Slashdot Mirror
The Free State Project, One Decade Later
Okian Warrior writes "About a decade ago Slashdot ran an article about the Free State Project: an attempt to get 20,000 liberty-minded activists to move to one state (they chose NH) and change the political landscape. Eleven years on, the project is still growing and having an effect on statewide politics. NPR recently ran a program discussing the movement, its list of successes, and plans for the future. The FSP has a noticeable effect on politics right now — still 6,000 short of their 20,000 goal, and long before the members are scheduled to move to NH."
It should be pointed out that most of those gatherings were open to anybody willing to listen, and that included nut jobs, communists, professional agitators ... liberal wannabes ...
You're working really, really hard on your "no true scotsman" level of defining a tea partier there.
This is not an uncommon thing at tea party rallies or in the tea party generally. Far from it, the movement - whatever it claims its stated goals to be - has attracted some of the worst of the worst of society, and they have inevitably had an outsized influence on the tenor, tone, and at times direct verbage that comes from the movement.
The larger problem for the Tea Party is people like you, who want to pretend that your movement doesn't have problems and hasn't attracted these people to show up time and again. But I was downtown when Dale Robertson had his infamous sign on the street, and I can tell you personally from viewing the attendees to that particular event, he was not abnormal compared to the rest of the attendees. While other movement members tried to throw him under the bus later, there's a reason he was the one who had owned teaparty.org, there is a reason he was there, and there is no question that he and those like him were welcomed with open arms and continue to be welcomed with open arms by the Tea Party movement.