leather sofa. andrew took the ottoman before her face when others in a considerable distance apart. i don't know where to start bernie begin again. he started to sob. the firm is insolvent. i broke. how is that possible? i don't understand. the money is gone. it's over. i don't understand. how can that be? for having an okay year. it is about the redemption? been bernie said something more terrible they could have imagined. it's all been one big lie. a giant ponzi scheme going on for years and all these redemptions and i can keep it going anymore. i can't do it. andrew stared at his father on his mind jumble of disconnected thoughts and phrases. he's tried to piece together what his father saying that the sentences kept evaporating. he was frustrated as he came to disappear. with a cigarette. but the ponzi scheme? eddings asset management

business. i've been lied to all of you for years their mother, customers and myself. i've an appointment to meet on monday bernie return to the family lawyer and i'm probably going to jail. he broke down and really sobbing. enter rows from the cabinet awkwardly put around your arm around his father and andrew started to cry, too. he got up and returned to the ottoman. through his tears he said there's all this money. where did it go? the money is gone. i've got 50 billon and abilities. his voice showed us. andrew stott. 50 million? 50 billion. >> watch this and other programs online at tv.org. >> an sos and present the tea party and the authors examined several regional tea party

offers and they are predominantly middle-class older americans who according to the authors mostly enjoy medicare and social security benefit that are reticent to pay taxes to assist those they deem undeserving. this is about an hour. [applause] thank you. we are delighted to be here in durham, north carolina today and look forward to a lively discussion after we introduce discussion in our book. just to remind you all, the tea party and its contemporary manifestation, first arm being very rapidly and amazingly, just weeks after barack obama was inaugurated as president of the united states following an election that itself was rather

amazing in history. on february 192,009, rick santelli, commentator on cnbc went into west indies gained our rants announcing obama administration policies to help underwater mortgage holders that they called losers. he invoked the founding fathers to talk about that they would feel at all that americans are too sealed what was happening to our country. at the end conservatives who have been quite injected falling to 2008 election recognized the rhetorical gold in the santelli ran, the symbolism that barack to pause and begin to organize using the internet cannot kind of face-to-face methods in communities and regions across

the country. there are also cheered on. within weeks or staging demonstrations in various regions featuring older people dressing up in costumes carrying signs and announcing obama as a socialist or communist. within months they were mounting huge demonstration in washington d.c. and set to work organizing what eventually became 1000 regularly meeting global groups and state all across the united states. by 2010 the mainstream media started to take more notice because they were affecting the dynamic of republican primaries, burning marker radio two victory over the previous establishment candidate in the week in the massachusetts special election

for scott brown who wanted it true that shocks the democratic party in my one-party state and by november 2010 the tea party was brought into the wave of massive gop victories at the national level in the state in helping to elect much more conservative republicans. we all know that they pushed many of those republicans to refuse confidantes with the administration throughout 2011, changes in direction and natural policies. and we see tea parties voters wayne and during the course of the 2012 primaries in no way i'll discuss at the end of our remarks. having reminded you of that huge phenomenon that changed the focus of national debate and create a lot of new energy in a formerly conjectured right, let me just mention how he got

involved. vanessa was doing a term paper for robert putnam's social capital fund and noticed that it was on the right that a lot of protest energy was made around health care reform. i was finishing up a book on the first years of the obama presidency in 2010 and couldn't help but notice that the agenda has been shifted by a remarkable manifestation that i didn't quite understand. still is out of curiosity that we teamed up an article on the book on the tea party. but his know about our research is weaker every conceivable data and every method known to the class at the problem. we analyze surveys, look at media coverage, track boats in the congress and the national let it. we also went out and visit it and sat in on tea party meetings in new england, arizona and virginia waited one-on-one

in-depth interviews with people who really answers somewhat differently when it's not just a call at dinner time and not just a matter of talking to a reporter out of a republican event. we put all that together and come up with conclusions that we will be sharing with you today. before i turn it over to vanessa to talk about the grassroots tea party-ish for a while, let me just say one of the big findings of our book the you should take away with you from this occasion is that although we'll talk about about the tea party and we will too, it is not one thing. it is not one organization. it is not one coordinated network. it is not entirely top-down or entirely bottom-up. the tea party has always gotten its energy, ability to impact national politics and remake the

republican party from the fact that it's an interaction of three forces working sort of together but not entirely. grassroots protesters and their 1000 local tea party groups are one forests. another force we identify in the book are right-wing media cheerleaders who played a very important role particularly in the beginning in getting the word out and creating a common sense of values and information. fox news to be sure, but also right-wing bloggers on right-wing talk radio hosts who are key figures in civic life on the red in every community. in the third force, the grassroots and media cheerleaders are all cherished free-market professional advocacy and political funding groups. these were groups that are the existed for many years in most cases. but when the grassroots energy

broke out, they relabeled parts of themselves t. party express or put their spokesmen in front of the cameras to prevent some solace as spokespeople for a grassroots movement. so we see them they are asked by billionaires very wealthy people who don't feel particularly tied to any particular organization but channeled their money to our accounts for raping closet. so these are the three forces. their interaction is what makes the tea party work in the 2010 election in a slightly different way in the 2012 election cycle now talk about that at the end. the knowledge of the chance to share the fascinating frames against the grassroots. >> so i want to talk to little bit about who the grassroots tea parties are and what they

believe. i want to reiterate something tina pointed out, which is this research was a lot of fun. it is deeply enjoyable to go out across the country and talk to americans about politics in a way that was not mediated by confrontations that have been in a protest or limitations of television interview with limitations of the survey. all of these things can be valuable, but the chance to sit down with people was really a great pleasure i think for both of us. so who are the grassroots tea partiers? first of all, these are older white middle class. above all they are conservatives. that was something we found across the board that even if they had not been involved in politics before and many have been quite engaged in the school board or by the reporter that sort of thing. the thing that is clearly the case is that they were conservatives. surprising number of people told us their first political

experience to remember was in the goldwater campaign. so these are republicans long-standing. so is older white middle-class people they tend to be wealthier and more educated than the average american. but the thing that i think really strikes you if you go to a tea party meeting at the democratic age of the group almost that exception i would be the youngest person in the room. i remember meeting in arizona i'd actually been doing interviews beforehand in a very lovely couple observed me to the meeting that night so i came up this couple and a host of the tea party takes one look at me and says he brought a young person. and i'm 30, so i don't think of myself that way. so is actually reassuring for myself personally. so the groups tend to be near retirement age, at retirement although the group leaders are bit younger or stay at moms for

pta versus the vibrant forces organizing the meeting that the same. so there's a lot of demographic similarity. one of the things is there's more religious members that libertarians. in our experience most of our socially conservative than the most sensual people and organization were socially conservative. so there would be libertarians that happened to be on the periphery of the organization but it wasn't uncommon for things like an imaginary son and they passed out a 40 day prayer to and abortion pamphlets piece so social conservatism was quite trying to bridge the divide on the issue so sometimes libertarians are more secular members thoughts on contra when a service of prayer talked about social issues. so that is the point division we thought it between the groups.

when it came to the rest there is a lot of similarity. i want to tell you about what the tea partiers believed. from the outside, what do you know about what the tea partiers believe? you might see signs at rallies that they need to take care country back and obama is a communist in their concerned about deficits and taxes and overall about the economy. it was really nice about the work we did is we got to use those things but also more in-depth interviews to get a better sense of what was really motivating people. it turns out like most americans when you talk about them is quite complicated use of government. it is not true that they look just like every program. occasionally you see a sign that said keep governments hands off my medicare card that was in a widespread belief. people know where that money comes from. so they've complicated use of

government. the thing that explains why some programs are okay and other programs are suspect with it checked to as a fundamental believe that some americans are hard-working and have contributed to system and therefore have earned government benefits like social security and medicare which are to pay into while other americans are freeloaders who haven't done their part and want to get something for free. so you see support for programs that social security and medicare which they are using or expect to use and objections to welfare but large and that often includes programs that food stamps, but also pell grants. there's concern about college students in particular. so here is the dichotomy. hard-working people on freeloaders. so who is in each group. we would ask people, who are these undeserving people? it's sad to tell this audience,

but the number one incident we would here is its young people. that there is a sense that the younger generations aren't entering the workforce in the same way, aren't working as hard come made the same contributions and so that is why you see concerns about pell grants being treated as welfare. so there's young people any other object of concern and the weight overlaps in a lot of ways is minorities and to delete unauthorized immigrants. there is very white concerned people, and to america and take advantage of various welfare health care programs despite the fact that they are not actually legally and america. and so of course these two categories overlap. young americans are more diverse and old america. ..

>> for people in the tea party, obama is a became sol of -- is a symbol of this cultural change. so you'd see signs and protests, but in person people were more circumspect. they would say things like i just can't understand him. they don't know where he's coming from, understand his background. so he's at this sort of nexus. he had a huge amount of support from younger voters.

perhaps more importantly, he's perceived as foreign, right? he has a foreign father, and he's perceived as sort of not of this country, and that made many people nervous. and perhaps worst of all, he was a college professor who would look down on regular americans, right? so he's at at the nexus of these three concerns, right? and this was in a really fundamental way what drove the sort of tea party spark right at the beginning of the obama administration, what inspired their continued activism, and i think it can, in some sense, help us think about what might happen to the tea party after the 2012 election. and with that, i'll pass it back to thee da. >> all right. so this upswelling of anger and fear and determination to checkmate a democratic liberal president -- that's a bad thing in conservative thinking in and

of itself -- who also had the added qualities that vanessa has just talked about injected a lot of energy on the right through the 2010 election cycle. and we talk about the way in which this has helped to boost the republican party and to propel it rightward. tea party people are quite pragmatic about politics, and we did not find at the grass roots any more than in elite circles a willingness on the whole the -- to turn away the party. instead it was to intervene with the republican party to effect the kinds of people who run in primary elections and who get elected to primary office and to hold the feet to the fire of republicans already in office to make sure that they don't compromise with democrats and that they hold firm in carrying through tea party priorities

ranging from cutting spending on freeloaders to cracking down on illegal immigrants and a variety of other priorities that tea partiers may have. in the 2010 election, they were going with the flow because a midterm election is an election when two out of five eligible voters vote, and they would normally be skewed toward older, more conservative people. a midterm election that's held right after one party takes the presidency and both houses of congress is always going to lead to a pushback in the other direction. this election was also occurring during a prolongs economic downturn that was alarming to many americans. so that helps to account for why the tea party was much touted in the media, was having a lot of impact on the kinds of republicans that run, and we

show in our book helped to elect one of the most rightward-leaning houses of representatives in all of political science quantitative measurement of these matters. during 2011 grassroots tea partiers changed their tactics. after the election they stopped mounting public demonstrations as often, and the right-wing media wasn't as interested in covering public demonstrations. the media as a whole was more interested in finding national spokespeople to tell them what the tea party wanted. so they would put people like the head of freedomworks, the 70-year-old dick armey, a former business lobbyist, a former leader of the republican party in the 1990s on the camera to speak for the grass roots insurgency that he now said he was representing. but we shouldn't imagine that the grassroots tea partiers went away. what they did for the most part was to dig into their local

groups and to monitor very closely the state legislators and the congress people that they helped to elect or that were in the republican party and, therefore, supposed to listen to them. and they are constantly contacting their legislators and pressuring them against compromise. meanwhile, the right-wing funders are busy deciding which primary elections to intervene in in this cycle and have sent checks to challengers to overly moderate republicans from their perspective in places like indiana where dick lugar is in the sights of the movement. that brings me, finally, to what all this tells us about 2012. we have to keep in mind that 2012 is going to be an election where closer to three out of five eligible voters will go to the polls. all the actors in this drama -- republican strategists,

democratic strategists, elite tea partiers and many grassroots tea partiers -- understand that the dynamic is a bit different in this election cycle. it's also true that as the general american public has figured out the style of politics associated with the label "tea party," the label tea party has become increasingly unpopular with the general electorate. so a lot of what's going on is not as visible tea party. it's not celebrated as much as tea party activism. and yet it has had a tremendous impact on the republican primary. not by picking out one horse in the horse race to endorse, because the tea party is not one organization, is not disciplined and centrally united. it had no capacity to select a tea party candidate. tea party voters and funders

looked around and have tried to find somebody they could get behind, and there have been waves of enthusiasm for one after another as a possibility. but it isn't surprising in many ways that when tea party voters go to the polls along with other conservative-minded republicans, some of them vote for libertarian ron paul, others vote for more christian conservative conservatives and others just for general conservatives. so there has been no united selection of a non-romney horse. and when we interviewed tea partiers in the spring of 2011, we found no consensus on who they wanted to be their candidate. we found a lot of pragmatism about finding somebody unlike sarah palin who could actually have a chance to win. they knew she couldn't. but we also found universal suspicion of mitt romney as not authentic. that's what they think.

and in that they probably agree with many liberals in the state of massachusetts. so, um, there is not a settling on one of these people. but to say only that is to miss the forest for the trees. because the impact of tea party funders and grassroots activists on the entire field of republican candidates has been tremendous. all of the republican candidates, including mitt romney, have competed to use code words that speak to the tea party belief that obama is not a real american, that we have to take our country back. they have all endorsed hard-line, anti-immigration policies. not just border control, but removing undocumented people from the country who are already here. and they have all signed on to very large, additional tax cuts

tilted toward business and the rich and less spending on anything. above all, obamacare. that can be construed as a new series of benefits for lower income or younger people. so all of the republican candidates have signed on to that, and that meanses that even though the -- means that even though the tea party funders and tea party activists who are half of the republican-identified voters and the more attentive half at that, they have had a very big impact on the republican party even though they have not settled on one candidate. in the field to support. i'll wrap it up by saying what does all this mean for the future? when i presented this research at cornell in the fall, a 20-year-old student got up in the question period and said, um, well, you're telling us that they're mainly old people, so that means they aren't going to

be a problem for long, right? [laughter] after everyone laughed just like this, very nervously, i said, hey, you're talking about my age mates. i blended right in at the tea party meetings i attended. and the fact is that 55, 60, 70-year-olds aren't going anywhere. there's medicare and social security and veterans' benefits. so their activism is whether the tea party label fades or not, and i think it will fade in the sense that once mitt romney has the nomination, they'll never use the phrase again. and fox news won't talk about tea party protests leading into november because they know it's not a popular label. but the urges and the fears and the determination and the political savvy that have gone into this remarkable movement are not going anywhere at the

grass root for quite some time, and it's a big deal to turn one of the major political parties away from compromise and in the direction of some pretty hard-line policy priorities by the standards of just three years ago. including anti-environmentalism which is another tenet. and the tea party funders who have seen this as an opportunity to push long-standing policy goals like gutting environmental regulations, privatizing the social security and medicare rams that many grassroots tea partiers depend upon. they're not going anywhere either. so i think for some time to come we're going to see a clash which in many ways is generationally rooted between an older america that experienced life in one way, life and work and patriotism in one way for many

years and now sees a different america, you know, an uncertain economy with young people who don't think the same way. including young people in their own families thatmany of the older tea partiers used as examples to us of the horrors that could come from changes they didn't approve of. so i think this is a phenomenon that's here in american politics for some time to come, and it's worth understanding. certainly, we had a very interesting time coming to terms, trying to figure out for ourselves what this is all about, and we also enjoyed many of the people we met who we liked person to person in almost every case very much. [applause]

>> love to take some questions now, so if you have a question, as i mentioned, we've got a microphone here on the ground floor in the back, and there's another one up on the second floor. go ahead. >> good afternoon. i'm actually an anthropology grad student from chapel hill, and i just completed about a year of research among about eight chapters of the tea party here in north carolina -- >> what's the name of the tea party? >> i'm sorry? >> what's the name of the one here? >> i was with seven different ones in counties around greensboro/winston-salem. actually, one of your research assistants came down other the her -- over the summer and started talking -- >> yeah, will eighter, one of the two undergraduates, he's just finished -- and north carolina plays a big role in his senior thesis. >> well, i'm grateful to you for not publishing the day that of the people i was interviewing.

[laughter] my question is, though, i was very -- i read the book and was very happy to see how you separated the tea party into those three different areas which i think is one of the most crucial things for people to understand. but i also found in my research that these chapters were amazingly autonomous, that only one of them was on regular communication with the person, for instance, with americans for prosperity. all the others resisted actively or maybe passively connection with any of these broader groups. and my -- i was working just in north carolina, so i'm curious whether that was something unique to the south or unique to north carolina or whether you saw that, that strong autonomy on the part of these chapters in the other areas that you -- >> well, thank you for that question. you know, obviously, because i've worked on the question of american civic activism, and one of the things i wrote about in an earlier book was federation, linking together groups that operate at the local, state and

national level was almost the key to success for about 150 years of american civic history. so we were very interested in learning, um, not only whether there was that kind of participatory federation going on, but what the links were from the top down to the bottom up and so on. we found, um, the same thing. i mean, local tea party groups in some ways remind me of the new left groups that i saw when i was a young, young person many decades ago. they're very per nickty -- persnickety and suspicious of higher manipulation. and that goes for the republican party, certainly, but it also goes for outside groups that try to speak in their name. we found varying levels of wareness in the local -- of awareness in the local groups of tea party patriots which is the

one that tries to reach out to the local groups and to create more of a state presence. some of them usually had heard from them, but some in virginia were not willing to join the conference calls and were not willing to be part of it whereas others were. things like americans for prosperity, freedomworks, the cato and heritage institutes in washington, we find them mentioned on web sites, and we tallied that. but it usually was just a link, not a presence. now, i think there's a lot of variety in this. i have to say that i believe americans for prosperity has sent out regional organizers and has established a presence in the midwest, in wisconsin. and we found, certainly, that groups were trying to send speakers out. and that's a big mechanism because the local groups wanted to bring in speakers. so if free speakers are offered, they will do that. they don't see that as control.

so we have a whole place where we talk about how that works as a sort of leverage system. the one final thing i'll say is that we looked for signs of federation from below, that is groups forming a state federation. as you know, they did in virginia, and that's quite remarkable. there may be some signs of that in michigan, but i think on the whole the local groups often do go their own way and don't even perceive when they're being influenced from outside. >> yeah. i mean, i would just add a tiny point which is that, um, if there's sort of a national organization that we saw consistent sort of approval for, it was fox news, right in so conservative media were often treated with sort of more credibility than a lot of these national political groups, i'd say. >> hey, all. my name is patrick, and i'm a student here at the public policy institute. my question is, it's my

perception that the media's tried to frame the antithesis of the tea party to be the occupy movement, and that would require a whole other study in and of itself. but my question is in your interactions with members of the amorphous tea party, what were their perceptions of the occupy movement, or if it was -- if you were interviewing these people before that movement really got started, that were their sentiments toward some of the claims that the occupy people are themselves making? >> it's a great question. so, we did our interviews in the year before occupy started, so i don't have any firsthand accounts, but i have gone back and revisited every local tea party web site in the country sense then, and there is widespread distrust of occupy. there tended to be sort of videos of the more violent or more apparently violent moments in occupy sort of as examples of, actually, sort of as this example of young people wanting something for free and being faintly dangerous.

it fit really closely into that narrative most of the time. in terms of the -- i mean, these are demographically very different groups, the tea partiers are older, more established groups, and the occupy movement is considerably younger. in terms of some of the ideological overlap, some people, i think, would like to believe that, um, that there's some sort of similarity between what they believe in the sense that both people in the tea party and people in occupy are concerned about corporate power and government. and i have to say i can't speak about the occupy movement, but i can say that i don't think that's true for the tea party. they tended to view -- and i actually interviewed -- well, i sort of pushed on this point because i wanted to understand the mindset of it. many of the people in the tea party are small business owners, and so they tend to perceive large businesses as just successful examples of small businesses, right? so they don't have as much concern about sort of corporate power as you might expect in

people more concerned about campaign finance, for instance. and when they were concerned about, for instance, the bailouts, they tended to focus on, for instance, the auto bailout and blame it on the unions, the autoworkers' unions, or they blamed sort of government officials for being corrupt. but the blame was really never centered on the corporate structure itself, i think. >> we didn't find a whiff of anti-business sentiment at all. you know, i'd say one more thing that, um, some of the tea party people that i got to know in this remain in touch on e-mail. in particular, one gentleman who ended up being the one who helped us visit the peninsula patriots in virginia. and he, he regularly sends me, um, e-mails attacking occupy. it's much more on his mind than anybody i know. and, um, i think that occupy is

sort of an anti-symbol for the tea partiers. they resent, they resent it very much as far as i can tell from my e-mail traffic that it got a lot of anticipation from the immediate -- attention from the media for a while. and they also, the lists that peter sends me are lists of criminal acts in the occupy camps. but there are lists that -- he sends me lists of horrible things that obama is doing and lists of horrible things that the unions and the naacp are doing. finish so, i mean, the principle here is that any organized force perceived to be on the left is really keyed on as an enemy. >> hi. i'm bruce cunningham, the dean of the sanford school, and i'm wondering if you could talk a bit about the question of race that's implicit in a lot of things, and it may be very difficult to talk about even in the context of your interviews.

but for a lot of people it's there in many different guises, and i'm wondering if you could talk about that a bit. >> i'll start, and i think we'll both say something about that because, of course, the context in which we did this research, um, for example, one of the tea party people we met in virginia said where you come from, everybody thinks we're a bunch of ignorant, racist rednecks. um, that's a bit of an exaggeration but not entirely. there is a widespread perception which came from some of the coverage of the more extreme things that people were saying at rallies and a small number of signs that said truly disgusting things with obvious racial overtones. so in our interviews we were

listening. and, in fact, in our interviews we were mainly listening. if you're going to come from cambridge, massachusetts, to sit down with tea party people, you better just be in a respectful, listening mode. [laughter] so our interviews all started with the question tell us about yourself and how you came to the tea party. and only then moved on to things like what do you not like about government, what do you like about government which surprised everybody when we asked them that question. um, we listened to what they said about who were the kinds of people they resented, why they feared and hated barack obama and who were the freeloaders and the moochers that they didn't want to get benefits. there's no question that language that has been historically associated with black/white racial stereotyping came up in the interviews.

usually not deliberately. but this was, of course, people who were trying not to step on that particular -- they knew, they suspected we suspected them. local leaders that we interviewed and observed went out of their way to try to make sure that racially-charged language and accusations did not come up in their meetings. and that was true even in the meeting that i attended incognito. it was a public meeting, so i could be there. in some ways the language was more loaded about immigrants who are assumed to be mostly illegal, even though that's factually not at all true. muslims and muslim-americans, nobody tried to disguise their hatred in any way about those categories of people.

um, and young people quite a few not-so-nice things were said. so we really do believe that tensions, long historical tensions about race play a role in this, and can that for many of these older people seeing barack obama elected president must have been shocking due to the color of his skin. but we don't think it was mainly that. we think it was the combination of that with the foreign father, the muslim-sounding middle name, the fact that as one of our informants put to us, the young people are all obama, obama, obama. you could hear in her voice the perception of the two million people screaming at the inauguration. and she didn't like it. and the fact that a college professor, very, very bad in tea party land. because college professors are seen to be seen people coming up

with obscure schemes to impose on real americans to benefit freeloaders and to enroll 11 million illegal immigrants as voters so that the real americans can be defeated in the next election. all of those things were said, so next to those prejudices the black/white prejudice was kind of down there in what we heard. >> yeah. i'll just say quickly that, um, they were definitely being careful in the interviews. and i was thinking of one moment in particular. there was a man who was later -- he said this was an admission. he was a member of the john birch society, and so he was saying, so we asked that opening question, you know, what brought you to the tea party, and he said, well, i first became aware of the problem -- and then he stopped, and then he said, i love foreigners and changed the subject. [laughter] and, um, and, you know,

obviously, people weren't -- you're being careful, right? you know you're talking to, you know, harvard academics coming down to your town, and people were being very careful. but i do think that, i just to stress theda's point, particularly about mexican-americans, they really ally that with illegal immigrant. they're not well-distinguished categories, and the very deep concern about sharia law and, you know, sort of some sort of islamic takeover of the united states was a very popular idea in tea party circles. and those were really the most sort of visceral fears that i recall hearing. >> so at the top this. >> yes. my name is brad fulton, i'm in the sociology department. my interest is in the religious composition of the tea party movement and the role religion plays. you made a distinction between social conservatives and fiscal

conservatives implying that there was more social conservatives in the midst. and yet when i look at the priorities, um, they seem to be primarily fiscally-conservative priorities. so the role religion is playing in the tea party movement. >> you know, that was a question that really we were interested in, and we were interested in it partly because the academic literature that we were familiar with going into this research would suggest that it's very hard for people to organize brand new groups in a short period of time. in fact, you know, given where american civic life has been over the last several decades, it's highly unusual to see regularly-meeting local groups form. so i have to admit that going into the research i thought, well, many of these are going to be relabeled either libertarian or christian conservative groups, religious conservative groups. we did not find, for the most

part, that the groups were relabeled previous things. most of the groups seemed to have genuinely come about through the efforts of organizer sets of people who met one another perhaps at protests or through letters to the editor in the newspaper and then decided to use technologies like meetup or announcements on local talk radio to bring together a group. the groups are internally diverse on this line of somewhat more secular and libertarian versus religious conservatives who place a high priority on fighting, um, abortion and gay rights. i would say that for the most part that's a divide that runs through the middle of groups that local organizers have to manage, and that's quite a divide to manage. and one of the ways they manage it is by placing the emphasis at least in the overt statements on the things that they all agree about, you know, opposing obama,

getting rid of obamacare, cracking down on immigrants and cutting spending. um, but in an actual meeting, the meeting may be held in a church. it may start with a christian prayer along with the pledge of allegiance which all start with the pledge of allegiance. some start with a christian prayer, too, some don't. and it may well, um, the meeting i attended in virginia where the leader who i thought was just a remarkable organizer, i write about her in the book, what a lovely woman in many ways. she learned to organize groups by organizing theater, volunteer theater productions in charlottesville. she's just such a good organizer. and she contacted me the day after the meeting i visited to say that my observation of a member standing up to say how wonderful it was that the virginia legislature had just voted through the law that harasses the medical clinics

that provide access to abortion by reforcing them to retool themself as hospitals which would, she said, drive them all out of business. the whole room was excited about that, and i had observed that. she knew i had observed it. she e-mailed me the next day, asheer me that the -- to assure me the tea party doesn't prioritize social conservative causes. and i think that tells us something. the organizers try very hard to play it down because they're casting a broader umbrella, and they've formed a group that isn't just the local church group or church network. but the people, many of them, probably 60-7 0% depending on the region of the country are often fervent evangelical/protestant conservative believers. >> jonathan reel. i did a dissertation on the federalist society which has a

lot of parallels in what you're discussing. for those of you who don't know, federalist society is a membership organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers, law students, policy people. has a very strong presence in d.c. and was famously labeled the core of the vast right-wing conspiracy by hillary clinton some years ago. in writing that i've continued to do on conservativism, an interesting thing that i've heard from folks of the kind of goldwater/reagan era -- and i'm curious about your reaction to -- is i've heard a lot of resentment towards the tea party from folks in kind of federalist society circles which tend to be more intellectual, tend to be, you know, a different demographic as well because there you get a lot of young conservatives -- >> yeah, there are. >> -- who pride themselves on following the footsteps of goldwater and reagan. and i've sometimes off the record but hear a fair amount of disdain that's not coming from the left.

it's coming from this different category of kind of the people who try to hold the torch of william f. buckley and who look at these folks as you were saying, you know, as some of the left look at the tea partiers as, you know, these rabid rednecks who are racist, etc., etc. but whether in your research you found any, you encountered any discussion of this different strand of more intellectual conservative thought. you noted goldwater in your opening. i'm just wonder, it sounds like a disjunket that's emerging here, and i observed that as well when you think of the movement versus what you're describing as this new wave. >> i think i'd say, um, there wasn't a lot of focus. in the same way there wasn't a lot of focus on elite groups that were really trying to link to the tea party. they just didn't seem central to the work they were doing at the local level. there wasn't a lot of focus on

that kind of thing. but one, you know, about 200 tea party groups as i remember i visited their web site and cataloged some things about them, about 200 of them went to the cato institute. so it's not that there's not some links to that kind of d.c.-based libertarian or that sort of tradition. um, but people in general seem very focused on local affairs, i think. >> you know, this isn't an intellectual movement. and be one of the things that happens when you go out and spend time with tea party people and listen to them and schmooze with them, they have the same kinds of divisions and prejudices about one another that you might expect. i mean, i wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the elite, old-line either libertarian conservatives or buckley-style conservatives look at this and think, my goodness, um, i mean, there are a fair number of elite

groups that have looked at it and said, wow, we can use this to knock out barack obama and take the trifecta in 2012, and that's what we're doing. and now they're finding that they get to the point where they're supposed to tell these people to stand down, and they're not standing down. so what else is surprising here? this is america. in virginia which i did get to know pretty well because i visited tea parties in more than one part of the state and also did an interview with some state-level leaders, they had stereotypes about each other. i mean, the tea partiers around charlottesville referred to the christian conservative tea partiers around lynchburg in very disdainful ways. and a leader from central virginia told me that the tea partiers up in fairfax and

alexandria were a bunch of rhinos. so, you know, they've got an internal geography about themselves that's much, as you might find on the liberal left about the various different strands. so -- >> i'm just curious, what percentage of the people would you say actually join the groups versus were at the tea party rallies themselves? the reason i ask that is i have been a tea party member probably since the beginning, and a lot of the things that you're conveying are not what have been my experience out at the rallieses, yet i don't join a group, and the reason people aren't in groups are they're raising kids and they're busy. the older people have the time to join, and i just would like your perspective on that. i think we were more concerned -- at least the rallies i went to -- about fiscal responsibility and just as angry at republicans as democrats. the corruption, those were the two things -- >> oh, there's no question that they're angry at republicans, and i, if i didn't stress that,

i meant to. i mean, we needed to make a distinction here. are these people who vote for democrats? no, they're not, and they never did. but are they distrustful of the republican party as it was under george bush? are they unenthusiastic about the john mccains of this world the? are they suspicious that republicans often sell out the principles they believe in? absolutely. and, you know, i will say, though, that our statements about the demography of the tea party are not simply based on our interviews and the meetings we attended. if they were, they would not be good social science. what we did in our research was to gather all of the national surveys that reported on tea party sympathizers and people who said they had done one or more thing like attend a rally or -- well, attend a rally would be the most useful or send a check. and then he compared with those said about those broader categories of people which at

one point probably about 25% of americans fell into those broader categories with what we were seeing in our interviews and our observations. and, you know, at -- the activists who attend meetings and form groups are a very small fraction of the larger group. but the demography is not that different. they are older, 45 and above for the most part, with some younger people. so this is, these are statistical statements i'm making, not absolute statements. and i wouldn't be at all surprised if at actual rallies some of the people who came on a saturday afternoon were younger than those who would typically attend a sit-down meeting. but all the things we said about the tendency to be older, those are based on both kinds of evidence. >> do we have any other? i'll take a point of privilege. i wonder if you could tell us a

little bit more about what you see as the origins of this antipathy toward the young people as freeloaders? >> we can both probably say something about that. i'll start by saying that, first of all, as somebody who's in her 60s i want to report that it is not uncommon for 60-year-olds to sit around and say that the world is going down the drain. this is, this happens. it's human. so part of what it is is older conservatives engawjing in -- engage anything the same kind of grousing that older liberals engage in, about how young people just aren't doing the things the way we did. and we did it better. but i think the other part of it is that, um, the economy, for example, has changed in such fundamental ways so quickly. so that many of these people have grandchildren, for example, who haven't gotten a job and who

are living at home with mom and dad, and they don't appear to be getting on life's ladder the way that the grandparents or even the parents were able to do. and it's not surprising and particularly not surprising from a conservative perspective to moralize those failings. the other part of it is that the younger generation doesn't think the same way about a lot of moral and cultural questions as older people do. there are incredibly big differences, and the younger generation is more black and brown than the older generation. so you just add all these things together, and particularly from an older conservative perspective, the it's easy to be distrustful of people who appear to be doing things the wrong way, demanding benefits and money and opportunities they have not yet earned. um, and just in general they're

just not the america we built. and so you do hear that from tea partiers. we built this country, we worked hard, it's being taken away there us. away from us. >> i think we have three minutes left, so one quick question, and -- >> bill holdman, work here at the nicklaus institute at duke. so the tea party members, they remember the chi yoga river burning, smoggy days, so why the opposition to environmental protection? >> i think that's a great question. um, and i think it does get to a really core question. people are conservative and this idea of conservation, i mean, they are related terms, and this rift and sort of -- thrift and not using more than you need are all ideas people practice in their private lives and something that, you know, tea party members talked about clipping coupons and that kind of thing which would seem like a related sort of ideological or value idea. um, but the thing about

environmentalism at least as it's sort of perceived by many people we spoke to in the tea party is that it's a set of rules or an ideology that coastal elites want to impose on real america, right? so they want to take away our guns, our cars, they don't approve of my lifestyle, they -- and so that, that concern, this feeling that there are sort of bureaucrats and people in the ivory tower who have a better idea of how i'm supposed to live was something we would hear again and again. and i think that that what was overriding other concerns that do play into an idea of conservation, i think. >> i think this is also an area where elite, free market groups that leaped into the tea party fray have played a very active role. one of the meetings that we attended in virginia and it later turned out that the same speakers were making their way across different tea parties in virginia because, you know, it's

word of mouth. somebody comes and gives a lecture, and it resonates, you recommend them to other tea parties, and they may invite them. and it was campaign for liberty speakers who are paid professional speakers. they delivered a hourlong, incredibly dense and very boring powerpoint which i thought -- i was taking notes, and i thought this isn't going to go over. it was about how the local committees designing bike paths were simply a manifestation of a decades-long conspiracy hatched by agenda 21 under the auspices of the united nations and involving democrats and republicans alike to impose communism on america by other means. and we got to the question period, and i thought, well, somebody's going to speak up here and ask a critical question, and not a single person did. instead, they added examples which -- and i think this is typical of populist, right-wing

thinking -- you draw an analogy be it the experience of a small business owner or a homeowner with the local, um, zoning board which is extremely irritating to people, zoning boards. they really are. they try to tell you where you can put a window in your house, they tried to do that with me. i didn't like it. so they draw an analogy between those daily irritations from government bureaucrats and pedagoguing rules and a u.n. conspiracy to remake american businesses put thermostats in every house that are going to regulate, um, the temperature for you. we couldn't figure out where that came from, and then vanessa went through the fox news transcripts, and there it was. many of the tea partiers that we talked to told us that they watch fox news 6-8 hours a day. um, so i think there was a big push about the time we were

doing our interviews to get a certain scary image of environmentalism out there, and we can report that it was working. >> all right. well, on that note, thank you all for attending. it was a wonderful discussion, and there's -- [applause] there's a reception upstairs, and theda and vanessa will be signing books just on the second floor here. [inaudible conversations] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> my journey into the black panther party started before i became a panther.

i think what i'd like to do is just read a little passage from the book and then show you how i happened to walk into the panther office and how that day changed my life. this is chapter three of the book. and it's called "finding the panther lair." i walked into a panther office in brooklyn on september 1968 -- oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. i meant to save the best for last, but not until the end of the program. is chairman bobby here? yeah. chairman bobby seale, founder of the black panther party, is in the house. wait a minute. chairman bobby, please, stand up. [applause] i knew i was saving that, but then i started reading, and i was like, no, you wanted people to know bobby seale is in the house and that we'll get a chance during the q&a to talk to

chairman bobby as well. i walked into the panther office in brook run in september 1968. dr. king had been assassinated in april of that year. riots and anger flared in the ghettos around the country. the feeling on the street was that the shit was about to hit the fan. black power was the phrase of the day, and hating whitey was the whip thing to do. -- hip thing to do. whitey had gone from being the man to being the beast. young black students were trading in their feel-good motown records for the recorded speeches of malcolm x and the angry jazz recordings of arkansas net coleman. i went down to 125th street in harlem that night, the night dr. king was assassinated. protesters overturned cars, set trash can fires and hurled bricks at white-owned

businesses. one of the storefront businesses was shattered. looters ran into the store and started taking clothes, appliances and whatever else they could carry. not everyone looted. in fact, most of the crowd continued to chant "the king is dead" and "black power," but it was enough for cops to start swinging clubs, shooting pistols and making arrests. a cop grabbed me and threw me against the wall. before he could handcuff me, a group of rioters across the street turned a police car over. the cop told me to stay put and ran toward the rioters. [laughter] i was scared, but i wasn't stupid. [laughter] i took off running in the opposite direction. i blended in with the group of rioters and tried to figure out which way to go. a group of cops headed toward us. some of the rioters ran into a clothing store that was being looted. i followed. the cops entered the store swinging clubs and making arrests. my heart pounded as i ran into the back of the store and found

a back door leading to an alley. i gasped for air as i ran down the alley and was stopped by a wooden fence. the cops came into the alley. halt, they yelled, put your hands up. in my mind i froze, put my hands in the air and turned around to face the cops with tears in my eyes. but my body kept hauling ass. i grabbed the fence and curried over the -- scurried over the top. two shots rang out. one splintered the wood on the fence near my butt. this gave me the fear of adrenaline push i needed to flip over the fence and scramble out of the alley. when i turned out onto the street, i kept running right past two other cops who tried to grab me, but i jerked away. turning the corner, i almost collided with a group of 20 or so black men in army fatigue jackets standing on the corner in a military-like formation. stop running, young brother, one

of the men with a beard and tinted glasses said. don't give these pigs an excuse to gun you down. i doubled over heaving, trying to catch my breath. i didn't want know this -- i didn't know this man, but his voice sounded like a life raft of confidence in a sea of chaos. moments later two cops ran around the corner. they stopped in their tracks when they saw the militant men. the men closed ranks around me. what are you doing here, the cops demanded, move aside. the black man with tinted glasses didn't flinch. we're exercising our constitutional right to free assembly, making sure no innocent people get killed out here tonight. we're chasing looters, the cop reported. no looters here. as you can see, we're a disciplined community patrol. you have guns, a cop asked with a tinge of fear in his voice? that's what you say, the man with tinted glasses replied. i said we were exercising our constitutional rights. the cops took in the size and

the discipline of the group for a moment and walked away. by the time i'd caught my breath, i was speechless. but by that time i'd caught my breath, but i was speechless from what i'd just seen. black men standing down the cops. go straight home, young brother, the man with the tinted glasses said. the pigs are looking for any excuse to murder black folks tonight. with that, the black men walked on. i scooted down to the subway and headed home. when i entered the apartment, grandma was sitting on the couch watching images of dr. king on tv. tears fell from her eyes. she at no time even ask where i had been -- she didn't even ask where i had been which was unusual since i was about two hours late getting home. i sat next to her, put my arm around her, and we watched tv reports of the assassination and the riots. i came to school the next day -- before that, i just want to say a little bit about my adopted

grandmother. i was conceived in cuba, and my mother was a graduate student and broke up with my, with my father and came home and announced to my grandmother that she was pregnant, but she had broken up with the guy. and my grandmother pressed her a little bit more about who the father was, and be when she found out that he was a young revolutionary who was hanging around with the likes of fidel and raul castro, mom got put on the first plane smoking to new york city. and in cuba she had been a debutante, and she had been a graduate student, and she was on her way to be a doctor, but when she showed up in new york city, she was a young black woman who couldn't speak english. she spoke spanish and french, and then a friend told her about a loving place where they took in foster kids. so she put me there for what she thought would be a temporary stay, but it wound up being my early childhood and my adolescent home.

nuni, grandma, took me in when they were quite old, and their parents and their older brothers and sisters had been slaves. so i grew up hearing stories about an america and about a south where you didn't look a white person in the eye if you were black coming down the street. in fact, if they were on the sidewalk, you got into the gutter no matter if it was raining, if it was muddy, how old you were. the sidewalk belonged to them. i heard about the ku klux klan and about lynching and about jim crow as first-person reports. they saw cross burnings, they lost relatives to lynching. with that, though, they were working class people. nuni worked as a domestic, pop worked as a laborer, and they have been garveyites in the '20s. they joined the naacp, and i was active in the youth council.

i was an honor student, i was in the choir, i had a sense of what was going on. we collected food and books up north to send to the civil rights workers in the south who were distributing that stuff to the communities. pa died when i was about 12 years old, so it was just me and nuni. so there was this thing of wanting to be a man, of figuring that out. and then dr. king got killed, and i was enraged, angry. and so the day after this i went to school, and be on the fringes, you know, on television you would see stokely carmichael and bobby seale and huey newton and the news described them as the black militants and, of course, stokely was talking about black power. i want to back up, too, and talk about pa because all of my lessons in black history, i don't want you to think that it was over the dinner table with books spread out. pa was a working man, and he was a good cussing man.

and he was what they called in those days a race man. so a lot of my lessons would just be as simple as we'd be watching television, the old black and white tv, and a tarzan movie would come on. johnny wise muller would swing across the screen doing the tarzan yell, and he would speak his language, and the lions would go here and the monkeys would go here, and pennsylvania would be looking -- pa would be looking at that, and after about five minutes he would go, what the hell is that? [laughter] you tell me how in the hell a little cracker baby can fall out of an airplane, grow up, boy, change the damn channel. [laughter] it was living history. then i would switch, and harry reasoner -- i remember in the first time seeing a young harry reasoner, and he was giving some editorial. i think it was about the space program. and he was going on and on and being very educated and very bright young white man, and pa looked at him for about four minutes, and he says you is a

lying onionhead damn cracker. change the damn channel, boy. [laughter] so it was living history. i could use some of that stuff in the schoolyard. so when the militants came on, not only were they challenging the power structure in a different way, in a way that we hadn't seen in the movement, they were fly about it, you know? you know, again, stokely was talking about black power, but i remember one news report where h. trap brown got arrested for possessing a rifle in louisiana, and they covered him getting out of jail, and rap was standing on the courthouse steps and had the reporters gathered up, and he said i want you to listen. if you thought my rifle was bad, wait until you see my atom bomb. i was like, this brother's crazy. he's bad. [laughter] so i went to school, and i was a hallway monitor, so i sat with a certain group of guys, and i announced to them, you know, as clear as day that i, eddie

joseph, am going to be a black militant. and one of my good friends, a jewish kid named paul, looks up at me and says, eddie, i don't know if you can announce you're going to be a black militant like it's a career choice. [laughter] i was like, no, paul, you watch. [laughter] and then i had to as much to prove to paul as to myself, as to the anger i was feeling find the most militant organization on the scene. and it was subjective. believe me, i didn't really know what was going on, you know? so there'd be reasons, you know, to look at organization and reject it just on the surface level. it was like the black muslims. no, i don't really like bow ties, plus, grandma makes some mean bacon. no, i know paul and them can can have fun with that, and then they ran a news report talking about the rising militancy in america. and there was a story about the black panther party. and they ran the footage where

the panthers, led by chairman bobby, stormed the state capitol in sacramento. and for folks who don't know, the panthers started patrolling the streets of oakland, california, with shotguns and law books enforcing one of the aspects of the ten-point program. i want to get to that later. but that caught the imagination not only of the community of america because it was legal to carry guns in california if they weren't concealed, and the law books were to make it clear that at first huey and bobby and the other panthers who joined understood the law, understood the right to bear arms, understood the right to witness the arrest. they would follow the person to the precinct, bail them out if they had the money, if not, they were young legal volunteers to help get the people out. and so california responds by saying, yes, the law say that you can carry weapons if they're not concealed. but when