Protests: Former Tea Party activist says rallies offer similar platform
A decade ago, Mark Meckler was leading one of the nation’s first major Tea Party rallies outside the Capitol in Sacramento. He’s not living here anymore — he left for Texas because of the “hostility” he felt as a conservative in California — but sees similarities in a “Reopen California” rally set for Friday near the seat of state government.
“It’s almost identical,” Meckler told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast. “And that’s why I ended up getting involved.”
Meckler, who now lives outside Austin, Texas, has
been coordinating many of the nationwide protests scheduled for Friday through his organization, Convention of States.
Much like the Tea Party, the fledgling “Open the States” movement is a stew of those who are economically hurt by government shelterat home orders and wealthier, politically connected conservatives helping to fuel the protests behind the scenes. Rallies in Michigan last month were sponsored by the Michigan Freedom Fund, which has received more than $500,000 over the years from the wealthy family of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“It is very reminiscent of the early days of the Tea Party,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for RightWing Studies at UC Berkeley. “There’s a contrast between the highpowered donors and the people who wound up in the streets.
“The question, ‘Is this Astroturf or is this a grassroots movement?’ is again the issue,” Rosenthal said. “The answer is, ‘Both.’ There are the people who are organizing who are supplying money and logistics and websites, and the people in the streets. They may have different motivations, but they wind up in the same place.”
President Trump has been a cheerleader for the rallies, using the rhetoric of the demonstrators to urge them to “liberate” Michigan and other election battleground states. The demonstrations, which have included many people wearing “Make America Great Again” caps, are becoming the “de facto substitute” for Trump’s campaign rallies, Rosenthal said.
Rallygoers will “talk about China, the World Health Organization, the Democrats, conspiracy theories about (Joe) Biden’s son and the lab at Wuhan,” Rosenthal said.
Trump can’t star at campaign events during the pandemic, so these demonstrations “are to his rallies what Zoom is to how business takes places these days.”
Meckler said his organization offers groups “a platform, but we’re not offering them any money. We’re not paying for permits, we’re not providing them anything other than, here’s a website where you can list your events and talk to other people.”
Meckler said that in the early chaotic days of the Tea Party in 2009, “nobody had any idea what they were doing, including me. Nobody was telling us what to do. Nobody was giving us money. We were just frustrated and pissed off and felt like the elites were disconnected from us.”
At that April 15, 2009, tax day Tea Party rally in Sacramento, Meckler asked the crowd that packed the west lawn of the Capitol, “Are you guys tools of the Republican Party?”
The crowd’s response: Boooooo!
Ultimately, the Republican Party did harness the Tea Party’s energy. The GOP, fueled by the conservative network of organizations funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, tapped into the Tea Party to capture governors’ mansions and control legislatures in more than twothirds of the states, an advantage that Democrats are still struggling to undo.
But many of the Republicans elected to Congress with Tea Party help didn’t live up to its original mission of lowering taxes and reducing deficits. The federal government, led by a Republican president, was running up record deficits even before Congress approved some $3 trillion this year to combat the coronavirus.
For “the Republicans, it was important to them to try to coopt the Tea Party because that’s where all the energy was,” Meckler said. “So everybody in the Republican Party basically started calling themselves ‘the Tea Party guy.’ Didn’t matter how moderate or squishy or bigspending, or crony capitalist you were, you needed to try and take on the Tea Party moniker.
“And so I think that really diluted the brand,” Meckler said. “Ultimately, I would say the Tea Party just got eaten by the swamp in Washington, D.C.”
The Tea Party brand was also diluted by Democrats pointing out the fringe’s racist elements. Just as some Tea Partiers compared thenPresident Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and toted weapons to protests, some in the new generation of conservative protesters refer to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as “Whitler” for her stayathome order. Some demonstrators were brandishing long guns at an antishutdown rally in Madison, Wis.
Mindful of how such imagery was used to portray the Tea Party as a movement of the unhinged, Meckler said, “I’m always concerned about stuff like this.
“Any time you get a mass movement, at the fringes there are going to be crazy people, or they’re going to be people who are just creating bad imagery, bad narrative,” he said. “And so I do worry about that. I definitely worried about it with the Tea Party movement.”
Meckler isn’t shy about using tough rhetoric that some have found to be racist. He refers to COVID19 as the “Wuhan flu” and “Chinese Communist Party pandemic” on his podcast, a reference to its origins in China. Meckler has said China “has to pay a price” for “foisting” the virus on the world.
“When I say that there needs to be a cost for that,” Meckler said, he means that “the world needs to reevaluate its trading and other relationships with the Chinese Communist Party. It’s not all just getting cheaper goods and everything’s gonna be OK. There is a real price to pay here.”
While the new protests echo the economic populism of the Tea Party, Rosenthal said they also reflect a new phenomenon he called “populist epidemiology.”
When Trump mused last week about injecting disinfectant to ward off the virus, Rosenthal said, he was expressing an antielitism sentiment shared by people who don’t believe in the science behind the stayathome orders. They believe that it is time to get back to work.
“It’s the feeling that regular people can figure out what to do,” Rosenthal said. “We don’t need these scientists to figure out when to go back to work.”