Behind the scenes of these high-profile national events, Tea Party activists across the country organized in local chapters. They mobilized in elections. They ran candidates for county and state offices. They contacted their representatives. They challenged establishment candidates in the Republicans primaries. And they used blogs and social media sites to disseminate information to their followers. Sometimes they posted about upcoming events, but just as frequently they posted about policy. From these communications, the contours of a different rhetoric of conservatism emerged, emphasizing threats to America’s greatness, security, and Constitution. [...]
Using automated content analysis techniques, I asked a computer algorithm to search for the 100 most frequently occurring groups of words. We could think of these groups of words as themes or topics. It was entirely possible that given how geographically diffuse the Tea Party groups were, this algorithm would return nonsense instead of coherent topics. Instead, it produced some surprisingly cohesive themes. A little over half of Tea Party communications were about activism: challenging Republicans in primaries, contacting their representatives, attending meetings, sharing information, and so forth. Although this focus holds some insights about the Tea Party, the more relevant issue here is the way they discussed policy. [...]
Parallels are apparent between these themes and anti-media, make-America-great-again, threat-centric rhetoric of Trump, during and after his presidential campaign. This is not to say that Trump consciously borrows from the rhetoric of the Tea Party, but his rhetoric did not originate in a vacuum. Trump draws heavily from the advice of former Breitbart chair Steve Bannon, whose blog was the ninth-most-cited source by Tea Party websites between 2009 and 2015 (right after major Tea Party groups, the Constitution, and Glenn Beck himself), as can be seen in the figure below.
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