Are the new “tea party” protests a grass roots rebellion or agitprop?

Summary:  Are the “tea party” protests a genuine grass roots movement?  Or are they a well-planned and funded agitprop campaign, perhaps designed to weaken the Obama Administration?   Or, as C Smith notes in comment #3, perhaps both!  A provocative article at Playboy provides some evidence that this is serious money at work.  Or not:  see the March 2 update!

The campaign opened on 19 February 2009 on CNBC with this broadcast (see a transcript here, posted by Freedom Eden):

“CNBC’s Rick Santelli and the traders on the floor of the CME Group express outrage over the notion they may have to pay their neighbor’s mortgage, particularly if they bought far more house than they could actually afford, with Jason Roney, Sharmac Capital.”

Two websites previously set up went live shortly thereafter.

• Here is the website claiming to be the “official home of the Chicago Tea Party”.
• Here is the “Official Chicago Tea Party” website.

There is also the “Tax Day Tea Party” website, “Online HQ for the April 15th Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party Rallies”.  Glen Reynolds, the Instapundit, has throughly covered this phenomenon:  see this Google list of his 160 posts about them (with photos!).

Now there is an article claiming that this is well-planned agitprop:  “Backstabber:  Is Rick Santelli High On Koch?“, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, online at Playboy, 27 February 2009 — {as noted by Rick Caird in comment #1, they are editors of The Exiled Online (see Wikipedia entry for details).

Update on March 2: 

1. Really bogus behavior by Playboy!  The story has disappeared, taken down without an explanation.  (hat tip to Instapundit)
2. “I Want to Set the Record Straight“, Rick Santelli, CNBC, 2 March 2009 — His reply to the allegations.

Excerpt from the Playboy article

Last week, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli rocketed from being a little-known second-string correspondent to a populist hero of the disenfranchised, a 21st-century Samuel Adams, the leader and symbol of the downtrodden American masses suffering under the onslaught of 21st century socialism and big government. Santelli’s “rant” last-week calling for a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest President Obama’s plans to help distressed American homeowners rapidly spread across the blogosphere and shot right up into White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’ craw, whose smackdown during a press conference was later characterized by Santelli as “a threat” from the White House. A nationwide “tea party” grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.

But was Santelli’s rant really so spontaneous? How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?

What hasn’t been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli’s “tea party” rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine, from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called “astroturfing”) to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that’s because it was.

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

I strongly recommend reading this in full!

For more information

1. Mentioned as a cog in this campaign, The Daily Bail presented evidence to show that they are uninvolved — except as an observer.
2. See the Wikipedia entries about astroturfing and agitprop.
3. Interesting comment on the significance of the Tea Parties from Rick Moran (libertine and free-lance writer):  “Weak Tea“, at his site Rightwing Nuthouse, 27 February 2009 (hat tip to Instapundit).

Afterword

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For more information from the FM site

To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar.  Of esp relevance are:

• About America – how can we reform it?
• About Good news about America, a collection of articles!

Some posts on the FM site about disinformation and propaganda:

1. News from the Front: America’s military has mastered 4GW!, 2 September 2007
2. 4GW at work in a community near you, 19 October 2007
3. The media discover info ops, with outrage!, 22 April 2008
4. Successful info ops, but who are the targets?, 1 May 2008
5. “Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable”, 8 June 2008 – About Debkafile
6. Does reading Debkafile make us smarter, or dumber?, 15 June 2008
7. Psywar, a core skill of the US Military (used most often on us), 26 November 2008
8. Concrete evidence of government info ops against us, but it’s OK because we are sheep, 2 December 2008
9. Iran’s getting the bomb, or so we’re told. Can they fool us twice?, 16 February 2009
10. The media doing what it does best these days, feeding us disinformation, 18 February 2009
11. The media rolls over and plays dead for Obama, as it does for all new Presidents (Democrats only, of course), 19 February 2009
12. George Will: climate criminal or brave but sloppy iconoclast?, 23 February 2009