Militias, Racists and Anti-Semites Found a Home in the Tea Party

Militias, Racists and Anti-Semites Found a Home in the Tea Party

"We Are at War": How Militias, Racists and Anti-Semites Found a Home
in the Tea Party
In places like rural Montana, the Tea Party is working hand-in-glove
with Patriot movement radicals -- many of whom have close ties to
anti-government armed militias.
November 21, 2010 |
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Maybe it's the gun-making kits that are being raffled off as door
prizes. Or maybe it's the fact that nearly everyone inside this hall
at the Ravalli County Fairground is packing heat. But most of all,
it's the copy of Mein Kampf sitting there on the book table, with its
black-and-white swastika, sandwiched between a survivalist how-to book
on food storage and a copy of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.

It is obvious: This is not your ordinary Tea Party gathering.

Mind you, they don't explicitly call themselves Tea Partiers. Their
official name is Celebrating Conservatism. But their mission statement
is classic Tea Party -- "to restore our country, counties, and cities
back to the Republic and the Constitution of the United States" -- and
Celebrating Conservatism is listed as a member of the national Tea
Party Patriots organization. Everyone in Hamilton, Montana -- the
whole of Montana's Bitterroot Valley, for that matter -- knows them as
the Tea Party's main presence in town. Once a month or so, the group
holds a potluck dinner at the county fairgrounds that typically
attracts a couple hundred people, which in a place like the Bitterroot
is a sizeable presence.

This night -- a September 14, 2010, potluck in the oversized metal
shed that is the fairground's main hall -- is special because there is
a high-profile guest: Larry Pratt, leader of Gun Owners of America.

Pratt, like a lot of Celebrating Conservatism's speakers, has a long
history with the far right. He is considered a godfather of the
militia movement, a network of conspiracy-minded, armed paramilitary
groups that exploded in the 1990s. Pratt addressed a pivotal three-day
meeting of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity adherents in Estes Park,
Colorado, in October 1992, convened in the wake of a shoot-out by
federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, that had sent shock waves through
the extreme right. That gathering is widely credited with birthing the
movement's strategy of organizing citizen militias as a form of
"leaderless resistance" to a looming "New World Order." Joining Pratt
on the stage at Estes Park were Aryan Nations leaders Richard Butler
and Louis Beam. (A few years later, Pratt became co-chair of Patrick
Buchanan's 1996 GOP presidential campaign, but was dismissed once
these Neo-Nazi ties surfaced in the national press.)

Pratt is hardly the only controversial figure to address the group. In
May 2010, at its convention on the University of Montana's Missoula
campus, Celebrating Conservatism hosted tax protester Red Beckman,
notorious for his open anti-Semitism and the author of a 1984 book
that argues the Holocaust was a judgment upon Jews for worshiping
Satan. At a Hamilton gathering in July 2009, a onetime Arizona sheriff
named Richard Mack addressed the crowd; he'd made a career in the
1990s out of organizing militias and speaking on the national circuit
of the anti-government Patriot movement. Mack's longtime Patriot
movement confederate, Jack McLamb, spoke at the group's Hamilton
gathering the following month. McLamb, a former police officer,
recruits "soldier and lawmen" to the Patriot cause through a group
called Police & Military Against a New World Order.

Those events served notice that Celebrating Conservatism had embraced
the Patriot movement cause.

Celebrating Conservatism formed in December 2008 in reaction to the
presidential election and slowly gained members that spring by
associating itself with a variety of Tea Party events in Bitterroot.
But locals only took real notice in September 2009, when the group
held a gun rights rally in downtown Hamilton at which participants
brandished firearms. Organizers followed up with a Celebration of
Right to Bear Arms in March 2010, which featured a march of several
hundred people along Hamilton's main drag. Anyone driving through town
that day was greeted by a gauntlet of people packing weapons ranging
from muzzle-loading muskets to a high-powered sniper-style .308
caliber rifle.

Continued here:
http://www.alternet.org/story/148946/%22we_are_at_war%22%3A_how_militias%2C_racists_and_anti-semites_found_a_home_in_the_tea_party_
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy

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