I'm Team Daryl Davis and I support the Tea Party
I, like thousands of people, watched the Daryl Davis Joe Rogan Experience and was captivated.(The above video) I was familiar already with Daryl Davis thanks to Minds and Tim Pool. When I say I am team Daryl Davis I mean it in the truest sense of the words. I support how he does what he does, and how he supports those whose ideas he has helped change and shape. Honestly it is something we should all strive for. Understanding and compassion as well as support for those who have been led astray are true and righteous ideals. I have been very vociferous about my feelings towards the white identitarian and white nationalist movements. I am no fan. His mastery of human compassion and patience have taken the venom from the snakes mouths themselves.
I listened intently, even pausing my game(I usually listen to podcasts at night after the kids are in bed while I build in Minecraft or rift in Diablo 3) just so I could pay attention, because I found him so enthralling. Then towards the end as he was discussing how people can get pulled into the ideology of hate he mentioned the Tea Party as being an organization with impure motives. To be precise, I have no doubt there are bad players in the movement, I also know that every large movement will have a percentage of undesirables. I know they are not even a vocal minority though, because the libertarians who follow the movement tend to ignore collectivism in its many forms to include racism. To quote Ayn Rand, whom Ron Paul so loved he named his son after her, “Racism is the lowest form of collectivism”. The idea that a smaller government that doesn’t bail out big corporations is a movement of racists is disingenuous. It is a vast strawman and oversimplification of what used to be a normally understood stance. Politicians no longer run on platforms or promises that fall within the scope or duty of the office in which they covet, but in promises that seem too wild and outlandish, not to mention impossibly expensive that they bend the rules often to make them happen, or simply turn into corporate welfare machines. I am not sure how supporting a smaller less intrusive and crony government can fall into the realm of racism.
The example Davis uses is immigration. I found this odd because he gave a perfect example about coal miners being ousted for cheaper illegal immigrant labor, which is a tool the KKK likes to use for recruitment. I think he hit the nail on the head in that regard. Just because the KKK uses it as a tool of recruitment does not make the action itself correct or moral though. Should we simply allow bad things to happen because those bad things are also opposed by ideologically misguided people? I myself do not fall in on Libertarian Party lines when it comes to immigration although I do not support the idea of a wealth test nor the need for thousands of dollars in immigration lawyer fees just to make it to the land of opportunity. I do know that our welfare state has become so robust that the incentives to come here are not what they once were, and that’s what I want to change, not immigration itself. Let’s talk about why the Tea Party was founded. Below is the link to the wiki.
The Tea Party movement wiki page describes the Tea Party as: “...an American fiscally conservative political movement within the Republican Party. Members of the movement have called for lower taxes, and for a reduction of the national debt of the United States and federal budget deficit through decreased government spending.” No where in there do I see a race based policy or belief. CNBC reporter Rick Santelli called for a “tea party” on the mercantile exchange. This is of course in reference to the Boston Tea Party where Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty(SoL) dumped British tea into the Boston harbor to prevent offloading because of the crony law that enforced the purchase and taxation of British tea. Now looking through the lens of time one could take exception with the fact that the SoL dressed up like Native Americans to disguise who they were, but I think that is a different discussion as wokeism was not really a thing then, for better or worse.
President Obama himself addressed the movement in a thoughtful and nuanced way. As far as I know he never tried to strawman the fiscal conservatism that the Tea Party was trying to accomplish, only the way in which they wished to achieve it. I find this to be healthy discourse, something we should all hope for more of. To quote President Obama in this regard. “Let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we're going to stabilize Social Security. Claire McCaskill and I are working diligently to do basically a thorough audit of federal spending. But let's not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the recovery act, because that's just a fraction of the overall problem that we've got. We are going to have to tighten our belts, but we're going to have to do it in an intelligent way. And we've got to make sure that the people who are helped are working American families, and we're not suddenly saying that the way to do this is to eliminate programs that help ordinary people and give more tax cuts to the wealthy. We tried that formula for eight years. It did not work. And I don't intend to go back to it."
So before I ramble on too long on what I hope is a thoughtful defense of the Tea Party I want to end with this final statement. I am team Daryl Davis and if in the future I can in any way lend a helping hand to help him on his journey, I will absolutely do so. I have no large audience, I do not have large sums of money, yet I will pledge to help him and any like-minded individuals as I can.