Brewing Up Trouble - Chip Berlet On The Tea Party And The Rise Of Right-Wing Populism

[BridgeTheGap]

Berlet has been researching and writing about American right-wing movements for more than thirty-five years. Throughout his career he has played the role of town crier, warning the public about groups that fuel hatred or encourage violence: the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, the Christian Identity movement, and racist skinheads. Prior to the 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, he cautioned about the dangers posed by armed right-wing militias.
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"So right now there are large numbers of people who believe arguments that a high-school student with one course in logic could disprove. It’s fine to believe something on faith in religion, but it’s bad in a democracy."
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Barsamian: What are the origins of the Tea Party movement?

Berlet: It started out as a fake grass-roots movement funded by political elites. We call them “AstroTurf movements,” after the brand of artificial grass. Republican and conservative political operatives were trying to create the impression that there was a groundswell of antagonism toward the Obama agenda. Some of the early activities were very thinly disguised AstroTurf, but as the media began to pick up on it — especially Fox News — the Tea Party turned into an actual social movement. It escaped the specific economic-libertarian agenda set for it by Dick Armey, the former Republican House leader from Texas whose organization funds a lot of Tea Party events. Other agendas were brought in: anti-immigrant, antigay, antiabortion, even conspiracy theories about the “new world order” and the un coming in black helicopters. The Tea Party movement has also drawn supporters from the Ron Paul people, the Christian Right, the militias, and the conspiracy theorists who think President Obama is going to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a North American Union. It’s not really fair to call it an “antigovernment” movement — I think the Tea Partiers would be quite happy with an authoritarian, laissez-faire government. It’s really antiregime.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/419/brewing_up_trouble

[Populist_Prole]

1. Reccommend. A longish read well worth your time

I copied and pasted it to notepad and saved it amongst my favorite missives for future reference.

Thanks for posting.