Chapter 5: The Story Slanted
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27, 2024.
“The Tea Party’s right-wing populism is the perfect kind for corporate news outlets at a time when the wealthy elites who own and support them feel threatened by more authentic populist impulses.” Fairness in Accuracy and Media newsletter, May, 2010.
Once the reality of Scott Brown's upset win in Massachusetts sank in, the media and leftists (but I repeat myself) quickly realized this momentous event occurred in a place that was about as safe of a Democratic state as there was in the country, at least in terms of its Congressional delegation. With the prospect of an already rocky midterm election staring them in the face, preserving power in the face of a potential electoral bloodbath became an all hands on deck and no holds barred situation for the Left. No fact was safe nor was truth necessarily an objective – it was all about the narrative and preserving the Democrats' majority in Congress to keep the “fundamental transformation” of America going.
In one respect, however, fortune was on their side. With the various personalities and groups who were jockeying for position in the TEA Party as it developed over the last half of 2009 and into 2010, there were ample opportunities for a political press corps who originally saw the TEA Party as an isolated event to exploit some of the fissures within the movement and develop their own narrative. I've already pointed out some of this media treatment of the TEA Party's formation back in Chapter 2, but it's worth revisiting as we continue on.
This attempted rewrite of history began with the charge that the various local TEA Party events weren't spontaneous, but coordinated by national conservative groups. Writer and author Jeffrey Feldman was one of those who originally attempted to equate the corporate sponsorship of one event in Washington, D.C. with the entire nationwide movement. According to Feldman and his Frameshop blog site, the whole thing was just a Republican plot:
The Republican revolt is called Tea Party U.S.A. and the idea is that Republicans will stage protests against government spending, today, to send the message to Washington that the American people are tired of taxation without representation – or something like that.1
As it was, the Washington D.C. event was sponsored by a number of inside-the-Beltway interest groups, including AFP and FreedomWorks. But the same was not necessarily true around the country.
Feldman's piece was the initial salvo in the drive to paint the TEA Party as just a phony movement based on its corporate sponsorship. Just weeks after the first set of anti-stimulus events, writers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine went to the most unusual of investigative outfits, Playboy magazine, to boldly claim that Santelli's February 19 rant was, “a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign.”2 Their journalistic snooping led them to infer the following:
ChicagoTeaParty.com was just one part of a larger network of Republican sleeper-cell-blogs set up over the course of the past few months, all of them tied to a shady rightwing advocacy group coincidentally named the “Sam Adams Alliance,” whose backers have until now been kept hidden from public. Cached google (sic) records that we discovered show that the Sam Adams Alliance took pains to scrub its deep links to the Koch family money as well as the fake-grassroots “tea party” protests going on today. All of these roads ultimately lead back to a more notorious rightwing advocacy group, FreedomWorks, a powerful PR organization headed by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and funded by Koch money.3
Ames and Levine noted that original TEA Party founder Eric Odom was the new media coordinator of the Sam Adams Alliance for a time in 2008-09, but he departed the group several weeks before Santelli spoke out. Later, Odom denied the allegations regarding any connection with the Koch family and called the story by Ames and Levine a “hit piece (that) was 100% fabricated and contained no reality whatsoever. Yet, its content was used to drive media narratives against the movement that still exist today.”4 (The original article was quickly pulled from Playboy, given its potentially libelous accusations about Santelli.5 But Odom is correct in noting that it served the Left's narrative well and is still often used as a reference.)
Indeed, the brothers David and Charles Koch are favored whipping boys of the Left simply because they use a portion of the fortune they built up in the business world to promote initiatives and ideas which they believe will benefit all businesses, theirs included. If anything, history shows they lean in a pro-liberty direction: the prime example is David Koch's run for Vice-President with Ed Clark on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 – prior to Gary Johnson's two efforts in 2012 and 2016, that election served as the Libertarians' high-water mark in national balloting. Thus, a political movement that featured advocacy for lower taxes and less government spending would be something the Koch brothers would logically support based on their political beliefs, just as other businessmen such as George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Tom Steyer back left-wing interests and issues. Similarly, as noted previously in this volume, FreedomWorks was a major backer of the initial TEA Parties because they had common interests with the organizers.
Because the backlash against the stimulus programs addressed by the original February rallies was real and tangible, the Left had a perception problem. In order to provide a counterpoint to the caterwauling by John Q. Public – without conceding that the solutions offered by their allies Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrats in Congress were indeed unpopular – it required the usage of the “A” word.
As the April 15 TEA Parties approached, more far-left websites, such as ThinkProgress, began to play up the term “Astroturf.”6 Then the phrase was picked up by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who called the upcoming round of protests “AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects,”7 which meant it became part of the spin for mass media distribution to the Left's echo chamber.8 With that, Nancy Pelosi obviously felt free to make the comparison in her own district.9
There were some minor attempts to correct this false narrative – you know, from actual eyewitnesses that showed up for the events, such as this one in Seattle from observer Don Ward:
These aren't the dime-a-dozen insta-rallies we've seen over the last eight years put on by professional protestors. Instead average people took time off from work, many of whom have never attended a political demonstration in their life, to exercise their right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Seattle Police estimated that about five hundred protestors packed into Westlake Park to protest higher tax and the intrusive nature of the federal government into the daily lives of average Americans. The event was peaceful and festive, marked by patriotic music and handmade signs harkening to the 1773 Boston Tea Party.
A few things were different. There were no drum circles. No one wore a mask over their face to hide their identity. Instead of taunting police officers, as usually happens when protestors from Evergreen or Seattle Central Community College crash a rally, the Tea Party folks thanked them. The ever present stench of reefer wasn't hovering in the air. The event started with the Pledge of Allegiance and ended with a singing of "God Bless America."10
Seattle Times writer and columnist Bruce Ramsey agreed, noting that his city's original “porkulus” protest was not put together by some large organization, but by 29-year-old math teacher and stand-up comic Kari Carender. In Washington state, the protests grew by Tax Day to involve a local radio station and a libertarian advocacy group, but they were still homegrown grassroots. “Some AstroTurf,” wrote Ramsey.11 Multiply that by hundreds of cities around the nation and it's hard to fathom that there was a corporate hand up the puppet's back in each and every case.
As a whole regarding the Astroturf accusation, I happen to agree with writer and blogger Liz Mair:
(I)rrespective of what you may think of the tea parties, the people who frequent them, or the underlying objections being raised by tea party attendees, the simple fact is that the people who are claiming this is all the product of some top-down organized astroturf effort are talking out of their rear ends and need to do some homework.12
So who are you going to believe? After all, the classic definition of Astroturfing involved the creation of front groups that encouraged willing dupes to perform some action such as submitting a form letter to their legislative representatives to create the illusion of a groundswell of support. (The political usage of the term is credited to former Senator and Democratic VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, in response to a deluge of mail he received advocating for a particular issue on behalf of the insurance industry.) Unlike the rent-a-mobs associated with protests on the Left, though, the TEA Parties were far more spontaneous.
Moreover, once you got past the initial idea about governmental fiscal responsibility, local TEA Party organizations exhibited a lot of leeway on other subjects, particularly social issues, and also disagreed on the degree of government restraint required. While they could all agree the stimulus was a problem, hard-core libertarians and those protestors under the age of 30 had a very different perspective from the more traditional conservative Republicans who felt the government needed to keep its promises on extra-Constitutional programs such as Medicare and Social Security despite their effects on the budget.
That distinction, though, wasn't going to convince those on the Left to see the TEA Party as a legitimate petition for a redress of grievances. Even when the key organizers of the TEA Party moved away from the established political groups and formed the Tea Party Patriots, the existence of the competing Tea Party Express which was rooted in the stridently anti-Obama Our Country Deserves Better PAC – a group that regularly promoted GOP candidates – allowed naysayers to maintain the Astroturf line about the entire TEA Party, not to mention identify it as just another sector of the Republican Party. Add to this the for-profit aspects of other groups like Tea Party Nation and the American Liberty Alliance, and the seeds of doubt13 could be planted among those in the middle who weren't quite sure what to make of these protestors and their demands.
The TEA Party, as it grew, also became the home of certain elements the Left loved to pick on. Take this example from reporter Ben McGrath at The New Yorker:
As spring passed into summer, the scores at local Tea Party gatherings turned to hundreds, and then thousands, collecting along the way footloose Ron Paul supporters, goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militiamen, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers” – those who remained convinced that the President was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya. “We’ll meet back here in six months,” (Glenn) Beck had said in March, and when September 12th arrived even the truest of believers were surprised by the apparent strength of the new movement, as measured by the throngs who made the pilgrimage to the Capitol for a Taxpayer March on Washington, swarming the Mall with signs reading “‘1984’ Is Not an Instruction Manual” and “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”14
Yes, McGrath had to get those signs in, even if they represented just a small fraction of the signage (and sentiment) of the event. But his story brings up a very good point: one issue with the TEA Party was the fact their local leaders were often common folk unaccustomed to the ways of marketing and telling the news. Since the TEA Party was born without an established group of people to handle PR, the job fell onto others whose interests didn't always square with the philosophy.
The pressing need to find media spokespersons for the Tea Party was, of course, awkward, given that the Tea Party has never been more than a disunited field of jostling organizations. A lot of Tea Party activism goes on in localities, states, and regions – and even at the national level there are no true chieftains of any global Tea Party entity.
(…)
(N)aturally, there are always ambitious national politicos and advocacy elites, who, in this particular case, like to see themselves as 'Tea Party leaders.' After the 2010 elections, especially, a lot of self-designated Tea Party leaders were happy to make themselves available for public statements or performances. Supply met demand.15
The “Astroturf” accusations about the TEA Party continue to this day – although we were treated to a shrill declaration of “final proof” back in 201316 – but they grew louder as the loyal opposition became more and more dominated by the nationwide groups, whether based inside the Beltway or not, that took charge of the movement in the time period leading up to the 9/12 rallies. As a prime example, FreedomWorks was criticized early17 and often during the summer of 2009, and whether it was Dick Armey not answering a question regarding their common cause with the Tea Party Patriots to a “gotcha” journalist's liking,18 trying to recoup its expenses for the Taxpayer March on Washington by charging speakers $10,000,19 or just advocating for more participation at the summer's frequent townhall meetings held by Congressional representatives in their districts,20 they (and to a lesser degree, Americans for Prosperity)21 were made out to be the poster children for inside-the-Beltway influence by most of the left-leaning commentary sites.
But the second and much more damning charge against the TEA Party came from the Left's usage of the good old race card. It didn't take long for the first accusations of racism to come out of the leftist media, based simply on the fact predominantly white TEA Partiers were condemning the policies of a black (but in reality, mixed-race) President. The day after the Tax Day events, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's Countdown welcomed as a guest the activist, comedian, and onetime Air America radio host Janeane Garofalo, and she planted the seed of the racist narrative. After watching the video of the crowd at an event in Pensacola, Florida booing a speaker who blamed the Republican Congress for overspending, Garofalo remarked:
You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become – it's like showing Frankenstein's monster fire. They become confused, and angry, and highly volatile.22
That message provided an undercurrent which slowly cut into the overall TEA Party message. William Jelani Cobb, a professor at Spielman College, returned to that narrative shortly after the reported sighting of racist signs at the 9/12 rally. “Now we have a black president,” Cobb told CNN, “which means, on its most basic level, that a black man has more power than any single white citizen in this country.”23 This despite the fact the vast majority of the 9/12 speakers and signs stuck to the original call for governmental fiscal responsibility and restraint.24
But it's not unfair to say that there was an element of the white supremacist extremists who saw the TEA Party as a good ground for recruiting, nor can it be completely dismissed that some of the e-mail chains25 and signage at the TEA Party events26 was politically incorrect when it came to race issues. Regarding the recruiting aspect, the Anti-Defamation League also attempted to tie in the libertarian side of the TEA Party:
As they have done with other political and social issues, for example, promoting the Ron Paul campaign and using the immigration debate, white supremacists and anti-Semites are planning to exploit Tea Parties to disseminate their hateful views and recruit a larger following.27
Remember, one thing Ron Paul was best known for was voting against a Congressional resolution commemorating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.28 So he was an easy target.
Over the years, this particular strain of the racism accusation has moved on to cling to the Donald Trump campaign and presidency so it's nothing new – all that has changed is the verbiage and, more recently, the degree of reaction from the Left. What once tarred the TEA Party now taints Trump and the “alt-right” but the white supremacist cast of characters is basically the same.
So as a complement to the “Astroturf” contention, the racist narrative was now also being set. And every time the TEA Party or one of its leaders did something remotely questionable in the runup to the 2010 midterm elections, it was yet another chance for that not-so-subtle accusation to be driven home by the media.
Let us look first at a March 20, 2010 TEA Party rally at the Capitol. Dubbed “Operation Urgent Care” by the Tea Party Patriots,29 it was held just hours before the final House vote on Obamacare was to be decided. After the event, Rep. John Lewis, a longtime civil rights icon, made the claim that he was called a “nigger” by one of the TEA Party protestors. “They were shouting, sort of harassing,” Lewis told reporters. “But, it's okay, I've faced it before. It reminded me of the 60s. It was a lot of downright hate and anger and people being downright mean.”30 (Lewis was not a speaker at the event; he was simply walking through the gathering – not that he had to.31 It was almost as if he was daring those gathered to create the controversy.) The same group also allegedly called gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank a “fag,” but reports noted the offender was admonished by others in the crowd.32
Yet when Andrew Breitbart challenged the leftists to put up video proof of someone using the n-word toward Rep. Lewis, no one stepped forth – even when he upped the ante by pledging a $10,000 donation to the United Negro College Fund.33 But no one needed to supply the proof – not that there was any, since several different videos and eyewitness accounts showed the opposite34 – because the accusation was as good as gold to the leftist media as it fit their narrative like a glove. “A weakness in (the TEA Party was) that the establishment media could find somebody presenting themselves as a Tea Party leader to say something crazy and then use those isolated instances to smear all of us,”35 said Sacramento TEA Party leader Eric Eisenhammer.
Although he did more than “present himself” as a TEA Party leader, this was especially true in the case of Eric's fellow Sacramento TEA Party leader and radio host Mark Williams, whose remarks and writings were continually referenced by the movement's opponents as proof positive the whole lot of them were racists just barely this side of the Ku Klux Klan.
Williams' fall from grace began when CNN broadcast a phrase he used in a blog post calling Barack Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and racist-in-chief.”36 When Williams, who probably should have known better given he worked in the media, feebly replied that it was the way Obama was behaving, the trap was set. Regardless of the context, anything Williams said over the next few months was viewed through that lens.
Even after he stepped down as the leader of the Tea Party Express37 a few months later, in June, 2010 – in large part due to his reputation and the distraction he was becoming – the media continued to seek him out, perhaps in the hopes of another PR disaster they could glom onto for their next news cycle. On July 14, 2010, they hit paydirt.
A day earlier, the NAACP, at its annual convention held that year in Kansas City, issued a resolution calling on the TEA Party to repudiate the “racist elements” within.38 Naturally, Williams was in demand for his commentary, so he was a guest on CNN's The Situation Room program with host Wolf Blitzer and CNN contributor Roland Martin when he said, in response to the tag team of questions and accusations about the TEA Party from the NAACP regarding the issue, “Racists have their own organization. It's called the NAACP.”39 Shortly thereafter Williams doubled down on the sentiment, penning a parody letter from “we coloreds” addressed to President Lincoln claiming that “we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing.”40
Sensing a PR disaster in the making, the National Tea Party Federation quickly ousted Williams and the Tea Party Express from their ranks.41 “Our members were offended by what he wrote,” said NTPF's Christina Botteri. “The Tea Party movement is much more important than this kerfuffle and we couldn't do nothing."42
In response, Williams called the tiff with the Federation a “personality conflict” with “some of the minor players on the fringes” hoping to advance themselves by taking him down, and told the media he was done talking about it43 – invariably that's seen like blood in the water for the media sharks. Now they had their “proof” that the entire TEA Party was simply based on racism and the Left wasn't going to let it go.
Looking back years after the fact, Williams was contrite about his impact. Let me set this up by stating up front that I consider all of the TEA Party organizers heroes, so this is reflected in the reply:
Thank you for considering me a hero but, please, do not let that you stop reporting what you see through your own eyes and hear through your own ears. I fucked up, a lot, to go with the good I may have done. None of the latter without the help of quite literally millions of people I never met (and) never will but was teamed with. Lotta heroes in the last decade especially.
And a lot of them I let down. That I regret.44
But I think there's a useful thought exercise in order here. Imagine everything about the administration of our 44th President: the stimulus, the Affordable Care Act (including the gymnastics needed by Congress to get it passed), cap and trade proposals, foreign policy failures, rules created by executive order, and the rest of the whole nine yards, was exactly the same but the occupants of the presidency and vice-presidency were reversed. Would there have been a TEA Party under a President Biden and Vice-President Obama? I think there would have, and I also think the media would have attempted to play the race card even if Barack Obama had only been the veep.
Policy is policy, and bad ideas come from all races and genders. But the presence of a black President was used well as a shield by the progressive movement to shout down any opposition with the cry that those who questioned their motives were simply racists. That, in turn, was offensive to two minority TEA Party leaders: Deneen Borelli and Katrina Pierson.
“It's easier for the Left to play the race card than address the public's legitimate concerns,” says Borelli, “but what the Left and the media is doing is damaging and dangerous. It's damaging because when everything is racist, nothing is.”45 (Emphasis mine.)
Adds Pierson, in her reaction to the NAACP resolution:
The existence of the NAACP, and others like it, are threatened by the existence of the Tea Party. The reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement in 2010.
(…)
The NAACP has been completely ineffective in my lifetime, and the lack of leadership in the black community has contributed to the ability of these groups to speak on behalf of the rest of us. The ignored and forgotten society that lives among the projects has been abandoned by the likes of the NAACP. As well as with other groups and individuals that rode in the coat-tails of MLK, they are irrelevant but continue to feed off of the co-dependence that they have created among blacks for validation.46
Perhaps author and TEA Party leader Jonathan Wakefield had the right idea: power through it.
(W)atching Big Government Disciples perpetuate the myth that my friends and I (in the TEA Party) are somehow racist bothered me and made me want to get out there and defend our collective name.
Eventually, though, I realized this is actually counterproductive. The Big Government Disciples would like nothing more than to trap us into spending all our time trying to convince people that we're not racist. That way Americans, especially minorities, are focused on examining us and not the abysmal record of the Big Government Disciples whose policies have fostered the poverty that many minorities struggle under today.
(…)
Instead of getting frustrated or angry with the false accusations, I say the Tea Party should be encouraged by them. They wouldn't attack us if we weren't making an impact. And because they can't challenge us on the merits of the issues, they have to play the race card.47
When the shoe was on the other foot, though, the media was very slow to judge – or just ignored the story altogether. After an August, 2009 town hall meeting in St. Louis, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan, a video48 emerged of two SEIU union members beating a black man, Kenneth Gladney. The much-smaller Gladney was, depending on which account you believe, either giving out or selling Gadsden flags and other TEA Party-related merchandise when he was accosted by the much larger union members, one black and one white. A witness stated the black attacker asked Gladney, “Why is a nigger like you handing out these flags?”49
For Gladney, the incident turned out to be his fifteen minutes of fame as he was embraced by the TEA Party as a hero. However, despite the video evidence, his assailants were acquitted in a jury trial that didn't occur until July, 2011 – nearly two years after the incident and fifteen months after the SEIU pair pleaded not guilty. Writing at his Gateway Pundit blog after the trial, Jim Hoft noted that the Gladney case was the prosecutor's first jury trial and the defense put Gladney's credibility on trial to counter the video evidence.50 Had this occurred in the other direction, it's certain the media would be screaming about a mistrial.
But race wasn't the only issue placed as an obstacle to the TEA Party: anyone who had a grudge against the government or perpetrated evil acts against it was automatically assumed to be a TEA Party-supporting far-right winger. This was the case in February, 2010 when disgruntled engineer Joseph Andrew Stack flew his single-engine plane into a building that contained the IRS office serving Austin, Texas. His suicide note blamed the IRS for many of his issues,51 but could be interpreted more as a diatribe against the 1% which would become more common a year and a half later with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The media's template regarding Stack was furthered when they found that Stack was a right-winger based on his Facebook page – only the page wasn't really his; it was a fake page set up as a plant within hours after the incident.52 When people actually asked the Austin Tea Party leadership, they found out that Stack was neither a member of their groups nor was he even on their contact lists.53 It didn't matter to the media, though, as each side blamed the other for influencing a clearly disturbed man desperate enough to wish harm on others in his final act.54
For several years afterward, any and all such outbursts of violence were blamed on the TEA Party – more often than not, though, it was eventually learned that the perpetrator was politically left-of-center. A good case in point was the Aurora movie theater shooting in July, 2012, where ABC's Brian Ross was forced to apologize for suggesting on air that shooter James Holmes was a TEA Party regular. The accusation turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, but Ross was led by how the other, innocent TEA Party sympathizer Jim Holmes fit well within the media narrative that the TEA Party was a violent group of Second Amendment supporters.55
Even though we have moved on from Obama to Donald Trump, violence is still blamed on the alt-Right (which is regarded as a successor group to the TEA Party despite having little in common) even as Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other left-leaning groups have rioted in the streets around the nation. Recall that President Trump was absolutely blasted by the Left – and a good percentage of the establishment Right56 – when he condemned “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides”57 for the August, 2017 rioting and tragedy in Charlottesville.
The overall point is: an “Obama good, TEA Party bad” message was perpetrated by the Left once the TEA Party showed its political worth by electing Scott Brown. Reflecting on her 2010 electoral bid, Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle noted her press treatment:
I was constantly aware that we only had a short time to convince the electorate to vote for me and I was impatient over the loss of valuable time.
Yet much of the press focus was not on issues but “buzz.” Some came to make their name on the national scene by trying to capture the footage that would launch their careers on the national stage. I spent a day with one reporter who got a call near the end of the interview. He exclaimed, “I've made it big. I just got a call from CNN and MSNBC. They want all my footage.”
(…)
My first encounter with the press in D.C. was outside a Republican Senate lunch. In my packed schedule for the day, no one from the press had made an appointment, yet nearly fifty media people crowded to take pictures and shout questions as I left the luncheon. I smiled, waved, declined an interview because of my schedule and got into the third floor elevator. Reporters raced one another down the stairs, and as I exited on the first floor, equipment flew across the floor in front of me. They rushed me as I entered a waiting vehicle. The story that day was “Angle Runs from the Press.”58
And whether it was an investigative series from the Huffington Post detailing “The Anatomy of the Tea Party” in sinister tones,59 an “aw-shucks” interview given to a grandmotherly TEA Party volunteer by David Letterman,60 or the books written as an instant analysis of the movement by authors on the opposite side of the political spectrum61 to glowing reviews,62 the message was continually pounded in that the TEA Party wasn't truly part of the mainstream, or, in the case of a PBS/Christian Science Monitor story from April, 2010, alleged that it was a political movement which only had about 67,000 members and thus was receiving outsized coverage.63 Yet, on the other hand, when it served the purposes of the media the TEA Party was portrayed as a “full-fledged independent political movement, (with speculation) whether it might even be an alternative to the two major parties.”64
Meanwhile, the frustration was evident on the TEA Party side as well. Los Angeles TEA Party co-organizer Stephen Kruiser put it this way:
Since last February a rather rapid shift has been taking place on the Right. Conservatives who used (to) express their displeasure with the GOP by simply staying home on election day (see: 2006 & 2008) decided to get out of the house and start putting faces and voices on our angst at Tea Parties.
Nobody but us got it. Elected officials and GOP party insiders ignored us. With no support at all from within the ranks of establishment Republicans, the Tea Party movement has battled an unceasing barrage of lies and attacks from Democrats at all levels, the MSM and every entertainment industry lefty thought-barfer in America.65
Certainly the TEA Party wasn't truly part of the Republican Party. Those in GOP leadership circles were fine with the help when it served their interests, as it did for Scott Brown, but bear in mind the TEA Party had to swallow its pride and back a candidate for political expediency. Unfortunately for the GOP leadership, primary voters are a fickle lot and, once emboldened, they didn't always make the choices the leadership preferred. The next chapter shows just how the party elites dealt with those TEA Party voter selections.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://jeffrey-feldman.typepad.com/frameshop/2009/02/tea-party-republicans.html
2 The Playboy link is no longer available (see note 5 below), but the story is retold here: http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/
3 Ibid.
5 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/03/playboy-dips-a-toe-into-investigative-journalism/4770/ Accessed February 7, 2017. The Ames/Levine piece was only up for a matter of days, apparently solely as an online feature. No wonder so few read Playboy for the articles, right?
7 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html
8 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/freedomworks-long-history-of-teabagging
10 https://web.archive.org/web/20140518052456/http://seattleweekly.com/home/939482-129/civics101
11 http://old.seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2009139525_opina29ramsey.html
12 http://www.lizmair.com/blog.php?Index=452
13 http://www.prwatch.org/news/2010/04/9012/will-real-tea-party-movement-please-stand Surprise, surprise: they also mention the Koch brothers.
14 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/01/the-movement
15 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 150.
16 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/final-proof-the-tea-party_b_4136722.html
17 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/freedomworks-long-history-of-teabagging Note how quickly the “teabagging” term took hold, since MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had only made that analogy days before.
19 http://www.politico.com/story/2009/08/the-summer-of-astroturf-026312?o=0
20 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/tea-baggers-team-with-freedom-works-to-target-blue-dogs-in-anti-health-care-push Another daily double: Astroturf and “tea baggers.”
22 A transcript is found at http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/noel-sheppard/2009/04/16/garofalo-tea-party-goers-are-racists-who-hate-black-president. Also worth noting: earlier in the exchange Olbermann gleefully uses a number of sexually suggestive double entendres in the vein of “teabagging” regarding the TEA Party.
24 http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/16/are-tea-parties-racist1 Walsh goes on to bemoan the fact he made what was considered by the Left a “racist slip” of comparing something President Obama said in a speech to a Snoop Dogg lyric.
25 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34267_Disgusting_Racist_of_the_Day
26 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34686_No_Racism_at_the_Tea_Party
27 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/33765_White_Supremacists_Plan_to_Rec This refers to the original Anti-Defamation League article which is no longer in their archives.
28 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/ron-paul-voting-record_n_1173255.html
30 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24577300.html
31
32 http://www.politico.com/story/2010/03/dems-say-protesters-used-n-word-034747#ixzz0ilzDfX0I
33 http://michellemalkin.com/2010/03/26/andrew-breitbart-offers-10000-to-united-negro-college-fund/
34 https://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/video-debunks-lib-accusations-that-slurs-were-shouted/
35 Social media conversation with Eric Eisenhammer, January 28, 2018.
36 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/tea-party-leader-melts-do_n_286933.html
37 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/mark-williams-steps-aside-as-chairman-of-tea-party-express/58402/ In this story he was the “controversial, anti-Islamist chairman of TEA Party Express” Mark Williams.
38 http://legalinsurrection.com/2010/07/naacp-passes-tea-party-is-racism-resolution/
39 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/14/mark-williams-tea-party-express-naacp-racist_n_646989.html
41 http://www.politico.com/story/2010/07/tea-party-federation-boots-williams-039909
42 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/28/tea-party-infighting
44 Social media conversation with Mark Williams, January 26, 2018. I lightly edited this for clarity but chose to retain the expletive.
46 https://katpierson.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/i-condemn-the-naacp/
47 Jonathan Wakefield: Saving America: A Christian Perspective Of The Tea Party Movement (Houston: Crossover Publications, 2012) p. 155-162.
48
51 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/plane-crash-suspects-online-diatribe
52 https://web.archive.org/web/20100222223048/http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=5608
54 http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/austin-attack-media-tea/2010/02/18/id/350266/
55 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/brian-ross-tea-party-colorado-shooting_n_1689471.html
57 http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/politics/trump-statement-alt-right-protests/index.html
58 Angle, Sharron. Right Angle: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim the Constitution, (Bloomington, Indiana: Author House, 2011). p. 214-215.
59 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-brantzawadzki/anatomy-of-the-tea-party_b_380567.html This is just one example, covering the Tea Party Patriots. They had a series of investigations on the TEA Party, but seemed less curious about the Obama administration.
60 http://ew.com/article/2010/03/31/david-letterman-pam-stout-tea-party/
61 Just a few examples, in order of release:
Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, by New York Times reporter Kate Zernicke
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker
Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics by Paul Street (author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics) and Anthony R. DiMaggio
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. Skocpol is a Harvard professor and past president of the American Political Science Association, while Williamson is a doctoral candidate at that institution as well as former policy director for the left-leaning Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
The Tea Party: A Brief History by historian and academic Ronald P. Formisano
Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost, at the time both of the Center for Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. It is now known as the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, part of the University of California.
62 https://newrepublic.com/article/78138/teaism-tea-party- This review was for Boiling Mad.
63 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/tea-party-how-big-is-it-and-where-is-it-based
64 Skocpol and Williamson, p. 142.
65 https://caliblues.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/the-real-story-behind-newt-dedes-breakup/
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 6: Backlash from the Beltway.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…