Month: July 2010

Tea Party Express is the astroturf group operated by the Republican Party PR group, Russo Marsh & Rogers, that coordinated corporate-funded bus tour rallies around the country last year. Mark Williams, who resigned as the group’s chairman last month but is still deeply involved in the astroturfing activities, attacked the NAACP in an NPR interview yesterday, after the venerable civil rights group passed a resolution at its annual meeting condemning tea party leaders for coddling racists:

“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history,” Williams said.

Sarah Palin, the tea party’s de facto supreme leader, went on Fox and demanded that Pres. Obama, whom she described as “half-white” and “half black,” refudiate the NAACP resolution. She also issued a rebuke of the resolution on her Facebook page:

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“My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with the facts.” Apparently, there’s more to that cute little expression than one might think. Indeed, when it comes to the way humans’ brains work, it seems to be an accurate description, according to some scientific inquiry conducted in 2005-06 — long before the rise of the Tea Party, and just about the time U.S. political discourse devolved into dismissive partisanship.

According to an article from the Boston Globe, facts can and often do, to use the scientific term, “backfire”:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

The ramifications of this for an erstwhile democracy like ours are serious, as was evidenced during last summer’s series of “townhall meetings.” You remember — the yelling, the screaming, the epithets, the shouting down of our elected officials who simply were trying to chat with constituents. Facts really become the immutable truth smashing into the immovable object when they collide with our beliefs:

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