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The Tea Party, being composed of millions of Americans strongly opposed to Obama’s policies, came in for some of the most fervid accusations of racism.

According to a batch of polls taken about the Tea Party movement in 2010, about a quarter of all Americans called themselves Tea Party supporters. (
USA Today
poll: 28 percent;
New York Times
/CBS poll: 18 percent.)
¹²
They were wealthier and better educated, but not much whiter than the nation as a whole.
¹³
(According to Gallup, Tea Party supporters were 79 percent white in a country that is 75 percent white. Less than half—49 percent—were Republicans.
¹⁴
) They were united only in believing the government was too big and Obama was taking it in a socialist direction.

Rasmussen polls showed that a majority of voters held a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement, up to 58 percent by April 2010. By contrast, 98 percent of the political class had an unfavorable view of the Tea Partiers.
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It was time to panic. The media had to act fast to make the Tea Party movement toxic. So they called it racist. You might get off with a warning once, but if the media caught you agreeing with the Tea Party again, then you’d be a racist, too.

To be sure, there were a lot of white people at the Tea Parties. At no point did it flicker across liberal brains that protests against the first black president probably wouldn’t draw a lot of black people, even apart from the fact that most blacks are Democrats. How many white evangelicals do Democrats have at their rallies? Complaints about Tea Partiers being white was reminiscent of the headline from the satirical magazine the
Onion,
September 20, 1990: “Iowa Family Blasted for Lack of Diversity: Exclusionary, All-White Petersons ‘Deeply Offensive,’ Say Activists.”

This is the kind of thinking we get from people churned out by our educational system. Anything that is not “diverse” must be bad.
If Israel is such a great place, where are the Nazis?

Unfortunately for the media, but fortunately for the country, no one
was ever able to produce evidence of the much-ballyhooed Tea Party racism. We keep batting averages around here.

So the media lied. As with the endless stream of racist incidents from the seventies and eighties, all the examples of Tea Party racism triumphantly produced by the media turned out to be phony.

There were three basic categories of false “racism” charges:

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Because many journalists are zealots, they never hesitated to believe every vile calumny about the Tea Party.

Hoping to provoke an ugly confrontation with the Tea Partiers, whom everyone kept calling racist, on the day of the Obamacare vote, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi marched members of the very liberal black caucus right through the middle of protesters on Capitol Hill. But the protesters didn’t oblige the speaker by acting racist, so the media just lied and claimed they did.

A hue and cry went up about Representative Emmanuel Cleaver allegedly being spat on, but when video evidence proved that false, Cleaver walked back his claim.

Most outrageously, the non-Fox media said Representative John Lewis had been called the N-word fifteen times. Fifteen. I guess if you’re going to invent an N-word story, you may as well go for the gold.

The protesters vehemently disputed that anyone had called Lewis the N-word, and commentator Andrew Breitbart promptly put up a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of it. Despite the media’s desperate quest for anti-Obamacare racism and hundreds of cameras at the protest, no one has ever been able to produce a video of the N-word being used. To this day, the reward remains uncollected. (If only journalists had cell phone cameras!)

No matter: Hundreds of news stories on TV, in newspapers and on the Web have repeated this lie, despite the absence of evidence that it happened.
On MSNBC’s
The Ed Show,
Salon.com’s Joan Walsh was indignant that anyone would question “whether John Lewis heard the N-word.”
¹⁶
Except Lewis didn’t claim he heard it. Others claimed it on his behalf.

The media kept playing bait-and-switch with the racism charges.

We have definite proof they’re racist! The protesters spat on one black congressman!

Show us.

All we brought was the Stalin sign.

Where’s the racist stuff?

I must have left it in the car. I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.

They are making the case—where’s the evidence? There’s nothing.

It’s great that the media don’t need proof. Journalists hold themselves to a Tawana Brawley truth standard. Using that criterion, why is no one talking about Chris Matthews’s gay porn collection?

According to Nexis, the lie about Lewis being called the N-word has been repeated dozens of times, even long after Breitbart conclusively demonstrated it didn’t happen. How many times is Chris Matthews—whose gay porn collection is way out of control—going to get away with this? How about Ed Schultz, who dates underage girls? Or Rachel Maddow, who has a major heroin problem?

These claims are based on the precise quantum of evidence that they have for the claim that anyone at the anti-ObamaCare rally called Rep. Lewis the N-word—actually less, since my slurs haven’t been thoroughly investigated and disproved.

Liberals smeared vast swaths of the country for failure to go along with the whole Obama agenda. In response to slanderous attacks on the Tea Party activists as racists, a number of conservative television pundits thought it was a great retort to say: “There is the fringe on both sides.”

Gee, thanks. Of course, since no one in the media was suggesting that liberals are racists, these idiots had just admitted that some conservatives were racists. Liberals have never been able to produce a single example of this alleged conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can come up with when defamed as racists is: “Man is imperfect.” Perhaps later in the taxi home, they think to themselves, “You know what I should have said? It might have been better to say ‘That’s a complete lie.’”

Republicans have to be trained that when they are falsely accused of racism, the proper response is:
You are a liar. That never happened.

How about trying that?

LIBERAL INFILTRATORS

The liberal infiltrators at conservative events were always like guys who do bad gay impressions—a little too flamboyant to be believable.

Tyler Collins, liberal infiltrator at a Rand Paul event in August 2010, claimed to be a Rand Paul supporter chirping “the Rand Paul campaign is a little bit racist” and denouncing Dora the Explorer, an illegal immigrant who was “corrupting our children.” He certainly enjoyed being interviewed! Collins was caught later that day, walking with supporters of Paul’s opponent.
¹⁷
Then it turned out he had also written an incoherent column in a local newspaper two months earlier attacking the Tea Party.
¹⁸

In July 2010, the George Soros–backed Center for American Progress produced a video purporting to show racism at Tea Parties. Most of the forty-three-second video showed innocuous signs, such as one saying,G
OD
B
LESS
G
LENN
B
ECK
; or old clips before there was a Tea Party, such as a random man calling illegal aliens “wetbacks” in 2006; or loopy, but nonracist, signs and statements. There was only one racist clip in the entire 43-second video, so it was showed twice. It was a well-known liberal infiltrator bellowing “I’m a proud racist!”

The full video of this wacko had been posted by the Tea Partiers themselves to identify the man as a liberal plant. In the original video, the Tea Partiers surround the infiltrator, jeer at him, tell him he isn’t one of them and to please go home. In a spectacularly evil fraud, Soros’s people used the video, but edited all that out.
¹⁹

Only one TV show presented the full video: Fox News’s Glenn Beck show.
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(That’s probably why the Tea Partiers wanted God to bless him.)

On the very day Beck had shown the video of Tea Partiers ejecting the liberal acting like a racist—we’ll generously assume he was acting—Chris Matthews announced on his show that he would believe the Tea Partiers weren’t racist as soon as “just one of those Tea Party people pull down one of those racist signs at the next Tea Party rally. I’m going to just wait. Reach over, grab the sign and tear it out of the guy’s hands. Then I will believe you.”
²¹
Forget the sign, how about throwing the racist liberal out? That’s what actually happened, so the media didn’t report it.

IT WASN’T RACIST

Then there were the examples of putative right-wing racism that had absolutely nothing to do with race.

In August 2009, the media hysterically warned that people were bringing rifles to protests against the
first black president
. As MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer put it: “Here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns.” She continued ever more frantically, “there are questions about whether this has racial overtones…white people showing up with guns.”

The network’s culture commentator, Touré, said there was a lot of “anger about a black person being president,” adding, “I’m not going to be surprised if we see somebody get a chance and take a chance and really try to hurt him.” MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan concurred: “Angry at government and racism, you put those two together…”
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And sure enough, all over TV and the Web, there was a photo of a man carrying a rifle! But it was edited strangely, zooming in on the rifle, but cropping out the person holding it. When the photo was expanded on various media-watch Web sites, the armed man turned out to be…an African American Second Amendment supporter.

In response to Second Amendment rallies on April 19, 2010—which no one at MSNBC knows is the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord—Ed Schultz claimed that the participants were rallying “on the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.” He said they “are embarrassing Caucasians in this country. I’m upset that we just can’t come to grips that we have a black president.” Demonstrating liberals’ famed racial tolerance, Schultz sneered: “They’re the base. They’re old. They’re angry. They’re white. They’re scared. They’re misinformed. They watch Fox.”
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Unless the Second Amendment defenders told Ed, “Oh yes, absolutely our rally was to honor the Oklahoma City bombing—we had no idea it was the anniversary of Lexington and Concord,” I’m fairly certain April 19 was chosen because it was the day the American rebels defended their armaments from British confiscation in the battles of Lexington and Concord.

What on earth does supporting gun rights have to do with not being able to “come to grips that we have a black president”?

VOTER ID LAWS

In 2011, the
New York Times
claimed in an editorial that laws requiring people to show photo identification before voting was “a modern whiff of Jim Crow.”
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Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, said on TV that voter ID laws were proof that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally—and very transparently—block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.”
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From the end of the Civil War until the passage of the voting rights act in 1965, Republicans were the ones registering blacks to vote, while Democrats were blocking their vote. That’s why the first black members of Congress from the South were all Republicans. The only people Republicans have tried to prevent from voting are those ineligible to vote. Now that blacks are voting for the Democrats, there’s no one to stop them from voting.

The claim that modern voter ID laws were a racist Republican plot was complicated by the fact that, in 2011, such a law was enacted by Rhode Island’s 85 percent Democratic legislature. The law drew its strongest support from black and Latino legislators, who cited specific examples of voter fraud.
²⁶

The Senate’s only black member, Democrat Harold Metts, pushed the voter ID bill, saying he’d heard complaints about election fraud for years. One poll worker told him about a voter who hadn’t been able to spell his own last name. In the House, the bill was supported by a black Democrat, Anastasia Williams, who had shown up to vote in 2006 and was told that she had already voted.
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A few years later, she said she watched as a Hispanic man voted, went to the parking lot to change his clothes, and then voted again. (She said she noticed him because he was “a hottie.”)
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As the Democratic Rhode Island legislature deliberated its voter ID bill, national Democrats begged them not to pass the bill. Wasserman Schultz called state legislators directly, asking them to kill the bill.
²⁹

Harold Metts and Anastasia Williams were unmoved by the national Democrats’ hysteria. The bill passed, prompting liberal periodicals such as the
New Republic
to suggest that the state’s African American Democrats were anti-Hispanic. Liberals are incapable of formulating an argument without accusing someone of racism.
We don’t like this, so who’s the racist?

Even with Rhode Island Democrats citing specific instances of voter fraud, the
New Republic
stated, “voter impersonation has never been proven.”
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What does that mean? Do they need a signed confession?

If eyewitness accounts of voter fraud given by black Democrats isn’t enough, how about a 98.2 percent voter registration in St. Louis, Missouri? Does that sound believable? How about twenty-nine voting districts in Missouri having more registered voters than voting-age people—including one county where 151 percent of the voting-age population was registered to vote in 2004?
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