The war against the Tea Party
Whether or not Obama or the White House or anyone high in the Democratic pecking order winds up being directly implicated in the IRS scandal, their influence has been strong.
From the very start of the Tea Party movement, it was recognized by leaders on the left as being a bona fide populist grass roots movement against taxes and against big government, with the potential to appeal to a great many moderates who were fed up with both. Therefore the Tea party had to be demonized, and fast, and the entire left took up that cause with its usual alacrity and its usual methods.
Especially prominent was #13 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Numbers 5, 6, 8, and 10 were in there, too:
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
Keep the pressure on. Never let up.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
The Tea Party was accused of racism, and if evidence couldn’t be found it was created. The Tea Party was in general the enemy, a group of ignorant and evil people with bad intentions.
So is it any wonder that the IRS treated them that way? Whether you look at the agents who harassed the Tea Party groups through the tax process, or the higher-ups who winked at it or directed it, or the people who kept the information from the public until now (when Obama has been safely installed in his second term) although it was known earlier, or the ones who ignored and ridiculed GOP efforts to investigate the Tea Party groups’ many allegations that in fact they were being persecuted in just this way by the IRS, what almost certainly unites the entire lot of them is the idea that they were fighting Tea Party groups that needed fighting.
Obama’s efforts to polarize an already-polarized political process are unusually overt and blatant, and they have borne fruit. His message has been heeded, whether his fingerprints are directly on these offenses or not. It is especially ironic—and an example of his especially well-developed and shameless hypocrisy—that this comes from a president who long ago (remember?) billed himself as a great uniter.
Neo- Reading your post, I’m not sure you characterize the issue as strongly as you might; from what I’ve read today, the pressure on the IRS was direct and frequent, in writing, and came from democrat senators, to name just a few. It was more than a wink and an nod or a tone coming from the top that condoned this — it was outright harrassing of the IRS by senators to investigate the Tea Party or they would write law to force them. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/05/13/senate-democrats-demanded-stricter-irs-standards-for-tax-exempt-groups/
The auditing of conservative groups was 100%, so there was no misunderstanding by the IRS on which tax exempt groups these senators had in mind.
As a young man, I was in Rochester, NY in the 1960s when a Black race riot torched its own–own– neighborhood, and a copter carrying the Chief of “Public Safety’ and others crashed and burned in the burning mess, killing all. Then the home of booming Xerox and Kodak, with the highest per-capita rate of millionaires in the US, and high cultural standards (museums, symphony) the Lindsayesque City Fathers brought Alinsky in, paid him handsomely, to advise him how to make Rochester better! Paid him to be a community organizer–er. agitator– for ‘change’.
Within a few years, Xerox left, Kodak (the inventor of digital photography) foundered, is now a bleak shadow of its former self; the surviving ‘strength’ is the liberal and tax-exempt Univ. of Rochester, priding itself on its diversity, and Rochester is well on its way to becoming another Detroit, as all of Western NY State has inexorably been driven down the toilet.
Mr Alinsky and the RINOs got it all started. Cowardice, self-guilt, and collectivist demagoguery triumphant.
southpaw: I didn’t mean to imply that there was no direct influence, as well. My point is that there was most definitely strong indirect influence.
Don Carlos
As a Western NY refugee (Buffalo area), I am still amazed whenever I return to visit at their infinite capacity for self destruction. I recall the debates about Hilary – then running for senator, who “understood and cared” about the downtrodden economy, and vowed to turn things around.
That’s just a small example of the delusional thinking, but it’s still going strong. Whenever I visit relatives, they complain about taxes and no jobs, but never stop voting for the people and laws that drove out thousands of good manufacturing jobs, and they continue to do so.
They wouldn’t know Saul Alinsky from Jim Kelly, so he wasn’t their problem. They never seem to make the connection that companies leave because they can get the work done cheaper and better someplace else. Many of them have an ingrained union mentality and adversarial view of all business, and the laws they vote for put way too much pressure on a business for businesses to bother. I don’t know where they get the attitude, or how it arrived, but I long ago quit trying to understand it.
I recall a lot of the finger pointing was always at NY city, who saddled the rest of the state with their regulations and laws; but the voting habits “upstate” – except in small pockets, weren’t too different from their urban overlords.
It’s too bad. There are some vast resources in NY state – they are rich in natural gas, more so than Pennsylvania, who are booming. But all I hear from my relatives is nobody wants any part of that. As everyone in WNY knows, drilling for gas will cause the Great Lakes to catch on fire, and all the farm land will be destroyed, and the oil companies will take all the money for themselves. As I was told “we don’t want them here” So jobs and prosperity will not set foot there as long as whatever baloney they are reading or hearing on the local news keeps up.
But… there’s a new hope — Warren Buffet did a commercial about investing in Buffalo. That will solve everything, just like Hilary did.
It isn’t just the IRS who has targeted Tea Party groups. Napolitano has fingered domestic right-wing groups as the greatest risk to our security with assists from Westpoint and the Pentagon. The press and Democrats have regularly blamed incidents such as the Gabby Giffords shooting and the Times Square bomb on the Tea Party, and totally ignored the often violent and destructive behavior by OWS folks. It’s been a coordinated effort.
The lefties hate and fear anyone and everyone who is not one of them.
Answer: The war against the tea party and the war against the womb.
Question: The only things Obama actually works at.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/if_obama_had_an_uncle.html
Off topic, and not sure it falls under any of Alinsky’s rules, but this over at NRO today highlights just how hard it is to combat misimpressions created by the MSM:
Its now being established ggat the irs was being used tk help jmllement gliechshaltung…. alignjng through nudges and no defense which way the horse head should go
As i detailed tge process
Its interestkng that thier targets are what hegel n other progressive germans of the nazi era would pick
The old system
The jews
The christians
And by following the coding i said
Which is why some conservative orgs are coming out that they passed easy as they have a liberal sounding name
Same process captured medua as those who pick shows create selection bias writers then try to adapt to to be paid
Rubes are funny…
They dint even realize they been rubes makjng things up rather looking up…. inductive reasoning with noise,nrandom facts, tossed in a confusion salad with a tasty dressing of negating natures n principals…. so the analysis goes where they wish… not where the facts n history lead…. oh i forgotcto toss in the tin hat croutons…
Too funny in ghe infinite goof sort of way!!!
Can’t remember exactly where I read this but various groups have been comparing notes and came up with a timeline on the IRS intimidation. IIRC the Champaign (IL) Tea Party got tax exempt status in February 2010 within 90 days of sending in their request, no questions asked. No other Tea Party groups were approved for the next 2 years.
And what happened in March 2010? The Tea Party protests during the run-up to the final vote on Obamacare.
The Tea Party was accused of racism, and if evidence couldn’t be found it was created
What do you think “making history” means????
Orchestrating histiry is how they operate
From fake nooses, fake rapes, coverups of thousands murdered bt them,hurt witnesses,and on and in… and if history is passed then rewrite it
Its so common you no longer see it
But like air you woukd notice its sudden absence
Its all one thing appliedceverywhere
It even has martyrs that act and are destroyed if csught
Its a failure of belief
No one believes they can be that bad n evil
So they make up reasons which is what makes them rubes
Especially the smartest who others depend on
Truth is they are far worse than you can imagine
You discover this if you read the books i recommended which tie ideas actions to common lives n reveal the beast
The idea is you win by being incomprhensibly evil and so people will barely oppose you
Satan
Who alinsky admires and that echoes lucifer bringer of light of the cimmunes….
They realized that satan is rarely opposed due to lack of belief in evil
The more utopian they are yhe more incomprehensible the evil
Worked to remove ppl from eden
Now its working to put them in hell
Just think
Impeach obama nthe war starts with biden at the wheel
He was selected knowing ghat eventually things woukd catch up
Funny but the rubes dont see him as a rook guarding ghe king…. butci said ghey love chess… obama is supposedly playing multidimensional versions
I play harder
I play go
southpaw:
I too saw the pro-business “New New York State” commercial, featuring W. Buffett and others touting the suddenly business-friendly NY while showing a Buffalo skyline that made it look like Manhattan. This total lie is of course paid for by the taxpayers. The median home price in Bflo in 2011 was $80K. Good luck with that, the tax rates, Cuomo the antifracker, and with the weather!
I was a member of the board of one of the first nationally-noticed Tea Parties in 2009, and I remember very great care taken in the discussions about our status as a 501 group. I don’t think we were put to the ringer in application to the IRS particularly – but some of the members who were longer with the group say that they did feel some heat. (I dropped out upon selection of a new board, after a lot of group-oriented drama early in 2011)
The really horrible thing to me is not that the IRS turned out to be so really obstructive, and willing to serve as the hand-maiden of the administration in seeming to want to harvest information about people involved in various Tea Parties. (Although that is horrifying enough.) We have been already primed to accept – although not to countenance or approve them doing so – the IRS being used as a weapon against political enemies.;
To me, the really horrible part was the use of the mainstream media to frame Tea Parties as an offence to all that was good and holy to the Vile Proggs. The people that I knew during my stint as a Tea Party media person were all small business owners, with a leavening of military veterans and Ron-Paululan libertarians. The leader of our local chapter was vehement about any racist, successionist and bat-shit-crazy elements. And yet – the national media, solo and chorus was all about painting the Tea Party in those colors.
For me personally, the national media have lost far more credibility and ‘trustability’ as the IRS has. Make of this what you will.
We had a lot of TEA Party rallies here in my village in 2009/10. The people turning out were as Sgt. Mom describes – small business people, vets, libertarians, and retirees. Though we don’t have a lot of blacks in the area, we do have a large percentage of latinos. We had a smattering of both blacks and latinos so it wasn’t a totally caucasian group. In fact, there was no discussion of race at all. It was all about the Stimulus Bill and then Obamacare. Huge government spending increases and legislation that was literally shoved down our throats were the issues we were protetsting. Once Obamacare became law and the Supreme Court gave it the stamp of approval, it kind of took the heart out of people here. There hasn’t been a rally since the Supreme Court decision.
The press and the progressive talking points about the TEA Party have been designed to cast it as a racist, know nothing group or astro-turf doing the work of the Koch brothers. I wrote snail mail letters to my Senators and Congressman explaining what the movement’s issues were, but they are all progs, so it did no good at all.
The local group has been working quietly at the grass roots for the last two years. We are trying to get conservative people nominated and elected at the local level. Standing on street corners waving signs wasn’t doing any good. What we are doing now may bear some fruit, at least locally.
The local group never tried to raise money, it was funded out of people’s pockets as we went along so we never tangled with the IRS. I have donated money to the TEA Party Patriots organization though. I just saw Jenny Beth Martin (head of the TPPs) on Fox tonight saying that the IRS demanded their donor list. That angers me as it might put many citizens like me in the IRS crosshairs. I hope we can muster up the energy to take to the streets again on this issue.
Think of all the Pulitzer Prizes left unclaimed by lazy or biased reporters. The story was sitting out there for THREE years waiting to be plucked, but there was no interest. They had to be spoon fed the information by a report from the Inspector General who worked for a year without attracting any attention from them. What a bunch of losers.
JJ: “The local group has been working quietly at the grass roots for the last two years. We are trying to get conservative people nominated and elected at the local level.”
Working towards elections is fine as far as it goes, but it’s insufficient.
In my conception, the Tea Party is essentially a popular grassroots movement. It ought to be activist. Its main focus should be growing and spreading its popular reach and public awareness, and reconfiguring the popular political environment. Infuencing elections should be a second-order effect only. That’s how the Tea Party started. They lost their way when they shifted their primary focus to elections.
Rather than “working quietly”, the Tea Party should be mounting a highly visible, widely heard, persistent, never-ending PR campaign. They should be engaging vigorously in diverse forums and media, educating, debating, and repeating talking points. They should aggressively build a political presence in the cities, especially media focii like NYC. The Tea Party should reach beyond its natural in-groups and make in-roads with identity groups that are stereotypically Democrat.
“Standing on street corners waving signs wasn’t doing any good.”
Yep, that’s not nearly enough.
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.
Eric said, “In my conception, the Tea Party is essentially a popular grassroots movement. It ought to be activist. Its main focus should be growing and spreading its popular reach and public awareness, and reconfiguring the popular political environment. Infuencing elections should be a second-order effect only.”
It was, and remains for the most part, a grass roots movement. There are no main leaders or centralized organization, though the TPPs are trying to become the central, national organizing group.
There are many TEA Party bloggers and people who write their local papers and Congress critters in an attempt to reconfigure popular political opinion. Standing on street cornerss with signs has some effect on raising local public awareness of the issues. You would be amazed at the number of cars driving by that honk, flash their headlights, and give thumbs up signals. I’ve even seen people drive by, then circle back and join the rally.
Many people are unwilling to express their political leanings in the open, however. Some business and professional people cannot risk losing business because of their overt political activities. When many of your customers are liberals or progs, and they are the majority in this blue state, they will boycott and try to hurt you, if you are an active, open conservative.
As a grass roots movement of conservative thinkers, not everyone agrees on all things. I have been opposed to bringing social issues into the mix, but some local and national groups keep insisting on raising those issues. Not because I’m in favor of abortion or gay marriage, but because I think they are side issues that detract from the major goal of slowing government spending and keeping taxes as low as posssible. IMO, that is and should remain the laser focus of the Taxed Enough Already Party.
I apologize for using the word “nigger” like I did. I’ve rethought it and it just not possible to provide the context or the “new meaning” I give the word. Ironic how that word seems to have an objective meaning for the idiots. Say that word and there’s no “it depends on what the meaning of is is.”
The word nigger to me means mental slave, a useful idiot residing on the liberal plantation. Obviously many niggers are white, brown, or whatever.
And I resist being intimitated. Don’t like it. Tell me you’ll fight if someone calls you a nigger and the first word out of my mouth is “nigger.” Lighten up Francis. That whole bullshit.
One thing gets explained. Tea Party activism was ubiquitous in the 2010 midterms. People were excited, wanted to get involved, wanted to make a difference. 2012, we’d take the country back. But then, pfffft. No more. They went away. Inexplicably. So it seemed.
What happened? The IRS chilled it, for one thing. That’s what happened. No nonprofit application with the name tea party or patriot in its name was approved, applicants had their personal lives invaded, they were intimidated and threatened. Hundreds of them, all over the country.
Actually, and in truth, the entire left and every part of every governmental agency they control, had declared war on the tea party.
You know, Nixon with his measly “enemies list” was a piker compared to these people.
JJ,
That is a problem. A diversity of stances vying for one label with the fear of distortion and false association, with competitors (the left, some right) eagerly distorting and falsely accusing, can easily turn into a crab barrel effect: crabs pulling down any fellow crab who rises above the rest so the whole group, while making some noise, stay in the barrel and pose no real threat to the existing order of things.
So, given real-world impediments to growth and progress, how then to change the ‘Ph’ of the social-political environment and normalize and mainstream Tea Party memes?
Suggestion – follow the road more traveled, side-step the impediments of the real world and set up camp in the marketplaces of ideas … What inroads has the Tea Party made on college, even high school, campuses?
The Left favors academic environments for a reason. Our universities are society’s founts and/or incubators of social-culture political trends.
Yet the Left does not hold a monopoly on the peculiar energies of student activism. Even the most reputedly liberal college communities have ‘dissident right’ students and student groups on campus who only need to be excited, rallied, and galvanized to action to passionately challenge the cultural status quo like only students can.
Example: The recent success of the insurgent ROTC/civil-military movement in the Ivy League that is actually restrained only by the Pentagon’s reluctance to expand in the Ivy League, not the universities.
If Tea Party student leaders are sufficiently skilled and dedicated as activists, then relatively few can make an outsized impact on the national culture and normalizing and mainstreaming Tea Party memes.