To anyone watching, it was pretty evident that the Tea Party movement people were out of their minds. It's an obvious conclusion, if you've had any exposure to their angry screaming over 'death panels', imbecilic hand wringing over 'czars', weird 'new world order' rants, shrill cries of socialism. Add to this an assortment of anti-immigration, anti-evolution, anti-global warming, isolationist rhetoric mixed with an elementary school level understanding of the American Revolution and it's pretty clear that most of these people are well-intentioned people who just happen to be politically unhinged.
Well, others are finally starting to get it too. Jonathan Kay, writing for Newsweek, attended the conference in Nashville and came away pretty shaken:
One of the most bizarre moments of the recent tea-party convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the mainstream media, prompting everyone to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream, "USA! USA! USA!" But the tea partiers' well-documented obsession with President Obama has hardly been diffused by their knack for finding new enemies.
Steve Malloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, kicked off the first full day of conference proceedings by warning that Obama and his minions are conspiring to control every aspect of Americans' lives—the colors of their cars, the kind of toilet paper they use, how much time they spend in the shower, the temperature of their homes—all under the guise of U.N. greenhouse-gas-reduction schemes. "Obama isn't a U.S. socialist," Malloy thundered. "He's an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government."
I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.
Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn't just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.
