The left's screwy theory of the origins of the Tea Party

Hans Bader:

Federal cancer research money funded a “laughable conspiracy-theory report smearing” the Tea Party as being created by the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers, which we earlier debunked. The left-wing academics that authored it have “received $7 million” from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

But the senior author of the “study,” Professor Stanton Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, has now doubled down on his wacky conclusions. He told Fox News that the Tea Party ”pretty much originated with that smokers’ rights stuff.” As a sarcastic Rick Moran notes, if you doubt Glantz’s conspiracy theory, “It’s obvious you’ve missed the thousands of signs at Tea Party rallies calling for an end to tobacco taxes and setting up cigarette vending machines in grade schools.” As one Tea Party leader noted to Fox News, “If you’re going to have a conspiracy theory, at least try to make it pass the laugh test … and this one doesn’t even do that.”

Glantz’s “study” is a tissue-thin, 10-page smear, produced using federal grants that reportedly exceeded $1 million, that contains wild claims, such as the ridiculous assertion that “the Tea Party has origins in the ultra-right John Birch Society of the 1950s.”

One of the study’s biggest promoters, ironically enough, is Al Gore, who, unlike the Tea Parties, has a history of supporting federal tobacco subsidies at taxpayer expense. The study isbased on strange reasoning, such as the fact that one group funded in part by tobacco companies used the word “Tea Party” in passing in 2002, a group largely unrelated to the groups that later came into being and used it in 2009. Ironically, as syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum notes, under this reasoning, which Gore endorses, Gore himself could be classified as a front for the tobacco companies, since Gore, unlike the Tea Parties, received cash from the tobacco companies for many years: “Given Gore’s own financial ties to cigarette manufacturers, it seems equally reasonable to conclude that he was invented by Big Tobacco.” (The first national Tea Party protests occurred in 2009, in opposition to bailouts, Obamacare, and the $800 billion stimulus package — not in response to tobacco tax increases, which had mostly already occurred. State cigarette taxes rose rapidly beginning in the late 1990s, before plateauing off by the time of the protests, reaching $1.18 per pack in 2008, $1.34in 2009, and $1.48 in 2012. The federal SCHIPP excise tax increase on tobacco had also been enacted before these protests, which did not oppose cigarette taxes.)

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The real origins of the Tea Party sprang from the rants of a CNBC contributors reaction to Obama's big spending policies and to Obamacare.  The movement took off from there without any mention of tobacco.  But, this is typical of left wing conspiracy theories and smears.  They are constantly trying to denigrate opponents by tying them to organizations they demonize such as oil and gas companies.   It is just a lazy way to thinking on their part, and it helps them avoid having to deal with issues on the merits.

There is more on this strange theory here.