Rick Santelli, Whose Epic Rant Launched the Tea Party Movement, to Retire

Rick Santelli, Whose Epic Rant Launched the Tea Party Movement, to Retire

On the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.”

I’m so old, I remember when Rick Santelli on CNBC lost his s–t on live TV on February 19, 2009, and thereby launched the nascent Tea Party movement. The context was post-2008 financial crisis bailouts:

The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea.

You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

TRADER ON FLOOR: That’s a novel idea.

(Applause, cheering)

JOE KERNEN: Hey, Rick… Oh, boy. They’re like putty in your hands. Did you hear…?

SANTELLI: No they’re not, Joe. They’re not like putty in our hands. This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.

(Booing)

President Obama, are you listening?

TRADER: How ’bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.

KERNEN: It’s like mob rule here. I’m getting scared. I’m glad I’m…

CARL QUINTANILLA: Get some bricks and bats…

SANTELLI: Don’t get scared, Joe. They’re already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.

KERNEN: They’re driving them on water, too, which is a little strange to watch.

SANTELLI: There you go.

KERNEN: Hey Rick, how about the notion that, Wilbur pointed out, you can go down to 2% on the mortgage…

SANTELLI: You could go down to -2%. They can’t afford the house.

KERNEN: …and still have 40%, and still have 40% not be able to do it. So why are they in the house? Why are we trying to keep them in the house?

SANTELLI: I know Mr. Summers is a great economist, but boy, I’d love the answer to that one.

REBECCA QUICK: Wow. Wilbur, you get people fired up.

SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.

(Whistling, cheering)

[transcript source]

Arguably the movement started earlier, but Santelli’s Rant definitely was a booster rocket. While Legal Insurrection never affiliated with any Tea Party organizations, I think it’s fair to say we were broadly part of the movement.

I covered the Tea Party rally in Corning, NY, in April 2009:

I attended the Tea Party in Corning, NY, yesterday. There was a good crowd in this relatively small town in western upstate NY (several hours from NY City), several hundred in total. Corning is home to Corning glass and Steuben glass. The entire region has been hit hard by the exodus of jobs to less tax intensive parts of the U.S. and abroad.

I don’t remember which speaker said it, but one of them described how politicians from New York City come up to the region so that they can say they have visited the countryside, and stare at the inhabitants as if through binoculars, like on safari.

And that description was a metaphor for what is motivating the Tea Parties and fueling the outrage. Taxes are the issue, but the problem is much deeper. There is a complete disconnect between the politicians who raise taxes to benefit people who do not pay taxes, and the people who pay taxes….

Lack of respect and a tax hell fueled the Tea Parties. But you wouldn’t know that if all you have are binoculars, and you are on permanent safari.

We started covering the Tea Party movement early on and eventually had almost 240 posts. We documented the smear campaign and attempt to portray Tea Party rallies as racist by, among other things, planting signs and provocateurs in crowds.

Nationwide rallies of hundreds of thousands of patriots in 2011 were — wait for it — completely peaceful, no stores were looted or burned. At one point almost one-third of the nation identified as a Tea Party supporter:

I gave a lecture at the Cornell Club in NYC in September 2011:

I gave a talk last night at the Cornell Club of New York City in Manhattan. The topic was the Tea Party Movement, and the thesis was:

Professor Jacobson will argue that the Tea Party movement has been among the most influential and most positive forces in American politics in a generation.

It was a hot topic and there was some hot discussion and argument afterwards. The crowd was about evenly split.

As part of the talk, I explored the many and varied smears of the Tea Party including false charges of racism, extremism and violence, topics explored here hundreds of times.

Our own Leslie Eastman (not yet an LI author) was one of the leaders of the San Diego Tea Party rally in April 2009:

Legal Insurrection readers were active:

The Tea Party movement and groups were subjected to unrelenting attacks from media, Democrats, and establishment Republicans (plus the Obama IRS), and eventually the movement faded. Some of it was self-inflicted because some of the groups turned out to be grifters.

Arguably, the anger resulting from the suppression and demonization of the Tea Party movement led to Trump 1.0.

Which brings me back to Rick Santelli. He’s retiring in October 2026, Variety Reports:

Rick Santelli, the longtime CNBC economic-indicators analyst whose plain-spoken but passionate takes on the effects of federal policy on average Americans boosted his profile at the business-news outlet, plans to retire from the Versant Media-backed network on October 2.

Santelli’s decision was revealed to CNBC staffers Thursday, but announced on air Friday during a segment on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” …

In 2009, Santelli let loose with an on-air rant that some people credit with giving rise to the Tea Party in the U.S. The correspondent actually turned to traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and asked if they would like to bail out their neighbors who had overspent on their homes — a dig at President Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, designed to help certain homeowners avoid foreclosure.

Santelli addressed the camera at the close of his remarks and asked: “President Obama, are you listening?” The display at the time was a stunning one at CNBC, which tends to focus on numbers, not sentiment, and a clip of Santelli has been used time and again as a symbol of the frustration of a wide swath of Americans over certain Democratic policies.

“Rick’s passion and personality have led to countless memorable exchanges,” said David Cho, CNBC’s editor in chief, in a memo sent to staffers Thursday.

One rant changed the world. For the bettter.

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