What, Exactly, is the New American Tea Party?

According to their website, this new grassroots anti-stimulus activist club, which is currently the most googled item on Google, is “a coalition of citizens and organizations concerned about the recent trend of fiscal recklessness in government.”

According to these revolutionaries, “this isn’t a conservative or liberal thing,” yet New American Tea Party is sponsored by the American Spectator, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Institute for Liberty, the Coalition for a Conservative Majority and the Young Conservatives Coalition.

Armed with a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a blog, tea party planners are organizing a “big event” on February 27—that “will resemble the classic tax revolt that jumpstarted the American revolution.”

The organizer of the main event—to take place “near the Washington Monument,” is the American Spectator’s J.P. Freire. “This is about government forking over billions of dollars, OUR MONEY, to businesses that should have failed,” he writes. “This is about taking money from responsible people and handing it over to CEOs who squandered their own…We are not opposing any specific legislation or politician. We are instead addressing the broader philosophical implications of a government that has grown too large and too distant from the very citizens it taxes. This is scary stuff.”

According to the site, tea parties are also planned for Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Fayetteville, NC.

Big Think encourages civil disobedience, especially in the name of liberty. But as Kirk Shinkle writes in his U.S. News & World Report blog, The Ticker: “keep in mind this interesting bit of history on the original Tea Party — notably, that it actually meant more expensive tea.”