A new report, backed by the NAACP, has found what it says are efforts by white nationalist groups and militias to link themselves to the tea party movement, even as some tea party leaders have expelled members who have expressed racist sentiment.
The report , called Tea Party Nationalism, uses news articles, visits to white nationalist Web sites and observance of tea party functions to claim that tea party events have become a forum for extremists "hoping to push these (white) protesters toward a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy."
The report was issued by the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which is funded, in part, by the liberal Firedoll Foundation. The paper was written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, both of whom have written widely about white nationalism.
The country's more formalized and politically active tea party organizations have made statements repudiating racism; the report focuses primarily on the more diffusely affiliated tea party networks online and in county-level chapters throughout the country. It also singles out five individual tea party members, one of whom has been expelled from the movement, as having ties to anti-Semitic, militia or white nationalist groups.