The following was written by Jeremy Styron, a news editor from Northeast Georgia. Much of his critique/commentary of the Tea Party movement centers around both the perception of the movement through the media and from commentary taken from this site (which we don’t expect to necessarily reflect your personal points of view). As an individual watching the movement from the outside, he has been gracious and bold enough to address “Tea Partiers” as a guest commentator. Please feel free to provide your feedback. In doing so, we request that you provide him the same respect for his differences of opinion that he has.

Everyone,

As I’ve recently offered some rather critical comments (and here) about the tea baggers and about the various “Tea Parties” cropping up across the country, I was invited to write a guest commentary for this site. Here, I will offer my appraisal of this movement as well a suggestion or two for making it less susceptible to misunderstandings.

One of my main arguments has been that it was getting a bit hard to tell — as we on the outside attempt to sift through various online and television media coverage and literature on the reteaparty Web site — just what this movement is all about. Obviously from the mainstream media, we hear movement supporters arguing against taxes and against government overspending, as in the recently passed $787 stimulus bailout plan. But as most everyone knows by now, all types of folks seem to be cropping up at these rallies nationwide. We have seen the far right and folks who are anti-anything Obama to the core. We have seen the anti-tax bunch. We have seen the cartoonish 18th-century throw-backs, pretending they are somehow helping to enact change by resembling those who helped spur the American Revolution.
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