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The Tea Party protests were a series of protests throughout the United States that began in early 2009. The protests were part of the larger political Tea Party movement.

Among other events, protests were held on:

Most Tea Party activities have since been focused on opposing efforts of the Obama Administration, and on recruiting, nominating, and supporting candidates for state and national elections.[8][9] The name "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party, whose principal aim was to protest taxation without representation.[10][11] Tea Party protests evoked images, slogans and themes from the American Revolution, such as tri-corner hats and yellow Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flags.[3][12] The letters T-E-A have been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already".[13]

Commentators promoted Tax Day events on various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, while the Fox News Channel regularly featured televised programming leading into and promoting various protest activities.[14] Reaction to the tea parties included counter-protests expressing support for the Obama administration, and dismissive or mocking media coverage of both the events and its promoters.[14][15]

The theme of the Boston Tea Party, an iconic event of American history, has long been used by anti-tax protesters with libertarian and conservative viewpoints.[16][17][18][19][20] It was part of Tax Day protests held throughout the 1990s and earlier.[21][22][23] The libertarian theme of the "tea party" protest has also been used by Republican Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters during fundraising events in the primaries of the 2008 presidential campaign to emphasize fiscal conservatism, which they later claimed laid the groundwork for the modern-day Tea Party movement.[24][25][26][27][28][29]Young Americans for Liberty, with the endorsement of Rep. Paul, organized a protest in late-2008 for January 24 the following year with participants dressing in Native American costumes and dumping soft drinks into New York's Susquehanna River in protest of former NY Governor David Paterson's proposed 18% tax increase on soda.[30][31] As home mortgage foreclosures increased, and details of the 2009 stimulus legislation became known, more organized protests began to emerge.[32][33][34]

On January 19, 2009, Graham Makohoniuk, a part-time trader and a member of Ticker Forum, posted a casual invitation on the market-ticker.org forums to "Mail a tea bag to congress and senate,"[35] a tactic that had first been attempted by the Libertarian Party in 1973.[36] The idea quickly caught on with others on the forum, some of whom reported being attracted to the inexpensive, easy way to reach "everyone that voted for the bailout."[37]

Forum moderator Stephanie Jasky helped organize the group and worked to "get it to go viral."[38] Jasky is also a member of FedUpUSA - a fiscally conservative, non-partisan activist group whose members describe themselves as "a group of investors" who sprung out of the market-ticker.org forums.[39] The group had previously held D.C. protests in 2008.[40][41] On January 19, 2009, Jasky had posted a formal invitation "to a commemorative tea party."[42] She suggested that supporters, in a coordinated effort, send tea bags on February 1, 2009.[38]

The founder of market-ticker.org, Karl Denninger, a stock trader and former CEO,[43] published his own write-up on the proposed protest. Titled "Tea Party February 1st?", it railed against the bailouts, the national debt and "fraud and abuse in our banking and financial system" which included the predatory lending practices currently at the center of the home mortgage foreclosure crisis.[44] Karl Denninger, who helped form FedUpUSA in the wake of the March, 2008 Federal Reserve bail out of Bear Sterns, had been a guest on both Glenn Beck and CNBC.[45] By February 1, the idea had spread among conservative and libertarian-oriented blogs, forums, websites and through a viral email campaign,[46] and Denninger has since been credited as one of the founders of the movement, and the organizer for the first Tea Party event.[47][48]

On February 11, 2009, talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying: "It's time for a Tea Party."[34] He was on the show criticizing the newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who that morning had outlined his plan to use the $300 billion or so dollars remaining in the TARP funds.[49]

The dominant theme seen at some of the earliest anti-stimulus protests was "pork" rather than tea.[50] The term "porkulus" was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh on his January 27, 2009 broadcast,[51] in reference to both the 2009 stimulus bill, which had been introduced to the House of Representatives the day before, as well as to pork barrel spending and earmarks.[52] The term proved very popular with conservative politicians and commentators,[53] who began to unify in opposition against stimulus spending after the 2008 General Election.[54]

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Tea Party protests - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia