Image 01 Image 03

Tea Party Tag

The repressive, often petty and irrational, lockdown measures implemented in many states and localities has caused a backlash that grows daily. Increasingly, we see hairdressers, restaurants, gyms, and other small businesses saying they are willing to risk arrest in order to reopen and save their businesses. People who normally obey the law are engaging in acts of civil disaobedience against orders and restriction that are viewed as illegitimate, both constitutionally and from a health perspective.

We've all seen how the mainstream media lives in NY and DC bubbles. Regardless of where they came from, they often embody the shock at how people outside the coastal and liberal bubbles live. They *literally* didn't know anyone who voted for Trump, so they were shocked that 60 million people did so. On campuses, which are feeding grounds for journo bubbles, there were crying circles on election night 2016.

We have not written a lot in recent years about Think Progress, the left-wing website owned by the Center for American Progress. But back in the day, in the earlier years of Legal Insurrection, we wrote a lot about Think Progress and its efforts to smear the Tea Party as racist and violent. Think Progress led an obsessive campaign to demonize the Koch brothers and Andrew Breitbart. The false claim that Sarah Palin's electoral map was connected to Jared Loughner's shooting of Gabby Giffords was spread with the early help of Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias.

The Jussie Smollett claim of a racial and homophobic attack in late January in Chicago by two white men wearing MAGA hats is falling apart. The story was suspicious from the start. While not impossible, it was improbable that two white guys were running around Chicago in the middle of the night during a sub-zero Polar Vortex wearing MAGA hats while carrying bleach and a noose and just happened to find a high-profile gay black actor to attack.

As someone who attended and wrote about Tea Party protests in 2009 and 2010, it has been surreal to watch folks at CNN and MSNBC twist themselves into knots to defend the recent actions of the left. I clearly remember Democrats and their media allies using words like "dangerous" and "mob" to describe people who obtained protest permits and cleaned up their own trash. Everything is different now.

The Supreme Court, in the case of Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, ruled that a Minnesota law that banned “political badge, political button, or other political insignia" at polling places on Election Day was unconstitutional. The case was brought by voters who, among other things, wanted to wear a Tea Party Patriots tee shirt (see featured image, via MVA Facebook):

Today, December 16th, is the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a response to a series of tyrannical actions taken by the distant King George III.  Although often downplayed as a fevered response to a single piece of legislation, the Tea Act, the Boston Tea Party represented an act of defiance against a long list of "repeated injuries and usurpations."  Each of which were enumerated three years later in the Declaration of Independence. Following is a brief history of the Boston Tea Party:
In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

By now, most people know the back story. In the run-up to the 2012 election, Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations were subjected to unnecessary scrutiny and even harassment by the IRS to whom they were applying for non-profit status.

As the GOP-led Congress fails to fulfill its seven-year, oft-repeated pledge to repeal ObamaCare and fails to support meaningful immigration reform that includes securing our border (building the wall), right-leaning voters who put them in power are becoming more and more restless, frustrated, and angry. Luther Strange's primary drubbing in Alabama suggests that the Trump phenomena is looking less and less like a cult of personality and more and more like a Tea Party-inspired insurrection. When then-presidential candidate Trump said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, many pundits and politicians marveled at his hubris while others rankled at the all-too-apparent truth of his statement. Trump supporters stuck with him through the Inside Edition tape release and the Trump University fiasco.  His opponents on both the left and the right were puzzled beyond measure, and for good reason.  These and any number of other problematic issues in Trump's background would have derailed any politician.