Passed in 2009, Rick Santelli had a rant on the floor of the chicago stock exchange. He said our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves and we needed to have a Tea Party Like they did. Rantre talking about his and we decided to have a Conference Call after his rant, 20 of 2009n february for about 23 people. Had 48lowing friday, we tea parties around the country with artie 5000 people in attendance. Where were you living . I was living in atlanta. There were two other people from atlanta on that Conference Call. We knew there would be at least one tea party in atlanta. What was your status . One of the things that Rick Santelli said, he asked the people who were standing behind him, if they wanted to pay for a home that their neighbors could no longer afford. Really is what motivated me to be involved. That part. My husband and i had just moved into a rental home in february of 2009. We had come out of personal bankruptcy and lost everything. Bankruptcy,fter the we were offered fannie or freddie money, i dont remember which it was, to bring us current in our mortgage. We realized we had a house that we could no longer afford and it wasnt right for our neighbors to be paying for a house that we couldnt afford with their tax dollars. We wound up losing our house as well as everything else, moved into a rental home and were starting over. How did you go bankrupt . With was related to issues personal guarantees. What was the business . Temporary staffing. In other words, recruiter type . It was for rare houses warehouses and factories. What were you doing when he was in business . Initially, i used to work for do programming. I am a complete and total geek. I like politics and computers and technology. I programmed for home depot and was a project manager. I left Corporate America as we went to fertility treatments. Going time that we were through bankruptcy, i was a stayathome mom. Fertility treatments . We ran into issues like many couples do when trying to get pregnant. Have some assistance. It worked out ok. We have twins now. Often,ve heard this so fertility treatments often end up with twins . They increase ovulation so sometimes there is more than one egg. So ited to have twins could not have been more pleased. I found out a week into the pregnancy that i was pregnant with two. When do you remember having your First Political thought . Wow. I think really my First Political thought was when i was nine or 10 years old during the hostage crisis in iran. Georgia and jimmy carter was our president at the time. I remember watching the news and hearing about that and asking my father questions. He answered my questions instead of treating me like a child and blowing off my questions. He went into a lot of detail. I just kept watching the news and asking more questions. I started paying attention to elections and Current Evidence throughout high school. Bug you get that political in your body, it is hard to let it go. What were your mom and dad doing when you were nine years old . My father is still a methodist minister. He was a methodist minister and my mom was a stayathome mom, very active in pta. How many kids in the family . I am the oldest of four. How would you define the way you were raised . Give me some things that happened that made the difference to you. Wow. I grew up in the church. Literally in the church. We lived in a parsonage that the church owned. We moved a few times in my childhood. Ministersen as some children and certainly not as often as military kids, but several times. I grew up in atlanta and a smaller city in northwest georgia. A lot of the experiences i had during that time impacted me. Atlanta, i was in a really large school and larger high schools. Then i moved to rome and it was a much smaller school. I got the experience of a large metropolitan area and a smaller city. Which do you prefer . The larger metropolitan area. There is a little bit more anonymity. In a smaller city, everyone knows you and everything you do. You graduated from high school what year . 1988. Then where did you go . I went first to Reinhardt College in georgia. Then i went on and graduated from the university of georgia. Managementn mis Information Systems and started Programming Computers after graduating from college. Where did you meet your husband . At Reinhardt College. What were the circumstances . We both were freshmen together. Campus,t, you lived on so we lived on campus and it was a small school. You knew everybody. We just got to know each other and were pretty good friends and started dating about a month before the kindness of our sophomore year. We got engaged while we were seniors in college. What was it like to go bankrupt . It is a little bit of a scary process. You dont know exactly what is going to happen. Exactly where i was when my husband said he was going to have to shut his business down. We had discussed that if he did that, the cash flow would stop and the money borrowing that was going on would stop as well, but it forced us to have to file for bankruptcy. It was on fathers day in 2007, i believe. We were on our way to brunch. He said that he was going to have to close the business. We werepoint, i knew kind of headed that way. Miscarriage. D a span, i gotwomonth pregnant, had a miscarriage, close the business and realized we were going to be filing for bankruptcy. It was a very, very stressful period in our lives. We focused on what was good. We focused on what we could do. Realized especially because of the upbringing i had, i knew the material things are not everything. And familyionships and our children that were more important. Were you ever out of money . We first close of the business, we had enough to get by for a while. The summer of 2008, we still did not have enough money together that we could actually file for bankruptcy. It took us until october of that year to have enough to file for bankruptcy. Because we were dealing with so much from his business, it wasnt just a simple bankruptcy. There were a lot of things that we had to deal with and we needed to make sure we had the proper legal representation. Where it wasoint in the middle of the recession, he was looking for additional work, there wasnt a lot of work to be found. We were watching neighbors in our community losing their homes. We realized we were looking at the same prospect. We wound up starting to clean our neighbors homes and repair computers. And imber sitting down said, we have got cleaning supplies, we have a copy machine , we have blank paper and we know how to repair computers. Why dont we put a flyer together . We did that and put flyers around our neighborhood and got some business that way, so that we would have enough money to pay for utilities and food. Point, what we were looking for was enough money to pay for utilities and food and keep the basic necessities under control. What kind of money were you making cleaning houses . Between 75 and 100 a house. It took a few hours to clean a house. What did you think about then . I just thought, you have to sometimes roll up your sleeves and do what it takes to make ends meet. I wanted to make sure i was setting an example for my children. You dont look at difficult iscumstances and think, woe me and have a pity party. You have a little pity party but then you get over that and get to work and figure out what is it that i can do and how can i move onto the next thing. About, were you thinking the cause of all this . How much of it did you blame on yourself or on outsiders . I had a very good friend you know you have a good friend who can be honest with you and tell you things that you may not even be ready to hear. Right as we were closing the business, he was also going through some financial crisis of his own. He said, here is the went into business, he chose to do that. You chose to support him. At the end of the day, you have to accept responsibility for it. You have to be able to accept that responsibility because then you can move past this. Dont want to stay in a place where you are angry or frustrated. That is what i needed to hear. It is easy to go back and point blame at other people but at the himof the day, i supported when he made the decision of starting a business earwig and a business. And the marriage survived all that . How many years . We have been married for 22 years. And the kids are 11. We have to get into the tea party. I am going to jump to a speech you made a couple months ago at the western conservative summit. Here you are several years later in front of the public. Unfortunately, those in washington are responding to the border crisis in the way they always do. The bureaucracy, concentrate more power in washington, commission studies rather than taking action, and spend more of our hardearned tax dollars. Used to bailouts were pay off special interests. Bailout billion border rewards the president s allies, filled the centralized bureaucracy and concentrates more power in the hands of the government. Opposed to it even if it were free. We dont need it, we dont want it, we oppose it. No border bailout. [applause] how did you get there . And what was that conference . That was the western conservative conference in denver. It is a conference that he Party Patriots sponsored for the last two years. There are a couple thousand people that attend and it is a really good event. I was excited to be able to speak again this year. Patriots are literally just coming from being down on the border in texas. We are doing a documentary right now on the border states of america. Our documentary team was down on the border, meeting with sheriffs and local residents, ranchers, and interviewing them and finding out what is going on on the border. What is the crisis that we are hearing about with the unaccompanied minors . And it isk from that all i could think about. I was calling everyone on our team and i said, i have to talk about this and make sure people understand what is going on on our border. There are american citizens who own property, some of them for generations, and their homes are being vandalized. They have crime happening in their backyard. We should behat seeing happen in our country. How did tea Party Patriots start and how does that fit into the whole Tea Party Movement . Tea Party Patriots started in large part because we had an outofcontrol debt and our government is overspending and we have so much debt in america right now. It started in large part based on economic issues. We wanted to make sure we have more personal freedom, Economic Freedom and a debtfree future. When it comes to the border, part of the way you have personal freedom in america is that you obey the law. For a country to have laws, that means you have to respect the constitution. You have to respect the laws that are in place. We are not seeing that happen on the border. 2013 when the senate was pushing the gang of eight bill, the tea Party Patriots had been very much , a billto obama care that moved through without Many Committee hearings and was pushed through even though the majority of americans did not want that to happen. We watched the same thing start to happen with the gang of eight bill. It was this massive bill. We were hearing reports that it would be over 1000 pages. Senators had not read the bill. They were trying to rush it through. It took a little longer in the senate than planned. Cost, weincrease our would have more costs associated with it. It was a bill that was not being read. It was a bill that was not respecting our constitution. We realize that if we were on thoseo obama care principles alone, we had to be opposed to this bill. Who would be the most surprised that you are in front of a crowd like this and helped organize the tea Party Patriots . Teachers . R, mother, is this where you were headed all along . I am not sure of the answer to that. In some ways, i am because i never set out to be a public speaker or to run a National Organization with politics. At other times, i think there are many things along the way that led to where i am. I have been in front of audiences and Church Congregations and done public speaking in some form my entire life. Did your dad ever had you get up in front of the church . I did speak in front of the church from time to time. Not so much my dad was putting me there, but as part of the youth group or whatever i would have along with other teenagers in the church. Then, when i get involved in an activity, i mentioned earlier that i went through fertility treatment. We joined a Fertility Support Group in georgia. Becoming the state president for that. I tend when i get involved in things to take on leadership roles. An office for the tea Party Patriots somewhere . We do have an office outside atlanta. We have about 11 people who work in that office. We have a few other employees around the country who work out of their homes. Most of the staff, except for the people who do most of our programming and technology work, travel a good bit of the time. We go around the country, meet with local groups, meet with leaders in the community, and we do everything we can to support the local groups around the country. You were talking about how you were tweeting friends after the santelli rant on cnbc. Were you watching it . I did not watch it live. I heard about the rant going in between houses as we were cleaning houses. I heard it on talk radio. I dont remember if it was Rush Limbaugh or sean hannity. I started tweeting from my phone. I got emails about it. I was involved with two groups online that started right after the election in 2008. One was top conservatives on smartr and the other was politics. Those groups laid the Digital Foundation for us to organize. That is what i did. I didnt start this group. I participated in them. Started and wey were on that first Conference Call, i started volunteering to do things. Are they still alive . People still use that. It is one of the most followed tags on the centerright, to let people know that this tweet is something people should care about. They just politics, had a conference in atlanta a few weeks ago. We sponsor their evidence. The ladies who started that are friends of mine. What does it do . They focus primarily on conservative women and encouraging conservative women to get involved in the political process. You spoke at a rally in 2013 about the irs targeting conservative groups. Here is a little bit of that. You are making a difference and it shows. [applause] if we were not a force to be reckoned with, the ruling elite wouldnt have turned a blind eye and ignored us. Instead, they transformed the that manyn Agency People fear more than death, into a weapon against us. Weapon to set their sights on us, the people of america, because we want a better america. What is a patriot . Someone who loves our country. It doesnt matter what your political beliefs are. Peopleou think there are in the United States that dont love their country . I hope there are not. We probably have one of the most patriotic countries, if not the most patriotic in the world. One thing about americans is that people want to be free. We appreciate our freedom and we love the fact that we live here where we can be free. What is the ruling elite . Orthe people in washington in positions of power, whether they are elected or bureaucrats, who act as if they are better than the rest of us. As if the rules somehow dont apply to them. Power, whetherve it is positions of power because they are elected to office and they use that power to better themselves, even if they are not doing right for the rest of the country. How can you tell when somebody thinks they are better than you are . It is not as much when they think they are better than us, it is when they are abusing their power and the trust that is given to them. When you work for the government in america, we typically think of those people as public servants. We saw with the irs, these were not people who were serving the public. They were serving their own agenda and political ideology. They have taken their position of power and used it and abused who had theeople audacity to disagree with their political beliefs. You gave us an example of where the irs abused their power . What happened to tea Party Patriots, what we learned from the Inspector General is that ,he irs targeted groups something with the names tea party or patriots, they targeted groups Whose Mission statement said they wanted to make america better. The way that the targeting happened was that we were applying for a tax status through the irs. When you bring in money, you have to report that in some way. We were doing what we could to obey the law that the irs laid out. We applied for a tax status. Groups could, receive their tax status usually within three to four months. When the targeting began, they just delayed and delayed and then started asking all sorts of invasive questions. And questions that were not germane to the process. It took our organization three years to get its tax status. In 2009, it took three months. Did people show up and talk to you from the irs . They did not. In 2011, we hardly heard anything at all. It was radio silence. Even in that silence, that was part of the targeting. We couldnt act. We were applying for two different statuses and one of the statuses, if a person made a donation, they would get a write off on their taxes. 501c3. Collect moneyen because we didnt know if we were going to collect our tax status. People wouldnt want to donate if they had no clue how it would affect their personal taxes. There were ramifications and dominoes that would fall just by not doing anything. In 2012, we got a lot of questions that were prior to that required banker boxes full of printed material to send back to the irs. Based on those responses, they gave us even more questions. They were asking wer