ABSTRACT
Keli Carender started blogging in January 2009, just after Barack Obama took the oath of of¿ce. An underemployed math teacher and improv comic, she adopted the pen name “Liberty Belle” and called for conservatives to come out and oppose the Obama administration and take back America. She described herself as
She expressed distrust of government, arguing that Republicans could offer better answers to the nation’s pressing problems, and that their success in doing so was predicated upon pressure from the grassroots. In her ¿rst post, she described her goals, and her strategy for achieving them:
Articulate and dramatic, yet a novice to politics, Liberty Belle served as an icon for the emerging Tea Party movement (Ward 2010, Zernike 2010). In addition
to her blog, she organized demonstrations in Seattle, and theatrically confronted Congressman Norman Dicks in a town meeting about health care. Waving a $20 bill at Dicks, she demanded that he take her money-if he thought it was legitimate for government to take money from American citizens for health care. Dicks refused the offer, and the video of Carender confronting him went viral, generating more than 70,000 hits on YouTube, and more on conservative websites (Carender 2009b).
