The Tea Party, Fifteen Years Later
Monday December 19, 2022
December 16, 2022, is the fifteenth anniversary of the modern Tea Party. That fact will come as a surprise to many readers who take the mainstream narrative about the Tea Party at face value. The mainstream account begins on February 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli, live on CNBC from the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), declared a rebellion against "socialism" one month into the Obama administration.
If you’re already sensing something amiss, that’s understandable. An editor at establishment NBC lighting the fire of an anti-establishment rebellion? An uprising over mere proposed Obama bailouts of mortgage holders coming four months after silence over (if not a defense of) George W. Bush's $700 billion TARP bailout of Wall Street? If this mainstream narrative seems fishy the more you delve into it, that is because it is.
What really happened 15 years ago and how was the Tea Party transformed from a libertarian grass-roots movement to today's almost completely dead establishment version? What are some of the lessons that can be learned?
The Ron Paul Revolution (October 2007)
The ground-zero event that founded the Tea Party was the registration of the domain TeaParty07.com on October 24, 2007, by supporters of Ron Paul's first presidential campaign. Here is archive.org’s snapshot of the site on November 13, 2007 displaying the famous original curled flyer...
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