Smearing the Tea Party with Taxpayer Money

You may be aware of a recent study that suggested that the Tea Party was founded by Big Tobacco. My colleague Hans Bader has been following this ridiculous story, and it gets more outrageous every day. To begin with, the National Cancer Institute paid anti-smoking zealots substantial amounts of taxpayer money to come up with this ridiculous conspiracy theory. But further, Hans explains:

The study is based on strange reasoning, such as the fact that one group funded in small 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. (Because, obviously, no one had ever used the words “Tea Party” before the 21st century.)

The researchers are sticking to their guns:

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.”<

The authors even go so far as to link the Tea Party to the 1950s-era John Birch Society. As Hans notes, the Left has taken up this study as proof of their suspicions, and it is being touted by Al Gore among others.

Now Hans points me to this study, which may or may not have been taxpayer funded, from the Journal of Psychohistory (which apparently exists outside of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series):

Extreme resistance to governmental taxation and authority is derived, according to Freud’s theory of anal characterology, from premature and harshly coercive toilet training, in which a child is forced unfairly and against its will to surrender the products of his eliminations (which represent money, among other things, in the unconscious) to parental authority. Among these individuals anal eroticism plays a significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive submission.

As Heinz Kiosk would say, “WE ARE ALL GUILTY!!!”