Dunwoody GA Tea Party History

I started the Dunwoody GA tea Party in 2011 after I attended a “visioning” session on the Dunwoody Village strip mall.  There were about 300 citizens in attendance.  Dunwoody had adopted a “Williamsburg” look in its strip mall buildings and we liked that.  We had been a northern community in unincorporated DeKalb County in Atlanta Metro until 2009 when we became a city.

The city council hired a “consulting firm” to handle the citizen input meeting, but the meeting was rigged.  They had us vote on a series of pictures (A and B) that looked similar, but none of it was Williamsburg. I asked them about this, but got no answers.  They used the “Delphi technique” that controls the outcome of the vote.  I was mad enough to start the Tea Party. I registered with teaparty.net and was added to their website. 

I immediately started getting emails from other Tea Parties and the first was from Little Rock Arkansas.  It included a video about UN Agenda 21 implementation in cities and warned about “Delphi” meetings.

We marched in the Dunwoody July 4^th parade with a banner and played fife and drum music on a boom box. We got lots of cheers and applause from the crowd. I also launched this blog as the Dunwoody GA Tea Party Blog.

The Tea Party groups I’ve spoken to in the rural counties have meetings. In Atlanta Metro, meetings were too difficult to hold, so I haven’t had any Tea Party meetings. We were under attack from 2011 to 2016 and I chose to rely on this blog to keep Tea Party fans informed.

My first project was to oppose a city ballot proposal to borrow $124 million to buy park land and outfit the parks, because an out-of-town planner from Portland added a 10% of land “parks requirement” in the ordinance, land use and zoning package the city had purchased. 

Our total annual city revenue was $24 million a year.  I bought 300 “Vote No Park Bonds” signs and they went into 300 yards.  We won the park bond vote with 66% voting No.  We attended meetings on the Park Bond and made our case.  I had also vetted and endorsed 4 candidates for city council for the November elections and 2 were elected.

In September 2011, I attended a State-wide Tea Party meeting and met 150 Tea Party Leaders from across the State. I got to know many of them immediately.

In March 2012, I got a call from the North Fulton Tea Party Leader asking me to join a committee to vet a State-wide ballot initiative to increase the State sales tax by 1 cent to fund $18 billion in “transportation” projects. It was called the T-SPLOST and was put on the ballot for July 31, 2012.  The project costs were doubled and the projects they proposed didn’t solve any of our gridlock problems.  We organized speaker panels, bought yard signs and worked with the rest of the Tea Parties throughout Georgia. We defeated the T-SPLOST of 2012 by 66% of the vote in 9 of 12 Regions.

I was giving an anti-T-SPLOST presentation to the Libertarian Party group and the Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty group was having a meeting at the same facility, so I went back to say hello to them. I met a lot of them and they signed up with our Anti-T-SPLOST coalition. Their leaders believed that we needed to take over the GOP. After the 2012 GOP convention, we were all fed up with the GOP “establishment”. I notified the Tea Parties and the Campaign for Liberty Leaders across Georgia.

The Tea Party and the Campaign for Liberty groups were all “Constitutional Conservatives”.  We believed that the federal government had ignored the US Constitution and had fiscal problems because they exceeded their “enumerated powers”. We were “originalists” and believed that the US Constitution (as written” had been violated.

We showed up at the GOP Mass Meeting County Conventions in 2013 and came out 20 votes short of electing our slate to the County GOP organization in DeKalb.  The Cherokee county group did win their county and so did many others.  The GOP “establishment” fought to keep us from taking over with our more “populist” approach.  They were knee-deep in Obama bribes and were 100% for UN Agenda 21 implementation.

In 2013, the Dunwoody City Council announced 3 projects that looked unnecessary and too expensive. They wanted to put a $1 million “roundabout” in the middle of a residential area, a multiuse $2 million multi-use concrete path in Brook Run Park that would remove over 300 trees and a redesigned half mile cut-through road in Dunwoody Village strip mall for $2.5 million.  Our road beds were decaying and this money was needed to fix these roads.  We formed “Save Dunwoody” and signed up 850 members.to oppose the projects.  We stopped the roundabout, but the other projects were completed.

Also, in 2013, I endorsed 3 candidates for Dunwoody City council and got one elected and another within 35 votes of winning his district council spot.  The emphasis was on road repair and they appeared in the July 4^th parade with a truck towing an asphalt road sweeper. The banner on their truck said “Clap if you want your roads fixed”. That same year I endorsed 5 Constitutional candidates for the US Senate and the State House and Senate.  They all got 25% of the vote. That told me that we needed to do more work on informing the voters of the facts.

In 2014, I continued to expand the Blog with articles about federal government abuse, failing economics, UN Agenda 21 abuse, bankrupt counties and cities, excessive immigration, low US labor-force participation, the global warming hoax, dumbed-down education, American Communist Goals, Muslim terrorists, EPA abuse, Common Core, the Wilding Project, excessive federal spending, expanding federal debt, declining private economy, declining jobs and abuse heaped on European citizens by their own governments. In 2014, the GOP won the US Senate. I began posting Legislative Scores on websites like Conservative Review and a site called electtherightcandidate.us for scores of Georgia legislators

Also in 2014, I expanded my attention to the Georgia State Legislature and opposed the bad UN Agenda 21 enabling “regionalism” Bills they had passed in 2008 and 2010. Again the GOP establishment did everything they could to ignore us.  In 2014, I tripled the number of blog posts from 487 in 2013 to 1227 to concentrate on national and global economic and political issues.

In 2015, I more than doubled my blog posts to 2853 from 1227 in 2014.  We came out against the Article V Convention of States because Soros was for it. We opposed TPP, and I endorsed Donald Trump after the first GOP Primary Debate.

The Trump election dominated 2016. Australia dumped the carbon tax and the UK voted to exit the EU. The tide was turning.  My Blog was registering 20,000 views per month and most other countries were reading the blog posts in bug numbers. My emphasis shifted to global issues, excessive immigration and citizens’ rights to refuse to let their elected officials ignore them.

The Trump election in 2016 was a big relief.  Trump’s first 6 months have delivered a ton of positive changes and has been completely in line with our most dangerous economic issues. 

Dunwoody 4^th of July Parade - I’ve walked and driven in the Dunwoody parade since 2011. Every year has been different.  I’ve been joined by other Tea Party Leaders, the Young Republicans, the DeKalb GOP, Herman Cain’s group and US Rep Dr. Paul Broun. I’ve carried the Dunwoody Tea Party banner, driven trucks from Jim Ellis Chevrolet and my white Prius with magnetic signs on the sides. Over the past 6 years, the parade crowds have had ample Tea Party fans who would clap and holler as we passed.

This year, the Tea Party fans were giving the thumbs-up sign and coming up to shake my hand.  They are indicating that we won a big victory by electing Trump.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader