Tea Party Enemies: Education, Facts and Knowledge

This is Dale Robertson, who runs teaparty.org and can't spell. On the site, he calls himself tea party founder, president.

"You really think that your superior credentials grants you social wisdom and intelligfence. It doesn't."

That is a sentence from the first comment on David Brooks' column on the rise of the tea party and how the uninformed are rebelling against the educated. What a sad, sad, sad commentary.

This is what's most frightening about the tea party--education or aspiring to be be smart or any kind of critical thinking is not considered a positive attribute. It's a negative. The tea party revels in dismissing "elites" (educated), essentially giving themselves a pass for being mediocre to low life. Being educated and being informed = elite in wingnut eyes. Search #tcot on Twitter and you will find an amazing number of misinformed people spreading fourth-hand information that can easily be proven as BS. But that doesn't matter to them. For them, it's all about a set of ideological beliefs. They're also easily misled and ready to take in garbage, which is cult-like. These people think they have been unfairly kept down by the "elite." The "elite" are merely a scapegoat for their own lack of knowledge.

Terrorists don't frighten me one bit. But tea party wingnuts are scary because they spread hate, fear and ignorance. That's what brings down a nation. I'm not talking about the tea party faction who rails against taxes, which is a valid contingent of people who are worried about taxes and U.S. debt. I understand that criticism completely. They are a sliver of the tea party, which is a sliver of America itself.

I'm talking about the ignorant, crass, bigoted, wingnutty, Glenn Beck-Michele Bachmann-led tea party. There would not be a tea party if a white democrat was president. If a white man ran against John McCain, we probably would've never heard of Sarah Palin, who also inspired the tea party movement.

For the tea party, Obama is an assault to "white culture." The election of Obama was the last straw for these people. They fear being the minority. They fear being less powerful. They abuse the Constitution for their cause. They abuse Christianity for their cause. These people are all about ignorance and fear and the election of Obama spurred them to action.

Education reform should be at the top of our agenda because a whole new generation of kids are being taught not to aspire to facts, truth, knowledge and critical thinking. But rather to BELIEVE in things. I'm concerned about these tea party children who often are the victims of their parents' bigotry, another form of child abuse. One truth is that bigotry is immoral.

Book TV recently captured wingnuts at a Sarah Palin book signing. At first, the interviewees sound normal but when they continue on, about halfway through, they reveal their bigotry, which I believe is the heart of the tea party. Socialism is code. They would never admit to bigotry because they don't recognize it as bigotry. They're unaware because it is who they are. It's how they were brought up.

This video illustrates it's the ideology, what Sarah Palin represents that's most important. Wingnuts aren't informed on policy or world issues: