Tea Party Movement

We are looking to make converts not punish heretics 

Matt O'Brien

It would be hard to miss the growing list of things that need to be controlled by the government so we simple folk don’t hurt ourselves or destroy the planet.  In fact, there is a long list of demands to improve America.   What all these schemes have in common is they are about using our government to make all Americans live the way some Americans, and an annoying Swedish girl, think they should.  

The Wokescolds have been very vocal and very busy, but one can detect that they are turning people off with their overheated theatrics.  Often, they wreck the lives of people on the edges of scandal.  We hear stories of the powerful and the famous who cannot live up to the standards they would mercilessly inflict on the rest of us.

This is proof that the truth will come out.  

I propose that what we must do is to offer a home to people in transition from loony leftist to honest citizen and even to respected patriot.  Just as in the antebellum south the Under Ground Railroad helped former slaves on the road to freedom, we must help our friends and neighbors. 

In some cases, it may happen one issue at a time.  Listen for a person questioning the wisdom of a sacred cow policy like the $15 Minimum wage.  That is the sign that  they are struggling to match up the promised happy outcome with the sad reality the have come to know.  That is the moment when an informed and compassionate patriot can guide that person to freedom and away from group think that has enslaved them.  It will take patience and understanding to help people that have been shackled. We cannot expect that this will be easy from us or for them, but it will be worth it.    

It is claimed that Harriet Tubman said: “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” While historians can argue if she said those exact words let us draw inspiration from her example and make ourselves conductors on this new under ground railroad which takes people away from tyranny. 

Matthew O’Brien
President Worcester Tea Party 

Ben is still right: “Join or Die!”

Ben is still right: “Join or Die!”

Matt O'Brien

Dear Respected Patriot,

Let me start by saying to all the racist scum at the New York Times,

F#(% You!

To mark the of emergence of the Tea Party Movement, the New York Times published an article attempting to blame the acrimony which is all too common in civic life today as having started with the Tea Party Movement.  As if that was not enough of a stab in the back of the true patriots in America, the New York Times goes on to denigrate and condemn our movement and finally pronounce it dead and buried. 

But even that was not enough for the “Old Gray Lady.”  On Twitter many Antifa Activists squealed that the article forgot to call the Tea Party Movement “Racist.” Those intrepid Democrat Stenographers of the New York Times dutifully (…slavishly…) responded with a “correction:” 

Our intent with the story was to look at the spending and deficit policy failures of the Tea Party 10 years after its rise, especially those failures under a Republican president and Republican Senate. The federal budget deficit is growing faster than expected because of President Trump’s spending and tax cut policies; this month the CBO projected that the deficit will widen to $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year.

After publishing, we heard from readers who made the point that in a story about the Tea Party and history, race and racism within the Tea Party movement needed to be addressed. While our story was chiefly about deficits and spending, we decided to add context about the Tea Party attacks on President Obama and the racist displays at some Tea Party rallies. We updated the story and sent out a tweet about that update.

For ten years the Tea Party has been struggling to clean up the mess made by the socialist and racist policies that the keyboard commissars of the New York Times have advocated.  For all that time editors throughout the main stream media, including the New York Times, contrived stories to smear the Tea Party, because we were doing the right thing by standing up against the policies that brought poverty and death across the world and throughout history. 

Nevertheless we have allowed the Tea Party brand to be spoiled by unfounded ad hominem attacks.  Some of us have moved on to other good government organizations. Some of us have given up. All of us, even myself at times, have had our own crisis of faith.  

But then I see video from Hong Kong, & Venezuela, and I see how bad it can get if we do nothing.   

The grim lessons of where Utopian promises lead to are left unlearned.  In fact newspapers, television, schools, and colleges, are working to hide those lessons.  We have many in our country that actively advocate for socialism. Too many of our fellow citizens don’t understand how close we are to the precipice, and how far we have to fall.  

We will continue, not without hope, but knowing the unacceptability of the alternative.  Not because we have any superior skills or genius plans but because we can’t just wait for Superman to show up and save us.  We will continue because we owe it to our parents and our children, and ourselves.

After years of fighting, we scored a major victory over the Establishment with the election of Donald Trump and it has driven them insane.  Those who wish to rule over you from birth to death are on the ropes.  The knockout cannot happen without sustained resistance. 

I ask for all of you to rededicate yourself to this movement, prove the anti-American tools of the New York Times wrong, and to do what you can to save our Republic.  Now is the time for All good citizens to join the Worcester Tea Party. 

Join or Die! 

Matthew O’Brien
President Worcester Tea Party 

An indebted nation is a defeated nation.

John

At some point over the last generation, the enemies of America realized they cannot defeat a capitalist country like the United States on the battlefield.  So clearly, they went back to the drawing board to start over, and at some point drew the scheme to destroy America by using our naivete and government systems could rot us from within.

On the federal level, this rot is evident.  22 trillion dollars of debt and climbing.  Deficits are surging despite record economic growth in the US.  We are moving rapidly towards paying nothing of our debt down and only paying on the interest, which is the last gasp of fresh air before we become Venezuela; some are calling it a death spiral.

Take it from the leadership of the Worcester Tea Party, changing the country on a Federal level is like pushing on a mountain.  We’ve tried it, countless hours of working late into the night for years.  These efforts, albeit not wholly effective, helped move the needle.  But the reality is that nothing is going to change until we change locally.  Great societies can rot from within, but their healing can begin from within as well.  When the cancer has spread as it has today, the most effective approach is to heal the smallest infection first and move out from there.

Consider this at the barbecues and holiday event you attend.  If you can change one mind that cared enough to speak to you about the real issues affecting Massachusetts, you can create another advocate for a capitalist morality and instantly double your efforts.  He or she will then move forward and double their efforts, quickly and exponentially increasing your influence.

Consider this at the next town meeting or school committee meeting.  Speak up about the debt locally, and the tax burden put upon the shoulders of the productive in society.

Consider this when you hear more about “equitable” housing, seeing “inclusion” used to push more subsidized housing in your neighborhood to bring more burden onto the backs of the Atlases of society.

All of these issues may appear to be trivial in light of the work and effort we must put in just to make ends meet today.  But rest assured, they are all carefully crafted to rot America from within.  The battle lines are drawn and you would be surprise how close they come to your front door. 

John Niewicki
Dean of Information Technology
Worcester Tea Party

“The Shell Game Debunked” A Pro Rank Choice Voting Rebuttal

John

Recently, we at the Worcester Tea Party sent our monthly newsletter riddled with misinformation about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), otherwise understood as the Fair Vote.  

Therefore, a rebuttal is prudent:

Claim #1:“The problem is people DO NOT participate!”
We do not need further turnout of voters who are ignorant of the issues and simply vote based upon the identity of the candidates.  RCV DOES turn out the vote of more people, but not just any voters as implied by the prior author.  RCV increases the turnout of educated people who understand the issues because now they have an opportunity to vote for the candidate they truly support as opposed to only the lesser of two evils.  

So in this respect, RCV does turn out more people to vote, but unlike today, these people are activated because they now have an opportunity to cast a ballot based upon the candidate they truly want as opposed to the lesser of two evils.  RCV allows people to make a logical decision without a concern they are throwing away their vote.  

The idea that we simply need more people to vote with no regard for their ability to make a rational decision will only lead to more bad leadership in Massachusetts.

Claim #2: “. . . under RCV the other candidates could rank up their votes until  a second place loser overtakes the original winner.”  
When people rank their votes, they rank them based upon their value system.  Therefore, the idea that someone would rank, say, Donald Trump first and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or any set of candidates that are complete opposites in political disposition) shows a complete lack of understanding of the very premise of RCV.  Therefore, no matter how “candidates could rank up their votes,” if the people do not share in the disposition of those candidates they simply will not rank them.  

Claim #3:“What is a proven fact is in elections you are choosing a winner over a loser.  A vote for candidate A is a vote against candidate B.  This is how elections work!”  
The idea that it is better to have to choose between an actual democrat over a slightly less democrat-like republican than to be able to actually vote one’s conscious is truly silly.  

To most honest voters, the choice in any election between, say, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, John McCain, George Bush, or John Kerry are all bad options, and this is how the Establishment wants it to be.  Why?  Because no matter who loses, the Establishment wins.  Ranked voting breaks this paradigm and places the power back into the hands of the voter because it is then impossible to make the options for office a choice solely between the lesser of two evils. 

Simply stating the elections are about picking a winner over a loser without consideration as to whether either option really represents the will of the people is dangerous.  With Rank Choice Voting, people can truly vote their conscious knowing that if their first choice is eliminated from the race their vote will still count. When such a mindset is put in place, elections become about ideas and not about money and parties, something the Establishment fear more than anything.

John Niewicki
Dean of Information Technology
Worcester Tea Party

Magnificent promises, Lackluster results.

Matt O'Brien

April 15 marks the 9th anniversary of the first Tax Day Tea Party rallies.  It was a time of incredible passion for the Constitution, limited government, and fiscal responsibility.  Thousands, perhaps millions, of people who had never done anything more political than vote or write a letter-to-the-editor, joined in rallies, marches, and campaigns.  They called talk shows, collected signatures, gave money, and even ran for office.  What happened to that passion?  Where are the thousands who fought so hard against bloated government?

Did the Tea Party live up to its promise or
did it wither in the hypocrisy of political partisanship?

Last week, a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican President passed and signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that funds the government through September.  It includes a treasure trove of liberal spending, along with dramatically increased defense spending.

The Atlantic Magazine said of the bill:

“President Obama finally got a Republican-controlled Congress to fund his domestic budget.  All it took was Donald Trump in the White House to get it done.”

According to The Atlantic, “Congress eliminated none of the 18 independent agencies Trump wanted to scrap, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And several of the programs he wanted to zero out won huge increases instead. Take the TIGER grants, an infrastructure program created by Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus package. Congress had allocated $500 million to it each of the last several years, despite annual Obama requests to boost it to $1.25 billion. Trump’s budget called for axing it entirely, but lawmakers went even higher than Obama, giving $1.5 billion to TIGER. Or the Community Development Block Grant, a federal housing program that had been receiving $3 billion from Congress annually. Obama actually proposed cutting its funding by $200 million in 2016, while Trump called for chopping it altogether. In the end, it received $3.3 billion—a 10 percent boost.”

This legislation is an insult to the thousands of Americans who have fought for fiscal responsibility over the past nine years.  But, where are the protests?  I see vigorous discussions on Facebook.  Has this replaced the real activism of the patriots who rallied and marched in 2009 and 2010?  The lack of real response leaves the Tea Party movement subject to accurate labels of hypocrisy.

The Republican majority in Congress, President Trump, and all who support them should be ashamed of this spending bill.  “Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska accused his party of hypocrisy. “Every Republican would vote against this disgusting pork bill if a Democrat were president,” he said in a statement.” said The Atlantic.  President Trump and the Republicans promised balanced budgets.  Instead they’ve continued to saddle our children and grand children with never ending debt.

Liberals and Progressives make themselves easy targets because of their expected and blatant hypocrisy.  Millions of people marched around the country, in Washington, DC, and in Lincoln Square to protest bank bailouts and President Obama’s stimulus bill (which was a puny $831 billion over 10 years compared to this $1.4 trillion over 6 months).  When so-called fiscal conservatives fail to live up to their promises, we must hold them responsible.  An (R) after their names should provide no protection from their lies.

In Liberty,
Ken Mandile
Senior Fellow
Worcester Tea Party

“Facts are stubborn things”

Matt O'Brien

“Facts are stubborn things;
and whatever may be our wishes,
our inclinations, or
the dictates of our passions,
they cannot alter the
state of facts and evidence”

— John Adams 1770 Trial for the British soldiers
involved in the Boston Massacre.

The election of Donald Trump as president has had a terrifying effect on many of our fellow Americans.  One has to look no further than the plans that are being made to have a Protest Scream on Boston Common on the anniversary of Trump’s election and this summer 40,000 of our fellow citizens marched in a “Stand Up to Nazis” event, of course no Nazis were there.

This is the state of politics in our Republic in 2017.  The politics of self-destruction and negative campaigns that have gone on for decades, seeming only to get more vicious and more personal as well as less issue-oriented and less principled every day.  This has turned off a solid majority of Americans from being involved in politics and their government.  Those that are involved are blinded by partisan zeal.  They seem more interested in scoring political points than in effectively crafting policy that serves our Republic.

Such facts could make one cynical about the future of our Republic.  Happily there are other facts that can’t be ignored, hidden or forgotten.

America is built on big dreams, small dreams, and impossible dreams.  Those dreams became facts.  America is the place that people from all over the world come to dream big.  Without dreams not only America, but most of modern society would be impossible.  Without dreams there’d be no airplanes, no satellites, no cell phones, no computers, no movies, no music; what a blighted world this would be if we allowed our dreams to be overcome by our cynicism.

The WTP is made of equal parts dream and cynicism.  We believe that our current political leaders have lost faith with the Dream that America is founded on.  And we still believe in that Dream.  All that we do together is to turn that Dream in to a fact.  The work of the WTP is by necessity profoundly hopeful.

That is not to say that our work is easy.

I am confident that working together we will face all the challenges and overcome every obstacle.  But this cannot happen without you.  The WTP needs you to volunteer your time.  The WTP depends on your donations to support our effort.  Follow the PayPal link and give what you can.

Thank you for all you do in the cause of Liberty.

​In Liberty,
Matt O’Brien
President
Worcester Tea Party

No right to absolute arbitrary power!

Matt O'Brien

In the fall of 1772, Massachusetts House of Representatives member Samuel Adams began to stir up some trouble in Boston.  The legislature had traditionally paid the salaries of the Governor and of judges, but the British decided that they would pay these officials directly.  This removed an important check on power, diminishing the power of the colony’s elected representatives.  Adams had had enough of dirty British political tricks.  It was time for action.

In November, he formed the Committees of Correspondence, effectively forming a shadow government that was not accountable to the crown.  Adams’ document forming the Committees of Correspondence consisted of three parts:

“First, a State of the Rights of the Colonists and of this Province in particular–

Secondly, A List of the Infringements, and Violations of those Rights.–

Thirdly, A Letter of Correspondence with the other Towns.-“

In many ways, it was a precursor to the Declaration of Independence that would follow less than four years later.   Samuel Adams’ declaration of rights goes further than our other founding documents.  He felt that no citizen could voluntarily cede their rights.  These were gifts from God.:

“If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.”

Can we look at today’s federal government and believe anything less than that we have alienated this gift?  While we fight over football players and statues and fake news, others fight to cede their gifts (and ours) to a bloated power in Washington.

Eight years ago this month, tens of thousands of Tea Partiers marched on Washington in the 912 March, demanding an end to the bloat.  Looking back, it seems that much of our effort was futile.  We can look at Washington today and we see little effective effort in Congress to deflate the bubble of bureaucracy.  Yet, many of us still fight on.  The fight is a lot more lonely today, but no less important.  Are we going to cede the gift of liberty through inaction and apathy?   We may not gather again in enormous crowds, but we can fight on alone, in our neighborhoods, and in our towns.  This was where Sam Adams brought the battle.  And, it is there that he helped spark the brush fires of liberty that we celebrate today.

 

​In Liberty,
Ken Mandile
Senior Fellow
Worcester Tea Party

All this is what it means to be an American.

Matt O'Brien

Independence Day offers us reason to celebrate and to reflect what it means to be free.  Looking to the revolutionary times of the late 18th century, we see a society where, for the first time in human history, the “common man” came to seize power from his aristocratic oppressors.  Today though, we should be looking beyond the “common man”.  We should all be uncommon.

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