cooke and Ken Vogel, a co-author of the <em>Politico</em> piece. Vogel pointed out that the nature of right-wing radio's sponsorship "begs the question 'where does the line between the core ideological beliefs of the host end and where does the paid sponsorship start?'" Cooke pointed out that the conservative radio advertising landscape had shifted after Rush Limbaugh's <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/11/27/right-wing-media-launch-attacks-after-sandra-fl/191536" style="outline: none; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">notorious attacks</a> on Sandra Fluke caused an advertiser boycott, due in large part to groups like <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/flushrush/" style="outline: none; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);">Flush Rush</a>, and explained that sponsors are often "treated like a news source," leaving many listeners not realizing that they are even listening to ads:</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 19.5px;">http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/04/17/media-expert-highlights-problematic-tea-party-t/198934</span></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div>
<p style="margin: 12px 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 18px; outline: none; display: block; text-align: left; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For more than 100 years, the Antiquities Act of 1906, brainchild of Theodore Roosevelt, has ensured that the executive branch can move quickly to stop business from destroying our national cultural resources by declaring them national monuments.</font>
<strong style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But House Republicans, led by Tea Party Caucus member Rob Bishop, recently passed a bill that would make it harder for President Obama and all future presidents to protect our great outdoor spaces and designate new national monuments.</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We have to speak out now to stop it. That's why I started my own campaign on CREDOMobilize.com, which allows activists to start their own petitions. My petition, which is to the United States Senate, says the following:</font></p>
<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; display: block; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
<p style="margin: 12px 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 18px; outline: none; display: block; text-align: left;"><em style=" font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">H.R. 1459 is a blatant attempt to make it more difficult for President Obama and future presidents to conserve our natural resources by creating national monuments. I urge you to reject this misguided bill.</font></em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">civil war:</font></p>
<h3 class="byline" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; margin: 5px 0px 0px; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><strong style="text-transform: uppercase; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;">MATT TAIBBI</strong></font></h3>
<div class="date" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; letter-spacing: 0.1em; margin-bottom: 25px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DECEMBER 30, 2013</font></div>
<div class="body" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">
<p style="font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The holidays are a great time in politics. Every year it's the same: the minute the last bits of wrapping paper have been cleared away, and Grandpa has passed his last puff of holiday gas, you can always retreat to the inside pages of the news section and find some embarrassing/despicable PR fiasco that some politician somewhere has just tried to sneak past vacationing America.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This year was no different. In a fitting homage to past holiday-season embarrassments like the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1224.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">Iran-Contra pardons</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>or Bill Clinton's signing of the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/106/hr4541/text" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">Commodity Futures Modernization Act</a>, the Republican Party last week quietly declared war on itself, in the process essentially confessing to a generation of failed governance and dumbed-down politics. </font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The news came in<span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-weight: normal;"> </span><a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304753504579280084264850074" style="font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Wall Street Journal</em></a>, where the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b>Chamber of Commerce </b>disclosed that it will be teaming up with Republican establishment leaders to spend $50 million in an effort to stem the tide of “fools” who have overwhelmed Republican ballots in recent seasons.</span> Check out the language Chamber strategist Scott Reed used in announcing the new campaign:</font></p>
<blockquote style="font-weight: normal;">
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates… That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.</font></p>
</blockquote>
<p style="font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The blunt choice of words is no accident. All year long, as they’ve crept closer and closer to having to face the reality of a Ted Cruz presidential candidacy in 2016 (with Cruz maybe picking <a href="http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/12/28/ae-says-phil-robertson-can-return-to-duck-dynasty-gladd-responds-90722" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">recently-redeemed<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Duck Dynasty<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>star Phil Robertson</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>as his more moderate running mate?), the Beltway’s Republican kingmakers have drifted into ever more alarmist language about the need to change course.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s been a transparent effort to reassure industry donors that the party's future isn't a bottomless pit of brainless Bachmanns and Cruzes and Santorums, all convinced our Harvard-educated president is a sleeper-cell Arab and that Satan is a literal being intent on conquering Nebraska with U.N. troops.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this month, for instance, former House Majority Leader and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/04/dick-armey-leaves-as-head-tea-party-tied-freedomworks/" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">cause-betraying</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tea Party progenitor Dick Armey complained that Republicans have been getting whipped at the polls because "<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dick-armey-tea-party-candidates-lost-because-they-did-dumb-things/" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">we had a lot of candidates quite frankly that did dumb things out there</a>." And way back in March of last year, Karl Rove himself, speaking on behalf of his Crossroads SuperPAC, told<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Fox News Sunday<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em>that "<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/03/13/174148350/republicans-face-off-over-strategy-for-picking-candidates" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">our goal is to avoid having stupid candidates."</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Rove’s group is reportedly also involved in this new $50 million effort.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber's announcement was met with howls of outrage from Tea Party-friendly voices, who naturally took immediate offense to the prospect of boycotting "fools" from the political process.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Misguided," said <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth.</span> "Insane," sneered conservative activist Cleta Mitchell.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tom Borelli, senior fellow for Armey’s old FreedomWorks group, quite correctly complained that the Chamber and their Republican allies were trying to defy the conservative base by hijacking the party and keeping it in the pocket of big-money interests. "The tea party is about lowering costs," Borelli<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/tea-party-business-economy-republicans/2013/12/27/id/544141#ixzz2oxvQ7NFD" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold;">explained to Newsmax</a>. "[The Chamber will] want regulations to favor big business."</font></p>
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<div id="node-917917" class="node node-story view-mode-print clearfix" about="/tea-party-and-right/inside-tea-party-brain-can-science-explain-their-seemingly-irrational-rage" typeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document" style=" position: relative;">
<div class="byline story" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://billmoyers.com/">Moyers & Company</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>/<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>By</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland">Joshua Holland</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[2]</span></em></font></div>
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<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Inside the Tea Party Brain: Can Science Explain Their Seemingly Irrational Rage?</font></h1>
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<div class="story-date"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-10-31T16:08:00-07:00">October 31, 2013</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em> | </font></div>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A growing body of research suggests that we are a nation divided not only by partisanship or how we view various issues, but also by dramatically different cognitive styles. Sociologists and psychologists are getting a better understanding about the ways that deep seated emotional responses effect our ideological viewpoints.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, Moyers & Company caught up with Mother Jones science writer Chris Mooney, host of the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943" target="blank">Inquiring Minds</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[3]</span> podcast and author of <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Brain-Science-Science/dp/1118094514" target="blank">The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[4]</span></em>, to talk about what this research may tell <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/30/morning-reads-geek-calls-for-revolution-and-a-zombie-dog-in-ms/" target="_blank" title="Morning Reads: Geek Calls for Revolution and a “Zombie-Dog” in MS (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">us</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[5]</span> about the attitudes of those involved in the tea party movement. Below is a lightly-edited transcript of our discussion.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Joshua Holland: Chris, let’s talk about morality. I’m personally offended by the tea partiers’ resistance to giving uninsured people health care. I find it a bit shocking that a political movement could be so filled with animosity toward the idea. But according to NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — and other scholars — conservatives have a different moral compass entirely. Can you tell us a little bit about that?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chris Mooney: Absolutely. There are many people doing research in the psychology of politics. Jonathan Haidt is a pioneer in the psychology of morality and how that feeds into politics, and it really helps with something like this where you have strong emotional passions that are irreconcilable on the left and the right.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So what you’re describing is his moral foundation of “harm,” which liberals tend to feel more strongly about.</span> These are emotions relating to empathy and compassion – measured by the question of how much someone is suffering and how much that suffering is a moral issue to you. How much is caring for the weak and vulnerable a moral issue to you?</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s not that conservatives don’t feel that emotion, but they don’t necessarily feel it as strongly. They feel other things more strongly. So to Haidt, this explains the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/13/the-rights-obamacare-rhetoric-is-completely-unhinged-from-reality/" target="blank" title="The Right’s Obamacare Rhetoric Is Completely Detached from Reality (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">health care</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[6]</span> debate because liberals feel, most of all, this harm-care-compassion thing. Conservatives feel it a little bit less strongly, even as they have this other morality. Haidt compares it to karma — it’s really interesting — where basically, you’re supposed to get what you deserve. And what really bothers them is somebody not getting what they deserve. So the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/21/the-healthcare-gov-debacle-spare-some-blame-for-bush-and-clinton/" target="blank" title="Healthcare.gov Debacle: Spare Some Blame for Bush and Clinton (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">government</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[7]</span> getting involved and interfering with people getting what they deserve is really bad. That, I think, is the clash.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: Jared Piazza — a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania — did a study which found that political and religious conservatives tend to avoid what he called ‘consequentialist thinking.’ So basically, they tend to see something as right or a wrong, in black and white, and if a policy that they believe to be right — say, not having the government get involved in health care — causes real world harm, they’re more likely to dismiss that. That seems consistent with what Haidt is saying, right?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Sure. Part of his whole theory is that you feel these views before you think these views, and then you rationalize your beliefs.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, he would say that both sides do it. But it’s actually an open debate whether one side does it more. But certainly, if conservatives have reached a position for moral reasons, are they then more likely to discount evidence suggesting some problem with their position? Absolutely. They’re also more likely to take whatever evidence there is out there and twist it so that it supports their view. And, the more intelligent ones will be better at doing that. [laughs] That’s what all the research shows.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: Right. And it all seems fairly consistent to me. I’ve interviewed <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">George Lakoff at UC Berkeley. He talks about how people don’t judge a political issue on its merits, but tend to filter the world through a moral lens.</span> He talks about a “moral cascade,” where we connect policies with deep-seated values. All of this research seems to be very consistent with what other people are doing.</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: That’s right. And you wouldn’t want to believe it if it were just one paper in just one journal by just one researcher. That’s what, as a science writer, we’re skeptical of. We look for multiple people working in multiple fields all converging and then we say, ‘okay, there’s knowledge here,’ something reliable is being discovered. With the psychology of politics – the psychology of ideology — it is actually surprising how rapidly all of this knowledge has come together. I don’t think we’re completely there yet, but I think that you can’t miss the fact that there are huge commonalities between Lakoff, Haidt and a lot of other people that we haven’t mentioned who are doing research in this same field.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: Let’s dig a bit deeper into Haidt’s moral foundation theory. In your <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/inquiring-minds-jonathan-haidt-tea-party" target="_blank">Mother Jones interview with Haidt</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> you have a graph comparing how liberals, conservatives, and then also libertarians score on what Haidt calls the “seven moral foundations.”</font></strong>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And when you look at the graph, the biggest disparities between liberals and conservatives — and, again,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> libertarians — are “purity” and “authority.”</span> That’s where you see the biggest gaps between the groups. What is purity in Haidt’s reckoning?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Purity is basically whether you feel moral emotions when someone does something you view as disgusting or indecent. A lot of this is going to involve your judgments about what’s sexually proper, but it could be other things that are disgusting. Basically, this is a way of measuring the emotion of disgust, and what this shows — this is the most striking disparity of all of them — is that liberals and libertarians really don’t sense disgust very much. And they’re together on that completely. There’s an amazing number of things that liberals and libertarians are together on. But conservatives feel it much more than either of them. And so this can explain a great deal in politics — it’s most regularly invoked to explain gay rights and how people respond to that, which I think is very appropriate. But I think it also gets into a lot of bioethical issues.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: And we’ve discussed authority before. That’s really central to understanding the conservative mindset. There’s been a lot of research on the so-called authoritarian personality type, and I want to connect this with the idea of political polarization.</font></strong>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the things that we understand about <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">authoritarians is that they have a stronger sense of the importance of loyalty to one’s own in-group.</span> How does that factor into this equation, do you think?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Again, this is an area where liberals and libertarians differ from conservatives markedly. Liberals and libertarians aren’t particularly tribal in the sense of having loyalty to their group, and they aren’t particularly authoritarian in the sense of thinking you have to follow a strong leader. And basically, authoritarianism is also associated with sort of black and white, ‘you’re with me or you’re against me’ thinking. But it’s also about deference to authority, whether that’s the police officer or your father or God. You must obey authority and if you don’t, that’s a moral wrong.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: Jonathan Weiler at the University of North Carolina did a study which found that you can predict a person’s ideological leanings by how they answered just a few questions about child rearing. And one of the questions was whether someone values obedience or creativity more in a child. It’s really — it’s telling stuff.</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Yeah, this is another way of measuring authoritarianism, because the theory is — and it seems pretty sound to me — that if you’re an authoritarian, one of the places it’s going to come out is in how you view child rearing. That is a situation in which the parent has to exert some level of authority, but parents interpret that differently. And if someone interprets parenting as sort of a strict father model — you need to obey the rules — then that’s an authoritarian style of parenting. So he’s just saying, ‘let’s ask about parenting and we’ll figure out who our authoritarians are,’ and what’s good about that as a scientific method is that you’re not actually asking anything that seems politically tinged. You could be confounding your variables if people get the sense that you’re asking them something political, but that’s not the case here — you’re just asking about parenting. That’s what’s nice about it.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: Now, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/156057/george_lakoff%3A_how_right-wingers_scam_people_into_buying_their_toxic_philosophy" target="_blank">George Lakoff says</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[9]</span> that our brains have both liberal and conservative moral circuits — if you will —<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> neural pathways</span>. And when one set gets activated again and again it grows stronger and the other set becomes weaker. How does Fox and the right wing blogs and the whole conservative media bubble play into this pattern of polarization, if we accept Lakoff’s argument?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Right, and I don’t think Lakoff would be necessarily inconsistent with others here. You’re reinforcing a circuit in the brain, so to speak, and the more it’s used the more powerful it becomes and the more it becomes habitual to <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/30/morning-reads-08302013/" target="_blank" title="Morning Reads… (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">use</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[10]</span> it. I think it’s a very different thing, but if you just think about how if you’re a musician, and you practice the guitar every day, then basically you wire your brain to have a certain aptitude, and every time you pick up the instrument, you’re going to be just as good. But if you then don’t practice for a year, you pick it up, and boy, some things are still going to be there, but some things are going to be lost. If you reinforce these political/emotional circuits, it’s a similar effect. The more you use it, the more it becomes part of you.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So what this is getting at is that the brain is plastic to a certain extent, but at the same time, a lot of the research suggests that there’s something very deep about political differences. So you’re probably predisposed to feel a certain way, but then if you reinforce the circuit you can strengthen that, or if your life experiences take you in a different direction, it can weaken those views.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: You spoke earlier about how we all have a tendency to marshal evidence that confirms our previously held worldview and reject evidence that contradicts it — this is known as motivated reasoning. Is that something that both liberals and conservatives do to a similar degree, or do we see differences in this area?</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: There’s no doubt that both do it. All the studies show that. And this is a debated issue right know — whether there’s asymmetry or not. I can point you to a number of papers that seem to suggest some sort of asymmetry. But there are researchers who are not convinced, and there are some papers that don’t show asymmetry. So it’s a big debate and it depends largely upon what kind of evidence you buy.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I would expect you to have asymmetry. I would at least expect that on those issues where conservatives have a stronger moral sense, say about an in-group thing, I would expect their emotionally motivated response to be stronger just because they’re feeling this more strongly. So I would certainly expect more response in one of those areas where just generally it’s something they feel more strongly about. That doesn’t seem like a hard thing to assume.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But an interesting question is this: if you get something that liberals feel really strongly about, something about equality or something about harm, are they equally biased? And I think that we still need more research on this, but I’m suspecting that we’re going to see real differences. And I think that there’s some evidence which points that way already.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Holland: One of the things that I think does point that way is the tendency of people with<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> authoritarian personalities to be really sensitive to cognitive dissonance.</span> That would seem to lead to a more fervent desire to ignore contradictory evidence that causes kind of a psychic pain, if you will.</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mooney: Right. There was the recent study — and this can show you both why I suspect you’re right, but also why these researchers are unsure — there was a recent study that actually showed that conservatives were less willing to entertain cognitive dissonance than liberals were. It was by some political psychologists at NYU, and what they did was they asked people, ‘would you be willing to write an essay talking about how the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/30/morning-reads-08302013/" target="blank" title="Morning Reads… (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">president</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[10]</span> you dislike did a good job?’ So in other words, would liberals write an essay on the good things about George W. <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/" target="blank" title="Hundreds of Wall Street Execs Went to Prison During the Last Fraud-Fueled Bank Crisis (AutoLink by Repost.Us)">Bush</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="print-footnote">[11]</span> and would conservatives write an essay on good things about Barack Obama—and the liberals were more willing to write that essay. It required them to entertain cognitive dissonance for a time.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But what’s difficult when you break it down is this: what if liberals just don’t hate George W. Bush as much as conservatives hate Barack Obama? I mean, what if the emotions are not as raw anymore? After all, a lot of time has passed. What if this isn’t the perfect apples to apples comparison? And that’s why these kinds of studies are hard to conduct.</font></p>
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[1] http://billmoyers.com/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joshua-holland
[3] https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943
[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Brain-Science-Science/dp/1118094514
[5] http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/30/morning-reads-geek-calls-for-revolution-and-a-zombie-dog-in-ms/
[6] http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/13/the-rights-obamacare-rhetoric-is-completely-unhinged-from-reality/
[7] http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/21/the-healthcare-gov-debacle-spare-some-blame-for-bush-and-clinton/
[8] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/inquiring-minds-jonathan-haidt-tea-party
[9] http://www.alternet.org/story/156057/george_lakoff%3A_how_right-wingers_scam_people_into_buying_their_toxic_philosophy
[10] http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/30/morning-reads-08302013/
[11] http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tea-party-0
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/conservatives-0
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/republicans-0
[15] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</font></p>
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<h1 style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government</font></h1>
<h6 style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;"><a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_radical_christian_right_and_the_war_on_government_20131006/" style=" text-decoration: none !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_radical_christian_right_and_the_war_on_government_20131006/</font></a></h6>
<h4 class="date" style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; widows: auto;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posted on Oct 6, 2013</font></h4>
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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Chris <b>Hedges</b></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em>Editor’s note: Chris Hedges will speak in the Los Angeles area Oct. 13 on the myth of progress and the collapse of complex societies. Robert Scheer will lead a discussion, with a Q-and-A period to follow.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://truthdig.com/hedgesinperson" title="Click here" style=" text-decoration: none !important;">Click here</a>for more information.</em></font>
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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America.</span> Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.purifyingfire.org/ministries.htm" style=" text-decoration: none !important;">Purifying Fire International</a> ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dominionism" style=" text-decoration: none !important;">Dominionism</a> or Christian Reconstructionism.</span> This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right</span>. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white.</span> They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”</span> I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced. </span>Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.</font>
<i><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A previous version of this column contained a quotation attributed to Sen. Ted Cruz that might have originated as a parody. Thanks to our readers for their sharp eyes.</font></i></p>
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<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><strong style=" line-height: 1.25em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://grist.org/news/tea-partiers-fight-over-solar-power-in-georgia-and-the-solar-fans-win/</font></strong></div>
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<h1 class="headline" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tea Partiers fight over solar power in Georgia, and the solar fans win</font></h1>
<p class="byline" style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By <a href="http://grist.org/author/claire-thompson/" title="Posts by Claire Thompson">Claire Thompson</a></font>
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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Georgia on Thursday,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> the Tea Party scored a victory against the Tea Party by helping push through a plan requiring the state’s largest electric utility to increase its capacity for solar power.</span></font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/tampons-confiscated-texas_n_3588177.html?1373658954">Never a dull day in Southern politics</a>, is there? A proposal by Public Service Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald to more than double the amount of solar energy produced by Georgia Power pitted the Tea Party Patriots against the local chapter of Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity (of the notorious <a href="http://grist.org/news/how-the-koch-brothers-screwed-over-the-climate-even-more-than-you-know/">“No Climate Tax Pledge”</a>). Virginia Galloway, director of AFP for the state, warned the group’s 50,000 Georgia members that the proposal could increase electricity rates by up to 40 percent, and that this “mandate” — as she called it — would “reduce the reliability of every appliance and electronics gadget in your home.” But the Patriots see an increase in the availability of solar as an expansion of the free market and the ratepayers’ right to choose their energy sources.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those on the left might have a hard time distinguishing between brands of Tea Party, but there are real differences. From the <a href="http://onlineathens.com/local-news/2013-07-08/tea-party-groups-opposite-sides-solar-debate"><i>Athens Banner-Herald</i></a>:</font></p>
<blockquote style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Disagreement between the two groups isn’t unusual. [Debbie Dooley, national coordinator of the Patriots,] says Galloway is using outdated figures since solar-panel prices have dropped by more than half in the last three years. She also accuses Galloway of being swayed by the fossil-fuel interests that contribute to AFP nationally.</font></blockquote>
<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And, to hear Dooley tell it, AFP’s opposition to solar <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/09/2267051/koch-brothers-fund-effort-to-undermine-tea-party-support-of-solar-energy-in-georgia/">may not reflect the will of the people</a> (or at least the people comprising its target audience).</font></p>
<blockquote style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dooley tells Climate Progress that despite AFP’s misinformation campaign, which “was based on misleading data and was not accurate,” most of the Tea Party activists she works with support the proposed solar plan because they see it as a “way to help protect the environment, give consumers choice and in the long-term help lower their rates.”</font></blockquote>
<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Help protect the environment? Tea Party, are you feeling OK?</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Patriots advocate an all-of-the-above energy strategy, saying in an email to supporters that they “just don’t believe it is responsible to be completely reliant on one or two energy sources to generate needed electricity.” Bubba, for his part, sees the writing on the wall when it comes to the traditional forms of energy on which Georgia Power has long relied. <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/energy/article/Regulators-OK-solar-expansion-for-Georgia-Power-4660228.php">The Associated Press</a>:</font></p>
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<p style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McDonald called for expanding the renewable energy source as a hedge against environmental rules that might force coal plants offline or future increases in the price of natural gas. …</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We don’t know what tomorrow is going to be with coal. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to be with natural gas,” McDonald said after the vote. “But we know the sun will be shining.”</font></p>
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<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2013/07/11/georgia-psc-orders-more-solar-power.html?page=all"><i>Atlanta Business Chronicle</i></a> has the deets on the new plan:</font></p>
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<p style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of a broader long-term electrical generation plan that requires Atlanta-based Georgia Power Co. to increase its solar power capacity by 525 megawatts by the end of 2016.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of that amount, 425 megawatts would come from large “utility-scale” solar projects and 100 would come from projects small enough to be installed by individual residential or commercial property owners.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia Power already is working to develop 260 megawatts of solar energy through two projects previously approved by the PSC.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But supporters of a motion by Commissioner Lauren “Bubba” McDonald to up the ante argued that recent technological advancements have brought down the costs of solar power enough to justify additional investment.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’ve got to approach this in a businesslike fashion and try to stay ahead of the curve,” McDonald said after the vote.</font></p>
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<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Solar will still make up just a small fraction of the utility’s overall energy mix. Solar providers will engage in a competitive bidding process, with oversight from the Public Service Commission, to ensure that rates don’t go up.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">No Republican wants to get on the Tea Party’s bad side. Maybe if solar boosters joined forces with grassroots Tea Party groups across the nation, we could give AFP a run for its money. (Well, probably not literally.)</font>
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<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.</font>
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<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A quick Google search found this HuffPost article:<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/tea-party-election-results_n_2084506.html">Tea Party Election Results: Conservative Movement Of 2010 Takes Pounding In 2012</a>,</span> which pointed out that of 16 U.S. Senate candidates endorsed by the Tea Party in 2012, only four won. The Tea Party candidates for Senate were not very successful:</font></div>
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<p style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) seemed poised to defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) until his comments regarding "legitimate rape" tanked his campaign. Additionally, Tea Party backed candidate Richard Mourdock enjoyed a narrow lead over Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) until a debate last month in which Mourdock said that pregnancies resulting from rape are something that "God intended to happen."</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similarly, Tea Party favorites Christine O'Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada squandered 2010 chances to pick up Senate seats for Republicans.</font></p>
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<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Google also led me to this article from CBS: <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57558169/dick-armey-tea-party-candidates-lost-because-they-did-dumb-things/">Dick Armey: Tea party candidates lost because they "did dumb things"</a>:</font></div>
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<p style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(CBS News) Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey blamed GOP leadership for the loss of campaigns of Republicans across the country in 2012.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I don't think the Republican Party schooled their candidates very well or supported their candidates very well," Armey said on "CBS This Morning."</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Armey left the House in 2003 and went on to run FreedomWorks, an organization that became instrumental in the rise of the tea party movement. FreedomWorks spent $40 million in 2012 to elect tea party candidates but only one-quarter of the candidates they endorsed won.</font></p>
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<h2 style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party is Amorphous and Hard to Define</font></h2>
<p style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Tea Party doesn’t exist as a monolithic entity. There are super-rich people like The Koch brothers or Sheldon <b>Adelson</b> who hate paying <b>taxes </b>and don’t like government regulations. They have funded various super-PACs and astroturf groups with Tea Party labels.</span> Then there are people like Ron Paul and various other <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">libertarians</span> who run Tea Parties here and there (and they may or may not favor things like marriage equality or legalizing marijuana or abortion rights). A third group is the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">evangelicals</span> who want to ban things like abortion and LGBT marriage and birth control and shariah law (WTF?) and so on. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They’re the exact opposite of libertarians.</span> Not that I sympathize with libertarians or evangelicals (or ultra-rich guys, for that matter). There are four or more national tea party groups, including one that was founded as a for-profit organization by a shady Tennessee lawyer. I think the Tennessee guy’s group went out of business after getting slapped by Friedman’s invisible hand).</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Calling it THE Tea party – using the definite article – makes it sounds like it’s a single political party or a single legitimate group. It’s not. It’s just a label used by Republicans who think it will help them get elected. Basically it’s an unorganized group of people who want to be elected to government positions so they can shut down most government services and lower taxes to nearly zero.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Which members of Congress (the House of Representatives) claim to espouse Tea Party values?</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I found different lists from different sources on the internet, so I decided to base this DKos diary on the official Tea Party Caucus page from www.house.gov. Here’s the web page: <a href="http://teapartycaucus-bachmann.house.gov/membership">House of Representatives Membership (of Tea Party Caucus)</a>. This web page will probably change soon, so here’s the list of current members of the TP Caucus in the House (when I started writing this a few weeks ago), in alphabetical order:</font></p>
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<p style=" text-align: left;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 59 Tea Party Caucus Members Before the 2012 Election</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Sandy Adams (FL-24)</strong> , Robert Aderholt (AL-04), <strong>Todd Akin (MO-02)</strong> , Rodney Alexander (LA-05), Michele Bachmann (MN-06), <strong>Roscoe Bartlett (MD-06)</strong> , Joe Barton (TX-06), Gus Bilirakis (FL-09) (FL-12), Rob Bishop (UT-01), Diane Black (TN-06),</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Broun (GA-10), Michael Burgess (TX-26), <strong>Dan Burton (IN-05)</strong> , John Carter (TX-31), Bill Cassidy (LA-06), Howard Coble (NC-06), Ander Crenshaw (FL-04), John Culberson (TX-07), Jeff Duncan (SC-03), Blake Farenthold (TX-27)</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Lee Fincher (TN-08), John Fleming (LA-04), Trent Franks (AZ-02)(AZ-08), Phil Gingrey (GA-11), Louie Gohmert (TX-01), Vicky Hartzler (MO-04), <strong>Wally Herger (CA-02)</strong> , Tim Huelskamp (KS-01), Lynn Jenkins (KS-02), Steve King (IA-05) (IA-04)</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Doug Lamborn (CO-05), <strong>Jeff Landry (LA-03)</strong> , Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-09) (MO-03), Kenny Marchant (TX-24), Tom McClintock (CA-04), David McKinley (WV-01), Gary Miller (CA-42)(CA-31), Mick Mulvaney (SC-05), Randy Neugebauer (TX-19), Rich Nugent (FL-05) (FL-11)</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Palazzo (MS-04), Steve Pearce (NM-02), <strong>Mike Pence (IN-06)</strong> , Ted Poe (TX-02), Tom Price (GA-06), <strong>Denny Rehberg (MT-AL)</strong> , David "Phil" Roe (TN-01), Dennis Ross (FL-12) (FL-15), Edward Royce (CA-40)(CA-39), Steve Scalise (LA-01)</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pete Sessions (TX-32), Lamar Smith (TX-21), Adrian Smith (NE-03), <strong>Cliff Stearns (FL-06)</strong> , Tim Walberg (MI-07), <strong>Joe Walsh (IL-08)</strong> , <strong>Allen West (FL-22) (FL-18)</strong> , Lynn Westmoreland (GA-03), Joe Wilson (SC-02)</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Note 1: </strong>Eleven Congresspersons (whose names I bolded) won’t be returning to the House next year. 11 of 59 members are gone, which is 19%. That leaves 48 current members (plus whoever joins next year after the swearing in ceremony).</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Note 2: </strong>If a name is followed by two Congressional districts, the second is their new district number after redistricting.</font></p>
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<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let’s consider this the official list of Tea Partiers in the House. Before I tell you what happened to those 59 Tea Party Caucus Members of Congress, I need to mention this…</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">.</font></p>
<h2 style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I Am Ignoring the Following Politicians</font></h2>
<p style="font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tea Party Senators</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party caucus in the Senate currently consists of Jim DeMint (South Carolina), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kansas), and Rand Paul (Kentucky). DeMint resigned from the Senate, so there are three left. Some candidates for Senate – Akin, Mourdock, O’Donnell, and Angle (and others, like the jerk In Alaska) – might have joined the Senate TP caucus, but those assholes lost their elections in 2010 or 2012. The Tea Party doesn’t have a significant presence in the Senate – at least not an organized caucus presence.</font>
<strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Representatives Who Left the Tea Party Caucus (or Never Joined) or Left Congress</font></strong>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tom Graves (GA), Ralph Hall (TX), Walter Jones (NC), Cynthia Lummis (WY), and Sue Myrick (NC) were once listed as members of the TP caucus, but they apparently left the caucus. Or whatever. Maybe they never joined. I’m not sure about Tim Scott (SC) and Mike Coffman (CO) – they might have had tea party leanings but they’re not listed on the Tea Party Caucus page.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Parker Griffith, Pete<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Hoekstra, John Shadegg, Todd Tiahrt,</span> and Zach Wamp might have been members of the TP caucus at one time, but I think all of them have left Congress.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So I’m ignoring those people.</font>
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<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One-fifth of the 50 richest members of Congress are freshman House Republicans sent to Washington last year with strong Tea Party support, </span>according to The Hill’s 50 Wealthiest for 2011.</font></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ohio’s Rep. Jim Renacci, the wealthiest of the 87 freshman Republicans elected in 2010, has an estimated net worth of $35.9 million and is the 11th richest lawmaker in Congress, according to The Hill’s list.</font></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div class="module" style="font-weight: normal;"><div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Reps. Nan Hayworth (R-N.Y.) and Blake Farenthold (R-Texas), who are also numbered among the 50, Renacci had a successful business career before entering Congress.</font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He made his fortune through LTC Management Services, the Ohio nursing home owner and operator that he founded in 1985. The lawmaker still has close to $2 million in holdings tied to the company.</font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayworth is a former ophthalmologist whose work at a very profitable medical group left her with a fortune valued at a minimum of $9.3 million. Farenthold founded a computer consulting and Web design firm and has a net worth of at least $8.8 million.</font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two other new members of the rich list, Reps. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) and Scott Rigell (R-Va.), made their fortunes with car dealerships. Kelly’s estimated wealth is $11.9 million, while Rigell’s is $10.7 million.</font></div>
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<div class="related" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">
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<h3 style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED ARTICLES</font></h3>
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<li style=" text-align: left;"><a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/179087-the-hills-2011-50-wealthiest-congress-rish-list" class="related"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">The Hill's 2011 50 Wealthiest in Congress</font></a></li>
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<p style="text-align: left; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></p>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as the GOP class of 2010 has had a huge impact on The Hill’s Wealthiest list, it has also hit Washington hard. The freshman class was a dominant force in the debate over reducing budget deficits that nearly shut down the government earlier this year.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freshman GOP members also had a hand in pressuring their leaders to negotiate a hard bargain on legislation to raise the debt ceiling, and have successfully prevented any new tax increases from being enacted. They have particularly stood against ending the Bush-era tax rates on wealthier households.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The other Republican freshmen on The Hill’s ranking of the 50 wealthiest members of Congress are Reps. Rick Berg (N.D.), <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Diane Black (Tenn.), Bill Flores (Texas), Steve Pearce (N.M</span>.) and Richard Hanna (N.Y.), whose minimum net worth was calculated from a disclosure report he filed as a candidate.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most of the freshman members appear to hold safe seats for their 2012 campaigns, though a few — including Kelly, Hayworth and Hanna — are in competitive districts. All three are in likely Republican districts, according to the most recent report by analyst Charlie Cook.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Overall, the 50 lawmakers on The Hill’s list are substantially wealthier than the class of 2010. Together, they reported a minimum net worth of more than $1.6 billion, about $200 million more than the lawmakers on last year’s survey.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The full list can be viewed <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/179087-the-hills-2011-50-wealthiest-congress-rish-list"><b>here</b></a>.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A financial boom among the most affluent lawmakers partly explains the increase. The most dramatic jump came from Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who reported a minimum net worth of at least $287 million — enough to vault him to the No. 1 ranking.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A number of family trusts and companies affiliated with McCaul’s spouse, Linda, were reported to be worth at least $50 million each in 2010, according to the lawmaker’s financial disclosure report. Linda McCaul is the daughter of Lowry Mays, the founder of the hugely successful radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The more than $213 million increase in McCaul’s net worth was by far the most reported by a lawmaker, though <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rep. Darrell Issa </span>(R-Calif.) notched an impressive gain of nearly $60 million, which solidified his position as the second wealthiest in Congress.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Issa reported a spike in his personal fortune in 2010 after he set up several different limited partnerships that took in commercial property from his DEI LLC, a Vista, Calif., commercial property management company. Those new companies are worth millions of dollars, and added to his minimum net worth of $220.4 million.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div class="module" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The upward mobility of McCaul and Issa booted Sen. John<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Kerry</span> (D-Mass.) from his long-held perch as Congress’s richest member. The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate ranked third in 2010, despite a $5 million increase that bumped his minimum net worth to $193.3 million.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The only freshman lawmaker ranking among the Top 10 in wealth is <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the former state attorney general.</span> He reported a minimum net worth of $54.9 million, placing him eighth in The Hill’s rankings.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Much of Blumenthal’s wealth comes from his wife, Cynthia. Blumenthal’s father-in-law is real estate magnate Peter Malkin, whose property holdings include a 114-year lease on the Empire State Building.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The GOP’s electoral success in 2010 helped tilt the list toward Republicans. Six Democrats on The Hill’s 50 Wealthiest in 2010 — including former Reps. Alan Grayson (Fla.), John Spratt (S.C.) and Harry Teague (N.M.) — lost their reelection bids.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Hill’s 2011 rankings include 32 Republicans and 18 Democrats. By chamber, the breakdown is 29 from the House, 21 from the Senate.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The threshold for making the top 50 rose significantly this year.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In years past, if a lawmaker’s minimum net worth was more than $5 million, he or she was nearly a lock to place among Congress’s wealthiest. But due to the sizable wealth of 2011’s freshman class, many lawmakers with more than $5 million didn’t make the cut.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The last slot in the rankings went to Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), whose net worth came to $6.2 million.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To calculate the 50 richest members of Congress, The Hill reviewed all lawmakers’ 2010 calendar-year congressional financial disclosure reports, which were released starting in June.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those financial disclosure forms do not give exact values for lawmakers’ assets and liabilities. Instead, they report value ranges for each item listed by a lawmaker. A lawmaker’s Caribbean vacation villa, for example, might be appraised at $1.5 million, but a lawmaker would only have to report its value in the range of $1 million to $5 million.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For consistency, The Hill researchers recorded the lowest number of each value range to calculate lawmakers’ assets and liabilities. The sum of the liabilities was subtracted from the assets for a conservative estimate of each lawmaker’s net worth.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When possible, The Hill used exact figures from bank statements and other materials that lawmakers released to the public along with their financial disclosure forms.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The methodology used to rank the 50 richest members of Congress can sometimes understate the true size of lawmakers’ wealth.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) is the owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, an estimated $258 million asset, according to <i>Forbes</i> magazine. Yet Kohl’s ownership of the Bucks only counts for $50 million in The Hill’s calculations, since that is the highest value range on the congressional financial disclosure report.</font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div>
<div style=" text-align: left;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kohl’s minimum net worth for 2010 is only $9.2 million, due to some large liabilities he reported.</font></div>
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