What's amazing about this thread is how wildly outraged some folks are getting at the mere mention of the Tea Party and Nazis in the same sentence, despite the attempts in the OP to remove the two ideologically as much as possible.
I'd disagree in the comparison between the two groups, but not because both grew in strength on the basis of populist ignorance-- in fact, I think that parallel is strikingly accurate-- but instead because of how the two grew and coalesced into a movement. The Nazis took longer and were built upon a different type of scapegoats, so essentially they're operationally and structurally different. The only real similarity is the populist anger, and that's awfully generalized and vague.
If anything, the operations and structure more resemble the
Know Nothing movement. A better thread would be to contrast those two.