We should start calling the tea party what it really is: a cult.

[Initech]

And a dangerous and scary cult at that.

[Posteritatis]

1. The emotive language to useful language ratio is a bit too high in general as is. (nt)

[anonymous171]

2. It's not a cult and it is not scary.

[Initech]

5. How is it not a cult?

They have a charismatic leader who is controlling the minds of his followers (Glenn Beck) and a central like-minded mindset, and their members all seem to behave exactly the same. The only thing they lack that would make them a certified cult is a compound.

[anonymous171]

7. They are far too public to be a cult. Also Glenn Beck is hardly their only "leader"

[onehandle]

3. Hate group. Cults are less likely to be racist. nt

[Tailormyst]

4. It's not a cult

It's an organization with ideas I find disgusting and offensive. But it is not a cult.

[Brickbat]

6. I find them neither dangerous nor scary. Nor a cult.

[YOY]

8. +1

Not even dangerous to themselves...

[Initech]

11. Read this thread, look at the dictionary definition of cult, then try to explain that they aren't:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7914097

Key paragraph:

Although Liberty Central is a nonpartisan group, its website shows an affinity for conservative principles. Her biography notes that Thomas is a fan of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, author of "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America."

"She is intrigued by Glenn Beck and listening carefully," the bio says.

Dictionary definition of cult:

cult
 
 /kʌlt/ Show Spelled
–noun a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.

[Brickbat]

13. Listening carefully to someone makes you a cult member?

Put the hyperbole down there, son.

[CountAllVotes]

9. they are a bunch of stupid fools

with tea bags hanging in their faces.

What a bunch of asswholes at best!

:kick:

[The Gunslinger]

10. I call it the corporations private militia.

And they are dangerous. I talked to the the other day who in all seriousness said he hopes Obama socialistic healthcare goes through so they can finally storm the white house. They are highly misinformed racist gun nuts who can't wait to finally use their guns.

[Kalun D]

12. The tea party is just a distraction

from the ongoing corporate as*-raping of the working class

We should start calling the white house and congress what they really are.

Corporate Whore Houses.

because spineless, and aiding and abetting of the corporations they are.

[marions ghost]

14. I think you could say

there are cult-like elements to the teabag "movement." It doesn't fit the narrowest definition maybe, but there is a connection in the behavior.

People join cults out of fear, when they have no anchor in their lives. This is the same hardcore cult of Boosh, morphed into an updated entity. Nothing different, just harnessing the same old, same old.

[Liberation Angel]

15. Tea Klux Klan

that's what I call them

ignorant right wing bigots and haters

[MisterP]

16. the Comaroffs' "Millennial Capitalism" is pretty good in showing how cultishness is almost a

requirement of modernity, because it sees itself as the Great Transformation, when everything will come to fruition and we will enter into the Earthly Paradise
this appeared in George Gilder's "telecosm" of ever-accelerating information, capital, and people, culminating in a singularity, the technocracy eviscerated in "Brave New World," Poppy Bush and Fukuyama's frozen-in-time neolib New World Order, Norman Borlaug's techno-utopian agribusiness-as-Savior (Africa will prosper if it only allows GMOs), SF's pipe dreams of "escape into space" where everything will be different and humanity will flourish and "evolve" for a trillion years, and Julian Simon's eternal growth where any problems are perpetually averted (the poststructuralists' "deferral") through ingenuity and technology; even neoliberals like Obama and Kerry had their little cults during election season, and the ConservaDems and inverted totalitarians have cultish enforcers (with a Devil in the shape of "theocrats," GOPers, and teabaggers)

this cultishness appears in the very language of Progress, where things get ever-better as knowledge, technology, and modernization grow and spread: withdrawal from population growth and intensive farming (increasing in yield and farmland) are unthinkable because "defeatist" and un-"Progressive"