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In case any of you were confused by the Evil Librul Media's depiction of the wholesome, America-loving Tea Party Movement as somehow a hotbed of racism and radical extremism -- all because it's over 90 percent white -- have no fear.

Dr. David Duke, former Klan leader, is here to explain it all for you in his new YouTube message:

Duke: Tea Party people are called racist because the vast majority wants to stop the massive non-European immigration that will turn America into a crumbling tower of Babel. Most Tea Partiers believe that we in America have the right to preserve our heritage, language, and culture, just as every nation has that human right. The vast majority of Tea Party activists oppose affirmative action and diversity, which are nothing more than programs of racist discrimination against white people. The vast majority of Tea Party enthusiasts despise Hollywood and the mass media.

You know, the unelected media bosses have far more power than any senator or congressman, and are far more alien to America than the British were at the time of the American Revolution. At least the British were of our own, Christian cultural heritage, while the non-Christian ethno-religious minority who dominates Hollywood sees itself as very distinct from the 98 percent of the rest of us.

Tea Party activists are true populists who see the powers that control international finance and the Federal Reserve as the biggest threats to American prosperity and freedom.

...... The Tea Party movement is made up of American people who have watched in silent anger while the nation of our forefathers has been destroyed. The Tea Party movement, as the original Tea Party, is about preserving our heritage and our freedom.

In other words, the Tea Partiers aren't any more racist than he is.

And of course, it's the fault of the evil Jewish media that anyone should think so.

Duke also notes that the Tea Party leaders have been eagerly promoting a multiracial image, while the reality is that it is predominantly a white movement. The message of the video was to advise them to stop doing this and embrace their whiteness.

See, when David Duke whines that "pro white" organizations don't get treated the same as "pro black" organizations, he's ignoring a critical difference: "Pro black" organizations (think the NAACP) are all about lifting up people of their own color. "Pro white" organizations are all about tearing down people of other colors. That's why they call them "hate groups."

The Tea Partiers probably don't want Duke's endorsement. But he's basically right: The Tea Partiers argue from exactly the same kind of appeals that Duke and his fellow white nationalist have used for years, particularly the appeals to the "Founding Fathers" -- most of whom were, after all, white supremacists themselves.

Indeed, the Tea Party movement is nothing less than the manifestation of the agenda Duke has been pushing for years. We appreciate him pointing that out for public consumption.

[Via FreakOut Nation.]

They're crawling out from under the rocks everywhere. In Missouri, white supremacist Glenn Miller has declared his candidacy for the United States Senate, vowing to "reach every nook and cranny in the state" in his quest for votes and launching a new campaign web site at the URL whty.org. His opponents include Roy Blunt and Robin Carnahan, and his last try got him around 40 votes or so, but hey, any excuse to spread a little hate among friends, right?

Miller isn't your ordinary run-of-the-mill Klansman either. From Southern Poverty Law Center, 2004:

One of the first white supremacists to use paramilitary tactics with his North Carolina-based hate group — the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which later morphed into the White Patriot Party — Glenn Miller went on the lam in 1986 after mailing a letter to 5,000 people calling for "total war" against the feds, blacks and Jews.

Miller had also violated a court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, prohibiting him from continuing to operate a paramilitary organization. After a nationwide manhunt, authorities tear-gassed him out of a mobile home in Ozark, Mo.

But Miller served only three years in prison, largely because he testified against 14 leading white supremacists in a 1988 Arkansas sedition trial. Among other things, Miller told the court that the late Order founder Robert Mathews had given him $200,000 in stolen money to finance the White Patriot Party.

To kick off his campaign, he's running a series of vile anti-Semitic ads hosted on the white supremacist site Vanguard News Network.

This is what happens when the dog whistle sounds among the wingnut contingent. Sure, they're not all racists, but they know how to stir up the ones who are violent, evil and malevolent.

I'm amazed Miller is qualified to be a candidate for the Senate. Doesn't a felony conviction disqualify him?

They gave us a republic.: GOP supports survival of the fittest

We are respectable negroes: Behold the Ugliness of the Right Wing: Breitbart compares ACORN to the KKK

Crooked Timber: Bookblogging: the reanimation of trickle down

Southern Beale: Nut Allergies

The Washington Monthly: "Stupak happens to be wrong"

Mad Kane’s Political Madness: Chip Off the Old Crock

As Eric Boehlert notes, Andrew Breitbart has a real credibility problem, and it extends well beyond his journalistic malfeasance in the ACORN video hoax.

His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in the cause of defending the videos and their makers or likewise attacking ACORN. The latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec and Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from "historian" Michael Zak at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" blog:

Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them. Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party. According to a southern governor, "Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night."

"The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory," wrote one historian. "There's no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls" - easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.

Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK's Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded. Why? The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.

Good God. It's hard to know where to begin. Let's try with Weigel's observation:

The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.

More to the point, the entire raison d'etre of the Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize them into submission and to ensure that they could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, they killed an estimated 20,000 people in the years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, the Klansmen of the postwar period essentially negated the war's outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, and the complete destruction of the voting franchise for black people, thereby ensuring white rule for the next century and beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky's riveting account, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, which was excerpted in the New York Times.)

ACORN's very raison d'etre, in blazing contradistinction from the KKK, is to enfranchise minority voters and bring them into the American democratic system. That is to say, its very existence is about repairing the damage created by the Klan and its legacy of Jim Crow and segregation -- damage that remains with us to this day. Moreover, its established means of doing so are peaceful and democratic: voter-enrollment drives and education work, empowering minority communities to achieve economic and politic equity. That was what the Klan was devoted to preventing.

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We have learned that Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) has a favorite Puerto Rican jurist -- Jose Cabranes. Sessions demanded to know why Judge Sotomayor did not follow Judge Cabranes' lead

Interestingly, Sessions was very critical of Judge Sotomayor's involvement, as a member of the Board of Directors, of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sessions seemed not to know that his favorite Boricua judge, Cabranes, was also a member of the Board of the PRDLEF. Now right wing groups allied with Sessions and following his lead are running an ad attacking Sotomayor as a "terrorist."

The question needs to be asked of Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) (the KKK sympathizer; the person who said the NAACP was a "commie" group and who berated a white lawyer who worked for civil rights as a "disgrace to his race"), what do he and his allies make of the fact that their favorite Puerto Rican jurist, Jose Cabranes, was also a member of the "terrorist" group - the PRLDEF?

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For Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, white men deserve preferential treatment. Given his stated sympathies for the KKK, this is hardly surpising. But it is worth noting. In his opening statement, Sessions said, Sessions said:

I will not vote for — no senator should vote for — an individual nominated by any President who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their own personal background, gender, prejudices, or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yet, Sessions voted for Samuel Alito, who testified in his confirmation hearings that he does take his own personal background and sympathies into account as a judge.

Sessions demands preferential treatment for white men. He clearly applies a stricter standard to persons who are not white men. Given his history, this is hardly surprising. But it is also the perfect embodiment of the Republican philosophy.

h/t to Media Matters.

[Poster by Favianna Rodriguez for Presente.]

The Right is throwing every little bit of ugliness they can at Sonia Sotomayor in hopes of derailing her nomination to the Supreme Court.

They've called her a racist. They've compared the National Council of La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan. They've called her a "lightweight" and "anti-white." They've suggested she lacks the right temperament, since she's just another stereotypical hot-blooded Latina. They've even suggested she's unfit to be a judge because she menstruates.

OK, we get it, fellas. The kid gloves are off.

Presente has organized a grassroots campaign to let ordinary citizens send the following message to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

We are outraged by the smear campaign against Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Instead of discussing her record, right-wing activists have sought to question Sotomayor’s intelligence and temperament, and suggested that her racial identity will prevent her from ruling fairly. This thinly veiled racism and sexism is not only insulting to Sotomayor, it's an affront to anyone who believes that a nominee should be judged on her record, not her heritage or skin tone.

The reality is that Sotomayor is an accomplished judge who would start with more federal judicial experience than any Supreme Court justice in 100 years. In her more than 3,000 panel decisions and almost 400 opinions, she has consistently protected the rights of working Americans and become one of the nation’s most respected legal minds. Sotomayor is not only a superbly qualified nominee; she is a powerful example of the American dream and knows how the law affects the daily lives of Americans.

I stand with Judge Sotomayor, and urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to give her nomination a speedy hearing and a positive confirmation.

Go here to sign it.

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Tom Tancredo isn't the first to compare the National Council of La Raza to the Ku Klux Klan. But his use of the comparison not only tells us a lot about Tancredo himself, but also movement conservatism generally and the Republican Party particularly.

It especially tells us a lot about how readily they overinflate their own claims of anti-white racism on the part of minorities, while simultaneously minimizing the horrific terror of groups like the Klan.

Back in January of 2008, Jim Gilchrist -- cofounder of the nativist border-watch group The Minutemen -- used the same analogy on Glenn Beck's CNN Headline News program:

During the segment, Gilchrist compared the National Council of La Raza, which identifies itself as the "largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States," to the Ku Klux Klan. He claimed that a sign in downtown Los Angeles identifying "La Raza Plaza" "is perhaps a racist sign," and asserted that "La Raza and MEChA [the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán] are, in my opinion, the largest organized racial supremacy group in the United States today. And if we're going to have a La Raza Plaza sign, what's next? A KKK Plaza sign, a Black Panther Plaza sign? This goes right to the heart of free speech."

As always, this kind of rhetoric quickly circulates among rank-and-file members of groups like the Minutemen. Last July, Kyledeb of Citizen Orange talked to members of the Minutemen who were protesting NCLR's annual convention and recorded it on video. As you can see above, it's a pretty revealing encounter with the people waving signs equating La Raza with neo-Nazis and the Klan.

Note, however, that this "Ku Klux Klan" meme originated with earlier, similar claims about MEChA -- claims that have since been thoroughly debunked, though they still enjoy considerable circulation on the right.

And who originated the "MEChA = the KKK" claim? None other than Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds, who even went so far as to call MEChA -- in a case of mistaken identity for which he never apologized -- "fascist hatemongers". Moreover, the whole "MEChA is a racist group" meme played a founding role in the whole Reconquista! conspiracy theory promoted by Malkin et. al.

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By now, I'm sure you've seen the footage of Tancredo calling the National Council of La Raza a "Latino KKK." The most recent Republican Presidential nominee, John McCain, should denounce these comments. After all, McCain keynoted NCLR's 2004 conference, and addressed their 2008 convention:

Mel Martinez should join Senator McCain in denouncing Tancredo. Less than three months ago, Martinez prominently accepted a Capital Award from NCLR in recognition of his "outstanding support of public policies that are vital to Hispanic Americans." In his acceptance speech, Martinez asked the crowd to pressure Obama for bolder action on immigration reform:

“We have got to come to an understanding” on immigration, Martinez implored recently at the National Council of La Raza’s gala, where he and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) were honored for their work on behalf of Hispanics. “Comprehensive immigration reform has got to be back on the top of the agenda,” Martinez said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Rand Paul has spent the better part of a week ducking accusations that he harbors racist beliefs. By burying his racial attitudes under a veneer of libertarianism, he has almost convinced our worthless mainstream media that it's possible to believe businesses should deny people the right to enter their establishment (and presumably their workforce) based upon their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

It isn't difficult for me to understand how Rand Paul can hang his hat on libertarian beliefs until they don't fit the narrative, but it's surely another case of whitewashed truthiness on the part of the press.

Via Daily Kos (MinistryofTruth):

Strike #1. Rand Paul's campaign spokesperson Chris Hightower was fired for posting "Happy Nigger day" with Lynching pics at Facebook along with posts describing how he liked to go to the local mall in KKK garb.

Strike #2. On The Rachel Maddow's Show and NPR Rand Paul, repeatedly, objects to Title II of the Civil Rights Act, stating that Businesses should be able to discriminate based on race. Upon learning of the controversy he had stirred by airing his pro discrimination views, he backtracks and goes into hiding/damage control.

And now Strike #3. Rand Paul has received funds and promotion from white supremacists, Neo-Nazi's and KKK leadership via Stormfront.org

Here's a screenshot of Stormfront.org head Don Black's tweet calling for Twitter followers to support Rand Paul's money bomb in March:

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