{"id":1310,"date":"2010-10-21T12:13:47","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T17:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/?p=1310"},"modified":"2010-10-21T12:13:47","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T17:13:47","slug":"is-the-tea-party-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/is-the-tea-party-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Tea Party Racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily Ekins, a student at UCLA, conducted a study of the signs at a Tea Party rally.\u00c2\u00a0 She took pictures of about 250 signs and then categorized them.\u00c2\u00a0 She discovered that a quarter of them expressed anger at Obama, but only 5% mentioned his race or religion, and just 1% questioned his citizenship.<\/p>\n

With the exception of a single article<\/a> in the Washington Post\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 the mainstream media completely ignored her findings.\u00c2\u00a0 Bias?\u00c2\u00a0 Naw, not them.<\/p>\n

The 5% number is telling.\u00c2\u00a0 A minimum of 10% of any group will be oddballs and misfits.\u00c2\u00a0 That goes for any <\/em>organization, not just political ones.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve served on the boards of two organizations that relied on volunteers, and about 10% of the people who showed up to help were creepy freaks you’d never choose to associate with.<\/p>\n

In a recent interview with Bill O’Reilly, the president of the NAACP said they’d been monitoring Tea Party rallies for racist signs for the past six months.\u00c2\u00a0 They’d found one offensive t-shirt.\u00c2\u00a0 One<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As I’ve mentioned before, standard operating procedure for the left is slapping a “racist” tag on any groups, individuals, or even ideas they don’t agree with.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes it easy to ignore and dismiss them, which is soooo much easier than addressing the issues being raised.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve been smearing the Tea Party since its inception.\u00c2\u00a0 Their “proof” consists of about two dozen tasteless signs they’ve found among the hundreds of thousands that have been displayed at rallies.\u00c2\u00a0 They post these pictures over and over again, at every opportunity.<\/p>\n

This study isn’t definitive, and needs a follow-up.\u00c2\u00a0 It should include more signs, from different rallies, and several people with different political ideologies should rate them.\u00c2\u00a0 But this is a good start, and debunks the oft-repeated charges of TP racism.<\/p>\n

I’ve got several problems with the Tea Party, which I’ll address in a later post, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear, from this study and the NAACPs inability to find racism at the rallies, despite their diligent search, that the most common smear on them is completely without merit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Ekins, a student at UCLA, conducted a study of the signs at a Tea Party rally.\u00c2\u00a0 She took pictures of about 250 signs and then categorized them.\u00c2\u00a0 She discovered that a quarter of them expressed anger at Obama, but only 5% mentioned his race or religion, and just 1% questioned his citizenship. With the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1312,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davehitt.com\/blog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}