The Tea Party showed itself in 2010, provoked by the election of Barack Obama as president. Many Americans thought we were advancing toward a more enlightened racial time. How wrong that was. With this black man as president, racism came out of the woodwork with a vengeance.
Barack Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, and organizers of the so-called “taxpayers’ march” began planning a few weeks later for a march in Washington that September. Thousands attended this Tea Party march protesting “big government,” “the so-called dismantling of free market capitalism,” and Obama’s health care reform and federal spending proposals.
On their way to leading the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the fall of 2010, the Tea Party activists disrupted town hall meetings across the country protesting Obama’s health insurance plan. However, these demonstrations were not spontaneous as they were purported to be. Instead, they were carefully orchestrated by organizations of the Koch brothers, who were provoking disorder to achieve their economic objectives by manipulating politics, which has continued since then.
with Obama as president, racism came out of the woodwork with a vengeance.
We in Southwest Virginia witnessed the expression of some other wild ideas the Tea Party movement pushed. One was the anti-government conspiracy theory, perhaps best classified under the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy. The NWO conspiracy theory says that many elites are working behind the scenes to create events to enslave the global population. Adherents argue that most world leaders are part of this plot, and they manufacture events like the coronavirus pandemic and mass shootings to create social unrest.
In New River Valley in Southwest Virginia, the Livability Initiative received a $1 million federal grant to develop plans for housing, energy use, cultural heritage, and economic and job development across a four-county area. However, hundreds of protesters showed up at community meetings held by local governments to discuss the Initiative. The protesters claimed it was part of the United Nations Agenda 21 and the New World Order conspiracy.
The U.N. Agenda 21 has admirable goals: end all poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives, ensure inclusive and equitable quality education, achieve gender equality, and empower all women and girls. Yet the Tea Party people argued that the proposed planning was part of the NWO conspiracy which would take their property. So they held things up for a while by disrupting local government meetings.
The Tea Party/NWO conspiracy adherents flexed their muscle again in 2013, blocking the likely establishment of the Crooked Road Music Heritage Trail as a National Heritage Area, managed by the National Park Service, and bringing billions of tourist dollars to the region.
The Crooked Road Trail is a state-designated highway trail stretching 330 miles and looping through 19 counties in Southwest Virginia, marking the birthplace of country music. Country music’s “big bang” is considered to have started with the Carter family going into the studio in Bristol, Virginia (the bottom of the loop), in 1927 and recording six songs.
The original Carter family, the first of many stars from the Southwest Virginia region, consisted of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and Maybelle Carter. With the help of an African American guitarist, Lesley Riddle, they popularized country music. Riddle traveled with A.P. Carter to collect songs that had been handed down vocally from folk in the region. He taught Maybelle Carter a guitar technique she developed into the so-called “Carter Scratch,” which revolutionized guitar playing.
Nevertheless, The Tea Party/NWO people, playing to the property owner obsession in the region, effectively blocked the NHA project by having five counties vote against it. Thus, Southwest Virginia residents had early warnings of some of the lunacy that has now arrived.
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Wornie Reed is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Africana Studies and Director of the Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech University. Previously he developed and directed the Urban Child Research Center in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University (1991-2001), where he was also Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies (1991-2004). He was Adjunct Professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (2003-4). Professor Reed served a three-year term (1990-92) as President of the National Congress of Black Faculty, and he is past president of the National Association of Black Sociologists (2000-01).
This column first appeared online at What the Data Say and is shared here by permission.
