The Tea Party Movement and the "Race Card"

The problem, Jabba, isn't with actual racism in so far as this post goes. The true problem, and the one that spawned this thread i believe, is false charges of racism. I was labeled a racist right here because I noted the frequecy that Hispanics jay walk. The fact is, in my experience, they do. Whether or not that experience holds true becomes irrelavant next to the charge of racism.

And that's why it is so important to some people here and in the media to have The Tea Party labeled as racist. If that can be accomplished then it doesn't matter if The Tea Party is right about taxing, spending and the size of government.

It's a dirty game.

 

LOL
That is racism, because last time I checked your anecdotal "experience" actually proves nothing, so you made an assumption based on race. Racism.

 

Well, no, because I'm pretty sure that most of the people arguing the former point would also contend that the Tea Party is wrong in terms of its policies on taxation, spending, and the size of government.

As for "the media," it's hardly a concerted effort (And I'm getting really sick of that being used as a lump term. If anything, entertainment and news media are more decentralized now than they've ever been in the past) seeing as a certain top station has been backing the Tea Party for a long time. Not that I'm going to name names.

 

Did you even read his post(EDIT: or your own, for that matter)?

 

Clarence Thomas said the whole reason a black woman accused him of putting a pubic hair in her Coke and comparing himself favorably to an adult film star was because he was a black conservative.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal rights group with at least three blatant lies in their name, says milk is a racist conspiracy. This in spite of being all-white. (Animal rights groups remind me of the Religious Right more than anything. Seriously.)

Much less on a national scale, but more meme-worthy, David Gonterman said his history teacher was racist for mentioning slavery, then proceeded to write a mega-crossover fanfic as a platform for his not-racist, not-homophobic views.

As for taxing, the problem is, the Tea Party didn't go after Bush for his massive debts. And they want to cut taxes more. The thing is, we tried supply-side economics in the 80s. Didn't work.

 

I know exactly how you feel about Hispanics.

You see, I know some Tea Part supporters, and in my experience, they have a tendency to make racist statements. The fact is, in my experience, they do.

 

Just today, it was revealed that an affirmative action program lead to a two-tiered admissions program at the Naval Academy. We can even go further. In the 1990s, the disparity between what an Asian student needed to get entry into the California state universities as opposed to an African-American student was astonishing. Now, what Asian-Americans had to do with Jim Crow or slavery is a mystery to me.

One of the most prominent critics of affirmative action is Ward Connerly.
[image=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Ward_Connerly_cropped_photo.jpg/220px-Ward_Connerly_cropped_photo.jpg]
Connerly is African-American, in case you haven't noticed.

So don't give me the nonsense you spouted. Affirmative action was not about stopping discrimination, it just transferred the discrimination to another group, many of whom had nothing to do with slavery or enacting the Jim Crow laws. All affirmative action did was to create different injustices, albeit ones that probably make those who support or perpetrate them feel good about themselves.

 

^ Pars pro toto.

 

Yes, let's show a token African-American person to prove our point. Oh lookit!

Here's one now:

[image=http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/3818/steele.jpg]

And he frowns on your shenanigans.

I will give you credit, though, you managed to completely destroy your argument without saying:

"Look, this darkie here supports my position."

"I'm not a racist, but..."

and my dear old fave - "What's wrong with you people?"


All joking aside, I'm sure you've made a wonderful case on how 'the black man keeps the white man down' and I'd love to hear it sometime, but the last bit of pro-white literature I read was accidental and I was in the 10th grade. Oh and it was an invitation to join the 'Seekrit' Empire. I'm not sure, but I don't think he meant Palpatine's order. And I guess he mistook me for a racist piece of **** because I'm pale as hell and have blue eyes and brown hair. So you can see why I'm in no rush to read such a thing.

 

Quotas are unconstitutional according to University of California v. Bakke. Nobody uses quotas for fear of reprisal. I have noticed a lot of white C students complain about minority kids like myself, geniuses who were on Student Council and two athletic teams, and had a history of charity work, and got 1400+ SATs (back when there were only two SAT tests) getting in on "a quota".

So where does that leave quotas? For live-action Five Token Band series? (The Big Guy and The Smart Guy are great places to put minorities, and they don't have any character development to speak of, so you can have a black The Big Guy and an Asian The Smart Guy or vice versa.)

Which is ironic, since the biggest users of quotas are the GOP. They even racelift white guys into minorities to make their point, as in the case of "Comanche descendent of Bad Eagle" and Michael Jackson lookalike David Yeagley, who apparently thinks the only muy muy bombad Indian leader out there is Russell Means.

 

No see, that's where you're wrong. Affirmative action was meant to give supposedly disadvantaged minorities a chance. It worked on the idea that if you had two college applicants, one white and one black, both of whom were equally qualified, the school would take the black applicant. After doing this for a while we decided this wasn't a good idea after all, so we ended it.

The fact that you're here saying "OH MY GOD REVERSE DISCRIMINATION" just makes you a exaggerating sensationalist.

 

This article was very disheartening for me.

One of the outgrowths of my own personal journey toward Malthusian fatalism has been a kind of uncomfortable sympathy toward America's anti-immigration movement. Creating a sustainable future for the United States is impossible without embracing some form of population control. And population control is impossible without an effort to prevent illegal immigration and limit legal immigration.

Illegal immigration, moreover, has been a tool used by Republican-supported big business to kill unionization and undermine the possibility of living wages for the nation's poor.

As outlined in the NYT article, these were also among the original motivating factors for one of the founders of America's anti-immigration movement, John Tanton. As liberal arguments against immigration failed to gain political traction, Tanton began embracing more radical views, including white nationalism, and tacitly supported inclusion of openly racist elements into the movement.

And it is these elements that have prevented me from being active in the anti-immigration movement and supporting anti-immigration policies. It is a very strange thing to support in theory many of the goals of a movement but be unable to do so in practice because of my objection to the people who would be my fellow travelers if I embraced the politics of it.

And of course because the anti-immigration movement has become fully embedded in the Tea Party, the same people whom I object to joining in fighting immigration are now an integrated and integral part of the Tea Party.

I know we've discussed this a bit before, but are there people here who initially supported political goals of the Tea Party movement but later felt compelled to reject involvement with it because of the political or ideological ties of their fellow Tea Partiers?

 

Well, I had hopes to see it become something promising, and while occasionally I see some good stuff come out of it, I'd say I've definitely shifted from "supportive of" early on to the about the same level of disdain I have for the GOP and Democrats as well. So instead I go more case by case; if they're right, then I'll support them on that issue, if they're wrong I'll oppose them. Same as I do with any other group.

Personally, I think it's important to try to provide a sensible voice when there are none, even moreso than to just support an established sensible side. I've been trying to hold to that view ever since back in 2008, when I nearly abstained on the gay marriage vote because I didn't want to vote for a side that was largely being voiced by illogical bigots. Which managed to be both of them. However, in the final day or so, I did decide that I was supporting an issue, not a group. And so I hold to that.... I'll go for the side that I think is right, and if I'm on the same side as people I don't like, then I'll try to push for a view that's sensible. I've also been known to call out people that are on my side on an issue if I think they're not logical about it.

I'm hugely opposed to illegal immigration, but I'm also a very big proponent of legal immigration, so I view it as important to push for nuance and good reasoning in all those policies, rather than stay quiet and let only the idiots be heard.

 

If the idiots are right, but for the wrong reason, and getting people interested for the right reasons has been demonstrated unequivocally to be a losing proposition, then you're left pretty much with the choice of silently getting out of the way of the idiots, or advocating the wrong side of an issue simply as a means of trying to mitigate the influence of idiots, which in itself seems pretty idiotic. Tanton decided to embrace the idiots because it moved the issue forward, but in the end that process also turned him into an idiot.

 

That said, I will make one point: Tanton and his groups DO have some racist overtones. It makes me uncomfortable, but they are a small part of the Tea Party, and the Tea Party's issues are primarily fiscal issues, not immigration.

But at the same time, the situation with the cartels and the drug war in Mexico does point to a need for more border security. However, there was an inconsistent (at best) effort to seal with it from the George W. Bush administration, and outright hostility to the concept from the Obama Administration. The result, of course is a perception that the government doesn't seem to care. Add in the unsolved murder of Bob Krentz, and some people start to ask questions, and stop feeling a need to be "politically correct."

There is another factor. The race-baiting aimed at the Tea Party, including the arguably false charges that the N-word was used at a number of Congressmen in March of 2010 (I posted links to videos that called those claims into question in the past), has also created a climate of skepticism about the racism charge. I can concede the racism of Tanton because I think it is there for real. However, many in the Tea Party are just going to write off claims of racism as "Surprise, the liberals are losing the argument, so they are playing the race card."

 

Except, I think this attitude of "can't have a side if there's idiots on it" is a dangerous attitude to take. For example, Al Queda is, apparently, involved in the fight against Gaddafi. I am not going to stop supporting those that are trying to free Libya from Gaddafi's reign because there's some bad guys on that side. It doesn't make the cause any more or less just if there are some on that side that are very much in the wrong when you look at either their arguments or the big picture.
As it relates to immigration, I think that you could very well get most people to support controls on illegal immigration. Beyond that, most Americans DO oppose illegal immigration the last time I looked at polling numbers. I think the numbers absolutely are there that one could push for no illegal immigration tolerated without letting it be dominated by racists. Actually, an interesting thing happened in a California election a few years ago. A congressman was targeted for his open-border policies and tolerance of illegal immigration. He was a Republican. The Democrat in the race came out and said that she opposed illegal immigration because she felt it was detrimental to American workers (lowering wages and what not). Her campaign started getting support from legal immigrants, and from Republicans, while the Democratic party dropped their endorsement of her (I can't recall if the state or county party did that). She gave the closest race that Congressman had had and he's been in Congress for some time, and it was an issue that nearly managed to propel an unknown Democrat into a Republican 'safe' seat against an incumbent. The support is there, if done reasonably. I also think that we can't simply avoid nuance, and I don't think proposing a "with us or against us" philosophy is good. I wasn't a a fan of the Arizona law because I think it had some key flaws (some of which got addressed in revisions, some did not), but I don't think that I have to back it because it's doing 'something' about illegal immigration, nor do I think that because I disagreed with parts of it that I can't still be vocal about illegal immigration.

I can see not backing a specific group (I refused to sign a petition being gathered by PETA a few weeks ago because there was no way I was giving my name and email to PETA) directly, but that's not the same as being on the same side as a group. I mean, would you say that you shouldn't talk about gun control because the Nazis did as well and you don't want to be on the same side as them? Most issues, if distilled down to it, are going to have two sides, and you won't always be on the same side as someone you'd want to be, but the focus should be the issue, not the teams. It's like how its detrimental that the parties won't do something good because the other party thought of it.

 

Great Op-Ed piece

There's a decent chance the deficit ceiling crisis may have killed the Tea Party as a viable political movement.

The Campbell/Putnam multi-year study of the Tea Party seems fairly compelling. The Tea Party has been revealed, as many in the Senate have argued for years (I wasn't one of them), as the same old religious right with a new set of clothes, only perhaps more open in their disdain for blacks and immigrants.

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek ?deeply religious? elected officials, approve of religious leaders? engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party?s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann?s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry?s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.*

*The Tea Party ranked lowest in popularity among 23 groups studied. "It is even less popular than much maligned groups like ?atheists? and ?Muslims.?"

I have characterized the Tea Party as the White People's Booster Club, but it's really the White People and Jesus Booster Club.