I've been critiquing the Tea Party since its first stirrings in 2009. I've blogged, tweeted, reported, and even given public lectures about its roots in the socially conservative New Right, its wealthy backers in corporate America, its close ties to the GOP establishment, its racist and anti-immigrant tendencies, and so on. I'd be happy to come to speak to your group on the subject.

As a health care blogger for the Media Consortium, I was denouncing the antics of the town hall mobs on a weekly basis. National leaders of the movement were sending out talking points with tips on how to shout down pro reform politicians. That summer, a pro-reform rep was burned in effigy. Legislators got death threats.

That summer the anti-reform leaders did everything they could to whip their supporters into a frenzied rage, including circulating lies about how Obama's plan included "death panels" to bump off elderly relatives and free abortions for all. Remember the folks who made a point of toting their guns at peaceful protests? It was a calculated display of intimidation.

I was scandalized, but no one seemed scandalized by me. Little did I know that a shadowy private listserv would be my ticket to notoriety.

Luckily for my brand, I also repeated these sentiments on now-defunct private email group called Journo-list. You may have heard of j-list, which was a group of about 400 liberal reporters, bloggers, and academics. Recently someone leaked a substantial portion of list's archives to the right-wing Daily Caller, which is republishing them to illustrate some kind of left wing media conspiracy. The Caller has been dribbling out "revelations" in small doses. With each new installment I was disappointed that my radical comments didn't make the news.

Yesterday, I finally got my wish. The Daily Caller finally leaked some of my comments. As I recall, this was part of a discussion about whether there was a fascist undercurrent to the town hall rabble rousing last summer. Some people thought the protesters were coming across that way, what with the loaded guns, the incessant preening macho bullshit, the burning in effigy, the revolutionary pretensions, the constant comparisons between Hitler and Stalin (tyrants anyone could feel good about removing by force) and President Obama and Speaker Pelosi, the racially charged conspiracy theories, and so on:

“I’m not saying [the Town Hall mobs] are capital F-fascists,” added blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, “but they don’t want limited government. Their desired end looks more like a corporate state than a rugged individualist paradise. The rank and file wants a state that will reach into the intimate [lives] of citizens when it comes to sex, reproductive freedom, censorship, and rampant incarceration in the name of law and order.” [Daily Caller]

I wish the reporter, Jonathan Strong, had contacted me for comment because I would have liked to expand on the point I was making in that email. The Tea Party isn't new, it's the same old conservative movement re-energized by a black president and an economic crisis. Therefore the same old contradictions that have always plagued American conservatism are manifest within this amorphous group of pissed off people.

If the Tea Party policy agenda were ever enacted, you'd see a simple repeat of the domestic policies of George W. Bush: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, bailouts, and heavy-handed religiously-motivated government interference in the lives of individuals from abortion to obscenity.