A week later, on Monday's episode of Raw in Lafayette, Louisiana, Colter and Swagger made the Tea Party connection even more obvious when they offered some more of the race-baiting and the catchphrases — "Don't Tread On Me" was displayed on a podium inside the ring:

It's important to note here that one of the WWE's world champions is a caricature of a wealthy Mexican billionaire named Alberto Del Rio. Does the sudden plot twist make a little more sense now? Over the course of the two weeks of WWE programming, Swagger and Del Rio were set up on a collision course to meet at the biggest event of the year, Wrestlemania.

And it seems like all of this has made a bunch of right-wing bloggers and commentators really, almost hilariously mad this week. Michelle Malkin collected reactions from conservatives on Twitter, as she so often does, all of which were fairly disappointed with the WWE for using a Tea Party gimmick. Malkin herself chimed in, calling the idea "ripped straight from yesterday's headlines." Breitbart.com got in on the WWE criticism, too. "It's hard to imagine a bigger PR blunder," they wrote. "Expect a mea culpa any minute now." The always reliable folks over at Alex Jones's InfoWars.com didn't appreciate the new character, either. Their Paul Joseph Watson writes:

This is part of the divide and conquer tactic of cultural subversion to manufacture racial division and to characterize the Tea Party, conservatives, libertarians, opponents of uncontrolled illegal immigration and constitutionalists as racist, extremist radicals who should be pushed to the fringes of the political discourse.



Now the demonization runs so deep that it’s even being bolstered by WWE wrestling.



The fact that WWE is owned by Vince and Linda McMahon, who are part of the Republican establishment, also tells us a lot about how grass roots conservatives and libertarians are viewed by those near the top of the power structure.



Why are we getting so wound up about a wrestling gimmick? WWE programming reaches 14 million Americans every week – and millions more worldwide. To put it in context – that’s more than 10 times the amount of viewers who watch America’s top rated news show, The O’Reilly Factor.

It's important to not here that, in an effort to really drive home how Tea Partyin' these new villains can be, the WWE announcers claimed Swagger and Colter routinely receive fan mail from Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck. The controversy was also picked up on Fox News' The Five, where the hosts spent a good five minutes bashing the WWE and its newfangled characters, but the video evidence seems to have been scrubbed from the Internet.

For its part, the WWE isn't backing down from the criticisms: "WWE has a long history of creating fictional characters that serve as either protagonists or antagonists, no different than other television shows or feature films," WWE spokesman Brian Flinn told The Hollywood Reporter. "To create compelling and relevant content for our audience, it is important to incorporate current events into our storylines. WWE is creating drama centered on a topical subject that has varying points of view to develop a rivalry between two characters." Finn also made clear the two characters do not represent the views of WWE or any of its partners. You know, just to be thorough — like that disclaimer before each episode of South Park.