"It is just a simple necessity that each of us identify with UNITE," says the American leader, so "report today to your local United Nations center and show yourself a true citizen of the world."
Our protagonist refuses to get the Mark, and we see her turned away from every door. "Citizens Only" signs announce that she can't buy groceries. She can't fill a prescription. She can't even buy herself the pretty dress she stares at longingly through the glass. (It was the '70s, and even the film's brainy female protagonist had to bow to the sexist conventions of the time.)
The electronic music swells as her fate is slowly sealed. "It can only be assumed," says the American leader, "that those who refuse to be identified are working against the Imperium ... In the interests of world safety, all people who do not bear the mark of UNITE are subject to arrest and prolonged inconvenience."
The word "inconvenience" betrays the film's amateurishness. But the message is a grave one. In Image of the Beast a man happily lets a little boy die, rather than submit to the centralized government, and the child is happy to be sacrificed:
"Now I ask you," the man says to his tormentors after convincing the child to die. "The boy's free. He belongs to Jesus Christ ... (pause) ... What can you do to him now?"
There is no compromising with the Beast, even upon pain of death for you and your children. ("Let our lives be the spark that ignites the fire of liberty," says the young man in "Movement on Fire.") The heroes always die in the Tribulation films, but they die as happily as that little boy.
To a population raised on Tribulation films, the message of the Tea Party Patriots video is clear: The "Development Party" is the tool of the Beast. Its leader may be the Beast itself. Better to die than to submit.
Who are the "Tea Party Patriots"? For a group that's stoking fear of shadowy organizations, they're pretty shadowy themselves. They refuse to disclose their funding sources. There's a paranoid strain to their style, which extends to their co-founder who was forced to resign after being arrested for bringing firearms onto an airplane. According to reports at the time, Mark Meckler made the implausible claim that he carries a gun because "he receives numerous threats." Meckler's gun was unloaded, but most of us who use guns recreationally pay more attention to laws and regulations.
That paranoid style even extends to the Tea Party Patriots website. The site is closed to all non-members, and registration must be pre-approved by the group's leaders. The process begins with a message stating that "this forum is for Tea Party activists only to discuss issues or legislation that fall under Tea Party Patriots three core values (limited government, fiscal responsibility, free markets)."
Applicants for website registration are asked, "Do you understand and agree to abide by these rules and do you state that you are a Tea Party activist that agrees with our core values?"
The Tea Party Patriots also produced a highly deceptive film called "The Determinators," which uses Oregon's assisted-suicide law and one woman's unfortunate death to make the "death panel" argument. Local columnist Rick Attig captured the situation in a column titled "Sensationalizing a sad case cheats the public of sound debate."
Oregon's Medicaid program denied payment for the highly toxic, rash-producing drug a doctor had prescribed to a dying cancer patient. There was a 92 percent likelihood the drug would fail, it had highly toxic side effects. Even in the unlikely effect the drug had worked, it would only have prolonged the patient's life for four to six months at best.
Fearmongers on the right used the case as proof that "death panels" were taking over the US healthcare system, even though Oregon voters (not government authorities) had passed that state's "assisted suicide" law, and that assistance was one of many options offered to the patient in her denial letter. Like the Tribulation films, their narrative was designed to terrify people into believing they could be at the whim of faceless government bureaucrats with the power -- and the will -- to send ordinary citizens to their deaths.
The Determinators succeed, at least on that level. As a commenter on the film's YouTube page writes: "It feels like Hitler is running our nation...is he?"
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