Guess who's coming to save print media? The Tea Party, that's who! Next week, amid all of the Islamophobia and cosplay that typically transpires at the Conservative Political Action Conference, attendees will have an opportunity to sample the inaugural issue of Tea Party Review, the conservative-insurgent response to the "lamestream" media, and also, possibly, the IFC show "Portlandia."
From the press release:
"There's a profile of the first Tea Partiers elected to statewide office, a look at key figures in history such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Booker T. Washington, and even a comic strip about a Tea Party congressman dealing with the Red Chinese," Pierson noted.
The "Tea Party Review's team of writers, artists, and editors reflect the diversity of the movement, including individuals from all over the country incorporating a wide variety of backgrounds. The magazine includes people who've never contributed before to a national magazine, along with people who have written for major publications like the Chicago Defender and The New York Times."
Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent sees this effort as being part and parcel of the Tea Party's ambitions to fashion themselves as a modern-day equivalent "to the most important movements in American history." (Let's recall that in his maiden speech to the Senate, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul (R-Ky.), cast himself in the same mold.) Is the comparison apt? Sargent believes it to be "too soon":
Publishers of abolitionist newspapers routinely had their printing presses broken up by angry white mobs, a fate that is unlikely to meet the publishers of the new Tea Party magazine. Yet despite the fact that the threat and reality of violence against them was ubiquitous, the abolitionists envisioned and helped put the nation on a path to the first interracial democracy in human history, and the civil rights movement took major steps to codify that vision into federal law, one of the greatest historical feats of all time.
By contrast, the Tea Party can't boast that level of accomplishment yet. Federal cash from the stimulus, which originally sparked the Tea Party uprising, continues to flow. And the jury is out on whether the Tea Party movement will even accomplish what has become its primary goal: Liberating millions of Americans from the tyranny of Obamacare and the individual mandate. It's true that the Tea Party has elected a few dozen representatives to Congress. But Tea Party leaders -- Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Rand Paul, etc. -- have yet to attain the historical stature of great abolitionists and civil rights figures like Senator Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, or great suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony.
I won't be the first to joke about comparing the Tea Party Review to another recently-formed print property, Inspire -- though with articles like "Why the Elite Media Hate Us" and "How the Top Colleges Turn Kids into Stupid Leftists," it's pretty clear that somebody wants to "make a bomb in the kitchen of their mom," to, you know, water the tree of liberty.
Anyway, no word yet as to when this media property will be merging with GeoCities, but we're on it.
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