Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:51 pm
The following is a PoliticusUSA editorial by co-publisher Sarah Jones.
Instead of ignoring the throngs of people protesting Donald Trump, the media is paying attention. And that’s great. But as seems inevitable, instead of acknowledging that this is a grassroots movement from the core of the Democratic Party, they’ve decided this is the “new Tea Party.”
The Tea Party was instigated and funded by big money.
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The people coming together to speak out for civil liberties and equal rights for all are not funded by some corporation, and they are not new. They are the soul of the Democratic Party, of the liberals who are the heart of the Democratic Party.
Are they radicals like the Tea Party? No. They are getting radical because being polite didn’t work. They are getting radical because that is what you do when your rights are under assault. They are getting radical because they have nothing left to lose now, no need to be polite to appeal to a middle, because they aren’t in power in any branch in the government.
That’s freeing. It’s horrific and it’s also freeing. So the soul of the Democratic Party is roaring to life because Donald Trump and the Republican Party are destroying and undermining the rights for which liberals worked long and hard.
Liberals will not go down without a fight. This is the fight. This is the beginning of the fight.
The media should get out more, because these people were always here. They felt this way last year, they felt this way the year before, but there wasn’t an all out assault on their rights and values. Now there is.
An assault taking us back decades and more.
This is not the new Tea Party. This is a passionate movement of real Americans based on real issues. The Tea Party was organized against progress, based on lies like “Death Panels”. They helped build the Republican Party into a clownshow of extremists that gave them Donald Trump.
The Democratic platform is more popular across the United States. Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump.
This is not the new Tea Party, this is a movement that represents the majority of the country who value equal rights and won’t stand by as human rights are attacked. That is a real thing, it’s actually happening, it is nothing like being afraid of “socialized medicine” when in fact Obamacare was not socialized medicine.
This movement is actually about the heart of America. It is about who we are. And not everyone who shares these values identifies as a Democrat, but of course there is no other party for them now. This movement isn’t new. The passion and the values have been there – it’s just that before, they were making progress through compromise and now they are working to protect that progress from violent attacks, because real people’s lives are at stake.
No one was going to be killed by Obama’s ACA, contrary to what the Tea Party claimed. But people are really going to die if Obamacare is repealed or messed with, as Trump already did Friday evening.
This is real. There is a difference.
The protesters aren’t speaking out about things that the Democratic Party doesn’t already have in its platform. They are simply getting loud about those preexisting values.
This is mainstream America. This is not an extremist faction of the Democratic Party. And therein lies the huge difference between this movement and the Tea Party. If people don’t recognize this passion and these values, it might be time to get out more.
Why didn’t we see this kind of passion before? Maybe it took losing everything they valued to motivate them.
But this fight was already decided. This election was a blip, made possible by a perfect storm. Progress is always a struggle. The Love Army is here.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
