I’ve seen the claim before about some protesters creating the backronym, but I cannot find any contemporary cites. Nevertheless, the Tea Party was named after the Boston Tea Party, any backronym claims by anonymous protestors notwithstanding.
Hey, if Encyclopedia Brittanica isn’t good enough for you, then whatever.
From the link:
So the Boston Tea Party origin came a couple of months before the ‘Taxed Enough Already’.
Yes, of course - ANY tax protest is going to invoke images of the Boston Tea Party - that’s been true in America for over 200 years. The point is that it WAS originally a tax protest movement, acquired the acronym TEA party, then mutated over time into something else entirely.
We were talking (I thought) about the origins and people seemed confused as to what it was all about when it started - I was trying to clarify the confusion by stating that from the earliest days (2 months after Santelli) it was becoming popularly known as the TEA Party by it’s members, not just another Tea Party, and that the reason for it’s existing was right there in the newly acronym’d name. It was a tax protest movement that has since been hijacked.
And you know that how?
The Tea Party formulation happened at least 6 months prior to Santelli’s (IMO scripted) rant. The whole “movement” was a well-financed and planned thing, not a grassroots movement as it’s backers would have the nation believe.
Zack Christenson, a producer of conservative Milt Rosenburg’s radio show, registered the domain ChicagoTeaParty.com in August 2008, for instance. As I asked in another thread: was he somehow psychic and just “knew” that a spontaneous grassroots movement with the same name (and that shared his own political goals and ideology) would appear soon afterward?
:dubious:
:rolleyes:
Well, normally I hate to see this but I must ask - cite?
Because that’s what the Republicans do?
Even earlier:
Ah, I see now - so anyone who is against high(er) taxes is a puppet of the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers.
Very nice.
Nobody said that. Care to actually dispute the cites that you asked for?
Well not really - wasn’t directly responding to you, but the gist of the HuffPo article cited before you is that because the Koch brothers and the tobacco industry started funding anti-tax initiatives 20 years ago, and since any anti-tax initiative is going to automatically draw comparisons to the original BTP (and use the name and imagery of the event - after all, it’s cultural shorthand for anti-tax movements because that’s what it was, we learn that in school), that anyone from that time forward who associates themself with any anti-tax group who uses the name (or is given the name by outside interests who want to paint them as such) “Tea Party” is automatically an astroturf shill for Big (fill in the bank).
It very neatly allows people who want to do so to “hashtag” anyone against higher taxes, or wanting lower taxes, as some mindless dupe who’s buying what their masters are selling instead of people who might actually have a genuine problem with the size of government and the amount of taxation they face.
Brilliant, really. I always wondered why leftists scream “Koch” anytime someone mentions the Tea Party (I’d never heard of them before then, actually - amazing how they were able to use their mind-control rays on me decades before they even started their sinister plan, actually), and now I know.
Not really, as I can see protesting taxes is very American, what it is not is when suddenly it is targeted to prevent tobacco and fossil fuels taxes. If you ponder just a little bit, one can see that the ones funding the movement do not care much about other things the Tea Partiers oppose, they only care that the Tea Party do oppose the taxation of their domains.
Of course that does not deal at all with the evidence, so it stands.
Well of course it stands - any person or gathering or organization that at any time from now until the end of time uses, says, displays, or in any way references (including being labelled by their detractors as) “Tea Party” in their anti-tax efforts is at the very least guided (if not outright controlled) by Koch, Big Tobacco, Freedomworks, et. al.
So say we all.
You guys must have exausting lives, fighting against these monolithic entities trying to destroy the world by seeking to implement policies you don’t agree with.
Cite?
See the HuffPo article - the gist is that the “Tea Party” movement is the result of a two-decade-old plan rather than spontaneous outrage among the citizenry. Any future “spontaneous” outrage will be hand-waved as just another example of the unseen (well, very clearly seen I guess) masters twitching their puppet’s strings. It’s a done deal - just ignore those poor misguided fools, they don’t really want lower taxes and smaller government, they just think they do.
It’s even better, because now they can just be pitied instead of having to hate them. Gives a far better feeling of moral superiority that way. 
Nah, the way I see it many are glad to be controlled, after all they do support people like Koch and big corporations.
However, I do think that many would be in the end upset to learn that they would be just a footnote like many other environmental grassroots groups if it wasn’t for all that economical support. And as I do remember from a past discussion many early Tea Partiers that did minded the environment were filtered out because they found out that it did not fit the narrative of the group. (If global warming is a hoax, then there is no problem and the EPA should back off)
Which facts in the cites that have been provided do you dispute? Bonus points for skipping the hackneyed hyperbole.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t anti-tax groups in existence long before the advent of the Tea Party rising in 2009 (hell, how long has Grover N been banging his particular drum?). That doesn’t mean the movement wasn’t seriously hijacked by political and corporate interests for their own purposes when Obama came to power. The two facts are not mutually exclusive.