By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
Tea party protest in Madison, Wisc., on April 19, 2009.
Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind have made careers out of ferreting out white nationalists and extemist anti-immigrant groups.
So the NAACP asked them to look for racism in the tea party movement, well, it was like asking Lady Gaga to find something outlandish to wear.
A slam dunk.
“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths,” write Burghart and Zeskind in their report. “Particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government.
“Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues. 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.’ ”
Burghart and Zeskind trace the roots of the tea party movement not to fiscal conservatism but rather to anti-immigrant groups such as the Minutemen Militia.
The godparents of the tea party — members of the Fox News clique such as Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin — were outraged by the report.
“NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous wrote: ‘What we take issue with is the tea party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements,’ ” Beck said.
“What statements are those? I haven’t seen any.”
If that’s true, why did Beck feel a need to tell Tea Party supporters not to bring race-tinged signs and T-shirts to a rally?
If that’s true, did black and gay congressmen simply imagine racial and homophobic epithets being yelled at them by tea partiers?
If that’s true, why would former Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer feel a need, at the height of the tea party rallies in September, to text: “I found that many within the GOP have racist views and I apologize to the President for my opposition to his speech last year and my efforts to placate the extremists who dominate our Party today.”
And Beck’s appeal to drop the over-the-top signs and shorts seemed to have worked.
A Washington Post article, which featured a photo survey of the signs by UCLA graduate student Emily Ekins, also confirms the basics of the NAACP report:
Tea partiers have indeed been waving race- and religion-based signs such as “Obama Bin Lyin’ – Impeach Now” and “Somewhere in Kenya a Village is Missing its Idiot.” And, as the NAACP report points out, Tea party leaders can have an impact on the overt bigotry.
Other than taking parts of the foreword by NAACP chairman Benjamin Todd Jealous out of context and totally twisting its meaning, folks such as Beck and Malkin offered no real repudiation of Burghart and Zeskind’s findings.
They’re main complaint is that when you hire a couple of people who are experts on white nationalism and racism to do a report, you can’t be surprised they found a connection to racism and white nationalism.
And perhaps the NAACP could have benefited from including at least one researcher with more moderate credentials. But the fact is, when you’re investigating a crime, you better go to someone who has dealt with criminals and knows where to find them.
And it’s not as if members of the tea party have made it particularly hard (for anyone who isn’t named Malkin or Beck) to make that link.
I mean, if you’re Burghardt, what are you supposed to write when you attend a tea party rally in Olympia, Wash., and see the following:
“With a pistol strapped to his hip and a cell phone headset in his ear, Darin Stevens, head of the Spokane 9.12 Project, gave a tortured reading of a section of the Declaration of Independence. After his presentation, Stevens spent considerable time chatting with Martin ‘Red’ Beckman. A name familiar to many northwest human rights observers, particularly those in Montana, Beckman is known for his anti-Semitic writings, his defense of militias, and his eviction from his Montana property by the IRS for refusing to pay taxes.”
Check out the report.