by David Ross
At 4 PM housesitting for parents, with nothing better to do, I decided to attend the Tea Party rally at Discovery Green.
I apologise in advance for the nature of this report. I haven't blogged in awhile. Technically, I am still not blogging - this is a standalone article, as it is mammoth. Also, I felt it would be best to hash this out per subject. For whatever reason, I posted as much as I could as quick as I could. It has been updated since then, developing into something more hostile as the hours have passed, as I've collected more information, and as I've read more apologetics, excuses, exaggerations, and lies from its organisers and its fans. Lastly, the pictures were taken on a cell phone which sends its pics through the world's fuzziest JPEG filter. Sosumi.
I desenrascated a placard out of one of Mom's sandwich boards, some old Christmas wrapping, and tape. I found some blue and red markers too, and drew up a pic of an O-bus driving over Iran, then Honduras; with the U.S. next in line. It's the residual neo-con in me what made me do it. I pasted the placard to the cardboard side of the board. Skip to the end to see it.
I brought along a cell-phone with a camera, and there will be pictures. There are also two pictures here, which are not mine, but taken from RightWingSparkle's blog - which originate from Becky Flowers at Facebook. I will point those out. Her camera was better than mine and took crisper photos. RWS tried to show only those pictures, and to tell only those stories, which made the Tea Party look good; my report here will fill in those gaps.
I got there at about 4:30. I paid an attendant $10 to park. It was very very hot indeed. I had brought a bottle of some kind of Thirst Mutilator or other but it didn't last. At the event I then bought some lemonade, and drank that; and went back for some Power Ade - but of that they were out, so I stole some Sprite instead. When that was drained I got a bottle of Ozarka water. I don't think any of these corporations sponsored the rally but I will give them product placement anyway as they literally saved my life.
But I am getting ahead of myself. First thing I did was sign up, and then I hit the crowd. I had entered via the southwest. Over there the Libertarian Party was pleading with everyone, please please to take their survey - you know the one, the diamond. I tried telling the partisans that I am a monarchist but that didn't help. I finally got them off my back by telling them they were "selling past the close". The far-out Constitution Party had people in the crowd too, but not at a table; they were surreptitiously handing out flyers toward the end. Again - ahead of myself.
Also, the event had vendors, mostly sellers of shirts; again, I'll show you one of those at the end. I didn't take a pic of all the shirts.
There was a live band playing Ramones, "I wanna be sedated"; some other stuff. I was going to take a picture of the crowd, but in the end I didn't bother. The crowd wasn't that crowded, except in the shade, and I didn't want to fauxtograph a "throng" that didn't exist. RightWingSparkle's second picture illustrates the line where the people settled, and where they didn't:
I walked around the vendors and got back to the southwest corner - milled around the tables there, noticed some stuff. I remembered that my ancient cellphone had a camera, so I started at the northwest corner to take the shots.
I didn't take pictures to make the Tea Partiers look nice, nor to make them look bad. I took pictures to familiarise myself with this movement of which this rally was a part.
My first pic was of a reactionary challenging the separation of church and state.
Then, Birchers:
A better look, perhaps on Becky #37 (not included by RWS):
Also on this side were 912 guys hawking "5000 Year Leap"; that is, Glen Beckers. And I saw one or two overt Ronulans (I'll get to the covert ones soon). But I didn't bother taking a picture here.
Here is an Objectivist with his holy writ:
Boy Scouts associated with St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church (they dealt with the flag handling):
Some placards along the north side of the Green, were noticed in RWS's fourth picture:
I took a closeup of the pink and yellow placards on the right edge of hers, which aren't as easy to see from her vantage:
People carried their own placards too (as I did); some witty, some not so witty: "Congress Epic Fail", etc. Among the former I chatted with the Palin-Nugent 2012 guy whom Melissa saw. Here's another sample:
Around this time I bought the t-shirt I hinted at above (a green one, with Sumerian logographs spelling "liberty"), and ran into a bathroom to change into it (I managed not to tap my foot). I still had a use for the red Hawaiian shirt I came in; it made a good protection for my thinning scalp and red neck. I looked like a Saudi prince in Bermuda.
By this point I noticed an angry haranguer or two demonstrating against immigrants, and holding up Sheriff Arpaio signs. They riled up the crowd by talking about the "invasion", and the murder of Houston Police Department officers. I should have filmed this. Oh well. Fortunately we have Becky #25 (again, not chosen by RWS):
As for other demonstrators: Many drew a comparison of Obama and/or Pelosi, with Hitler. I suppose we have Jonah Goldberg to thank for that. And there were V for Vendetta references, complete with Guy Fawkes masks. The same guys were noticed by Houston Press Hair Balls on 15 April.
I should mention here the crowd was overwhelmingly of Tocharians past their 40s. There were maybe 20 black people in the crowd - mostly associated with the Conservadors and the Raging Elephants. There were about as many Hispanics and very, very few Asians. I didn't talk to very many people and I will mention where I did.
Like this guy:
Yep, that's a Infowars (and Loose Change) Truth-er; talking to a Nirther (Obama Birth Certificate skeptic). That shirt on the pic reads to the effect that 9/11 is an inside job. I followed him and then told him off, loudly; and promised to report him. But I was not very convincing; he made a comment that we are all supposed to be for free speech, and nobody in the crowd backed me up (although some said to me, to the side, that he was just a nutcase to be ignored). I reported him to the conference volunteers and, I guess he slunk off on his own. There weren't any other troofers but, there were maybe ten other nirthers.
UPDATE: Instapundit relates this rebuttal:
Eh, the guy doing the negative report seemed to come and try to find the nuts in the crowd :/ can’t really control who shows up, and we didn’t discriminate much on tables. The truthers were removed though.
Numbers came from the police estimates they gave us. Definitely many times more that 2000. We do admit our sign-in efforts failed to even get a third of attendees, the area was just too open.
The organisers are very, very mistaken. First, I came to the rally to protest, which is why I drew up that sign. I started getting antsy when I saw how non-marginal the "nuts" were. It took no effort to "find" the far-out placards, the Arpaio guys, and the V guys, all of whom were out and proud. As for the truthers- well. RWS linked to Melissa Tweets. RWS didn't link to everything Melissa snapped - just a couple of "nice" pics. Look at the "houstontruth" pic at the end. I had run into the guy around 5:30 PM. Notice that the same guy is on the right, three hours after the opening band... by my math, some time before closing time 8 PM. Either the truther was not ejected, or else the man just walked right back in, at the end of the rally, to unfurl the banner. LoneStarTimes noticed too, also I think at the end of the thing. (UPDATE August: Josh Parker, who may have been one of the organisers, informed me on 17 July - when I was in Barbados - that the truthers themselves were "whining about" censorship. So it appears they were, at last, ejected; although I stand by my accusation that the Tea Party did nothing until they were forced to.) Infowars: 1; Houston Tea Party: 0
And we may as well discuss the Nirther problem again. One more time we are indebted to Becky - perhaps accidentally and once more, inexplicably absent from RWS (h/t, the Houston Press)
:
We now return you to your scheduled de-briefing - or whatever you call it when someone takes notice of an emperor who didn't bring his briefs in the first place...
After the Scouts' flag ceremony, there was the Star Spangled Banner. That was only the first verse, mind. The following prayer was less terminable. The (African-American) minister who delivered that, started with a reading of Genesis 47 - wherein Joseph colludes with Pharaoh to hoard foodstuffs and, when the famine comes and the Egyptians had not prepared, Joseph and Pharaoh together enslave the Egyptians. Up to then I'd never heard that text read to me from the Egyptians' point of view.
I have to concede that, technically, the reading was not anti-Jewish; because Joseph was Judah's brother, and father to Northern tribes like Ephraim. Maybe the Samaritan community ought to write a letter. At any rate the minister did pray for Iran's protesters as part of the prayer proper. Other speakers (and the crowd) were explicitly pro-Israel.
Now, the speakers came on. Here is Natalie Arceneaux of the Civil Right talk show, who MCed the joint:
Arceneaux plugged Facebook and Twitter a lot; and she pointed out Steve Crowder as a PJ Media dude. There were a few speakers who delivered extemporaneous conservativey applause lines about TARP, bailouts, cap-and-trade, health care - they missed card-check, but otherwise, you know the checklist.
When time went on, the weather got a little cooler.
I was noticing more and more that placards are supposed to be double sided... and one side of my placard was still just a dinner mat. But then I ran into some "Debra Medina For Governor" supporters. These were very young, and very driven. They got me pretty excited at this alternative both to creationist Perry and to D.C. squish Hutchison. I walked over to their table, next to the Birchers, and they had some roll-on glue; which let me stick one of their leaflets onto the sandwich-eatin' side of the placard. Then they set me to handing out more Medina leaflets - maybe 80 of them. (I managed to give away only one - because, I still had no idea who she was, and so Ididn't try talking her up.) What I did not know at the time was that Debra Medina was a Ron Paul gal. I should have guessed, when I ran across one of the kids arguing against the Iraq War, in opposition to a man who was (like me) more neo-con than not. His opponent, whom I shall call Mr Porlock, was offended and did not bother taking a leaflet. Ron Paul cultists cannot help themselves.
(Yes, carrying Ronulan posters utterly takes away from the point I had been making with my placard. Ron despises free Iran. Luckily, or not, no-one called me out on the Double-Sided Irony.)
Mr Porlock then bent my ear with his opinion on almost everything. Apparently them kids today, they had everything handed to 'em, and they have no respect for their elders' years of experience. Another speaker, Termite Watkins, came up but I didn't hear much from him because of Mr Porlock.
I finally disentangled from Mr Porlock and got up close to watch a comedian - Steve Crowder (a good picture here, from Glenn Reynolds at PJ Media). Crowder joked that Obama looks like a "photo negative" of Alfred E. Newman (the crowd laughed embarrassedly); and he riled up the crowd with cracks about Janeane Garafalo (SP? who cares), Ted Kennedy, Rosie O'Donnell. I should have filmed that too.
Finally at 6 PM the band came on again but everyone fled, so said band packed it in after a couple of songs. I got a number of positive responses to my placard, and two people wanted me to pose for a picture of it. I preached to people about Zelaya and the Honduran Constitution to anyone who was interested - and surprisingly, to me, several people were. It seems I am a better evangelist than an enforcer (or an artist).
So I came home. I took that pic of the sandwich board:
Yeah, maybe a bit heavy on the ol' imagery. And I am aware that I cannot draw.
And here is me, after the exhaustion, with the green shirt:
To sum up on my adventures that day: I added my name to the list of attendees; spread awareness about Honduras and Iran; got punk'd by Ronulans; wasted time with Mr Porlock. And, hopefully, gave a comprehensive report on what these rallies are like, to you.
If the organisers are saying "7-10,000 showed up" (as Instapundit relates), they are lyingexaggerating (and I see they since walked back that claim to 5,000). I didn't see more than a few hundred at any given time. Even the police as filtered through the hopelessly biased RWS only said 5,000. I guessed at the time that maybe 2,000 signed in, and that many of those peeked around and ran away. I see that by Monday, The Houston Press (after I notified them of this article, heh) had contacted the Houston Police Department and also the Discovery Green people. If RWS heard "5,000" from "the police", she heard it from a single pro-Tea cop and not from the Department.
The presenters seemed a sane bunch - just tired of socialism. The mad hatters at this party would be the closet Ronulans, who seem to own the grassroots / organising side of things; and the nirthers, who are the grassroots.
Ace's commenters have witnessed InfoWar troofers in other Tea Parties. I can't speak to how much influence the Troofers swing in these rallies because, I got personally involved. I can speak to their tactics, now, having seen MelissaTweets's last picture. They try to infiltrate crowds at the beginning, and then they unroll their banners at the end when it's too late to eject them. I should have got a picture of the jerkoff's face and shown it to the organisers. But note this: the crowd doesn't care and the organisers aren't willing to do anything. Until the Tea Party (and the Ron Paul coterie, who started the movement) figure out that they need to make the Troofers unwelcome - the troofers are going to be a problem for the Tea Party's public face.
And, if the organisers think that the pics I have taken were of "nuts", then could the organisers pretty please tell us which of these guys are "nuts"? Take the Birch Society - are they "nuts", and unwelcome at the Tea Party booths and tables; or are they kosher, and worthy of a table? Which will it be, guys?
It is in that light that we must read RightWingSparkle's response to my concerns (my bold, and editorial notes). She will tell us who is a nut or not, in her eyes...
*note: I didn't take these pics, but I would have PROUDLY taken pics of people who admire Glenn Beck's love for this country (ed. notice RWS's descent into cant here). Although I don't know what the reason is that Obama has spent a million dollars fighting a lawsuit demanding the bc, instead of just presenting it, I can see "the birth certificate folks" having a right to keep asking the question (ed. ah yes, the "just asking questions" trope, the pride of everyone from Ben Stein to David Irving). Nothing wrong with the John Birch society either (ed. !). Didn't see any Nazi comparisons, but like I said before the difference between our protests and the left's, is that we tell people not to bring those signs (ed. RWS has no credibility here), and your side (ed. "my" side?) has those signs remade for their supporters. You can try all you wish to try to make this out to be some fringe thing, but it is simply every day people, hard working Americans, who are sick at the direction this country is going.-TexasSparkle
For RWS, all that matters in a Tea Party attendee is a professed love of country; or, if they're InfoWars / Arpaio / Nazi-comparing types, she'll pretend she doesn't see them. It would be interesting to hear what she would make of American Renaissance or other "nationalist" organisations who might attend such events. UPDATE 7/6/2009: We now know they have attended such events - they're organising some of them.
I also observe that the Republican Party absented themselves entirely.
The Tea Party seems to be a marginal phenomenon at present, with too many kooks, and without enough advertising among normal people. The danger is that, for many of the Tea Party's fans, the Birch Society is already not marginal.
This Tea Party was not the liberty rally I set out to attend; it was a nationalist rally, with exclusionary undertones, which are growing with time.
If you'd like to read more of what I've been up to, mostly non-political, over the past 14 years I've been on WWW, then go here.
To send mail, I am at zimriel@sbcglobal.net.
3-4 July 2009: wrote this and posted it. I also notified Glenn Reynolds; my thanks to him for posting back to this, less complimentary post. 6 July: Thanks also to Lady Liberty's Lamp (by way of alter ego Spockista, commenting at Little Green Footballs) for the trackback and more additional perspective. And thanks to the Houston Press for the link-back and additional followup, too. Finally, my thanks to Becky Flowers, despite herself.
Some more commentary from Josh, probably Mr Parker.
Mobaby at LGF was also there:
55: I have been to a few tea parties in Houston and my feeling is that it is a dying movement. ... The tea party movement is populated with a number of people in Houston - Ayn Rand enthusiasts, Ron Paulians, black conservatives (Raging elephants dot org), John Birchers, and others who may be or may not be interested in the same things. I went out of fear of economic collapse in the US precipitated by unsound economic practices - but the movement lacks focus or direction and has a lot of people latching on for their own causes. The speakers were uninteresting, the crowd uninspired, and the future direction unclear.
115: oh yeah, there was a "9/11 was an inside job" sign at the Houston Tea Party too. I have no idea who was behind it - I just avoided them as did most others. They had a huge banner. The crazy signs I would look at and then look at the person holding it, in the eyes, trying to see if I could see crazy in there.
On a lighter note, while trawling the interwab (searching for Josh's commentary), I see that a spammer at sbilya.com (sabîliyya - a term for the Jihad, I think) stole my chapter heading. Sigh.