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An explanation of the Tea Party's origin
#1
From Quora  It's long but thorough and I think it's a worthwhile read.

Why does President Trump have such a committed base of voters?

44 Answers
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Christopher Black, Sc.B. Applied Mathematics & Psychology, Brown University (1987)
Updated 5h ago


Solid marketing and Steve Bannon’s “Bottom Third Strategy.”

Imagine you’re a decent white guy. Not necessarily valedictorian, but a smart guy, a good guy, and a hard worker. Absolutely not a racist. You’ve probably voted for some Republicans and some Democrats in your life, but you think a lot of politicians are corrupt. You pay your dues, raise a family, and start looking forward to retirement. Then, in 2008, the bottom suddenly falls out of the economy. Your 401k crashes, you go underwater on your mortgage. You lose your job and your pension. Somebody screwed up. Somebody has to pay.

The trust fund billionaires and casino bankers start to panic. Although they still have all the money they could ever spend, they’re scared that the working and middle class—solid folks like you—will catch on to what they’ve been doing. Once Americans figure out how the trust funders have been rigging the tax code and the casino bankers have been gambling with your pension and 401k money, they’ll want billionaire heads to roll.
This was a crisis that the trust funders and Wall Street gamblers—oops, I mean “job creators”— absolutely had to prevent!

And, with a little bit of razzle-dazzle, they could.

Along came Rick Santelli. One morning in January 2009, the CNBC bond and commodities analyst made a speech on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that went viral. He ranted to the brand-new president, Barack Obama, that if he passes a proposed bailout of the “loser” taxpayers who were stupid enough to take out sub-prime loans, there would be a “Tea Party” revolt. (No, the Tea Party didn’t start in 2010 as a grassroots protest by fed-up taxpayers. It was started in early 2009 by day traders and casino bankers at the top corporate financial news program on cable TV, abetted by mega-billionaire, current Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.) (Oh, and those sub-prime loans the losers were taking out? The banks strong-armed them into taking out toxic loans so the casino bankers could bundle them into gold-plated turds called “asset-backed securities,” gambling that home prices would keep going up forever, and fueling the 2007–2008 crash. Then they made billions more betting AGAINST them. Heads I win, tails you lose.)

The bankers couldn’t believe their luck: the public was buying Santelli’s rant! The corporate media play the rant over and over, from the “leftist MSNBC” to the “fair and balanced Fox News.” (Do you really think they’re playing for different teams?)

The corporate elite now had a scapegoat: the “losers.” It turns out it’s super easy to make folks hate the “lesser haves.” Don’t worry about the guys at the top of the ladder—worry about the guys on the next rung down. They’re the socialists that are being paid by George Soros to take your job. They’re the real scammers who want something for nothing, not us! (It can’t be that the guys on the next rung down are hard workers trying to provide for their families and who are just as disgusted as you by the trust-funders and scammers who buy their way out of the army and into the Ivy League.)

Lo and behold, the bankers got their bailouts and bonuses, and the “losers” got squat. All you had to do was make angry sounds on TV! The Tea Party was a huge success, and tons of corporate money poured in (thanks to Citizens United) to keep it rolling. The “losers” didn’t have much of a Twitter presence, so they could hardly fight back.

Santelli was the Paul Revere of the Tea Party, but Steve Bannon took anti-loserism up a notch with the “Bottom Third Strategy” that plowed through the 2016 election. The message was simple: the bankers (like Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker and Saudi Arabian agent) and real-estate developers (guess who) weren’t to blame. In fact, the rigged game they’d been playing with your money wasn’t a scam at all. It was what made America great! (Now show the people something shiny, like your supermodel wife and private airplane.) Success! Trump doesn’t dodge his taxes because the system is rigged for billionaires like him, he’s just way smarter than you!

In fact, anyone trying to change the rules of the game was a “leftist,” a “socialist,” and (believe it or not) an “elitist.”

Now, not everyone bought this bullshit. The vast majority of Americans with college degrees (be they conservative or liberal) saw through the ploy, because they had some inkling of how a strong capitalist economy actually works: it is a powerful system of trust and controlled risk that rewards smart, hard-working entrepreneurs, and not a coke-fueled game of Russian Roulette run by trust-fund brats and scammers with other people’s money.

But Steve Bannon didn’t need them. He realized that, to win elections, all you need is the “unified bottom third.” He defined this “bottom third” primarily in terms of educational attainment: specifically, white voters without college degrees. Over-educated liberals and conservatives have a tendency to overthink things, overfeel things, and tear their own movements apart. The bottom third, though, were steady, and they rarely look beyond the messaging they see on TV. Even though folks like Bannon, Trump, and Mnuchin were not in the Bottom Third, they could easily connect with them based on flimsiest thread that tied them together: their “patriotism.” The guys who want to take away the tax breaks for Ivanka’s inheritance? America-hating socialists.

The Bottom Third strategy was perfected by Internet scammers over a decade ago. Know why those e-mails from billionaire Nigerian princes contain so many spelling errors? It’s not because the scammers are semi-literate, it’s because their targets are. Misspelled subject lines, like misspelled MAGA memes, are great filters. They are quickly dismissed by educated people, so those folks won’t stick around to expose the scam. The scam doesn’t actually work if you use reason, evidence, and grammatical sentences. You have to dazzle them and make them angry.
If the Bottom Third is feeling scared and their lives are feeling more and more desperate, it’s easy to convince them it’s because of the black leftist (probably secretly Muslim and not even American) in the Oval Office who probably only got elected because of—Chicago thuggery? Yeah, that’ll work.

The marketing worked like a charm, and now the Bottom Third machinery is running at full tilt. The most popular cable news channel and national newspaper chains are fully on board. Twitter is Trump’s bitch. The Russian troll farms supply steady income to nihilist Ukrainian millennials. (You can see some of their handiwork in this thread if you look for it.)

If Rick Santelli is the Paul Revere of the Bottom Third Revolution and Steve Bannon is its Thomas Paine, Donald Trump is its George Washington. He is the master of all the dark arts the Bottom Third Strategy requires: turd-gilding, TV grandstanding, punching down, cheating the little guy, race baiting, scamming, spotting “losers,” taking credit for the work of others, and lying as easily as he breathes. (And, contrary to popular belief, he actually did hold a very important elective office prior to the presidency.) He’s the only one brave enough to say, “None of your problems are your fault, and they are certainly not the fault of our beautiful bankers or real estate developers. They’re the fault of the Mexicans, the Muslims, the dirty asylum seekers, and, of course, those “globalist socialist elites” in Washington, whoever they are. (It doesn’t matter; they won’t check. Razzle-dazzle.) Plus, he’s got tons of awesome real estate advice! Only losers had trouble selling real estate during the 2008 crash: all you need is a pipeline to Putin’s kleptocrats who need to offshore their stolen money.

Apparently, Steve Bannon was right, and his Bottom Third has absolutely no problem buying into this insane narrative. (Especially with the helpful propaganda from Fox and conspiracy radio.) As we all learned in high school, we can always count on a third of the kids not to do the homework. The folks who tried to rein in the out-of-control financial industry and who saved the collapsing American automobile industry (Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Barney Frank, Bernie Sanders, Steve Rattner, et al) are really “loony lefties.” (Remember how Obama turned General Motors into a state-run communist collective? Yeah, me neither.) That guy from TV who cheats on his taxes, hides behind American bankruptcy courts (6 times now and counting), started receiving his $750 million inheritance when he was 8 years old, steals money from his own family “charity” to buy a giant portrait of himself, and has never done a hard day’s work in his life? Yeah, that guy’s totally got your back.

The success of Bannon’s “Bottom Third” Strategy is indisputable. His company, Cambridge Analytica “microtargeted” this group relentlessly on social media (by harvesting and weaponizing personal Facebook data without asking permission), and the results speak for themselves:
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The importance of Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation campaign can hardly be overstated. Trump won the 2016 election by 70,000 swing votes in a few swing states. Cambridge Analytica harvested 30 MILLION certified voters through Facebook, and targeted them with fake news tailored to their individually profiled fears and trigger points. For the Bottom Third, it was The Truman Show times 30,000,000. (Think “Lock Her Up ™,” “Crooked Hillary ™,” “Deep State ™” and “Drain the Swamp ™” were spontaneous memes from the brilliant mind of DJT? Think again.) The Trump campaign fed them exactly what it wanted them to hear, whether it was true or not. If you were an NRA member, it was how Hillary wants to eliminate the Second Amendment. If you were an elderly Catholic, it was how she wants to rip third trimester babies from their mothers’ wombs. If you were a millennial liberal, it was how she stabbed Bernie in the back. (Just wakin’ up the sheeple.) The Russian-Ukrainian cyber campaign investigated by Mueller was a drop in the bucket by comparison.

As H. L. Mencken said, “No one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Donald Trump and the American kleptocracy needed another bailout, and the Bottom Third gave it to them from their own pockets. Trump and the Republicans then turned around and gave the casino bankers and trust funders (not to mention the Trump Family and Trump’s “Golden Cabinet”) the biggest handout in history, with top-tier tax cuts and the doubling of the Estate Tax exemption. And the Bottom Third didn’t even squeal. Big cuts to my Social Security and health care? Bring ’em on, as long as it hurts the guy on the next rung down. Oh, and the TV billionaire told me that’s how you “stick it to Hillary and the elites.”

I just happen to live in the town where Ivanka and her brothers grew up. Coincidentally, it’s also the town where George H. W. Bush was born and raised. (Oddly enough, it’s also just 10 miles from where Bill and Hillary currently live.) It’s also the CEO capital of the world. By all accounts, it’s where American blue-blood conservativism is manufactured. But it also just happens to be the world headquarters for the WWE. Razzle-dazzle. Guess which CEO from my town Donald Trump chose for his cabinet? (Hint: she was also by far the biggest contributor to the Trump Foundation, which was recently exposed as a corrupt Trump Family slush fund and consequently shut down. Gotta pay to play.) None of it makes any sense until you realize it’s all a show for the Bottom Third.

The vast majority of CEOs and hedge fund managers I know are very smart, honest, decent, hard-working people, and genuinely good parents. They run great companies that provide useful goods and services. They have zero tolerance for the Wall Street gamblers (because they’re careless) and trust funders (because they’re lazy). They loathe Trump because he’s both. He’s an emotional and intellectual child. He has barely any concept of how capitalism works or what conservatism means, let alone what leadership is. All of his money came from his father, and he’s been using tax dodges to shelter it all his life.

They don’t even want the big new tax cuts they’re getting from Trump (at the expense of the Bottom Third). But, for the time being, Trump is keeping the wolves snapping at the poor, the foreigners, and the brown folks—oops, I mean the “globalist socialist elites”—instead of them.
Sally, the flaming asshole of MockForums
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#2
I read it and it only served to reinforce my opinion that the bottom third are the dumbest people in all the land. It's why they are commonly referred to as the lowest common denominator. I don't just randomly call those people stupid, I always wait until they show me they are, that's the polite thing to do. Smiley_emoticons_smile
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#3
Well I read that and it was ideological talking points spouted in EXACTLY the same way as John Oliver, Colbert and the late night idiots do.

There was a LOT that was pretty stupid for some one holding themselves out as a font of knowledge around the situation.

Trump taking advantages that are afforded to him as a rich person is not something that he has shied away from. Hell, he was the first to say "I paid money to you and you and you"

The bottom third is NOT to say that the lowest 33% of people are going to vote for Trump or any Republican or that he is trying to win their vote and it would be a bit silly to infer that.

Disagreeing with Trump is NOT because you see through him but rather that you do not like him or are inclined to not vote for him irrespective.

It is ENTIRELY possible for there to be MULTIPLE issues at one time. Trump talking about the wall and the problem with illegal immigrants is not to say that there is not also corruption in the government. It would be stupid to say that he is focus exclusively on this to detract from the corruption in the government (in fact he has promised to investigate the FISA abuse through Huber and Horowitz for example).

A person without a degree does not make them less politically aware or even less intelligent that someone with a degree.

Trump using kooky phrases or saucy language or making the occasional silly tweet means precisely nothing in the scheme of things.

I could go on but there is only so much time I feel like investing in this.

Essentially JUST because someone has an impressive resume or writes well and articulates themselves well, it does not necessarily mean that what they say is anything more than just their point of view. It does not make it fact or truth or warrant it heightened credibility. This guy wrote something, so fucking what?
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