http://www.theblaze.com/stories/who-wrote-the-naacp-racist-tea-party-
report/
Who Wrote the NAACP Racist Tea Party Report?
Two weeks before a potentially game-changing midterm election, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has given its
endorsement to a report labeling the tea party as a self-preserving
movement of racist bigots. It s no wonder given the fact that NAACP s
political agenda conflicts with the vast majority of the tea party platform
of smaller government and reduced spending.
With Wednesday s release of the report, however, the news media is once
again dropping the ball, not only by not pointing out the NAACP s obvious
conflict of interest with the tea party movement, but in failing to do
their due diligence in reporting on where the report comes from and why it
was written.
The Washington Post reports that the NAACP-endorsed Tea Party Nationalism
was put together by the Institute for Research and Education on Human
Rights, but doesn t report further on who the IREHR is. Politico reports
that the NAACP commissioned Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart to write
the study, but makes no mention of who Zeskind or Burghart are other than
noting their association with the Institute.
The IREHR is a group with long-held dreams for social and economic
justice, who condemn the so-called Christian right, paleo-conservatism,
and other far-right movements for their symbiotic relationship[s] with
nativism and white nationalism.
Call me crazy, but I think this group may have had a specific agenda in
mind before they set out to paint the tea party movement as uh nativists
and gee, white nationalists.
But who are Zeskind and Burghart, the two authors the NAACP commissioned
to write the report? The New York Times reports that Zeskind, a lifetime
member of the NAACP, has written extensively on white nationalism, a
serious understatement. Zeskind s career has revolved around an obsession
of the abyss of mayhem and murder America faces at the hands of white
nationalists. He has worked to establish himself as an expert on
extremist groups various media outlets routinely rely on for comment, but
few have bothered to expose his own extremist past.
Laird Wilcox, a civil rights activists who is known for examining
extremists on the right and left ends of the political spectrum, has
previously had Zeskind on his radar. Like many notable modern liberals,
Zeskind reportedly got his start working with the Sojourner Truth
Organization (STO) where his primary role was motivating the working
classes to make a revolution. The STO s role model: Soviet dictator Josef
Stalin, whose iron discipline the STO idolized.
Leonard Zeskind
In a 1978 article he wrote for the group s journal, Urgent Tasks, named
after V.I. Lenin. Zeskind wrote about Workplace Struggles in Kansas City
and discussed the value of a grassroots school of communism that would
destroy the marketplace, not sell at it. In a 1980 article for the same
publication, Zeskind denounced the American military as a tool of U.S.
Imperialism.
A 1981 City Magazine profile of Zeskind, author Bruce Rodgers described him
as elusive and near hysterical and paranoid. Further, the STO was
described as a group which surfaced on occasion to distract and intimidate
non-violent groups working for social change.
According to reports, Zeskind spent the 1980s as a member of one pro-
Stalinist group who worked to provoke the Ku Klux Klan and stir up racial
tensions between blacks and whites. In 1986, this National Anti-Klan
Network changed its name to a more benevolent-sounding Center for
Democratic Renewal. In 1989, with Soviet communism on the way out, Zeskind
told the Jewish Chronicle that he was never the kind of Marxist-Leninist
that they think of and claimed his Stalinist ideology was no longer a
defining feature of my politics.
At the same time, the CDR and other leftist groups were busy re-branding
themselves as well. According to Wilcox, rather than present socialism or
Marxism-Leninism as their goal at the time, they chose to change tactics
and piggy-back it onto anti-racism which is far more popular.
At the same time, Zeskind s co-author, Burghart, expanded his work studying
white nationalism to include condemning anti-illegal immigration groups
like the Minutemen on the country s southern border, claiming the group was
not patrolling the border to enforce American immigration laws, but only to
prevent non-whites from entering. According to Burghart, the Minutemen
represented Klan-style border patrol.
Devin Burghart (photo: TPM)
While working for the Center for New Community, Burghart participated in
programs of the Center for Democratic Values, the think-tank arm of the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Zeskind and Burghart began working cooperatively at the IREHR and have
written in the past about birthers but only now insist the label belongs
slapped on the tea party.
During the summer, Zeskind and Burghart turned their focus toward the tea
party. On July 11, Zeskind delivered a presentation to the NAACP s National
Convention specifically addressing the dire threat of the tea party
(emphases mine):
The Tea Parties are a little bit like a poison apple with three layers.
At their center is a hard-core group of over 220,000 enrolled members of
five national factions, and hundreds of thousands more that we have not yet
counted but are signed up only with their local Tea Parties. At the next
level is a larger less defined group of a couple of million activists who
go to meetings, buy the literature and attend the many local and national
protests. And finally there are the Tea Party sympathizers. These are
people who say they agree with what they believe are the Tea Parties goal.
These rank at about 16% to 18% of voters, depending on which organization
is doing the polling. That would mean somewhere between 17 million and 19
million adult American voters count themselves as Tea Party supporters.
This is an overwhelmingly white and solidly middle class slice of the
population, slightly older and less troubled financially than the rest of
us. Please, remember this point when some political pundit or the other
tells you these are economically strapped Americans hitting out at
scapegoats. These are not populists of any stripe. These are ultra-
nationalists (or super patriots) who are defending their special pale-
skinned privileges and power.
Now much of the media attention has been focused on FreedomWorks Tea
Party, because it is headquartered in the DC area, and because Dick Armey
was a big deal Republican. There are some who mistakenly speculate that
this is an Astroturf phenomenon, that is a fake grassroots thing conjured
up solely by Republican money and party officials.
But it is a real grass roots problem for us, and Dick Armey s
FreedomWorks Tea Party is not one of the larger Tea Party groups. ResistNet
and Tea Party Patriots are actually the largest of the six national
factions.
The Tea Parties are not just about taxes and budgets. They are against
everything we are for, beginning with President Barack Obama.
The IREHR also convened a July meeting in London during which, as Burghart
notes, the growing momentum of the tea party was discussed on an
international scale (emphases mine):
From the reaction of the audiences during my recent Searchlight-
sponsored speaking tour of the United Kingdom, July 17-21, it appears that
there is a high level of interest and concern about the influence of the
Tea Parties on the political scene here in the United States.
The tour began in London at a Labour Friends of Searchlight conference.
Early in the day, highly-regarded Labour MP John Cruddas encouraged the
crowd to learn from one another, and declared that Labour must create a
party rooted in a culture of organizing. Continuing the organizing thread,
I used my keynote speech to discuss the organizing techniques utilized by
the Right in the United States. From the Christian Coalition to the Tea
Parties, the Right has adapted new organizing techniques to stymie
progressive change.
At each of these events, the vast majority of the attendees responded
that they closely followed American politics and were concerned about the
rise of the Tea Parties. In my presentations, I discussed the birth of the
Tea Party movement, and the size, scope, and ideology of the national
factions.
Back in London for the final event of the tour, we held a public
meeting to discuss the Tea Party phenomenon in the council chambers of
Unison Britain s biggest public sector trade union. At the end of my
presentation, there was tremendous interest in hearing about efforts to
counter the rapid growth of the Tea Parties. We discussed the resolution
passed by the NAACP condemning racism in the Tea Parties, and the NAACP
delegates who held up Hope Not Hate signs on the convention floor.
An old Stalinist standby for undermining opposition is ritual defamation,
as Wilcox has noted, to call people names in the hope of defaming,
discrediting, stigmatizing or neutralizing them. From decrypted Venona
files, we now know that the KGB routinely used race to divide people and
British author Mark Shields has observed how the Soviets hoped to weaken
internal cohesion of the United States and undermine its international
reputation by inciting race hatred.
Are today s liberals taking a page out of the old Soviet playbook? It would
seem that way, as many on the left have decided the best way to undermine
the influence of the tea party is to paint it as racist, nationalist and
…