Reagan and Goldwater threw these same folks OUT of the Republican party in the sixties. They were known as John Birchers, then. But if you don't remember and learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. They dumped their name--it had to many negative connotations attached to it--and quietly reinfiltrated and returned to the Republican party, stepping lightly so as not to be discovered. When the insurance companies and the Republicans, with the help of the Koch brothers, created the fake grassroot Teabaggers in an effort to combat the Presidents Health Care Bill and other Obama inspired and pushed legislation, they saw the Teabaggers as simply a tool they controlled and didn't supervise and keep an eye what was going on inside the group and this gave the radicals the chance to move into leadership positions. All they had to do was be the loudest yellers and shouters and the rank and file voted them right in.
Once the radicals had control, they started recruiting the ignorant and the scared by fooling them that their taxes were extremely high, when actuality, taxes were at the lowest levels they had been since before WW II.
Quoting Mark Twain,"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled". Once these ignorant, scared people had been fooled into believing their taxes were extremely high, they became diehard believers and nothing in the world could convince them otherwise. Not charts, not graphs, not columns of numbers showing the decline in tax rates from the Eisenhower period to todays low rates. NOTHING!
After the passage of the Health Care Bill, the Auto Bail-out Bill, the Stimulus bill, the Republicans had no further use for the Teabaggers, but wanted to keep them around in case a need for them arose. so it cut their funding to the bone, with just enough funds for them to be able to hold their local punch and cookies meetings, but not enough to do any traveling activism or make any loud noises on the National front.
By the time the mid-term elections were about to roll around, the Teabaggers started talking about putting up their own candidates for Republican seats in congress. You can imagine how this displeased the traditional Republican party, so they decided to put an end to the Teabaggers by cutting off ALL funding. To their surprise, the Teabaggers DIDN"T dry up and blow away. They had found their own funding from sources of funding even farther to the right than the Insurance companies and the Koch brothers.
In the most ignorant and depressed parts of the country where their message resonated with the ignorant and frightened, they managed to knock off a handfull of traditional Republicans and a few Democrats.
This scared the sh*t out of the traditional Republicans. It seems as if they had created a Frankenstein monster and that the monster was intent on destroying its creator. To save themselves, traditional Republicans started falling all over each other to get as far to the right as it was intellectually and physically possible.
That's how they found themselves in these ultra far right positions that guarantees them a loss in the Presidential race and possible loss of control of the House.