Censoring our culture and civilization

The censors have been coming for Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.  By the time they finish sanitizing every politically offensive phrase or character, we will have libraries filed with books containing nothing but blank pages.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Peter Caddle’s report on Breitbart re: Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels:

Ahead of a coming re-release to mark the 70th anniversary since the release of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale novel, the first in the James Bond series, the publication reports that the works have been “rewritten” to appease woke sensibilities.

The revelation comes after a week of controversy surrounding recent reprints of Roald Dahl’s books, with it being revealed that the works of fiction have been edited in order to change or remove language deemed problematic. . . .

Full report is here. 

Here’s Robert Spencer, writing last week at Front Page about Shakespeare and other classic writers:

A day in the life of destroying a civilization

The UK’s Prevent program, which is supposed to be protecting the Sceptered Isle from terrorism . . . has kept busy looking for “far-right extremists” and has now published a helpful guide to spotting those dangerous right-wingers. It turns out that they’re people who read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, 1984, and other great works of English literature.

. . .

Prevent casts a wide net. The UK’s Daily Mail reported Friday that among the “potential signs of far-Right extremism” and “key texts” for “white nationalists/supremacists” that Prevent flagged were the “comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters, and even The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare.”

And much more: “A report by Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) described how far-Right extremists promoted ‘reading lists’ on online bulletin boards.” These include “The Lord Of The Rings by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 1984 by George Orwell and the poems of GK Chesterton. It also referenced films including The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Great Escape and Zulu.”

Other books, shows and films on Prevent’s list included that bane of freshmen literature majors everywhere, Beowulf, and other monumental works including Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts marveled: “This is truly extraordinary. This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilised, liberal, cultured education.”

Yeah. It almost seems as if the Prevent top dogs don’t want people to get a civilized, liberal, cultured education. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

MLK statue in DC

MLK sculpture in Boston 

Today honors the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And Daniel Greenfield observes the occasion by weighing in on the newly unveiled bronze sculpture on Boston Common:

The Sculptural Degradation of Martin Luther King Must End
When leftists aren't tearing down noble statues,
they're putting up ugly ones

Forget tearing down the statues of American historical figures, if they really wanted to humiliate them, they would put up new statues of them.

Just ask MLK.

The D.C. MLK memorial was bad enough. Not only does it look more like Mao than MLK, and maybe carving the most prominent black man in the country out of white rock was an odd choice, but the $10 million Boston MLK memorial decided that it could do better.

Titled “The Embrace,” it’s a nightmarish image that looks like a collaboration between M.C. Escher and H.R.Giger. There’s nothing ennobling or dignified about this artistic statement about the sculptor’s love of curves and circles. It goes beyond being meaningless to being actively ugly and offensive, a tangle of arms that embrace themselves. When leftists aren’t tearing down noble statues, they’re putting up incredibly ugly ones. . . .

Mr Greenfield closes:

Putting up something like the $10M MLK memorial in Boston is its own act of artistic vandalism and, in its own way, shows the degeneracy of a culture that tears down statues but can’t manage to create one.

The full commentary is at Front Page Magazine here.

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Our Banana Republic

 

image credit: politicaltilt.com

The blogosphere is full of reports and commentary on the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence Mar-A-Lago, but Robert Spencer’s column atFrontPageMag is the one I am linking to today.  Mr. Spencer begins:  

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal.

. . .

This is no longer a republic, except of the banana variety. It may be a republic again someday, but for now, the great American experiment is over. Born July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, died August 8, 2022, in Mar-A-Lago, at the hands of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Christopher Wray.

Read the rest here.  President Trump’s announcement is on most websites, including here.  

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Vaccination passports: gateway to the police state

Matthew Vadum just published “Vaccination Passports: The Cornerstone of a Totalitarian State: Ushering China’s Social Credit System into America” at FrontPageMag.  Below is part of his report:

Vaccination passports, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want everyone to be forced to carry, are profoundly un-American.

This data-driven authoritarianism, if it comes to pass, will wash away what remains of the rule of law and the Constitution, and annihilate the American way of life.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) inflicted their possibly lab-designed Wuhan Virus on America, and now we get their Social Credit System, their totalitarian digital architecture for society as well.

America’s placeholder president, the Communist Chinese ventriloquist’s dummy who fantasizes about becoming the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants these vaccination passports badly.

POTUS 46* signed Executive Order 13998 on January 21 directing government agencies to “assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.”

The Biden-Harris administration is now working on a “vaccine passport” for Americans to carry to prove they have received a vaccination against the novel coronavirus, according to the Washington Post.

Read the rest of the column here.

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Immunity Passports Bring Back Racial Segregation

 

image credit: themunicheye.com

More very scary developments: Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage reports:

Vaccine passports aren’t coming: they’re already here. And while discriminating against people based on their vaccination status is bad enough: the implications are even worse.

A vaccine passport transforms all of society into a two-tier system, but the basis for it isn’t a needle, it’s a set of government guidelines that were based on identity politics or ‘equity’.

From the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to various state equity initiatives, some even worse than the CDC’s push to prioritize people by race, the vaccine rollout was designed to put minorities at the head of the line. These prioritizations were meant to be invisible, using disparate impact to advance groups with the right demographic skew.

The government using race to prioritize medical treatment is horrifying enough, but vaccine passports take the biased vaccine system and embed that bias into everyday areas of life.

The end result is a horrifying cross between China’s social credit system and the racial segregation of the South. Call it the equity credit system based on racial and sexual identity.

Read the rest of it here.

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Alicia Colon on the 2016 and 2020 elections

 

Alicia Colon brings some historical perspective to the 2020 election fraud:

Most of us, however, were definitely against Hillary Clinton and the idea of Bill Clinton ever being in the Oval office again. Clinton was the first president I’ve ever regarded as treasonous. It was very clever of the Democrats to frame his impeachment as due to an improper sexual incident rather than one of high treason.

According to David Horowitz of Front Page Magazine, as president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China. His administration took in millions from the military and intelligence services of at least one hostile foreign power. All of this was done in exchange for illegal campaign contributions from a massive totalitarian country determined to eclipse the U.S. as a world superpower. Don’t take my word for it. Google the word China Gate 1996 or read about Johnny Chung and his many visits to the White House. “One of the key technological breaks China received, without having to spy to get it, was the deliverance of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons,” writes Horowitz.

. . .

The Trump supporters or the Deplorables as we are called, love our president for what he has achieved in the last four years and we don’t give a whit for what he was before. What we do know is that everything he has done has been for all Americans and to save our great nation from the enemy within. What we all believe is that Trump won reelection in a landslide. This is the only fact that makes sense. Compare the millions that attended all his rallies to the empty parking lot Biden events that were held when he infrequently left his basement. What happened on November 3rd, Election Day was that the counting stopped and the Deep State minions had to switch to Plan B. Why? The original theft was supposed to be confined to the Dominion computer program switching Trump votes to Biden but the algorithm was set to handle fewer votes than the Trump landslide. Plan B depended on the phony mail in ballots that would be counted as valid because Democrat election officials had unconstitutionally changed the rules to allow massive voter fraud. We know this because there are videos, hundreds of signed affidavits by witnesses, many patriotic whistleblowers, and yet the Never Trumpers, Rinos, the SCOTUS and the lamestream media are “the none so blind, they will not see.”

Never Trumpers, Rinos, the SCOTUS and the lamestream media are not so much blind as they are complicit.  Read the full column here.

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The margin of fraud

 

image via PowerLine

At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield fills in some of the blanks on the massive voter fraud we are witnessing:

One of the unprecedented things about this election, in the year from hell, is that the amount of mail-in ballots, of ballot harvesting, made the voter fraud margin so much bigger. Democrats had set the ground by seizing control of key states and key positions in them in preparation for the election. And even where they didn't, their machines got busy. 

This was always going to happen. It happens every election, but the scale of it is different. As are the stakes.

I don't have to state the obvious about all the Biden votes that "magically" showed up, about why vote counting was suddenly suspended, or why totals suddenly stopped being updated for no apparent reason.

These are symptoms of voter fraud. It's a "Hacks at Work" sign being hung up outside the door.

If there is an upside to any of this, Mr. Greenfield suggests that

The post-election street fight is a test of how big the voter margin fraud can get, how many more votes can be discovered than there are people, and how many ballots can magically show up overnight.

And even if the street fight is lost, it's worth fighting because it exposes the lie behind the legitimacy of the powers trying to take over the White House. 

They couldn't steal the election in the daylight, so they had to do it in the dead of night. They couldn't steal it in empty halls, so they had to do it after everyone went home. And the more their lie is challenged, the weaker their power becomes, and the more they have to resort to blatant thuggery to wield it.

That's what happened on Election Day. 

Read the rest here.  And it's not over. 

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Katie Hopkins on Breaking Back In

 

 photo from the Front Page article

Katie Hopkins is a much-needed breath of fresh air and a shot in the arm.  She’s been censored, abused, and quarantined, but she is traveling in the US, and her report “Breaking Back” at Front Page Magazine starts off:

The time for asking permission is over. Waiting for approval has to be a thing of the past.

It’s a way of thinking that has served me well in recent weeks breaking back into the USA and beginning a rolling speaking tour across the States. My mission is to support Donald J. Trump. But I have been taught by my audiences that there is something far more important to do. My mission is to gather people together and remind ourselves who we really are. And we are the side of love, laughter and light.

The things I am learning along the way have given me a burning new faith and optimism which perhaps can only be gleaned by being amongst people and by defying the very rules that seek to keep us apart.

Brits are currently banned from the USA - even those with visas. It is not a Muslim ban (although my country will be a Muslim majority in twenty years). It is a corona ban, on the basis that inflated British COVID death rates made the British Isles appear as the epicenter of some infernal plague. We have ‘The Science' to thank for that.

It became impossible to sit at home as a passive observer when everything we know and love is being fought for on the other side of the Atlantic. At some fundamental level, I needed to be a part of this fight. I needed to break back into America.

There is no way to overstate the significance of the election faced by American people in November.

The 2020 Presidential election is a tipping point for Western Civilization. It marks the last stand of the right against the very wrong, of law and order against anarchy and chaos, and democracy over socialism. It is not political but biblical in proportion.

. . .

Read the rest here.  What a pick-me-up.  

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Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name

Daniel Greenfield’s article “Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name” highlights the insanity of this craze to re-name sports teams.  And of course it won’t stop with sports teams.  Mr. Greenfield begins:

Every name is racist. Every name must change.

The Washington Redskins agreed to change a name that offended no one except white leftists, but the media, which always speaks with forked tongue, is demanding more sports scalps.

The Cleveland Indians have issued a statement whining that "the recent social unrest... has only underscored the need for us to keep improving as an organization on issues of social justice."

Remember when the Indians were just known for being cursed with the second-longest championship drought in sports, now they can be cursed for their commitment to social justice.

The curse used to be known as the Curse of Chief Wahoo, but he's already been purged for political incorrectness. And now the Indians announced that they're "committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name.” Those stakeholders won't be their fans or anyone who knows what baseball is.

. . .

Some media editorialist will, eventually, link the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Southern cavalier mythos and accuse them of white supremacy. The English Civil War would seem to have little to do with a Cleveland team, but King Charles I was involved in the African slave trade.

“The name Cleveland Cavaliers represents a group of daring fearless men, whose life's pact was never surrender, no matter what the odds,” the fan who won a contest to name the team wrote.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

. . .

The simplest solution might be for every team to change its name to Black Lives Matter.

And when the Pittsburgh Heinz Black Lives Matters play the New York MetLife Black Lives Matters, it’ll be a little bit confusing, but that’s okay because no one will be watching.

Read the full article here.

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Destroying our heroes and culture: coming to Cleveland

photo credit from Portland: pamplinmedia

Daniel Greenfield is an associate of David Horowitz at the Freedom Center, and he blogs at Sultan Knish.  Several days ago, he posted a sobering essay, “Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked,” about the destruction and defacement of monuments.  Highly recommended, pretty upsetting, but a must-read. Here are a few extracts:

The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with "BLM" and "Free Palestine" graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.

The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.

. . .

In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced. This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.

While the media has upheld the racist narrative justifying the Taliban campaign against America by focusing on confederate memorials, the vandalism has been extensive, targeting both sides in the Civil War, and spilling over to vandalize statues that have absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics.

. . .

As every statue falls, is defiled, and disgraced, a part of America dies. When Democrats and even Republicans collude in the desecration and stand aside for the mob, a part of America dies.

The soul of a nation lies with its heroes. The radicals and racists tearing down our statues are out to destroy that soul. They want our heroes to be Karl Marx and Angela Davis, they want terrorists, totalitarians and criminals celebrated, and heroes, explorers, founders, officers and soldiers condemned.

They aren’t just coming for the “controversial” statues as the media likes to tell us.

They are coming for all the statues, for our entire history, for every great man and woman who sacrificed, strove, and struggled to move the course of human history forward by even one inch.

They are coming for America. And they intend to destroy it, one statue and one city after another.

When the history of this period is written, we will learn whether we had any heroes in our time.

Mr. Greenfield full article is here.

The Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument honors Civil War soldiers and sailors from Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.  It is located at Public Square. And it was defaced during the recent riots.  

How much longer before it is destroyed? 

To make matters even worse, Cuyahoga County is considering “declaring racism a public health crisis.” This blog already reported that Cleveland Council unanimously approved a ‘Black Lives Matter’ mural outside City Hall   All this support for an organization that is utterly destructive to our way of life.

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Katie Hopkins at the Brexit Celebration

photo credit: relocatemagazine.com

Today, the great Katie Hopkins posted her column on FrontPage about the Brexit celebrations last Friday.  Here’s a part that will likely resonate with any Trump supporter:

And then the jarring realization: what we came for could not be delivered.

This was not a Brexit celebration as advertised in our minds. We wanted to feel it was over. That the monster had been slain and the white knights were back in control. We wanted to feel elated by our win.

But we could not. This was not the end and we knew it. Our adversaries are all still there: the system, the media, Remainers, globalists, and self-serving politicians. And many of these are now hardwired for something that feels like revenge.

Gathered here in the mud and rain, perhaps we also allowed ourselves a moment of weakness, a kind of confessional that this has been really brutal with scars of the fight across all. We are nursing bruises from families divided, children fallen silent, Christmases made awkward, and the loss of friends.

. . .

We have suffered far beyond these personal or parochial injuries: the politicians, elected by us but unwilling to represent us; the lawyers, interpreting law to block Brexit and suit their partisan beliefs; teachers schooling our children that Leave was the wrong answer and that all Brexiteers are racists.

. . .

This crowd needed the kind of Trump rally I have seen, a chance to feel triumphant, to feel strengthened by tough leadership and to be lifted up. They needed refueling with patriotic pride. . . .

She concludes with a sigh – watching the corrupt media in action:

I walked away quietly, watching mainstream news crews try to pick off the most drunk or incoherent of us to humiliate for their TV shows in the morning.

I posted this as I expect she speaks for many Tea Party readers. The full column is here.

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Election issues 101

art credit: blog.press.princeton.edu

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite columnists, not the least because of his ability to explain economics in ways that anyone can understand. He writes in plain English, marshals his facts, and it’s all but impossible to find a logic lapse in any of his arguments. While I may disagree with him on this or that, I admire him and respect his opinion. Always. So I am extracting his column from a recent Front Page column on “Essential Reads For The 2016 Election:  Books every American should be familiar with before voting this November”:

If you are concerned about issues involved when some people want to expand the welfare state and others want to contract it, then one of the most relevant and insightful books is "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple. It was not written this year and is not even about the United States, much less our current presidential or other candidates.

What makes "Life at the Bottom" especially relevant and valuable is that it is about the actual consequences of the welfare state in England — which are remarkably similar to the consequences in the United States.

Many Americans may find it easier to think straight about what happens, when it is in a country where the welfare recipients are overwhelmingly whites, so that their behavior cannot be explained away by "a legacy of slavery" or "institutional racism," or other such evasions of facts in the United States.

As Dr. Dalrymple says: "It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America — for very similar reasons, of course." That reason is the welfare state, and the attitudes and behavior it promotes and subsidizes.

Another and very different example of the welfare state's actual consequences is "The New Trail of Tears" by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It is a painful but eye-opening account of life on American Indian reservations.

People on those reservations have been taken care of by the federal government for more than a hundred years. They have lived in a welfare state longer than any other minority in America. What have been the consequences?

One consequence is that they have lower incomes than any other minority — including other American Indians, who do not live on reservations, and who are doing far better on their own.

The economic plight of people on the reservations is by no means the worst of it. The social problems are heart-breaking. As just one example, the leading cause of death, among American Indian boys from 10 to 14 years of age, is suicide.

As regards black Americans, there is much talk about the role of police. If you want a book that cuts through the rhetoric and confusion, and deals with hard facts, then "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald does precisely that.

On racial issues in general, the best economic survey is "Race and Economics" by Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University. Just the table on page 35, showing unemployment rates among black and white teenagers, going all the way back to 1948, should demolish all the rhetoric and spin that tries to conceal the deadly effects of minimum wage laws on unemployment among black teenagers.

The rest of Sowell's column is here. The authors cited by Sowell are also regular contributors to print and online sources. So if book-length discussions are too time-consuming for a busy schedule, you can access columns by Dalrymple on welfare and poverty here, Williams on the consequences of minimum wages here, and McDonald on the war on cops here. And here’s a review of McDonald’s book on cops. 

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Trump on the African American vote: A Lincolnesque Moment

photo credit: therightscoop.com

Yesterday, I appended a link to an article by David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine. It was an afterthought posted on the blog about  Rep. Marcia Fudge’s complaining that Trump rallies are not attended by people of color. Horowitz’s article is worth a blog on its own. The entire article is here, under the title "Donald Trump’s Lincolnesque Moment: A landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party”. Here’s a take-away:

Trump’s Dimondale speech was a pledge to African Americans trapped in the blighted zones and killing fields of inner cities exclusively ruled by Democrats for half a century and more, and exploited by their political leaders for votes, and also used as fodder for slanders directed at their Republican opponents. This was his appeal:

Tonight, I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen in this country who wants a better future. The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic Party for 50 years.  Their policies have produced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools, and broken homes. It is time to hold Democratic Politicians accountable for what they have done to these communities.  It is time to hold failed leaders accountable for their results, not just their empty words.

Time to hold the Democrats responsible for what they have done. For twenty years I and many others on the right have waited for Republican leaders to do just this. Until now we have despaired of seeing this happen in our lifetimes. But here is Trump articulating the very message we have been waiting for - support for America’s inner city poor – a message that should have been front and center of every Republican campaign for the last fifty years.

Trump: “Look at what the Democratic Party has done to the city of Detroit. Forty percent of Detroit’s residents live in poverty.  Half of all Detroit residents do not work. Detroit tops the list of Most Dangerous Cities in terms of violent crime. This is the legacy of the Democrat politicians who have run this city.  This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by Hillary Clinton…. The one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunities from African-American workers.  Her support for open borders.  Her fierce opposition to school choice.  Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses.  Her opposition to American energy.  And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.”

Tying the fight to liberate African Americans and other minorities from the violent urban wastelands in which Democrats have trapped them to his other proposals– secure borders, law and order to make urban environments safe, jobs for American workers, putting Americans first – these are a sure sign that Trump has an integrated vision of the future towards which he is working. Call it populism if you will. To me it seems like a clear-eyed conservative plan to restore American values and even to unify America’s deeply fractured electorate.

I love this line: “America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” Yes African Americans and other Americans too are suffocating under the racism of the Democratic Party which takes African Americans for granted and lets the communities of the most vulnerable sink ever deeper into a maelstrom of poverty and violence without end.

Read the rest here. Whether you support Trump or not, his message should be heard by anyone who considers him- or herself a Tea Party person.

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