Sometime in February, about 1,000 people gather in St. Louis to protest the economic crash and the election of Barack Obama. They call themselves the Tea Party and claim to be a grassroots movement against big government, taxes, and the national debt. They are not.
The Tea Party (or Tea Party Patriots) is the result of combined influence operations by the Council for National Policy, the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity, the Sam Adams Alliance, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, and the Koch brothers (Koch Industries).
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…. According to publicly available IRS records, the five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009—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.
TIME
Over time, the Tea Party’s messaging grows more and more racist, with their targeted villain alternating between big government and the president himself. One of the organizers of this movement is Amy Kremer, who later becomes the face of Women for America First / Women for Trump.
[Overt racism] was not back, exactly. It had never really gone away, never even gone underground. What was new was the structure of the national media, now dominated by cable news anchors who used heartlanders to parade bigoted ideologies they did not want to overtly claim themselves.
Sarah Kendzior, Hiding In Plain Sight
The Tea Party becomes so prominent in state and national politics across the country that when I asked a Trump supporter to explain the group to me, they just said “it’s another name for the GOP, right?”
External Sources
Sarah Kendzior, Hiding In Plain Sight, p.35
Photo: Gage Skidmore (Color Edited)
