Veterans Join Tea Party to Defend Constitution at Home

Veterans Join Tea Party to Defend Constitution at Home

On Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, veterans who are involved in the Tea Party movement joined Breitbart News Executive Chairman and host Stephen K. Bannon to discuss why they joined the movement to fight for the country at home after serving abroad. 

Christian Stevens, an Army veteran, said he often sees the same people at VFW and Tea Party meetings, and he emphasized that he took an oath to “protect against all enemies foreign and domestic–and Tea party is doing the domestic side.”

Mark Herr, an Air Force veteran, is involved in the Center for Self-Governance and the Mid-South Tea Party movement, and he told Bannon that he never understood the oath to the people of America until after he joined the military. He said there is a “sense of obligation to stand up and defend the republic so that the next generation can enjoy the freedom and liberties brought to us by the Founding Fathers.”

Stevens emphasized that the Constitution is a limiting document and what worries him is that he has seen countries abroad break apart because of too much government, and that is a major reason why he has been so involved in the Tea Party movement. 

Mark Hager, an Army veteran, also emphasized that the “commonality” among veterans in the Tea Party movement is they had to “give an oath to preserve the Constitution and save it from all enemies foreign and domestic,” and it was only fitting to protect the Constitution on the domestic side. 

Herr, the Air Force veteran, said that veterans have been galvanized because of the “realization that the Constitution is the most unique type of government in the history of mankind” in that it allows average citizens to “control institutional government.” 

“We are under a fundamental transformation of our current type of government,” he said. “I think that may explain why so many veterans are galvanizing around this movement. They want to preserve our type of government and prevent it from being fundamentally transformed into something new.”

Hager agreed, saying veterans in the Tea Party movement feel they have a loyalty to the hope and promise that has always been the Constitution, which allows the country to have a Congress, President, and Senate. 

Lt. Colonel Rick Moreland, an Army veteran, also said that when veterans are asked to be acknowledged at Tea Party organizations or meetings, “you see a heavy representation.” 

“In my training, the Constitution that we were sworn to defend is what the Tea Party is about,” he said before emphasizing that the Tea Party is about reducing the government to a “size that is within the Constitution.” 

Kurt Potter, an Army veteran, said he was inspired to be involved in the Tea Party movement after listening to Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of Wall Street in 2009, which he said motivated him to become more politically active and put “more skin in the game.”  

Talking about the future of the Tea Party movement, Moreland said the Tea Party has already in four years become “much more tech-savvy and much more effective in ways others than a street protest organization. They will continue to establish itself, probably on a high-tech plane.”

Potter said though the Tea Party has been criticized for being nativists, racists, and homophobes, he “doesn’t care about” those criticisms and portrayals because they are not accurate. He said Americans who have died abroad “didn’t lay down their lives so people can enjoy barbecue” at home, “but so that people can stand up and fight for liberty in their own country.”

He said there will always be that fight for liberty and emphasized that “we are responsible for our own destiny.”

Moreland agreed, emphasizing one of those liberties is being “able to speak free.” He said “freedom of speech” has to be defended, and it goes both ways. He said the Tea Party movement has a right to “say we want the government controlled by the Constitution” as much as Americans have a right to hurl invective at the movement.

The veterans all agreed that once the Tea Party better learns and grasps the political process, they will see the movement from a “self-governance” perspective and will not want to be controlled by established political parties. 

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