Tea Party Racism by my good friend, Emery McClendon

My dear friend Mary Ann Hunt posted this on her blog and I wanted to share it.  If you'd like to check out her blog click here.  I don't know Mr. McClendon, but if he's a friend of Mary Ann, I know he is a reliable and honorable man.

To Whom It May Concern:

The following is a response to charges of racism at Tea Parties. I hope that you will consider using it. Thank you

In response to the mainstream media outlets that are trying to discredit the Tea Party Movement as racist, I feel that it is imperative that the truth be presented by one who’s been there.

First of all let me say that I am a conservative African American and a Veteran. I have not only attended several Tea Parties, but I organized the Tea Party event in Fort Wayne, Indiana in April of 2009! The event turned out to be well attended. Our keynote speaker was also African American; former presidential candidate, Dr. Alan Keyes. I also recently was a speaker at the Indianapolis, Indiana 2010 Tea Party, and I was the Keynote speaker in Wabash, Indiana.

I am outraged at the biased coverage of these events. The racist accusations against the Tea Party movement are false and do not portray the truth about a movement which is waking up Americans to the principles that founded this great nation. Every day a new charge is made, and the major media outlets refuse to allow someone like me refute these allegations and defend the Tea Party, and those that attend the rallies.

I challenge the media to allow an African American conservative patriot to evaluate the Tea Party movement based on experience. I also accept the offer to be that person, because I would like to share the truth about them from my first hand experiences.

I have attended dozens of these events, and have been featured as a speaker at several of them. I have also served on several U.S. Senate candidate panels, and was the moderator at a Senate and Congressional debate. I have also been asked to serve as a speaker at Town Hall Meetings. It has been wonderful to meet and to talk to those that attend. These are folk that love their country, share a deep respect for our Constitution and those that serve in our nation’s Armed Forces. It is a movement that unites everyone, regardless of race, based on those beliefs.

I have never encountered any racism at any of the events that I have attended throughout Indiana or in other states. Even after being the only Black person at a Tea Party in an Indiana town that has a very racial history in the past. The people there were friendly, and allowed me to ask questions, and to speak to them.

I have also attended rallies in the nation’s capital, and these have also been with out any incident.

I cannot sit by and allow a movement such as this to receive unwarranted negative publicity.

The movement is driving true patriotic Americans back to our founding principles and recreating a love for our Constitution. It does this across racial and cultural barriers. The Tea Party movement is bringing us together to stand up for a common cause; that of restoring the traditional values which encompass all people who call themselves Americans. Perhaps unity is what is what the naysayers really fear and the race card is always a handy tool to divide the people.

Sincerely;

FREEDOM and LIBERTY (Use Them Or Loose Them)

Emery McClendon / KB9IBW

Racism and ObamaCare

Star Parker
4/5/19

Like chewing gum stuck to the heel of your shoe, racism seems to be stuck forever to American public discourse. No matter what we do or what happens, somebody will find a racial motive.


Democrats have passed government healthcare with no Republican votes. Their leadership threatened and bribed their own members to eek out a majority. They resorted to an arcane procedure that maybe 100 people in the whole country can explain in order to pass a massive bill that polls show a majority of Americans don't want.

The federal government, for the first time ever, will force every American to buy, with a big chunk of their income, a product designed by government bureaucrats, with an army of IRS agents snooping on each of us to make sure we did it.

And how are many liberals explaining why so many Americans are ticked off?

It's because our president is black. It's about racism.

Even me. I'm steamed. And even though I happen to be black – I've even spoken at some Tea Party rallies – I still must be a racist.

Obama's approval rating has dropped from 70 percent when he was elected to 50 percent today. His disapproval has skyrocketed from 10 percent when he was elected to 42 percent today.

Per the Washington Post, in January 2009 58 percent of Americans said that the Obama presidency helped race relations. By January 2010, this was down to 40 percent.

Has this wave of disillusionment with Obama been driven by a sudden realization that the man Americans elected president is black?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's approval has dropped from 41 percent in January 2009 to 36 percent today and her disapproval has risen from 42 percent to 54 percent. Is she black?

Were the raucous townhalls last summer – which gave birth to the Tea Party movement – where irate constituents gave their representatives a piece of their mind about ObamaCare, racially motivated?

Care to understand what all this is really about?

Consider a powerful observation about a former time by one of America's great historians, Jacques Barzun. Barzun was a professor and dean at Columbia University and a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner.

"We make a great mistake in calling the American War of Independence, the 'American Revolution,'" he wrote. "In 1776 the Americans rebelled against recent rules and impositions. What they wanted was not a new type of government, but the old type they enjoyed. They were used to many freedoms, which they claimed as the immemorial rights of Englishmen. Once they defeated the English armies and expelled the Loyalists, they went back to their former ways, which they modestly enlarged, and codified in the Bill of Rights."

In a similar fashion today, Americans are rebelling as the freedom we have enjoyed, freedom which defines life in this country, is being taken away and new "rules and impositions" are being imposed.

It's not about theory or some abstract ideology. The intense feelings flow from losing what you have and what you know is vital.

What is new today is we can no longer continue the illusion of having our cake and eating it. We can no longer afford to be both a big government entitlement state and a free, creative, and prosperous nation. It's the prosperity created by our freedom that has financed the entitlements. But now the entitlements are overtaking and strangling our freedom.

So now is a time of choosing. We're either going to remain the land of the free or transform into the land of the bureaucrat.

The antipathy of activists toward Mr. Obama is not about how he looks but what he has done. That he has chosen and imposed on us the path of bureaucracy.