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naraburns  nihil supernum  5mo ago (text post)   Edited 5mo ago   4319 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2026

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@helmut_hofmeister:

@naraburns:

@George_E_Hale:

@Rov_Scam:

Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026

@pbmonster:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@RandomRanger:

@FtttG:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026

@100ProofTollBooth:

@P-Necromancer:

@clo:

@JeSuisCharlie:

@gattsuru:

@urquan:

@oats_son:

Natalism & Co.

@LazyLongposter:

@gog:

@self_made_human:

@RenOS:

@OracleOutlook:

Contributions for the week of February 16, 2026

@RandomRanger:

@quiet_NaN:

@Closedshop:

@urquan:

@OliveTapenade:

Contributions for the week of February 23, 2026

@TitaniumButterfly:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@birb_cromble:

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The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.

In the first half of 2009, the Tea Party was a libertarian-coded anti-bailout movement, with "bailout" defined broadly to include any kind of support for troubled banks, any kind of support for troubled homeowners, the welfare state, fiscal stimulus, efforts to protect jobs at GM etc. It quickly became de facto a partisan Republican thing because a Democratic trifecta was doing the bailouts, and the Republicans who had supported the 2008 bailouts were no longer relevant. It is unsurprising that a pre-existing libertarian-coded Republican movement would lead the opposition to Obamacare.

There was a lot of anti-establishment horseshoing going on in 2009-10, with Occupy, the Tea Party and the emerging alt-right (particularly via Milo Yiannopoulos) all swapping ideas and people with Ron Paul libertarians (though not, I think, Paul himself) at the centre of the network.

I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.

The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.

Yes, skipped over the initial stuff that was a backlash against Bush and the Democrats doing Swampy uni-party things because it didn't really address the point he was making which urquan phrased as

I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.

But I've seen often described less charitably as "mad he was black and president."

And my point was well he was actually doing a lot of bad things.

I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.

I think this is too uncharitable to the tea partiers and FARRR too charitable to their enemies. A Democrat accusing their political opponents of racism is synonymous with them talking. The media treating these accusations as "plausible" is no different, they are largely DNC stenographers and have been for decades. Maybe there was degradation of the tea party's intellectual movement as it got larger, but mostly IMO it lost any momentum it had when Romney/Ryan lost while acting nerdy and not actually fighting during the campaign. Thats what opened up the opportunity for MAGA/Trump because the only appetite left on the right was for someone who actually fights and didn't care about fake rules made up by liberal media.

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