Tea Party Central Caves To ‘The Ministry Of Truth’

How can you be certain that a grassroots, decentralized movement is in the process of being thoroughly co-opted by the political establishment? Here’s one telling sign: A campaign that arose to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” for the purpose of bowing-and-scraping to mainstream muckrakers and race-baiters. That’s one way of telling that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

The background, via the NYDailyNews.com:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation … for a racist blog post. … He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.” A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery ─ that apparently crossed the line.The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Much of the 2007-2008 Tea-Party groundswell consisted of Ron-Paul opponents of big government Warfare-Welfare statism. In those far-off days, the Tea Party also opposed the “Mc Mussolini” and Palin versions thereof. Not nearly as likely to be reeled-in by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, leaders of that America would have worn the NAACP’s ad hominem as a badge of honor.

So it was that this once-gritty movement, now led by the kind of people who’ll claw their way onto the statist “Face the Nation,” doubled-up in paroxysms of pain and guilt in the face of NAACP bullies.

“Is it not an absurd world we live in?” Pat Buchanan asked rhetorically. “Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal — advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race — accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

The NAACP and its leader “are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race,” continued Buchanan; “from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives. By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander. Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.”

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. The NAACP is one of America’s many Ministries of Truth. Like the rest of them ─ the education system, most churches, the “intellectuals,” the ruling duopoly and their attendant bobbleheads ─ it issues countless edicts. “The dark art of rule” required that the Tea Party bête noire be ramrodded.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” was an appropriate response. Ignoring the NAACP; now that would have been even better. After all, what good does engaging with malevolence do? Too dumb to debate first principles, the reptilian brains at the NAACP are wily enough to work to shred every fragile filament of this country’s founding liberties. That is, those liberties that linger, or are in danger of being revived.

Asked to choose between a politician who is a Philo-Semitic statist, and between one who hates Jews such as myself, African-Americans, albino pygmies, homosexuals, and women, but has a zealot’s commitment to liquidating the federal government ─ you know who’d be my pick.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free college for quasi-literates, loans for agribusiness; the Departments of Transportation, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy; the “secretive totalitarian security cabal,” the Commerce Clause Capos who regulate cabbage patches in backyards, the warlords who wage war in Iraq, against tokers, and on toothless Pashtun primitives in Afghanistan ─ on-and-on to the tune of hundreds of trillions of depreciated dollars not its own ─ any man or woman able and willing to beat back this beast, even if bigoted, has my blessing.

So long as my bigot has not acted on his justly or unjustly harbored hostilities toward society’s protected species ─ these hostilities should matter not one whit.

Public purges are designed to shape opinion in politically pleasing ways on pain of purgatory. By participating in these staged displays of outrage, the establishment Tea Party has, inadvertently, sanctioned the illiberal persecution of unpopular thought and speech.