What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.”
– Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead

The words of Jerry Garcia are today taking on new meaning for us Tea Partiers. For the seven years we have been working for truly conservative values, the Tea Party Movement has been minimized, marginalized, vilified, denigrated and assaulted. Yet through it all, we have, unlike the paid members of Occupy, again and again risen to our task.

Slowly but surely we have muscled up, put our heads down and turned what was a Democrat majority in the US House and Senate to a Republican majority. Just as significant, we worked with other grass-rooters to increase majorities of governorships from 31 to 33 and to win more than 900 state legislative seats that have switched hands from Democrat to Republican since 2009. Republicans now control both legislative chambers in 32 states, compared to 13 for Democrats.

And then, the pièce de résistance: Donald Trump beats Hillary Clinton!

And the Russians made it happen? Well, not exactly. Out of the darkness came the seemingly long-lost Tea Party. Monica Crowley and Herman Cain described the election of Donald Trump as nothing less than the “second iteration of the Tea party movement.” Crowley went on to correctly state that we were “assaulted by a weaponized IRS,” and Cain added, “the Liberal media tried to demagogue the Tea Party to push them into silence and submission.” See interview here.

So after being called “The American Taliban” on HBO’s The Newsroom, here

After being lied about by entertainers like CBS’s Aisha Tyler who falsely tweeted, “Remember when mobs of gun-toting Tea Partiers flooded DC, pledged to assassinate Obama & burned him in effigy on the mall?” here

After Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) said that we are “mean racist people.” here

After being demeaned by every component of the Left, and after losing in every political arena, they are now embracing the actions and results of the Tea Party movement. This imitation is the sincerest form of (unwanted) flattery.

“Indivisible” is a well-funded Leftist organization that ironically takes their name from the very Pledge of Allegiance they want to remove from our children’s classrooms, and have now realized the success of Tea Party movement. Hence, from their Chapter One Summary of “A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”:

We examine lessons from the Tea Party’s rise and recommend two key strategic components:

* A local strategy targeting individual Members of Congress (MoCs).

* A defensive approach purely focused on stopping Trump from implementing an agenda built on racism, authoritarianism, and corruption.”

There is much more flattery throughout the guide which you can read in its entirety here.

Another group organizing around Tea Party principles, this one supported by Obama himself, is “Organizing for Action” (OFA). Putting his fund-raising skills to work for OFA he recently issued a statement saying he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests over the executive order on immigration. Similar groups formed by Obama’s top aids and staffers are ramping up nationwide. More here.

However, the strangest revelation we in the Tea Party Federation have experienced is an invitation we recently received through our VTPPF.org website. A very nice woman offered us free Gadsden flag bumper stickers. The Gadsden flag has been the flag most representative of our movement from its conception. There was, however, a catch tied to these “free” bumper stickers. These bumpers stickers were from the radical Leftist group called Resist. Funded by the Center for American Progress, a Soros organization, they too, are trying to take the Tea Party movement as their own.

“What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Rick Buchanan
Chairman, Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation