Thursday, October 21, 2010

Who Wrote the NAACP's "Tea Party is Racist" Report?




Who Wrote the NAACP's "Tea Party is Racist" Report?

In typical fashion, the NAACP turned to individuals who have a great love for all things communist, socialist and Marxist. In other words, they are identical to those who attended the NAACP's One Nation Rally.

TheBlaze.com reports:

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.

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.

Continue reading about the two guys who wrote the NAACP report>>>

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