Conservative Astroturf and the Health Reform Debate: Let's Follow Some Plastic Roots

ThinkProgress.org and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann have recently reported that powerful, well-funded conservative political organizations with ties to the Republican party and corporate interests are coordinating conservative volunteers to harass public officials and disrupt public town hall meetings across the country.

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Organizations like FreedomWorks, a 501c4 activist group chaired by former House Majority leader, Republican Dick Armey, and Americans for Prosperity, a group (chaired by David H. Koch, founder and current Executive Vice President of the notorious environmental law breaking megacorporation, Koch Industries) that has previously advocated on behalf of the tobacco industry and campaigned against legislation to slow climate change, are organizing and promoting anti-health reform protests that are designed to look like spontaneous grassroots uprisings.

As ThinkProgress notes, "A leaked memo from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, details how members should be infiltrating town halls and harassing Democratic members of Congress."

The memo in question advises volunteers attending town hall meetings to create the illusion that their numbers are greater than they really are:

Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington. They need to leave the hall with some doubts about their agenda. The other objective is to illustrate for the balance of the audience that the national leadership is acting against our founders' principles which are on the other side of the debate - and show them that there are a lot of solid citizens in the district who oppose the socialist approach to the nation's challenges.

The memo also instructs volunteers on ways to disrupt the meeting without getting ejected, advising them to set the tone of the meeting as "informal and free-wheeling" from the beginning by shouting questions and having other operatives, dispersed throughout the crowd, shout briefly in agreement:

You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses — call him on it, yell back and have someone else follow-up with a shout-out. Don't carry on and make a scene — just short intermittent shout outs. The purpose is to make him uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly informal, and free-wheeling. 

The memo then offers a list of prepared questions for volunteers to bring to the meeting -- a list that strongly resembles that provided in this official FreedomWorks press "Action Kit" memo released in June.

This is certainly not the first time since the election of President Obama that Republican politicians and wealthy corporate CEOs have mobilized astroturfed protests to create the illusion of a grassroots uprising against majority-supported Democratic policies. Many of the supposedly grassroots Tax Day Tea Party protests were organized with the assistance of not only Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, but also the conservative-leaning Fox News Corporation.

The original Tea Party Facebook Group was started by Republican strategists with ties to both FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. The Americans for Prosperity website shows a list of early Tea Party events that were openly hosted and funded by the group. The FreedomWorks site boasts a proud thank you letter to attendees of the 2009 Tea Parties "Proudly brought to you by the FreedomWorks Foundation."

And even as big time establishment conservative lobby names like Americans for Prosperity — run by the billionare Executive Vice President of a giant oil and gas corporation —  and FreedomWorks — run by an establishment Republican politiican — planned the Tea Parties back in April, a television news source run by a giant corporation, Fox News, promoted them, with Fox News television personalities speaking at and personally inviting their viewers to attend Tax Day Tea Party protests.

Yet conservative blogger Michelle Malkin called the Tea Parties "A grass-roots revolt against the culture of entitlement." The TaxDayTeaParty.com home page reads: "Organized in all 50 states by Americans from all walks of life, these "tea parties" were a true grassroots protest of irresponsible fiscal policies and intrusive government."

Organized in top-down fashion by activist groups run by Republican party operatives and corporate executives, and aggressively promoted by a major international corporate news conglomerate with an established interest in promoting a conservative, pro-business political agenda, the Tea Parties have been represented nonetheless by their promoters as spontaneously arising community-based grassroots efforts.

And now the same pro-corporate, anti-regulation, anti-consumer-protection groups are applying the astroturf protest model they used to create the Tea Party phenomenon to wage a proxy guerrilla protest war against health care reform, convincing ordinary concerned citizens who are worried about health care to storm political offices and public town hall meetings and argue preselected Republican Party talking points on behalf of corporate interests, as if these ideas and tactics were their own.

In my own state of Missouri, the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity recently helped organize two anti-health-reform protests in the style outlined by the leaked memo that present a near-perfect case study of how astroturing works:

The Missouri chapter of Americans for Prosperity, which is headed by a former Deputy Speaker of the Missouri State House of Representatives, Republican politician Carl Bearden, organized an anti-health-reform protest in front of the St. Louis office of Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill on July 17th. AFP organizers invited local conservative blogger Jim Hoft, of the Gateway Pundit website, to advertise and cover the event, and asked local conservative blogger, Tea Party organizer, and a local radio talk show host, Dana Loesch, who works for a Fox News affiliate station, to promote it.

When protesters holding "No ObamaCare" signs surrounded the Senator's office and reportedly began knocking on doors and windows of the building and repeatedly pressing the door buzzer, shouting "Where is Claire?" staff inside the office called local police, who asked the protesters to step back from the building and continue their protest from across the street. 

This intervention caused the protesters to publicly declare that their civil liberties had been violated (despite the fact that the police did not actually break up their protest and in fact only asked the protesters to move the protest to the public sidewalk directly across the street from the office); protest attendees also reported that a McCaskill staffer had flipped them off through a window (though later McCaskill's office and local news confirmed that particular gesture came from a local business owner who shares office space in the building, not a McCaskill staffer).

In response to the protesters' public indignation at not being allowed to speak with the Senator (who was, in fact, not in or anywhere near her St. Louis office at the time of the protest), Senator McCaskill's office invited the Missouri chapter of Americans for Prosperity to attend an open, public town hall meeting with a key member of her staff, St. Louis area District Director, Michelle Sherod on Monday, July 27th, where the protesters would be welcome to share their views on health care in a venue that would theoretically be more conducive to productive discussion than a public street.

AFP, several local conservative bloggers and local radio talk show host Dana Loesch promoted the meeting on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to attract a crowd.

And on the night of the town hall, the protesters organized by Americans for Prosperity appeared, according to one St. Louis-area liberal blogger from Show Me Progress who was at the meeting, to follow the FreedomWorks town hall disruption plan outlined in the aforementioned leaked memo to the letter.

The protesters spread through the crowd. They immediately started to "to put the Rep on the defensive" and "rock the boat" by shouting their questions. As Show Me Progress blogger Hotflash reports:

To give them as much benefit of the doubt as I can muster, I'd say they were . . . passionate. Unfortunately, for many of them passion is indistinguishable from rudeness. Basically, every time Sherod opened her mouth, regardless of what she had to say or how tactfully she expressed it, several people in the crowd of — I don't know, 400? — shouted at her.

The AFP group shouted their questions. When one protester asked a question, others scattered throughout the crowd would yell in support or response:

After the meeting, Dana Loesch, the conservative talk show radio host blogger who had promoted and attended the town hall meeting, appeared on the Fox News Channel television show, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, where she was referred to as a "radio host" and Tea Party organizer; Dana's affiliation with a Fox News affiliate station was not revealed:

(Note Van Susteren's portrayal of the planned event as a spontaneous surprise. Note also Loesch's implication that the entire crowd at the meeting was there to protest health reform when, in fact, it was a public forum attended by several groups including the aforementioned Show Me Progress.)

Just as with the Tea Parties, these local health care protests were organized by a national conservative organization — Americans for Prosperity, through a local chapter run by a Republican politician. They were promoted and attended by an employee of a Fox News affiliate radio station, and given favorable coverage on a national Fox News television broadcast.

The Missouri protests fit neatly into a pattern, now being seen across the country, of loud, disruptive protests outside Democratic politicians' offices and inside public town hall meetings. Strikingly similar protests have "broken out" at several recent town hall meetings, including one held by Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett over the weekend, and just yesterday at a town hall organized by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

To a keen observer, the fingerprints of frustrated GOP politicians, big business, and big media can be seen all over these coordinated events.

And yet, I am personally convinced that the vast majority of individual volunteers who show up to these protests — carrying a protest plan outlined by Republican political operatives, armed with a list of questions written by anti-regulation corporate lobbyists, and followed by camera operators ready to email their footage directly to Fox News — are utterly convinced they were joining an actual grassroots protest. There a clearly a lot of angry conservatives out there who strongly believe that reforming the broken health insurance system will hurt them in some serious way. 

While I believe that, as fellow American citizens, they have every right to protest legislation they oppose, as long as organizations like FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Fox News seem to be writing the script at these town hall meetings, the rest of us will have no way of knowing whether the "free speech" we're hearing shouted so loudly is coming from the protesters themselves, or Dick Armey and David Koch.

Comments

[Lawyer Mama]

I love how their instructions assume the representative is a "him."

[cynematic]

GOP tactics:

Astroturfing = intimidation + fearmongering + spreading little bits of cash around in their giant pseudo-think tank/public opinion apparatus. Could Fox News be any more a jobs program for conservatives?

[Dana]

Jaelithe, if you're going to try to smear me perhaps you should get your facts right.

I'm not a "Fox Radio host." My station carries the Fox news feed. That's all. I don't work for them and I don't have a contract with them. I'm not a member of any political party being that I hate them all equally.

There are a frillion groups out there all party of the tea party ecosystem and it's intellectually dishonest to try to smear an entire movement based on a few beltway famewhores. If you want to talk about astroturfing, let's talk ACORN and other groups whose get-out-the-vote drive last election brought in over 100% voter turnout. Now that's some fuzzy math.

[Jaelithe]

Dana,

I just corrected the post to clarify that the station you work for is an affiliate that carries Fox Radio programming, and is not owned by Fox radio. I still think Greta should have mentioned the association.

I did not mean to smear you personally or accuse you, personally, of astroturfing in this post. I only mentioned your segment on Fox News TV to illustrate the fact that Fox News is portraying the town hall protests as spontaneous events when they are actually being planned by a nationwide organization. The event you attended WAS planned by AFP, and you yourself mentioned in your Fox TV segment. I believe that Americans deserve to know that AFP is not a local group but in fact a nationwide lobby.

[Jim Durbin]

Your cluelessness on this is astounding, and it's more shameful that you dare to write this considering how many people you personally know here in St Louis that you could have picked up the phone and called.

Every event that has been held since the February Tea Party has been a hold-your-breath and hope people show situation. The shadowy national organizers you talk about are a) wrong, and b) barely able to call each other at the last second to see if someone can record, or what time to show, or even where the event is.

And none of us hide behind front organizations. At the McCaskill townhall, I spoke with one person who showed up because a neighbor told them to, and another who was there because McCaskill's office called and asked them to show as a sign of strength. Who was astroturfed?

The climate kiddies there were organized by Missouri Votes Conservation, a paid political organization that got their facts wrong when posting on Kos and Show Me Progress.

You're a decent writer, but this isn't journalism. It's cut and paste blogging of the talking points of Journolist bloggers sprinkled with some local flavor. It's shameful you have the nerve to print this when you don't have the nerve to call anyone actually involved.

[Jaelithe]

Jim, if you are truly convinced that Americans for Prosperity did not help organize the town hall meeting, then maybe you should tell Missouri Americans for Prosperity head Carl Bearden to not say on the Americans for Prosperity website that Americans for Prosperity organized the meeting:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/072809-scenes-sen-mccaskill-town-hall-meeting-72709

You should also call the St. Louis Beacon and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, because they both reported that Americans for Prosperity organized the town hall meeting.

And perhaps you should tell Lee Presser to take the Americans for Prosperity title off of his Flickr set of the event:
http://www.americansforprosperity.org/072809-scenes-sen-mccaskill-town-hall-meeting-72709

And maybe you should edit that post on your own blog where you mention that Carl Bearden from AFP arranged the town hall meeting:

http://www.24thstate.com/2009/07/video-footage-of-claire-mccaskill-healthcare-townhall.html

As for your argument that Americans for Prosperity does a bad job of helping to organize local protests, then might I suggest that you and the rest of the St. Louis Tea Partiers cease your association with them? Then you would not have to worry about liberal bloggers writing about your association with them. It would be a winning situation for everyone.

AS I STATED IN THE CONCLUSION OF MY POST, I do not doubt that people with real anti-health-reform feeling show up at these protests. What concerns me is that the scheduling and promotion of these protests are being coordinated nationwide by corporate lobbyists who work on behalf of the health insurance industry.

If you are not upset by the town hall protesters' affiliation with AFP and Koch Industries, you should not be upset that I revealed it.

If you are concerned about astroturfing by various liberal groups, by all means, write a post about it.

[Jim Durbin]

That's quite a stretch, even for you. I never denied AFP was involved. I deny this is astroturf.

Your post starts off talking about plastic roots, and accusing conservative organizations of organizing these protests.

1) Pick up the phone and call Carl Bearden. Ask him how much money he gets from the Koch foundation. Ask him what relationship he has with the national AFP organization. You make some weird leap of logic that says this is a shadowy organization, but you know nothing about them. AFP doesn't hide who they are. Neither does Carl. He volunteers his time, Jaelithe, but you don't know that because the only research you've done is a google search of liberal blogs. You don't get to throw out the Koch bogeyman and then pretend you've uncovered some great secret.

2) Carl is a former state senator, and he arranged with the McCaskill office to hold a townhall for protestors who didn't get to meet with McCaskill's staff. His involvement with the original protest and the Clayton Rally are very much as support, and not organization. I know because I know the guy who organized the Show Us the Bill Rally. The way it works is someone has an idea, and different groups throw their weight and web presence behind it. That doesn't make it some shadowy corporate funded event. It is the very definition of grassroots.

Tea Party volunteers go to these events, which are barely pulled together, and videotaped and reported on by unpaid volunteers who are risking their careers and businesses to get involved. For you to claim the St Louis Tea Party events are organized on a national level from corporate interests is a vile lie you didn't take the time to research. You just repeat it -over and over and over, with no evidence behind it.

3) your words: "are organizing and promoting anti-health reform protests that are designed to look like spontaneous grassroots uprising"
This did not happen at the local level, and it is a lie to pretend it did. You're copying and pasting ThinkProgress, which is one of those Journolist connections parroting what the WhiteHouse is putting out. That "memo" - was written by a libertarian and forwarded to maybe a dozen people after the event, yet he's reported as a highly placed Republican official. No one I know locally had any awareness of such a memo until ThinkProgress published it. Those explosions of outrage were real, the same as they were at Carnahan's event.

4) you want astroturf - watch the livestream of Carnahan's event where lobbyists and putative heads of coalitions stood and read prepared remarks that all stated how important this bill was. Compare that with the 30 some people who stood and spoke from the heart at McCaskill's town hall.

Your constant assertions that the St Louis Tea Party events are dupes of corporate special interests is insulting and wrong. I went that night because I actually read the first House version of the bill, as did many of the other speakers. That put's us up on you, and Carnahan, and their staffers.

At this point, repeating these lies without asking the people involved is blatantly dishonest. You don't get to pretend to be a reporter covering local politics if you're writing propaganda. This post is designed to be some kind of expose, but all it does is state easily obtainable facts from people not hiding their involvement, while smearing them with conspiratorial and insulting chatter about funded corporate interests.

Find a check stub, and you can write this. Until then, it's propaganda.

[Jim Durbin]

Bob MacGuffie is not with Freedom Works, and Think Progress made the story up out of thin air - and you bought it, hook, link, and sinker.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/think_progress_msnbc_manufactu.asp

Next time pick up a phone before reporting (gasp) astroturfed messages from left wing sites.

[Jaelithe]

Mr. Durbin,

Don't you have your own blog? If you'd like to write any more post-length comments essentially calling me stupid, a liar and a plagiarist for reporting verifiable information that has been repeatedly covered in the national news media and clearly citing my sources, I suggest you do so on your own site. If you really want traffic, maybe the whole St. Louis Tea Party could call me and the other people trying to expose organizations that are spreading misinformation on health care reform Nazi informers, for good measure:

http://stlouisteaparty.com/2009/08/04/nazi-snitches/

Oh wait, you guys already did.

Here is Think Progress with more details on the memo, explaining how it was distributed to the Tea Party Patriots listserv:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/inside-the-tea-partiers-anti-health-care-organizing-campaign.php?ref=fpblg

And the Minnesota Independent:

http://minnesotaindependent.com/41134/no-revolt-as-tea-party-activists-try-to-rattle-ellison-at-health-care-forum

Here is the Tea Party Patriots website, where, at the bottom, they list FreedomWorks as a partner:

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/

Here is a FreedomWorks blog post openly encouraging people to disrupt town hall meetings, praising people who booed and screamed to interrupt the Secretary of Health and Human Services:

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/nswift/specter-gets-schooled

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