The endless parade of endless leftist lying has now gotten to the Tea Party. Everything and every one that stands between the Democratic Party and power gets labeled as racist, so why should the Tea Party, a spontaneous grassroots movement that helped Republicans retake the the House and Senate following the passage of ObamaCare, be any different?
As always, it’s a complete and utter lie:
Left-wing protesters, no matter how puerile, hateful, or bigoted, are typically depicted as righteous agents of change. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, “rage.” The “summer of rage” typically refers to the riots that swept a number of American cities in 1967. The Tea Party protests never turned violent. There were no riots. No broken Starbucks windows. It was the most peaceful “rage” you’re ever going to see.
I reported on the first of numerous Tea Party protests on April 16, 2010. What I saw were some silly people, and many others who were idealistic neophytes peacefully organizing around founding principles. Most had very specific policy goals in mind. None of them were about race. Most of them supported free markets. Many of them were still quite mainstream.
A CBS/New York Times poll at time found that the average Tea Party activist was more educated than the average American, and their concerns mirrored the mainstream. Although a majority were more socially conservative than the average voter—particularly on abortion—8 in 10 of them wanted their burgeoning movement to focus on economic issues rather than social ones.
Hardly the anarchists depicted in the media, the poll found that a majority of Tea Partiers wanted to reduce the size of government rather than focus on cutting budget deficits or even lowering taxes. A majority, in fact, believed that Social Security and Medicare were worthy taxpayer burdens. Not even clamping down on illegal immigration, often the impetus for charges of racism these days, was a big topic among these activists.
The Tea Party had three main grievances: Obamacare, government spending, and “a feeling that their opinions are not represented in Washington.” The protests were fueled by Democrats’ unprecedented action on a health care policy. A decade later, the Tea Party’s suspicion that the health-care law was merely an incremental way to move towards more socialistic policies turned out to be correct, as most of the Democratic Party presidential field can attest.
The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.
In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years. Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.
One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.
This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.
These are the lies leftists tell in order to justify their increasingly unhinged rhetoric and actions. Everyone standing in the way of the hard left agenda of the Democratic Party now gets labeled a white supremacist, no matter what. Especially now that President Donald Trump is calling out the Democratic Party elite on how badly they’ve failed inner city blacks over the last half century.
I can’t see how that supergenius plan could possibly fail in 2020.
Tags: ObamaCare, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Tea Party
Tangentially related – Scott Adams pointed out about a month ago: most Antifa activists are white, too.