Primordial Teabagging

Like a political paleoanthropologist, Justin Elliott has traced the emergence of the modern teabagger back to the mid-1970s. Peering through the evolutionary mists, we see a simpler variant of the species, fending off disco and trying to survive the liberalism of Gerald Ford. The proto-teabagger would evolve into an anti-Obama birther, adapting new tools — like the informercial — to propagate the species.