Tea Party Racism

The Tea Partiers continually deny that they are motivated by racism, that their leadership promotes or facilitates racism, that their members are disproportionately racist, that racism has anything at all to do with their movement.

Well.

David Neiwert reports: "The NAACP has now fully backed up its accusations of racism within the Tea Party movement with a meticulously documented report on the Tea parties' multifarious connections to racists and various far-right extremists."

The report, "Tea Party Nationalism," looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations -- FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express -- and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right "Patriot" extremists of various stripes.

"In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment," write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.

The heart of the report is the section titled "Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Militia Impulse," which includes some previously overlooked facets of the movement and revealing details:

-- James von Brunn, the white supremacist who killed a Holocaust Museum guard last year, posted on Tea Partner Express partner websites.

-- Mark Williams, former chairman of the Tea Party Express, not only wrote racist screeds, he made death threats against President Obama,

-- Billy Joe Roper, a member of the ResistNet Tea Party who also happens to be the founder of the overtly racist White Revolution organization, indulging in "Nazi glamorization" with his eulogy for William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the notorious race-war blueprint.

There's more at the link.

Naturally, the Tea Partiers are dismissing out of hand the demonstrable proof that there is an ugly thread of racist extremism running through their "we're just good patriots and totes condemn racism, we swears" quilt:

"Here we go again," said Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation. "This is typical of this liberal group's smear tactics."

Yes, "facts" are indeed typical of the NAACP and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.