MISSION STATEMENT: The goals of the Eastern North Carolina Tea Party are not partisan. Our goal is not to be an accessory of either of the two major political parties, nor to be e foe. Our goal is GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM, motivated by a deep concern and love for our country and fortified by EDUCATION and taking the time to become informed on the issues that matter, whether it be at the state level, local level, or federal level.
In April 2009, the Tea Party movement, a grassroots movement comprised of conservative concerned citizens, began. It was founded on the following core principles:
- Limited government (limited by the words and express meaning of the Constitution)
- Fiscal responsibility
- Lower taxes
- Free Markets
- States’ Rights (the power of the States to effectively check the abuse of the federal government, the most effective of checks and balances; The Tenth Amendment)
- Originalism (the re-adoption of our Founding values and principles
- Personal responsibility
- Individual Liberty (the freedom to exercise our God-given and amendment rights
And the movement took off like wildfire, with groups starting almost immediately all across the county, always reminding their respective communities of the values that our country was founded on and the values that had once made us great.
The Eastern NC Tea Party was started primarily to educate members of our community and even those who serve in our various levels of government on the important responsibilities of government, as long as they are constitutional and legitimate. Our goal is that educated, informed, and concerned citizens will be the watchdogs over government that our Founders hoped they would be. As Nigel Farage, the father of the Brexit movement in Great Britain, emphatically proclaims: “Grassroots activism is how a people take back their country,” He has since joined FreedomWorks to help spread this message all across our country.
Nigel was able to remind FreedomWorks of the Brexit movement’s own struggles. The country went through a horrible period of fear and discouragement, culminating on the morning of March 30, 2019, when we awoke to a country that had still not left the European Union, despite then-prime minister Theresa May promising the nation 108 times that we would leave the EU on March 29. For a while, Brexit seemed lost. It was as though the greatest democratic exercise in Britain’s history was being squandered, mainly because of the weakness of Theresa May. What saved us, ironically, were the European Parliament elections of May 2019, which Britain was forced to take part in even though we had voted to leave the European Union three years before. For the purposes of these elections, I formed a new political party called the Brexit Party. We won the election handsomely even though the Brexit Party had only existed for a few months. This was possible because the anti-European Union grassroots following that I had built up over the previous 25 years was ready on standby. Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media and the political elites, these people had not changed their view; they were determined to leave the EU—even if they had to make this clear via an election that they should not have had to participate in. Grassroots organizations and activism works !!
The Eastern North Carolina Tea Party welcomes discussions and learned discourse; we do NOT discourage it. We are NOT politically correct because to be so means we believe in or tolerate the suppression of free speech and we would be a party to the propagation of lies, the rejection of science (immutable laws of nature), fraudulent history, and to the misrepresentation or deletion of facts. The great Thomas Sowell was a Marxist as a young economics student. In fact, he finished college still considering himself a Marxist. When asked why he finally rejected it, he answered simply: “Facts.”
The Eastern North Carolina Tea Party stands for constitutionally-limited government, free markets, the rule of law (equally applied to everyone), fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, education free from federal government intervention, the right to keep and bear arms (the Second Amendment), the right of Free Speech and the right of Conscience (First Amendment), the right to freely exercise one’s religion and have it influence one’s views (the First Amendment), the separation of sovereign responsibilities as between the States and the federal government (the Tenth Amendment), and States’ Rights (including the sovereign right to nullify and refuse to enforce unconstitutional, abusive, or arbitrary acts, policies, or federal judicial rulings), and it faithfully supports everything articulated in the Declaration of Independence (it is our moral compass and the foundation on which we built the government in DC by delegating certain limited powers to it with the Constitution, and an honest, original, and textual interpretation of the Constitution by the court system. We the People formed a Perfect Union back in 1787 the US Constitution was ratified and adopted. We the People viewed it then as a COMPACT firm and unyielding (and NOT as a “living, breathing document,” which is the evil and insidious brain-child of liberal and progressive judges to mold and transform the Constitution from the bench…. to effect an end-run around the Constitution, by not having to confirm to Article V, which is the constitutional and only legitimate way to amend or alter the meaning of the words and provisions in the Constitution.
The Eastern North Carolina Tea Party believes, as the Founders believed, that the primary role of government is to secure our individual rights, regulate commerce among the 50 states, and to keep our country (and its citizens) safe and secure as a limited government. We still believe in that ideal.
If we don’t take a vested interest in our country, in what’s going on around us, and if we aren’t willing to be active citizens and fight for what is right and necessary, then we can be fairly sure that we will lose this last greatest place on Earth for human freedom. As President Ronald Reagan once said: ““Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
THE BIRTH OF THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT (2009)
The event that led to the birth of the Tea Party movement occurred on February 19, 2009 when CNBC commentator Rick Santelli referenced the Boston Tea Party in his rant against Obama’s mortgage relief plan – his infamous Bail-Out plan. Speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli cried: “The government is promoting bad behavior! Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?! This is America!” He questioned whether the government has the authority to bail people and businesses out. He then proposed a Tea Party-type response to the government’s intervention in the housing market. He called on all those opposed to such government over-reach to hold Tea Party rallies in their towns and cities on April 15 – Tax Day. And that rant by Santelli gave birth to the Tea Party movement. All across the country, with the same energy that Santelli displayed on that day in February, Tea Party groups sprang up almost immediately all across the country. The Eastern NC Tea Party in Pitt County was started that same year and has been going ever since.