Three national-level conservative groups, all with slightly different agendas, are guiding what is known as the Tea Party movement. All are quick to tell you that the movement is a bottom-up affair and that its grassroots cred is real.
They are:
1.FreedomWorks, the conservative action group led by Dick Armey;
2. dontGO, a tech savvy free-market action group that sprung out of the oil-drilling debate in the House of Representatives;
3. Americans for Prosperity, an issue advocacy/activist group based on free market principles.
Conservative bloggers, talk show hosts, and other media figures have attached themselves to the movement in peripheral capacities.
All three groups vehemently deny that the movement is a product of AstroTurfing--fake grassroots activism organized from the top down--as some on the left have claimed.
They will tell you that citizens-turned-activists, upset with President Obama's economic agenda and the financial bailout, have been calling them, asking for help and how they can organize protests.
The movement, they say, is entirely organic: they are mostly providing help and resources to this new class of outraged conservative free-market populists, some of whom are their own members and some of whom are outsiders to politics with whom they've never communicated before--not even on an e-mail list.
FreedomWorks and dontGO seem to have taken ownership of the bulk of this coordination. The homepage of FreedomWorks' website now offers visitors a Google map of protests taking place across the country.
They say they know of 600 Tax Day protests for which they are providing resources. The group has used its e-mail list to augment the work of dontGO, which created the website www.taxdayteaparty.com in February.
dontGO, which was formed as an online rapid response team during the House of Representatives oil drilling debate says it is "tracking" 700 events under its aegis.
Americans for Prosperity says it has 24 state chapters that are organizing events. Overlap between all those numbers is quite likely: FreedomWorks clues its members to other protests in the area, so protesters can cooperate and conglomerate their events.
