Talking To the Tea Baggers

(Photo by Shereen Hall/Campus Progress)

Since one of yesterday’s Tax Day Tea Party protests was being held in Lafayette Park, which is across the street from the White House, I decided to go and to bring a camera to record the event and some attendees’ reactions to it. The protest took part under a persistent rain that occasionally lightened but never fully dissipated. During the first portion, a couple of the activists hosting the activities introduced a series of speakers to come up and give short talks on stage (some of them appeared to be involved in the movement; others seemed to simply be “concerned citizen” types).

Later, some bigger names, including Laura Ingraham and Alan Keyes, spoke, during which I got reactions from some of the people in attendance—some in the park and others who had moved to the area in front of the White House.

I’ll let the folks I talked to speak for themselves, but my overall reaction was that it wouldn’t be fully accurate to describe the event as a contrived gathering thrown together by high-powered sponsors. It’s certainly true that the protests benefited from some powerful “astroturf” connections, and were publicized endlessly by major right-wing media outlets like Fox News. But the crowd was also quite large (somewhere in the range of a thousand, I would estimate), and the people I talked to, who had traveled from as far away as Oregon, were genuinely upset. Unlike the Tea Party movement in general, they were relatively adept at relating their grievances: They’re mad that, in the wake of an economic crisis, our federal government is giving countless billions to giant banks.

To be sure, many of the peripheral messages that were delivered (which you’ll see below) were offensive and characteristically radical—attendees and speakers echoed the “Obama is a socialist” line, I heard the word “welfare” more than once, and the event attracted some conspiracy theorists (see the video of “Lancelous” below) and outright racists. But I still spoke to a healthy percentage of people who didn’t, at least at first glance, appear to fit into the radical-right mold.

On-stage speakers:

Mindy McAlindon, the founder of teatodc.com, noted that the country was built on “Judeo-Christian values” and claimed that the Obama administration is trying to disempower those who provide for the nation’s well-being by working hard. “Can we secure the poor if we destroy those who provide the wealth?” she asked the crowd, which responded with a firm “No.”

Jeffrey Shapiro invoked fears of government-run health care. “We don’t want federal bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies,” he told the crowd:

Another speaker, Jason, got on stage with his family and held up a sign which read “Stop!!! Stealing from my children!”

“Quit stealing from my children, Mister President!” he screamed, his voice cracking. He accused the U.S. government of “attacking the producing class” (this theme, that the government is punishing hard workers, was a common one throughout the event):

Attendees:

Jack and Ryan talked to me a little about their fears about Obama and the economy:

Abraham Mudrick, who was holding a sign with a quote from Benito Mussolini that seemed to implicate Obama in precipitating a slide toward fascism, joked that he had walked from Silverton, Oregon, and gave his views on the origins of the crisis:

Later I talked to Rob Edwards, a 21-year-old college student who came to the protest as part of a group from George Washington University. He spoke of some of the generational differences between the younger and older protesters:

I also interviewed another college student, Jenna, who talked about the iniquities she saw in the bank bailouts:

As I was talking to Jenna, I overheard a man engaged in a heated diatribe before a circle of onlookers—a diatribe that included a reference to “Shylock usury.” He expounded for awhile on his conspiracy theories and then began arguing with another protester who had a slightly less paranoid take:

The man, who said he wanted to be known as “Lancelous,” agreed to an interview afterward, and spoke of a vast web of powerful, shadowy figures who had intentionally triggered the United States’ financial crisis:

Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.

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