06.04.12
White, right wing and paranoid — PA Tea Party funnies
From the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog comes news of a neo-Nazi elected to the Luzerne Country, PA, Republican Party committee:
Steve Smith, a longtime racist activist with a history of violence and top-level ties to numerous white nationalist hate groups, has been elected to a 4-year term on the Republican Party’s county committee for Luzerne County, Penn., One People’s Project reports.
Recruited into the neo-Nazi movement while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1990s, Smith, of Pittston, Penn., has been active in an extraordinary array of white nationalist, skinhead, and neo-Nazi groups, including American Third Position, Keystone United (formerly Keystone State Skinheads), and the Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a former Aryan Nations member and former leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People …
Smith’s ties to the racist right stretch far beyond the political. In 2001, he co-founded a racist skinhead group now known as Keystone United (which was until 2009 known as the Keystone State Skinheads, or KSS), one of the largest and most active single-state racist skinhead crews in the country. In March 2003, he and two other KSS members were arrested in Scranton for beating up Antoni Williams, a black man, using stones and chunks of pavement. Smith pleaded guilty to terrorist threats and ethnic intimidation and received a 60-day sentence and probation.
To advance his goals, Smith has distanced himself somewhat from his violent past and focused on political activism. As state chairman for American Third Position (A3P), a white nationalist political party that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule, he has for several years been working the crowds at local Tea Party gatherings, which he once described as “fertile grounds for our activists.???
In October 2010, he led a delegation of A3P activists in presenting the party’s position to a Scranton Tea Party group. “We explained that the A3P was formed to represent white Americans, who have been denied representation for decades …”
Over the weekend, more on Tea Party bigots and their conspiracy theories, from the Sacramento Bee:
In our book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” my co-author Theda Skocpol and I examine this remarkable grass-roots engagement … In the end, we found that tea partyers combine laudable and effective political engagement with high levels of misinformation and troubling intolerance of their political opponents …
[Tea Party] members we interviewed held wildly inaccurate views of what is in, or not in, public policy. Tea partyers confidently told us that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ObamaCare” in their parlance) includes both death panels and the abolition of Medicare – although both claims are flat-out untrue … At times, the level of misinformation in tea party circles reached conspiratorial proportions. At a tea party meeting in Massachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the “smart grid” (an electrical infrastructure improvement approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people’s homes. Where are these smart, educated Americans getting such terribly inaccurate information?
Some of these rumors live primarily on the Internet, but another major source is Fox News. Almost all interviewees I spoke with had a favorite Fox News show – and some retirees reported watching as many as eight hours of Fox News a day. Checking the transcripts, we found that former Fox News host Glenn Beck had indeed raised the weird possibility of federal thermostat control on his show …
At a meeting I attended in Virginia, a visiting lecturer informed local tea party members . . . The United Nations and American authorities at all levels of government, it was claimed, are engaged in a communist conspiracy. In the near term, this scheme would take the form of apparently innocuous measures like new bike paths. But in the long term … would lead to the confiscation of all private property and the herding of Americans citizens into urban ghettos and then concentration camps. “Sustainable development,” the lecturer concluded, was a euphemism for the coming one world government.
Last week I used the words “bug nuts” to describe The Iowa GOP’s proposed party platform, also chock full of conspiracy theories including an assertion that government had made it illegal to do home repairs.
I have been told a Zygote is a person. That’s Zygote, with a capital Z.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm.
Jason said,
June 5, 2012 at 12:23 pm
There was an article in the WaPo last week (weekend?) about people in Fayette County, PA. It’s south of Pittsburgh against teh West VA border. You’ll be shocked, shocked to discover a healthy Tea Party attitude down there as well. But then again, hard to distinguish Fayette County from the WVA hicks who already made it clear they don’t like the black guy in teh White House.
Maybe PA is just too big to have a solid, consistent population from end to end – which is a shame, there are so many parts of PA to like.
George Smith said,
June 5, 2012 at 2:42 pm
Yeah, I spent half my life there. All of my experience getting higher education, post doc’d at Hershey, still have friends in York, a really conservative town.
Pennsy’s really two states — Pittsburgh, State College, Daughin County and Philly and near environs — all blue. And everything else, the in between parts, all red and much like the resentful American south in attitude.