"Today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies," the
Washington Post's Colby King [1] charged in his weekly Saturday column,
maintaining "they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are
entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because
they are the 'real Americans,' while all who don't think or look like
them are not" and so, "without folks like them, there would be no Rush
Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan."
King, the Post's deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007 who
in 2003 won the Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished commentary," began the
column, "In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and
history [2]," by equating the Tea Party activists with the racist
segregationists of the 1950s:
The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956....Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. "They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, 'Lynch her! Lynch her!'"
Subtle.
King proceeded to recall: "Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke
rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in
victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman
and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power
rhetoric."
Interestingly, while King made sure to identify Duke as a Republican,
he failed to identify George Wallace as a Democrat (long before and
after his "independent" presidential runs), nor how the violent
anti-desegregation efforts he cited in Alabama and Arkansas were led by
Democrats.
From February: "Washington
Post's King Disparages Palin as 'Simple-Minded' and 'Mediocre [3]'"
An excerpt from "In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate
and history," Kings's column in the Saturday, March 27 Washington Post:
The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class. Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.
"They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, 'Lynch her! Lynch her!' I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd - someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."
Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.
People like that old woman in Little Rock, the Alabama mob that hounded Autherine Lucy, the embracers of Duke's demagoguery in Louisiana, never go away.
They were spotted last weekend on Capitol Hill under the Tea Party banner protesting the health-care-reform bill....
Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don't think or look like them are not.
And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace...
And they are faithful to the old Wallace playbook.
McWhorter wrote how Wallace, in a 1963 speech to the political arm of Alabama's Ku Klux Klan, "referred to the recent bombings in Birmingham against prominent black citizens, citing the lack of fatalities as proof that the 'nigras' were throwing the dynamite themselves in order to attract publicity and money."
Fast-forward to today. Note the pro-Tea Party conservative commentary debunking last weekend's racist and homophobic slurs as a work of fiction and exaggeration strictly for political reasons....
The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.
- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [4] to follow him on Twitter.