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Not "always." I believe the Tea Party was a genuine grass-roots movement for at least a few weeks or months at the very beginning, before the Koch-suckers co-opted it. Frankly, it had a lot in common with Occupy Wall Street and I was holding out hope for a while that the two movements would merge.
Nah, sorry bud, it was always a corporate product aimed at reducing taxes on billionaires, organized by Koch organizations, and designed to look like it was grassroots as a disguise:
CSE = Citizens for a Sound Economy, Koch offered the role of Chairman of CSE to Ron Paul... So there was some blurring of the line between Ron Paul's 2008 campaign and later offshoots of CSE (which by that time was Chaored by Dick Cheney). CSE were doing the fundraising and organizing/publicity behind it (helps to have Phillip Morris on board for that type of thing).
It was always the same groups of billionaires and their adjacent politicians trying to not pay taxes.
Sometimes the PR, sentiment, and spectecal is just so good that it lasts a long time in memory... And no doubt the movement had genuine believers (I know Ron Paul did), but the whole crew were running with the same aims, sharing the same funding sources.
It's the whole Libertarian and Conservatives pretending to have values but actually serving billionaires. Of whoch the left has its own version. It all covers over much more serious structural and foundational issues which ideology alone can't touch.
I don’t think so, it was a well funded group from the get go. At the time there was pretty strong consensus that there were rich organizers starting the tea party groups from scratch.
The Koch brothers were documented backers of candidates in our district in 2009-10. Them winning so many seats after Obama was elected wasn’t just a coincidence.