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GLENN: In today’s New York Times, The Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse For Rebellion on Right.

STU: Seems like a balanced beginning, isn’t it?

GLENN: Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs watching government lift struggling families and job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college. But all of that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping… change. And multiple fronts before her son lost his job and his house, Mrs. Stout said she woke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated, even manufactured by both parties to grab power. She was happily retired. She had never been active politically. But last April she went to her first tea party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard and nominated herself for president. "I was like, did I really just do that?" She recalled. Then she went even further. Darkness is about to envelope her. Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her tea party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project, the John Birch Society, Oathkeepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement. Militia movement?

When Friends of Liberty held its first public event, Mrs. Stout listened as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Mrs. Stout said she feels as though she had been handed a roadmap to rebellion. Members of her family said she’s disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories! But Mrs. Stout said she’s never felt so engaged. "I can’t go on being the shy quiet me. I need to stand up!" It goes on and on and on and on and on, for twelve pages. Frequently led by political neophytes who prize independents and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession.

Look, we’re getting together: Okay, all right, here’s our story. When the recession hit, we started worrying about jobs. "Nobody’s going to believe that." Shhh! If we all say it, they will have to believe it. "But how about some of us say we were awakened on September 11th?" That’s good, that’s good. Let’s go there. Some of you do the September 11th and I think and then some of you say you woke up at the border and then others will say the recession! We’ll be able to fake them all out! It will be great! And then we will take over the world.

PAT: You know why they believe that way? Because that’s how they operate.

GLENN: It is.

PAT: That’s how the left operates.

GLENN: This is often the point when tea party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance they explored… the Federalist Papers! They explored exposés on the Federal Reserve! Some of them even looked into the works of Ayn Rand! And then there were those that went to constitutional seminars. It’s true! Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn into a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold, survival, food, crazy! In anticipation of the worst for others, though, the transformation seems to amount to trying a new ideological outfit on, embracing the rhetoric and buying the books. By the way, Arguing with Idiots available at bookstores everywhere. Tea party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some oh, I know given their relative passive nature of mostly the Bush years. In sum, though, their main answer: Strict adherence to the Constitution, would comfort every card carrying ACLU member. Yes, yes, it would. But their vision of the federal government that is frequently at odds with one that both parties have constructed. Yes. Has nothing to do with the White House having a new approach and attacking harder those that oppose the White House.

STU: Those couldn’t be connected. There’s no way those two could possibly be.

PAT: That is what I hate about you! You take two plus two and you’ll tell us it equals four.

STU: Yeah!

PAT: That’s so ridiculous!

GLENN: I know.

PAT: Just say two plus two and leave it alone!

GLENN: That’s why I said completely unrelated.

PAT: Thank you. Okay.

GLENN: Man, you are a conspiracy theorist.