Also at The Albany Project
The anti-government "Tea Party Patriot" movement around Albany, NY, has had some successes in turning out people and getting free media, but not so much lately.
Two recent events, one of which I attended, saw their turnout go from the few thousand of April 15 to mere dozens.
Perhaps as a result, in their local Yahoo group chat room, the mood has darkened somewhat, with much more talk of violence.
One of the guys doing that talking is pictured at left. Spyder could have posted a head shot, or a photo of him on his chopper, or no photo at all, on the Albany 9/12 Meet-up site.
But he chose to put up a photo of him brandishing deadly weapons in each hand and wearing an ammo belt and a Klingon Warrior Academy T-shirt. No other photos of local tea partiers featured weapons, with their implicit threat of violence.
Details about Spyder and more, below.
First, about the two events -- a day-long speeches, video and live music Great Awakening held in Troy on Sept. 26 and an open house for NY-20 Congressman Scott Murphy's new district office in Clifton Park that became a mini-town hall on Monday.
The Great Awakening was evidently a great FAIL, at least according to the photos that one tea partier posted.
I could not find any media story about it, which makes sense since fewer than 100 people were there.
I did attend the Murphy event, and there were much fewer tea partiers there, compared to his previous town hall in Clifton Park last month.
Of about 100 people there, only 20 or so were tea partiers, and they displayed no signs and did not rudely disrupt Murphy even when he explained his support for a public option, as they had last month.
On their chat board, a couple of the local tea party leaders have been discussing the possibility of violence as the inevitable next step if they don't get their way.
To be fair, others there have argued that "the violence option is a big mistake."
Here's some of what they were responding to:
I have been in a vast number of discussions with many other Liberty minded groups for a long time. Most of these groups have a heavy Veteran audience. Most of them are combat vets who have fired shots in anger and know about battles, dieing and killing for their country. All of them, to the man, will go the extra mile again to fight to their deaths for Liberty and their family's safety.
I have never been in the military myself and I never want anybody to think I have been. I would jump in on conversations with these heros and almost every conversation about the pending loss of liberty turned into a discussion of going to DC with arms to take back America. This discussion was with men who hate the battle field, who still have night mares about war, yet were willing to do it all again.
Then slowly the conversations evolved into a reality check of what we were really proposing. We discussed the logistics and the what ifs of a battle. Their final conclusion was what the only conclusion should be. A straight on battle in DC would produce nothing but death and family's on both sides would be left mourning their fallen members. All agreed, all had the fear that in the end Americans would be the only looser. I think probably Oath Keepers grew from this type of discussion.
We tea party people are now talking of possible violence, the next level of what to do, the what ifs of battle.
Spyder is an active participant in the Yahoo chat room. Here's some of what he was up to at the Great Awakening:
At every event that I have been to (including Troy) we have spent a lot of time talking to the Police about Oathkeepers, and our Tea Party movement
And let me tell you, the cops are on OUR side, almost without exception, in fact, I haven't personally seen ONE single exception
Not ONE
We're polite, we're respectful, we always leave every place we attend CLEANER than when we got there, and we support our armed forces, and Police, publicly
For crying out loud, we're even respectful of the PEOPLE we're fighting against !
This fact is not lost on the cops who monitor us, and it makes a BIG impact on them
The two UNIFORMED cops who were at the Troy event on Saturday, BOTH pulled me aside individually to tell me "We're on board with everything you're doing", of course, the plain clothes cops wouldn't talk to us...
They RESPECT us for the way we present ourselves
They KNOW the fight we're fighting, and UNDERSTAND the enemy we face
The cops are a HUGE asset to our battle, and I don't want to ruin that
snip
I realize that Star Trek is only science fiction, but, we are the Klingons
We will fight our fight HONORABLY, even if the enemy doesn't
And here's the more recent Spyder post, about a national tea party day of prayer and fasting in December, that inspired this diary:
I've been praying every day for my friends and family, and recently have added "my Country" to that prayer
No, it's not a written prayer that anybody else knows, it's just something I ask God for every morning before I start my day
I've been doing that for years, and it's only recently that I added "my Country" to it
I don't know if it was because of reading your and Val's conversations or not, but, it sure coincided with 'really close to that timeframe'
Me and Val took our first class on The Constitution Monday night, and we learned some very important things
Some that I have been arguing for months, and some that I didn't understand until it was pointed out to me
What I already knew was that The Founders were Christians, what I didn't realize was that The Constitution was BASED on SCRIPTURE
Yea. Every single word
If God said it was a law, the The Founders said it was a law. That's something I already observed for myself, but, the DETAILS are the difference
If God said it was bad, The Founders said it was bad, and they made it law
snip
Now, a homework question was given in the first class. "How many times was God mentioned in these documents ?"
Once
In the Declaration of Independence. And not once in The constitution
God didn't write The Constitution, Man did, with God's guidance, so he has given us a test
He gave us 0bama
0bama is our test
Will we follow 0bama, and behave like Sodom and Gomorrah and be destroyed ?
Or will God's Army wake up and do what needs to be done to stop it ?
It's up to US to answer that question to the best of our ability, and I'm proud to say that most Patriots... are Christians
And everybody OPPOSED to us claims that we "cling to their Bibles..."
Go figure
I like to be on the winning team, and it doesn't look right now like The Patriots are on the winning team, but...
They don't know that we have God on our side
On the other hand, if God sees that there aren't enough people who BELIEVE, then 2012 WILL be the end of the world as we know it
And we'll go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah
It's up to US to prove to God that WE are worthy of continuing
So the tea-party-leader biker guy with guns is a Christianist wacko, too.
And this is not happening in Alabama, but in a more-blue-than-red part of upstate New York.
Finally, there is surely more tea-party violence talk going on online that I'm not aware of, since the Yahoo chatters have been encouraged to move over to Homefront Patriots, which requires registration to read what's going on in its chat room.
Spyder naturally thinks that's a good idea, since "The problem with this board is that it's totally PUBLIC, whereas Daniel's forum is hidden unless you log in."
I haven't registered yet, but I really hope someone from the local FBI office has.