NYTimes Connects Tea Party to the Racist Right

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

This article is a damning indictment of the Tea Party, associating it with the white-supremacist movement, various right-wing conspiracy theories, and domestic terrorists who believe force may be necessary to secure their concept of Constitutional liberty. In other words, it is describing the paranoid style returned to ascendancy.

Does this necessarily describe the average activist in the Tea Party movement? I don't know (my guess is no). Does it describe a worrying and potentially dangerous undercurrent? I'd say yes.

Just to keep things in perspective, a few other choice bits cut and pasted from the same "damning indictment", but first, the "racist right" in living color::



Ooh, I don't know who's more terrifying, the codger with the tricorn hat or the frat-boy wearing the Cowboys jersey behind him



These guys look like more of a menace to rush-hour traffic than a threat to democracy.

Note; I've structured my quotes to show where I've taken specific statements individually from the article, to avoid the appearance of editing the article in such a way as to draw false conclusions, I still recommend reading the complete article if you have the time.

Notice the very different picture my much more numerous excerpts from the same article paint, an amorphous movement with no clear central leadership made up of disgruntled, typically non-political types who are dissatisfied with their government and who bring a whole host of issues with them, some more sensible than others. If I had to pick a theme for the movement, it would certainly not be "racist" but "anti-government", mistrust of the government is a FAR more prevalent thread among the Tea Parties than any sort of racism is, that some racists are present in the movement notwithstanding.

I'm particularly amused by the alarm caused by the "Oathkeepers", law enforcement and military personnel who vow to disobey orders that violate The US Constitution, which is usually already part of their oath of office. You'd think everyone would be thrilled by such a movement, but true to partisan politics, anything the other guys think of is inherently evil, even swearing an oath not to commit evil. Haven't we hung people for "just following orders" that they should have known to be wrong, even when disobedience would have meant death? We certainly wouldn't want the sort of people who would refuse to illegally detain citizens or perform warrantless searches in our military or police, right?

As I said above, read the article if you have the time, it actually paints a pretty interesting picture of the people involved in Tea Parties and what motivates them, and even if you disagree with them it's useful information to know. I don't know why the OP chose this particular article to quote out of context to trot out that favorite cry of "racist!" that is the left's own version of "socialist!", perhaps they thought the prestige of the NYC byline combined with the 5 page length would discourage further analysis of the actual article; but I speculate. With all this conflicting rhetoric, I might have to go check one of these things out next time they come to town, maybe bring my black girlfriend and see what happens. In the meantime, I'll continue to take everything I hear about the Tea Party with a large grain of salt, especially when the group itself doesn't really know what it stands for yet.

Last edited by Unorthodox on 17 Feb 2010, 2:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's alright, keep bitching and carrying on about taxes, keep demanding that taxes get lowered, and do everything in your power to make sure the government doesn't get a dime of your money.

Wall street won't mind, they're more than happy to pay for your government. I think they have a term for it.... "investment".

And we wonder why big business owns our government...

It's because they're the ones who are willing to pay for it you dense tax-phobic conservatives!

Hey, an anti-conservative polemic without a single whiff of implied racism, I call that success!

Or, the government could just stop wasting money on stupid ****. then it wouldn't need to raise taxes.

and the idea that government officials accept bribes to make up for low taxes is preposterous. Officials take bribes to fill their own pockets, not the government's depleted coffers, and no matter how much you pay them they'll still take bribes, because it's the result of a moral failing on their part, not some desperate attempt to get by.

You're obviously implying that I took the excerpts out of context to misdirect the reader. The excerpts were for fair-use reasons (I think that's within fair-use limits, but hell if I know) and time (I just looked for the most damning bits of the article). I think they accurately reflect the general thrust of the article, which from my reading of it was that people coming into politics through the Tea Party movement are in some cases being further socialized into even more extremist right-wing positions, familiar specters like the militiamen, white supremacists, and even secessionists advocating for civil war (an obvious allusion to the Confederacy). The quote from the elderly lady thinking a violent insurgency may be necessary to defend her freedom reinforces the ominous tone (yes, a threat from an elderly lady is toothless in itself, but it shows the extremity of their views, and likely there are potential Timothy McVeighs among their ranks).

I don't know the demographics of the movement, but the article conveyed the link.

Personally, I can't say I'm bothered by it as I've had a problem with things like the USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc. It obviously would be better looked into at a systemic level rather than individuals going rogue, though.

In the old days, heartland populists wanted to repeal the gold standard because it was bad for the heartland - murder for farmers in particular. What's with the proliferation of gold-bugs in the heartland? Don't they have a memory?

@Neanthumain, I wasn't accusing you of pulling a Michael Moore on the article, though you do admit yourself that you stitched together what you felt to be the most damning bits in order to produce what you felt was a desirable impression of the article. I was more interested in what parts of the article were not mentioned, notably the parts concerning the lack of a unified agenda and the hodge-podge of issues represented by the Tea Party movement. Where I read a fairly balanced article about a fractured but angry group, you read a "damning indictment" linking them to racist ideology, and I personally feel that the contrast in perception has more to say about your personal bias than it does about the tone of the article or the true composition of the Tea Party movement. I'm not arguing that there are no racists to be found among the Tea Party, but that focusing on those that do show up in an attempt to discredit the entire movement is dishonest, sort of like referring to the proposed health care plan as "socialist".

You used three short quotes from the article to present your viewpoint, where as I used 8 of varying length to support mine, I think the lesson here is that information is what you make of it, i.e. you wanted to see evidence of racism, and so you did, while I was looking with a neutral to supportive eye, and also saw what I wanted to. I agree with some of things the Tea Party supports (small government, civil liberties) and disagree with others (anti-immigrant sentiment, religious ideology), just as I feel about the major political parties, I like and dislike elements of both. What I can't abide however is the blanket tarring of entire groups by extremists of either side, whether it's referring to the "racist right" or the "socialist left" or any variations thereof.

well, as there are suspicions that the Times could be biased....

I don't think they're particularly organized.

That's hilarious.

"Buying politicians" is to "paying for government" as "bribing a police officer" is to "paying for justice".

Or like this guy, Joseph Stack:

The guy that tried to 9/11 the IRS with a Piper Cub? Now there's a threat to the country for ya... I've also seen nothing linking him to the Tea Party, and all of his friends have come forward to say they never heard anything political from him before, sounds more like the poor guy just snapped than anything.

He shares the anti-tax fervor and anti-government mentality of the Tea Party.

Ted Kaczynski shared a lot of viewpoints with the radical left, are they all potential Unabombers now?

Yet if you'd read his suicide note, the nature of his anti-tax fervor is quite different from that of the Tea Partiers. Stack's note's largely about how the IRS/Government totally screwed him over time and time again through the class warfare of the very wealthy having the law on their side and always being able to stomp on people like him, to bail out big companies at his expense. Plus how the Government failed to pass Health Care reform since it wasn't convenient for corporate profits, and that George W. Bush was a puppet for those interests. That he ended his note with the Communist Creed and 'Capitalist Creed' too, seems to be the furthest cry from anything a Tea Partier would ever say.

The core message behind the Tea Party isn't even taxes so much as excessive Government spending and its likelihood of collapsing our nation economically, something Stack didn't mention, apart from bail-outs, and people all across the political spectrum were opposed to those too. Only a fraction of the Tea Party is about abolishing the IRS (some to replace it with the 'Fair Tax', others with nothing at all), most just don't want to see their money taken just to be wasted or re-distributed, definitions vary as to what all that entails exactly.

If just being anti-status quo in terms of Taxes and Government policy makes one a potential terrorist, than we need a New Super-Duper Patriot Act now to protect us from everyone who thinks that the IRS is unfair or who believe in Crazy Conspiracy Theories like Corporations get special treatment by the Government, cause you never know how mentally unstable they could be! /sarcasm

Easy: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt118670.html

Some are with the racist right, the others are sheple trying to look cool and not figuring out what they are really doing.