After David Brat's win last night, I read this article. Here were a bunch of very, very rich people gloating and cheering because a Tea Party candidate, David Brat, had beaten Eric Cantor.
Bozell described the group’s mood as “ebullient,” and it’s easy to see why. For months, conservative activists have watched as their attempts to oust establishment Republicans with a 2010-style insurrection fall flat. The dominant media narrative throughout the midterms has centered on the taming of the tea party, with the donor class and party leaders in Washington declaring victory over the grassroots and the activist organizations that support them.
But with Cantor’s defeat, the leaders at Bozell’s dinner table had proof that the movement was still very much alive — a fact that warranted some gloating.
--snip--
As they dined on vegetable lasagna, the guests plotted their next moves — from beating Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Senate runoff, to marshaling an army of activists that would make sure the GOP nominated a true conservative for president in 2016.
Donald Chump, er, Trump, posted a three congratulatiory tweets.
Unity! Unity! Like I would ever allow one of you within twenty feet of me.
Yeah, I know you eat up every word I say. Hahaha, fools.
I am one with you, you with the teabags tied to your hats, and me with my bespoke suits!!
And it struck me: why hasn't the Tea Party, apparently comprised of mostly uneducated people from poor red states, ever questioned why very, very rich people would be on "their" side? As they so proudly tie teabags to their hats and look absolutely ludicrous, as they labor over their oft-misspelled signs, don't they realize that THEY are the targets of the "elites" who REALLY run the tea party? And don't they have a single clue that THIS is actual FACT, not liberals making fun of them?
What the Tea Party flag should REALLY say
And then they're all cheering the win of this supposed underdog. But he is, no surprise, actually a
Kochsucker.
This was NOT a "grassroots victory." It wasn't some triumph for the raggety-taggety teabaggers who think that David Brat is one of THEM, unlike snooty, steak-eating Eric Cantor. FAR from it. Sorry, baggers.
I wish that baggers would read this:
As Mark Ames and Yasha Levine first reported in February of 2009, less than a month after the start of Obama's presidency, this "Tea Party" (not even generally heard of, at that time) was actually no "grass roots movement," but was instead a large-scale operation of the Kochs and of their billionaire friends. (Ames and Levine published this report on their own news site, because no major "news" medium would publish it.)
The basic theory behind this Tea Party "movement" was first clearly publicly stated by then-congressman Jim DeMint (R-SC) in the New Yorker on February 19, 2001. Nicholas Lemann wrote that DeMint told him "Today fewer and fewer people pay taxes, and more and more are dependent on government. ... Every day, the Republican Party is losing constituents, because every day more people vote themselves more benefits without paying for it." The goal of the "Tea Party," therefore, at least from the standpoint of the people (such as DeMint, now the head of the Heritage Foundation) who created it, is to loosen the bond between voters and government, by privatizing Social Security, Medicare, public schools, and other social programs. And the best way to force that to happen is to starve government of funds for such programs. (For public education, another means was private school vouchers, which would transfer some students into parochial and other private schools, thus ending teachers' unions.)
As LeMann himself put this, "A program of tax cuts stretching out over many years would make it more difficult for the Democrats to launch new programs that would increase voters' loyalty to them. All these changes would have the collateral benefit of strengthening Republican interest groups, like stockbrokers." (Private schools are also a Republican interest group; and there are, of course, many others, not just "stockbrokers.")
Emphasis mine.
Source
And...
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
Source (Emphasis mine)
One more, just for my own thick-headed bagger friends (I love you guys, but you're being bamboozled):
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
--snip--
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
This article was from
2010, but still applies. (Emphasis mine)
The Tea Party, and Brat himself, are humbly trying to fuel that narrative in terms that not-too-bright baggers can understand:
Brat and his supporters in the ranks of the tea party were triumphant.
"This is a miracle from God," said the economics professor, who toppled the second-most powerful Republican in the House in an upset that few, if any, in the party's high command saw coming.
But as he looked ahead to November's elections, Brat declined to spell out policy specifics.
Read more: http://www.eveningtribune.com/...
On the right, blogs are whooping it up over their "victory" and trying to paint Brat as
their kind of guy.
Listening to David Brat on election night, following his upset win over Eric Cantor in Virginia’s seventh congressional district, I heard a principled, free-market, pro-growth individual who is going to make an excellent Republican House member.
Mr. Brat, the Randolph-Macon economics professor, talked about pro-growth tax reform, spending limits, and entitlement reform. He wants to end the congressional bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and return them to the private sector. He opposes corporate cronyism in Washington. He’ll have no more special favors for the K Street crowd. He emphasizes the importance of the rule of law and property rights, which are so essential to our free-market system.
In other words, Brat seems to be saying that free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. My kinda guy.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/...
But on the left, we know that it was
dark money as usual. "Grassroots," my ass.
In the immediate aftermath of last night’s shocker in Virginia, analysts have been saying Brat’s victory was just a fluke.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
Dave Brat’s victory wasn’t just a fluke, and he isn’t just some Tea Partying economics college professor from Virginia.
Both he and his victory have dark money written all over them.
Well, perhaps the reason that the Teabaggers just don't understand, or willfully ignore, every word we say to try and teach them that they are nothing more than patsies for the very people that they think they are fighting against, is simply this:
Totally
I spent the last three days, in spare moments, arguing with baggers on Twitter. Their absolute intransigence was nothing short of astounding. I kept tweeting memes that refuted EVERY single bit of their nonsense, and the only responses I got were often misspelled insults and name-calling. Finally, I couldn't resist:
This made them angry
And these are the "activists" that you KNOW Bozell, Trump, et al have private giggle fests over. Oh well. I give up.
Yep
More reading:
HuffPo
The Daily Beast
Andy Borowitz
Slate