About
Tea Party Patriots (TPP) is a conservative nonprofit that offers an online umbrella for three separate organizations: Tea Party Patriots Action, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization with the mission “to equip Americans with the resources and training they need to be engaged citizens and effective activists…[who] are free to pursue their American Dream.” Tea Party Patriots Foundation is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit created “to promote the ideas of the Tea Party movement and to engage in charitable and educational activities. The third group, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, is a federal PAC “dedicated to empowering Americans to engage in our democracy and help preserve our rights and liberty.”
According to Accountable, TPP has accepted $4.29 million from GOP megadonor Richard “Dick” Uihlein since 2016.
Mother Jones has described the Tea Party as a political movement that united “Islamophobes, nativists, paramilitaries, Christian and white nationalists,” and Pew Research Center data from 2014–18 showed Tea Party members as among “Trump’s most stalwart Republican supporters.”
TPP co-founder Jenny Beth Martin remains active in leading the group and has proven to be as big a supporter of the Big Lie as of Trump himself.
January 6, 2021
- Tea Party Patriots was listed as one of 11 major sponsors of the March to Save America, the rally in Washington where Trump and other speakers fired up the crowd just before the mob attack on the Capitol.
The Big Lie
- TPP’s leader Jenny Beth Martin has been a consistent proponent of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by a Democratic conspiracy to remove Trump from office.
- According to Mother Jones, after the election the TPP website “became a clearinghouse for ‘Protect the Vote’ protests over ballot counting in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.”
- On Nov. 17, 2020, TPP posted a recording on Facebook of Martin pestering Georgia election officials with questions about the vote count. For no obviously discernible reason, TPP called the video a “BOMBSHELL” and described it as “futher [sic] indication that the Georgia recount is a total sham.”