by Muriel Kane
When a few hundred protesters showed up in each of some 30 or 40 cities nationwide on Friday to object to President Obama's stimulus plan, they claimed that the well-coordinated protests had arisen spontaneously in response to a tirade against mortgage bailouts, delivered just over a week earlier, on February 19, by CNBC's Rick Santelli. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin enthusiastically called the "Tea Party" protests "a fledgling grassroot movement" and some of the protesters even described themselves as the vanguard of a "new conservative counterculture." Those claims naturally aroused a certain amount of skepticism, since similar activities in the past have proven to be not genuine grassroots activity but so-called corporate "Astroturf."
Now fresh revelations suggest that the skepticism may be well-placed. Mark Ames and Yasha Levine allege in their blog at Playboy.com that the protests were planned well in advance, coordinated by old-line anti-tax organizations, and funded by right-wing corporate interests.
"What hasn't been reported until now is evidence linking Santelli's 'tea party' rant with some very familiar names in the Republican rightwing machine," they write, "from PR operatives who specialize in imitation-grassroots PR campaigns (called 'astroturfing') to bigwig politicians and notorious billionaire funders. As veteran Russia reporters, both of us spent years watching the Kremlin use fake grassroots movements to influence and control the political landscape. To us, the uncanny speed and direction the movement took and the players involved in promoting it had a strangely forced quality to it. If it seemed scripted, that's because it was."
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