For several months I have called the Tea Party a CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to our country. Will Bunch did a great job in the article of articulating the hypocrisy and categorical lies that Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, and The Koch brothers and others that are using the Tea Party as a tool to mislead under the premise of some grass root movement.
I think more importantly he fails to mention that the massive amount of money by the Koch brothers and their like minded billionaires as well as the indoctrination abilities of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin would be ineffectual had it not been for the complicity of most of the broadcast and print media. Interesting enough those in the media are not dumb. What they’ve done is make the misinformation on the Right seem like a plausible alternative to reality. They’ve given those indoctrinated by the Right an excuse for their ignorance on how the policies they advocate actually damage not only our economy but the fabric of our nation.
Unfortunately I believe the media is complicit for the same reason we have politicians on both the Right and the Left that pass failed policies that always seem to benefit the wealthy. In the case of the media it is the fear of not receiving advertising from corporations. In the case of politicians it is the fear of dried up contributions.
Who will stand up for AMERICA?
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We are going to protect our young, we are going to protect the next generation of Americans, so the Mama Grizzlies are growling, we are rising up on our hind legs and saying no, we are going to change course, we need that real hope, we need that real change.
— Sarah Palin, speaking this weekend to a Patriotic Gala Celebration in San Diego.
"…[C]hildren and grandchildren…"
During late 2009 and early 2010, I criss-crossed the country talking to the rank-and-file not just of the Tea Party Movement but the 9-12 Project, the Oath Keepers and others in the backlash movement that sprung from nowhere practically in the hours after President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
And there were days when it felt like if I collected a dime for every time a Tea Partier told me the main reason they threw themselves into the movement — spending seven hours in a dank arena listening to Glenn Beck and his pseudo-historian David Barton or marching against health care reform — was to save America for their "children and grandchildren," I’d have enough cash to pay for my travels and maybe take in a couple of NHL hockey games with all the spare change.
The idea that that weren’t doing it for themselves — struggling with their own anxieties and deep discomfort with cultural change in America — but were fighting to save "the next generation of Americans" is a core belief. Beck — whom I listened to for that long day at the UCF Arena in Orlando so that you didn’t have to, while reporting my book The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama — knew this and played it to the hilt. He even told the throng of mostly $134 ticket buyers on that March day to keep a Moleskine diary of their activity in the Tea Party uprising.
Said Beck:
"I’m telling you — our children and grandchildren will fight over who gets Grandma or Grandpa’s Moleskine — they will fight over this! You need to tell history, because whether or not you believe it yet, you’re making it."
This comment to another journalist at a Tax Day Tea Party from April this year sums it up well.
Many Tea Party activists say that they’re motivated to speak out about fiscal responsibility on behalf of future generations.
"When I first started going to meetings, I immediately liked that everyone was friendly, organized, and genuinely concerned for their children and grandchildren," said JoAnne Carowick, a homemaker who became involved with the Tea Party in State College, Pa.
Carowick said she worries every time she thinks about her six-year-old grandson and the burden she believes he will face from excessive government spending and high taxes.
Here’s the thing: Of course Tea Party activists are "genuinely concerned for their children and grandchildren" — anyone with a pulse wants a better world for their loved ones who come after them. The tragedy is that their genuine concerns are being played — manipulated by the high-def hucksters like Beck and Palin who’ve become multi-millionaires through fact-free appeals to fearful Americans and by billionaires like the Koch brothers who have a self-serving agenda.
Will Bunch: Palin, Beck, the Tea Party and the Big Lie About Saving "Children and Grandchildren"