How BigGovernment.com and FreedomWorks Took Down the Voice of Geico

UPDATE: The headline of this post has been corrected since publication.

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The Tea Party community and its ethos of decentralized leadership and individual freedom is under an orchestrated attack from left-wing apparatchiks, elected Democrats, and their cheerleaders in the liberal media. Having suffered through bomb scares, hostile abuse, death threats, and racial slurs, we are now called every epithet in Webster’s, from “phony,” to “astroturf,” “redneck,” “racist,” “domestic terrorist,” “mentally retarded,” “seditionist,” and “potential killer.”All this because we choose to petition our government in peaceful protest for a redress of policy grievances? For practicing our First Amendment rights, they smear our moral character. It’s as if they are afraid to debate their big government ideas on the merits.

Its time to draw a line in the sand. Its time to call out the bad actors, the crashers, and the haters. We judge people as fellow individuals, based on the content of their character, and based on their individual actions. We will self-police our community and let openness, sunlight, and transparency shine the spotlight on individuals behaving badly.

So when we received the hostile message left on a FreedomWorks’ staffer’s phone by D.C. Douglas (a.k.a., Lance Baxter), with return phone number, we checked him out. He is the voice actor who does the Geico ads. (Not the gecko, thank goodness). We posted his message calling us and all tea partiers “mentally retarded” on biggovernment.com. We asked tea partiers to call him and Geico customer service and let them know that they were not, in fact, mentally retarded killers.

Geico cut D.C. Douglas loose.

Now the perpetrator claims to be the victim. Me, I’m a “douche bag.”

There is power in accountability. You have it, that power to speak up, to act in non-violent civil disobedience. As the Reverend C.L Bryant asked the crowd of 40,000 peaceful protestors gathered on the Washington Mall at last Thursday’s Tax Day Tea Party: “Is there any one out there that will stand up for American principle?”