Study Confirms Tea Party "Grassroots" Was Just Astroturf Created by Billionaire Koch Brothers

ataraxia said:

Yes, yes. We know "scientific studies" are just liberal fake news and will be dismissed by the right. But 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.

The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.

However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com.
Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers | HuffPost

Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was planned and carefully implemented by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the experienced anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes against science linking them to cancer were hired and deployed their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption. The same PR experts were then also used to try to cut the Koch Brothers' taxes.

The key was to somehow find a way to link these interests to things which they could use to shore support from the general population. They found that appeals to nationalism and freedom, with subtle undercurrents appealing to latent racism, were going to be the key to this campaign. It worked, as these people willingly started working against even their own self interest to promote the personal interests of the billionaire brothers.



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So as Tea Party candidates rose to power, they cut help to those in rural America who had voted for them: education, jobs, infrastructure, etc... These poor people had just shot themselves in the foot, and were hurting in a very bad way. So did they smarten up and figure out what was happening? No. They were angry and frustrated. So out of their anger and frustration, they elected Donald Trump and shot themselves in the other foot too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amp6SkpWIxk

You really do have to feel sad for this forgotten demographic of our country.

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haymarket said:

Thank you for this fact filled piece which every American should read. The right libertarian populism of the tea party was a fraud from day one and continues to be so today.

This only confirms it.

When I worked for the Michigan legislature from 2011- thru 2013 I attended several tea party sponsored rallies at the Capitol Building and every single one of them was tied to the Koch Brothers and their various political fronts. And you saw the same few dozen people each and every time .

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few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala (honoring David Koch for his philanthropy), the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

At the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

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Some readers may also find surprises in Mayer’s accounts of the central role of the Koch Brothers and their allies in launching and funding the Tea Party and the protracted (and successful) effort to undermine the public consensus about the serious threat that climate change poses to human life in the near future. Mayer reports that “from 2005 to 2008, a single source, the Kochs, poured almost $25 million into dozens of different organizations fighting climate reform . . . Charles and David had outspent what was then the world’s largest public oil company, ExxonMobil, by a factor of three.”

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ataraxia said:

Yes. Here is how the covert operation was happening by the time of the Obama administration:



Well, by hook or by crook, they succeeded. Maybe they couldn't do it as well as they liked with the Tea Party movement. But they pulled it off finally with their employees in congress recently passing this recent tax cut for them. So just goes to show: perseverance pays off!

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chuckiechan said:

You show me a viable political cause that doesn’t have a backer, and I’ll show you one person standing on a corner with a hand painted sign.

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ataraxia said:

This was planned, implemented, and funded by the Koch brothers for a very specific purpose of advancing their own personal agenda. They just got all these people fooled. This was not just "a backer".

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chuckiechan said:

All of the movements are funded by someone. Look at the democrats buddy George Soros.

It is what it is.

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ataraxia said:

This was planned, implemented, and funded by the Koch brothers for a very specific purpose of advancing their own personal agenda. They just got all these people fooled. This was not just "a backer".

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chuckiechan said:

All of the movements are funded by someone. Look at the democrats buddy George Soros.

It is what it is.

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