Report exposes fact that Tea Party groups are really a astro-turf organizations that were originally funded by tobacco companies. In other words they serve as camouflage for big business interests and have NOTHING to do with individual freedoms.

Courtesy of  an exhaustive research paper published earlier this year:

Background 

The Tea Party, which gained prominence in the USA in 2009, advocates limited government and low taxes. Tea Party organisations, particularly Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, oppose smoke-free laws and tobacco taxes. 

Methods 

We used the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, the Wayback Machine, Google, LexisNexis, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) to examine the tobacco companies’ connections to the Tea Party. Results Starting in the 1980s, tobacco companies worked to create the appearance of broad opposition to tobacco control policies by attempting to create a grassroots smokers’ rights movement. Simultaneously, they funded and worked through third-party groups, such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of AFP and FreedomWorks, to accomplish their economic and political agenda. There has been continuity of some key players, strategies and messages from these groups to Tea Party organisations. As of 2012, the Tea Party was beginning to spread internationally. 

Conclusions 

Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009, the Tea Party has developed over time, in part through decades of work by the tobacco industry and other corporate interests. It is important for tobacco control advocates in the USA and internationally, to anticipate and counter Tea Party opposition to tobacco control policies and ensure that policymakers, the media and the public understand the longstanding connection between the tobacco industry, the Tea Party and its associated organisations. 

In other words the Koch brothers, and other big businesses, used the model already put into place by big tobacco companies when they were trying to manufacture fake grassroots resistance against laws restricting smoking in public places or the introduction of cigarette taxes that they knew would impact their ability to make money.

All they had to do was give it a shiny new name, access the same easily manipulated group of dipshits, and the next thing you know they had a new political "grassroots" movement willing to jump through whatever hoops you held up for them, so long as they kept inspiring their anger with words like "freedom," "traditional values," and "communism."

And THIS is the group now keeping the Republicans on a short leash and fro all intents and purposes holding out country hostage