The Tea Party’s Slogan Has a Very Dark History

With you, as soon as I got the pitch, I was like, I need to talk to you. Like what you're doing is insane and amazing and very, very unusual for someone to have that kind of patience and commitment to something like that and to convert these people and without judgment and to be able to rationalize with them and talk to them reasonably. These are my fellow Americans. Yes. You know, we all are in this game together. And sometimes people get trapped in a really fucking stupid ideology and they don't, they, there's a part of their brain that knows it's dumb. There's a part of their brain that knows it's toxic and they deny that. They ignore that, they squash it and they try to avoid thinking about it and then someone like you comes into their life and you kind of like open this door. And Joe, you know, that toxic thing happens on both sides. You know, I catch hell from people who look like me, not everybody, you know, but there are people who look like me who totally disapprove. Because you're giving these people a platform. Giving them a platform. Because you're communicating with them. Yes. Yeah. Listen, you cannot change somebody's mind by disallowing them to express what's on their mind. Right. You know? Well, that's the argument about de-platforming people online. Right. Right. But then the argument, the other way is that you're radicalizing young people. The argument is there's a lot of young people that would go on these social media sites and they're impressionable and they don't know any better. Particularly YouTube, they worry about that because these YouTube videos, they have music and it's a multimedia experience. Right, draws them in. It can be compelling and with a really good narrator, you can get people to be like, look at this fucking flat earth movement. Right? Where's that coming from? It comes from a few articulate narrators who put together these videos on YouTube where they're the only ones that get to talk. Just don't get to interject and go, stop, that's wrong. That's not how I'll show you. Nope. It's like this. Look, here's a satellite photo. Look, here's a hundred satellite photos. Look, here's all the satellites to take pictures of the earth. They don't get to do that. So these guys, they'll have this long uninterrupted narrated video that makes so much sense. You listen to this guy. God, he's genius. Oh my God, the world's flat. I can't believe they're fucking lying to me. So there's hundreds of thousands of people that believe in the flat earth now because they've been radicalized, because they've been converted by these multimedia things like YouTube. This is what people worried about in terms of radicalizing them towards hateful ideologies as well. And I'm glad you're using that word radicalized. Yeah. Because that's exactly your spot on because we, it wasn't until recently that we began using that word domestically. For a while they were only using it for Middle Eastern type people. When somebody like Dylan Roof did what he did, we didn't say he was radicalized. He said, oh, he must have some mental issues. Well, it's both, isn't it? Well, sure. Anybody who walks into a place and starts shooting at people has mental issues. What allowed them to become radicalized? Maybe those mental issues. But we don't say radicalized when it comes to our own. Yes. Because we're ashamed of it. So many different code words. For example, what do you call these groups of white people who go out in the woods and practice maneuvers and survivalist stuff? They're like anti-government, kind of a paramilitary. Yeah. Like what do they call them? Malicious. Exactly. Right. Okay. Malicious. What do you call the same type of things with black people? I didn't know they had them. Yeah, they have them. What do they call them? What do they call them? They call them militants. Oh. Like the Black Panthers. Okay. Right, right, right. So it's the exact same thing. Right. But one term has more of a negative connotation. Malicious has got a pretty negative connotation. Not as negative as militant. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. That's the same shit to me. And let's take back when Obama got into office, we had a new political party that came out of nowhere. The Tea Party. The Tea Party. Right. Last time you heard of a Tea Party was in 1776. Yeah. What happened to them? Those Tea Party folks? They're still floating around. Really? They still call themselves the Tea Party? No, because Obama's gone now. So, you know. I think they were out by the time he was, I mean, it was before he was even gone. Didn't they fall apart? Well, because he got a second term, you know. Right. It didn't quite work. But their slogan was, take our country back. We're going to take our country back. Okay. Take America back. That is a Klan slogan. Okay. And it was a code term for the Tea Party that was a Klanian call. And people, it resonated with a certain ilk of people. That slogan started in 1954 with the Klan. 1954 when Brown versus the Board of Education desegregated schools. You can go on YouTube, find all these Klan rallies with these wizards and dragons saying with the burning cross and the back one saying, we're going to take our country back. I'm not going to let my little white boys and girls go to school with little nigger children and blah, blah, blah. We're going to take our country back. Back to segregation. They didn't want to integrate it. Right. I would ask these Tea Party people, why are you using a Klan slogan? And they say, oh, no, no, no, Darrell. That's not what we mean. I said, well, you don't say take our country back from who? You don't say take our country back to what? You say take our country back, kind of open-ended. I said, you know, what are you trying to say? Oh, what we mean is we're going to take our country back from the Democrats, take it back to Republican rule. Okay. That's fine. Why not say that? Right. See? Exactly. They're using an already used slogan that was a KKK slogan. Exactly. So it harkens to those people. And here's the thing. Last time I checked, Bill Clinton was a Democrat. Jimmy Carter was a Democrat. Where was the Tea Party? Where was take our country back? And then all of a sudden, a black guy gets in the White House and they start screaming take our country back. Right. Right. You can put two and two together, right? Where were you guys eight years ago? Four years ago. Yeah, exactly. Right.