Why the Tea Party MUST Be Racist

The Tea Party movement must be racist.

That’s not to say that its candidates or supporters actually ARE racists, but rather that they MUST be racist, if the establishment elitists of both parties hope to hold onto their power-lock in Washington, state capitals and local governments.

Journalism Professor Curtis Wilkie’s New York Times op-ed warns Southerners to avoid the siren song of the populist Tea Party, to avoid plunging back into the racist abyss.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, journalism professor Curtis Wilkie revives the evidence-free assertion of Tea Party racism by rehearsing the sins of past “demagogues” and then attributing their discriminatory actions to the modern movement for a more Constitutional government that taxes less and regulates less. Wilkie cries out to stupid Southerners to stop their ears against the “siren song” of the latest incarnation of the anti-brown-skin choir, knowing as he does that the South could tip at any moment and go full antebellum Dixie.

Under a patina of history, Wilkie warns that populists often have rallied the “working class” to blame blacks for their problems, and they could do the same today, visiting their vitriol this time on immigrants.

Wilkie accurately notes that the Tea Party is winning, even though its candidates in six U.S. Senate races failed to attract a majority of voters. But lest you marvel at the success of this decentralized movement in pressuring politicians to take our founding charter seriously, Wilkie conjures a heinous specter.

The [Tea Party] movement’s success, with its dangerous froth of anti-Washington posturing and barely concealed racial animus, raises an important question for Southern voters: Will they remember their history well enough to reject the siren song of nativism and populism that has won over the region so often before? [emphasis mine]

Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, among others, portrayed himself as a tribune of the working class while championing segregation. It’s hard not to hear echoes of those eras today. Tea Party candidates have targeted federal taxes and spending, while attacking Chamber of Commerce interests and the leadership of the Republican Party. Racism has been replaced with nativism in their demands for immigration restrictions, but the animosity toward the “other” is the same.

You see, if you think the federal government spends too much, or spends on the wrong things, you’re a racist.

If you believe that big business uses its financial muscle to elect crony politicians who then use their pens to protect and feed big business, you’re a racist.

If you think that the Republican Party has become little more than an incumbent-protection racket, steered by the politicians and deaf to the people, you are, of course, a racist.

If you believe that the federal government should enforce existing laws regarding immigration and naturalization, you are an even more despicable racist.

But those aren’t the only reasons for your “racial animus.” Your support for charter schools, vouchers, private schools and homeschooling condemns you to the KKK mezzanine of Hell.

Education became their whipping boy. A century ago, the first wave of populist demagogues withheld funds for poor, segregated schools and tried to purge college faculties of nonbelievers. The second wave, citing “states’ rights,” threatened to shut schools rather than integrate and denounced federal aid to education as a sinister investment. In the Cochran-McDaniel race, you could hear that same strain in Tea Party criticisms of the federal government, of federal aid to education and of the “establishment.”

Now, I could write a column about the rise of extreme Leftist Democrats, whose populist preaching conjures the spirit of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and other eugenicists, whose crusade against the “unfit” aimed to purge dirty DNA from the gene pool, primarily through cutting off the stream of brown-skinned peoples at its fountainhead, both the womb and the U.S. border. I wouldn’t do that, because that would be inaccurate and unfair to Democrats.

After all, support for abortion-on-demand, with its genocidal toll on racial minorities, is not a fringe position in the Democratic Party, it’s a core principle.

Racial discrimination and segregation are not alien concepts to the Democratic Party, but rather its distinctive heritage — from Thomas Jefferson, to the Civil War, to the KKK, through the Jim Crow era, up until LBJ realized that there’s votes in them thar Negroes. (Except the N-word he used was less civil.)

And finally, it was the Democrats’ beloved Progressive forebears who worked to choke off immigration, backed by the American Federation of Labor, that didn’t like the competition. Much like President Lyndon Johnson, they’ve recently come to see those brown-skinned folks as potential union members and Democrat voters, who aren’t going away, so we might as well co-opt them.

Curtis Wilkie and others on the Left are frightened, not by the chimerical racism of the Tea Party — a mythology of their own construction — but by a movement that refuses to idolize politicians and their cronies in business, academia and entertainment.

There’s nothing more terrifying to the satraps of the status quo than a people who will not kowtow before the altar of influence, power and prestige.

And that’s why the Tea Party MUST be racist.