Almost 30 years ago, Tony Stewart, a civil-rights activist, co-founded the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in Coeur d’Alene. The task force has campaigned to rid north Idaho of its reputation as a haven for anti-government extremists. Its tactics brought many successes, including a $6.3 million civil judgment that effectively bankrupted Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations.
When the Tea Party uprising gathered force last spring, Stewart saw painfully familiar cultural and rhetorical overtones. Stewart viewed the questions about Obama’s birthplace as a proxy for racism, and he was bothered by the “common message of intolerance for the opposition.”
Branding Obama a tyrant, Stewart said, constructs a logic that could be used to rationalize violence. “When people start wearing guns to rallies, what’s the next thing that happens?” Stewart asked.
http://firedoglake.com/2010/02/16/early-morning-swim-keith-olbermanns-special-comment-on-racism-and-the-tea-party-movement/Countdown Special Comment - Racial discrimination inherent in the Tea Party movement
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ Host of far-right causes invited to the Tea Party SANDPOINT, Idaho — Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs in California, when she saw government, however imperfect, lift struggling families with job training and educational assistance. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
She was new to protest politics — happily retired, she had never made a political donation in her life. Last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard and nominated herself for president. "I was like, 'Did I really just do that?' " she recalled.
Then she went even further.
Worried that the country might be on the brink of hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes local representatives from Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, and Oath Keepers, a new player in the nation's resurgent militia movement.
When Friends for Liberty held its first public event, Stout listened raptly as Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff, brought 1,400 people to their feet with a speech about confronting a despotic federal government. Stout said she felt as if she had been handed a road map to rebellion. Members of her family, she said, think she has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But Stout said she has never felt so alive and engaged.
"I can't go on being the shy, quiet me," she said. "I need to stand up and be heard."
The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011086509_teaparty16.html
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