Alex Copulsky’s reporting on the Tea Party is hilarious. If you haven’t seen his post yet, go check it out.
But his sightings of “trolls” — people unsympathetic to the Tea Party movement who are there just to make it look bad — corroborate the reports we’ve been hearing about left-wing activist groups mobilizing to crash the Tea Party events and frame them as racist and violent. (See, for instance, crashtheteaparty.org.)
Now, the Iron Law of Populist Protests says that for every 1,000 people at a public protest, 100 will be an embarassment to the cause.
And as Copulsky observes, some of these are true believers. The Birthers, for instance, are not going to go away any time soon. They’ve been hermetically sealed off from reality for the foreseeable future. They are going to be a vocal minority at every Tea Party event.
But what about the Hitler impersonators? Aren’t these the same people who hassled Barney Frank last year at his town hall? The primary, organized force behind the Hitler signs and costumes has long been the cultish LaRouchePAC, which believes that the Queen of England controls American politics and wants to start an FDR-like Civilian Conservation Corps to achieve “productive employment” in the United States. Note the Obama-Hitler images all over the home page and the ObamaWatch campaign.
There is no rhyme or reason to their politics, except idolization of Lyndon LaRouche and his conspiracy theories, and they certainly don’t support small government or lower taxes.
The Left, naturally, tries to pin him on the Right. And the Right tries equally hard to pin him on the Left. But he’s not so much left-wing or right-wing as a certifiable independent.
If take out the left-wing activists (the crashers) and the LaRouche nuts (the piggybackers) you may be left with a much less circus-like cross-section of people.
After all, even if the activists tend to fit a certain profile, they seem to have broader support in the population than is commonly thought.