It’s time to form a new tea party

Remember the Tea Party of 2009? Stupid hats? Misspelled protest signs? [1] Angry people in town halls shouting at their Congressional representatives: “Get the government the hell out of our Medicare”?

The original Tea Partiers weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but they were loud, extremely well funded by Oil and Tobacco billionaires, and eventually led to the mess we’re in today. The Koch Bros got their wish: The tea party is now the party in power, god help us all.

They haven’t gotten any smarter over the intervening 16 years, nor has their spelling improved. But their original message is starting to finally resonate, even with libtard commie pinkos like you and me.

We need to get Uncle Sam’s grubby paws off of our Social Security and Medicare systems — for real, this time. And, like the original 18th century rebels whose branding the Koch Bros co-opted, the best way to get that message across is via a tax protest.

It's the Social Security, stupid

While DUI hire Pete Hegseth and his band of not-ready-for national-security players may be grabbing all the headlines — proving there is no brand of stupid more aggressively stupid than overprivileged white male stupid [2] — ‘Signalgate’ is actually obscuring what is some ways a bigger story with longer lasting political implications.

Congressional republicans will never admit in public that they’re hoping to kill Social Security and gut Medicare – because the bravest of them make the Cowardly Lion look like Rambo – so they’re letting Elon Musk's DOGEbags do their dirty work for them.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published the following story.

I’m not going to link to it – because intercourse Jeff Bezos – but here’s the gist:

The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out.... A DOGE-imposed spending freeze has left many field offices without paper, pens and the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs communicating with callers, at the exact moment calls are spikinDeath by a thousand cuts is still death.

Last week, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to prevent DOGE operatives inside the SSA from having unbridled access to

"... the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses."

As Popular Information's Judd Legum reported this morning, the administration is now attempting to evade that order by hiring DOGE apparatchik Scott Coulter [3] as the SSA's new CIO.

See? DOGE no longer has access to your most sensitive data. So when the checks stop arriving, you can blame some faceless bureaucrat instead.

Red state redemption

Here's the thing. Americans — even people in red states who enjoy screaming at their elected representatives while holding up grammatically dubious signage — really like Social Security. And the Venn diagram between people receiving taxpayer-funded assistance with their medical bills and those who voted for the Red Hat Guy is nearly a perfect circle.

While this is a crisis, it's also an opportunity. Your Qanon-worshipping Aunt Edwina in Topeka isn't going to like eating cat food for dinner or waiting in line at the free clinic to get her insulin shots.

These attacks on the social safety net may be the one thing — besides maybe an invasion of hostile extra-terrestrials — that could unite Americans, who otherwise hate each other, to oppose these heinous assholes.

We're already seeing the cracks in the foundation. Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo is tracking all the "empty chair town halls," where constituents in red districts are showing up to meetings their Republican representatives are too cowardly to attend.

And they’re not a few people showing up holding signs. The one in Little Rock had 800 attendees. There were reportedly 1,000 in Lexington.... When people want town halls because they want to express displeasure at their Trump-Elon-supporting members of Congress, it’s pretty striking that you can get this kind of turnout when those folks are not even going to be there.

I think Monty Python put it best.

All your taxes need the axes

Here's the thing. Uncle Sam needs money the way a junkie needs smack. Even the DOGE employees who are gleefully hacking and mangling our social safety net want to get paid at the end of every week. And the vast majority of federal tax dollars are flowing out of blue states and into red ones. What happens when that flow turns into a trickle?

Thanks to DOGE's chainsaw approach to "efficiency," the few IRS officials who are still standing predict a $500 billion shortfall in tax collections this April. I think we could probably get that figure up over $1 trillion without breaking much of a sweat.

I'm not suggesting you stop paying your taxes (I understand that's illegal, unless your net worth is at least $50 million). But I am suggesting you might consider delaying your payments, to send a message to the Incompetent Powers That Be about who really controls the pursestrings.

A tax revolt, in other words. It worked in 1775. It took down Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Why not now?

We need a new tea party, but with spellcheckers and without the silly hats. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments or email moi: [email protected].

[1] These misspellings were so prevalent that they inspired their own meme: Teabonics.

[2] The gender jury is still out on Tulsi Gabbard, at least until the DNA results come back.

[3] Coulter is a private equity dickhead who is apparently not related to the vampiric Ann Coulter, except by mutual soulessness.