NAACP REPORT ON TEABAGGERS TO BE RELEASED THIS WEEK

The last line in this article is telling: “The attempt to paint a very diffuse movement with a pretty broad brush will no doubt infuriate grassroots conservatives.” That is exactly going to be what the right-wingers are going to say the NAACP is doing. Their problem is that they haven’t. When the NAACP called out teabaggers to repudiate their more racist elements, that meant their more racist elements. They didn’t paint them with a “pretty broad brush”, or say that all teabaggers are racist. But then again the Department of Homeland Security report that warned against right-wing extremists did not call out all right-wingers, but those right-wingers went on the defensive saying the report, as Michelle Malkin posted on her blog April 14, 2009, “demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party”. Now that was posted ten days after a white supremacist in the Pittsburgh area shot four police officers,  and a little over a month before an anti-abortion activist killed abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, which itself was two weeks before a white supremacist killed a black security guard and injured others when he shot up the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Malkin herself has been a contributor to the anti-Hispanic website VDARE, maintained by right-wing extremist Peter Brimelow and featuring a number of white supremacist writers like the Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. In short, who gives a rat’s ass what the teabaggers say about the NAACP report? Judging from the history, if they go that route of saying that the NAACP is painting them with a “pretty broad brush”, they just might be telling on themselves! For more about the NAACP’s efforts, visit TeaPartyTracker.org.

Politico

The NAACP is continuing its sharp criticism of the Tea Party movement, releasing a report later this week that it says will detail “various associations between Tea Party organizations and acknowledged hate groups in the United States.”

The group’s board recently ratified a resolution calling on tea partiers to repudiate racists in their ranks, something that’s rankled grassroots conservatives, who have turned allegations of racism into a kind of organizing point.

“These groups and individuals are out there, and we ignore them at our own peril,” says NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous in the advisory. “They are speaking at Tea Party events, recruiting at rallies and in some cases remain in the Tea Party leadership itself. The danger is not that the majority of Tea Party members share their views, but that left unchecked, these extremists might indirectly influence the direction of the Tea Party and therefore the direction of our country: moving it backward and not forward.”

The report isn’t yet online, but the press release has a bit of the substance:

The TeaParty.org faction is led by the executive director of the Minuteman Project, a nativist organization that has in the past been associated with the murder of migrant Mexican workers as part of its vigilante “border operations”. Roan Garcia-Quintana, “advisor and media spokesman” for the 2010 Tax Day Tea Party and member of ResistNet, also serves on the National Board of Directors of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), the lineal descendent of the Council of White Citizens. In Texas, Wood County Tea Party leader Karen Pack was once listed as an “official supporter” of Thom Robb’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a modern-day white supremacist organization.

The attempt to paint a very diffuse movement with a pretty broad brush will no doubt infuriate grassroots conservatives.