While Progressives Dither, Tea Partiers are Getting Down to the Business of Politics

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Bill Berkowitz 

The Tea Party-related National Precinct Alliance is organizing in precincts across the country to remove every RINO (Republican in Name Only) while grabbing control of the GOP state by state. 
 
Maybe it was inevitable that a decade that began with heated warnings of an oncoming apocalypse, whose president – a fervent born-again Christian – believed he was chosen by God to shepherd the country through perilous times, and for a brief period saw a light at the end of the tunnel with the election of Barack Obama, should end with claims that the country is going to hell in a hand-basket. The current confluence of events is bringing the improbable and increasingly politically savvy Tea Party movement into the political foreground. 
 
From the Pacific Northwest’s “Sovereignty Winter Fest” to a candidates’ night in a suburb of Philadelphia; from an anti-immigrant rally in Durham, North Carolina, to battles in local precincts in Nevada, tea partiers – or assorted iterations of this phenomenon -- are on the move.
 
Tea party activities range from the silly – a California group is organizing around keeping Christmas music in the public schools during the holiday season – to the strident – last weekend, three-hundred tea partiers gathered on the steps of the Washington State capitol for a rally “to support a series of state’s rights 10th Amendment ‘sovereignty’ resolutions in the Washington legislature,” the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights’ Devin Burghart recently reported – to the shrilly mean-spirited – a late-November anti-immigrant crowd in Raleigh, North Carolina listened to William Gheen, president of ALI-PAC (Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee) railing against the “illegals."
 
Whatever their given focus at any particular time, it is clear that tea partiers are on the march. And, despite the kafuffle over how expensive it is for the average tea partier to attend next month’s Tea Party Nation convention, or questions about how much money the Tea Party Express folk (aka Our Country Deserves Better PAC, aka Russo, Marsh and Rogers) is siphoning off from the movement, or whether tea party money and ground troops put Scott Brown over the top in the Massachusetts Senate race, a number of serious organizing projects are underway across the country.
 
A project with great potential to impact the future of the Republican Party is being carried out by the National Precinct Alliance. “Welcome to the National Precinct Alliance Where Freedom loving patriots UNITE to KEEP their nation free!” reads the banner at the NPA website. According to the website, the NPA, founded by Phil Glass and Tony Warren, is “The eternal home for Precinct Executives outside the influences and strong arms of government and political parties.”
 
The NPA is proud to tell you that it is “at war... a political war for our very lives and the salvation of this great republic...” The NPA is savvy enough to understand that “this war will never end and we must never relent... because neither will our enemies.
 
Therefore, “We must ask ourselves; Where on this planet would free men go, if the United States of America were to fall?  We must never again allow our country to come so near to it's demise.”
 
The NPA is not about bluster and sloganeering, it is working the streets; the precincts if you will. As the New York Times’ Kate Zernike recently reported, “they are signing up to be Republican precinct leaders, a position so low-level that it often remains vacant, but which comes with the ability to vote for the party executives who endorse candidates, approve platforms and decide where the party spends money.”
 
According to the New York Times, the NPA’s “mantra” is “take the precinct, take the state, take the party — and force it to nominate conservatives rather than people they see as liberals in Republican clothing.” But, unlike the stealth campaigns run by the Christian Right in the 1980s, the NPA is very clear on its objectives. A recent report from Nevada pointed out that an “approved slate of candidates swept the elections and we now control the entire State”: “No RINO was left standing. Everyone of them has been moved out of our way. Every change to the State Party bylaws we didn’t approve of was voted down. It was a complete and total VICTORY for the grassroots conservatives in Nevada.”
 
The Nevada uprising resulted in the founding of the National Precinct Alliance. In an article titled “Nevada Precinct Success Launches National Precinct Alliance,” JB Williams, whose tagline at the end of his articles describes him as “a no nonsense commentator on American politics, American history, and American philosophy,” pointed out that Nevada was the proving ground and now [Tony] Warren and his leadership council, Dan (aka ColdWarrior) and Philip Glass, have taken the Nevada strategy and formed a nationwide networking organization aimed at recreating the precinct level success in precinct after precinct, state after state across the nation.”
 
Williams asserted that “There is no doubt that the long term solution for a runaway government is the patriot’s control of a primary party, and the direct retaking of the federal steering wheel.” Williams, recognizing that it would be near impossible to seize control of the government via a third party, advocates uniting “Tea Party folks” with “RNC [Republican National Committee] folks [so that they] can defeat the DNC [Democratic National Committee], better known today as the Democratic Socialist of America.”
 
In a recent piece in the Canada Free Press titled “Tea Partiers Find Power in National Precinct Alliance Strategy,” Williams described the development of the precinct strategy: Despite last year’s spate of activities, which included “912 meet-up groups, town hall protests, Tea Party rallies and a host of internet political networking sites [that] had brought like-minded citizens together …. no politician was listening and nobody knew what to do next.”
 
To accomplish this heady mission, the NPA has aligned itself with Freedom Force US, Williams pointed out that “Freedom Force US was formed for the sole purpose of bringing patriots across the country together in a targeted tangible strategy, strategically partnering with initiative specific organizations capable of mobilizing millions of citizens in a proven strategy.” 
     
In regard to dust-up over Tea Party Nation’s upcoming convention – the NPA has been asked to hold a workshop on NPA straegy-- NPA Director Phil Glass said that his organization is “aware of” the situation, “and as a non-profit foundation, we are very concerned about” it. “We are trying to gather all of the related facts and will have no official comment until we feel like we know what is really going on down in Nashville.”
 
Glass recognizes that “Infighting between patriot factions is counter-productive to the interest of our nation and the real grassroots patriot movement. NPA is an action oriented operation and we have no time for anything besides seating constitutional conservatives in GOP precinct seats. With hundreds of new members every day, it’s all we can do to keep up. We’ll leave the infighting and backbiting to others.”
 
In early January, NPA issued a press release announcing “a strategic alliance with Tea Party powerhouse Eric Odom and his organization of more than 60,000 members, Tax Day Tea Party." According to the Press Release, “A growing list of Tea party – Town Hall and 912 groups have joined the NPA project, but Odom’s outfit is the largest group to strike an alliance with NPA since its launch less than a month ago. … the two joining forces at the precinct level may prove to be a force that the RNC of old is in no position to reckon with.”
 
The Press Release pointed out that “Divided across hundreds of factionalized efforts often operating at odds with each other, [protesters] were of no great concern to anyone. But united in number, purpose and strategy, the people present a grave political threat to everyone in DC currently operating as if the will of the people doesn’t matter anymore.
 
“No matter what happens next, this alliance serves notice that the people are not only awake and angry, they are uniting in common. This alliance may be the beginning of a nationwide unified effort to reclaim the people’s control of their government and if it is, it isn’t happening a moment too soon.”