I'm posting this diary to help start an organizing process to counter the anti health care tea baggers at town halls.
First, I'm highlighting the infamous tea bagger strategy memo by from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer with the FreedomWorks website Tea Party Patriots, exposed and publicized here by TPM, because the memo shows more about the tea bagger's organizing strategies and objectives that we need to examine in order to counter organize.
Second, I urge folks to keep up on the town hall events and other tea bagger anti health care activities by diarying about when they will occur. I am providing a link below to their site where we can see where they'll be striking next. It's state by state, so I suggest people start diarying about town hall events in each state. Another option is to look at all events held each week in each state, but that would take some amount of work to put together that kind of diary if some folks can do it.
By examining the teabagger's own instruction memo, we can organize counter strategies:
Teabagger strategy:
People should be asked to meet in the parking lot of the hall a half hour before the scheduled start.
Proposed Counterstrategy:
***Come early then, to a town hall and take a look and assess the group (their size, attitude, etc.) before they come in. This could come in handy to ask the town hall organizers to check ID's for district residents only, and to come up with other strategies for dealing with the group.***
Teabagger strategy:
You could schedule a press conference 20 minutes before the Town Hall is scheduled to begin... have someone available to read a prepared statement and answer questions.
Proposed Counterstrategy:
This should be countered by going straight up to any media interviewing this group and demanding they interview you as well, where you can denounce the group as outside agitators bussed in. We need to aggressively counter and inform any local media being attempted to be monopolized by these groups, especially considering we will be representing local opinion while they are carpetbagging nutjobs.
The team should meet outside the hall... [and] the team should also be advised to spread out inside the hall but should try to get seats in the front half. The Rep wIll inevitably start picking people toward the front.
Proposed Counterstrategy:
Knowing this, we can employ people to take those front seats ourselves and block these jerks from monopolizing them, as well as disrupt their strategies. By assertively but respectfully disrupting their script, we can confuse and disorient them.
Let's now take a look at and be aware of the teabagger's objectives and try to counter them:
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' principle... We want the independent thinkers to leave the hall with doubts about the Democrat solutions continually proposed by the national leadership.
Now you can see the important role that chanting slogans and making noise plays in making it seem a large amount of the audience opposes reform.
To counter that, encourage town hall organizers to call for no chanting of slogans and boot people out who do, or if not possible, then organize our supporters to chant and drown out the loonies.
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 tallow-up with a shout-out. Don't carry on and make a scene - just
short intemlittent 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 goal is to rattle him, get him off his personal script and agenda.
Note how they are trying to disrupt without getting so out of hand they'd be kicked out. What we can do to counter this is to get clarification on the rules of participation at these events from event organizers, and if the teabaggers break the rules, call for evicting them.
Note they want press attention:
When the session ends, those who asked effective questions should seek out any press remaining at the hall, providing their names for attribution-- you may be quoted in the
press article
Of course the counter to this is to do the same for our side, and point out the tea baggers are not from our disctrict and don't reflect local opinion.
And what are the teabaggers' objectives?:
If the gameplan above is implemented the resulting impact will likely be:
A Rep and his staff set back on their heels, recognizing that people in their district... are angry about the socialist agenda... After a couple of these sessions one of the weaker ones may consider swaying from the party voting line.
Audience members expecting business-as-usual go home recognizing that many of their neighbors oppose the agenda...
Articles appearing in the local press will amplify the above points to the local
community rather than being puff pieces for the local Representative.
Just imagine what we can achieve if we see to it that every Representative in the nation who has supported the socialist agenda has a similar experience!
We can counter their objectives by letting representatives know that the tea bagger disrupters do not represent the district. Come armed with poll numbers in your district on health reform and speak out on that, and also hand it to rep staff and local media covering the event.
Let's get on top of tracking and diarying where town hall meetings are and get organized to show our presence and counteract and marginalize the teabaggers:
Keep track of town hall meetings here at FDL, and here at the Tea Baggers's site find out where they will be showing up: scroll down the page to Groups and Events By State and click on your state to find events. Take a look at California, for example, they are targeting 12 town hall events from July 25 through September. They are organized, we just have to counter organize, improvise, and not be intimidated. Remember, we win when we're nonviolent, respectful and keep our heads on straight.
Post publication update:
Today's Rec List diary on the same topic,Tea Baggers FAIL to disrupt Health Care meeting lessons shared, was so outstanding I have to link to it, so anyone reading this again looks at the lessons learned.