The tax day tea party at Augusta Expoland in Fishersville turned into conspiracyfest lowlighted by a rambling speech about black helicopters and unmanned drones used by the federal government to take down the Twin Towers on 9/11 and additional such nonsense.
You know how I know? Well, no, I didn’t read it in the papers or get it from the two local TV stations that were there. It was local conservative bloggers who gave us the real inside story.
And folks in the mainstream media wonder why people say they’re irrelevant, and not reading and watching and generally caring what they have to say.
“Wednesday at Augusta Expoland, the parking lot was full,” local blogger Mike Judge, aka Fishersville Mike, posted to his blog after Wednesday’s Augusta Expo tea party. “The chairs were mostly filled and people milled about. Plenty of tea bags, homemade signs and passion. Probably 300 people, many who obviously knew each other. Young and old, a cross-section of Augusta County.
“Then Michael Nash got up to speak. The man sure can suck the excitement out of a room,” wrote Mike, a regular commenter on our AFP site, who reported that Nash, the organizer of the event, got three applause lines for his trouble – “when he prayed, mentioned Glenn Beck, and said he was concluding. The rest was quite confusing,” Mike wrote.
Blogger Steve Harkonnen picked things up from there, explaining that Nash went into a “rant about how 9/11 was done by our government….how unmanned drones hit the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and that there was no one on those planes.”
Harkonnen wrote that he stood up and voiced his concerns aloud. “‘YOU’RE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST,’ I yelled out. ‘9/11 WAS CAUSED BY ISLAMISTS,’ and that’s when people started yelling ‘LET HIM SPEAK!'”
The News Virginian story confirmed the outburst, sort of. “The crowd mostly listened, except for a single outburst,” reporter Tony Gonzalez related deep into his account, which was headlined “Protest fills Expoland” with the subhead “Patriotism, petitions put ‘fire in the belly.'”
The “fire in the belly” quote came from Nash, who if you didn’t know otherwise from Fishersville Mike and Harkonnen only had sensible things to say, like this from Gonzalez’s story: “I care so much about the people and their children,” Nash said, “and what we’re leaving for posterity.”
Or this from his interview with NBC29: “We want the people that are currently up on constitutional issues, have a real fire in their belly and get that network together, get it working, get full of information and then get the power back to the people, the way it has supposed to have been all along.”
Nothing about the 9/11 conspiracies and the rest from WHSV-TV3 or the News Leader, either.
For the record, the Leader wasn’t even on hand for the event, though it did give play to a tea party in Staunton.
(Maybe the layoffs and furloughs have them too short-staffed to cover more than one event at a time on a given day.)
You’d have a hard time believing the credentialed media were in the same room as the bloggers, who it must be said didn’t take time out of their busy days to expose the tea parties as being a fraud or anything of that nature. Quite the contrary, Judge and Harkonnen had every reason not to share the fires in their bellies after the meeting, because doing so would ostensibly provide fodder for people like me to go on about how “I told you so,” et cetera, regarding what was expected from progressives at these events.
Even so, they told us what they saw. Why the silence from the mainstream media? People who had been looking forward to these tea parties for weeks left in droves because they had wanted to protest the direction the country is going in and got instead a paranoid rant that Matt Damon couldn’t make believable.
Isn’t that the story, or at least a key part of the story?
“Protest fills Expoland: Patriotism, petitions put ‘fire in the belly'”? So that paranoid rant about our government killing civilians on 9/11 is “patriotic”?
Shame on you guys, and kudos to Judge and Harkonnen for telling it like it is.
– Story by Chris Graham
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