Alex Brant-Zawadzki Neo-Nazis, Militants Eye Tea Party for Recruitment

Alex Brant-Zawadzki Neo-Nazis, Militants Eye Tea Party for Recruitment

Alex Brant-Zawadzki , January 28, 2010 | 7:01:22 PM (EST)

Produced by HuffPost's Eyes & Ears Citizen Journalism Unit

Tea parties are proving very attractive to both white supremacists and the militia movement. At 11:15 on Friday, in an online Patriot Caucus discussion forum, David E. Parsons wrote a post called "Militia Training Videos," with links to videos by Mark Koernke, a leading figure in the American militia movement, and his followers.

One video linked to from the Patriot Caucus forum (embedded below) features militiamen emerging from a smoke-screened forest, armed with assault rifles, with the instructions: "Train as you will fight... So that you will fight as you have trained!!!"

Militants such as Koernke have referred to their cause as the Patriot Movement for years. Meanwhile, multiple tea party groups are springing up which refer to themselves as "militias." Eric Odom, executive director of American Liberty Alliance, created the Patriot Caucus website on which the militia recruitment post was made. He has yet to respond to a January 22 email informing him of the post. At time of publication, the post was still up.

But militants are not the only ones infiltrating the Tea Party movement. The white power movement views Tea Parties as opportunities to recruit as well as incite violence, as is evidenced by postings on the white power website Stormfront:

Whites Forward: "Go where our people are starting to stand up around symptoms of the problem, and INTERVENE to guide them. Just because these started as an anti-tax protest doesn't mean that they must be limited and can't be developed upward toward an explicitly racial mass struggle."
Scottish: "I think the "tea party" is a good way to meet people with potential. Most people at this event will be white people who are fed up with the direction of things and they are ready to hear how we got into this mess."
On Jan. 22 the Council of Conservative Citizens attended a Florida Tea Party, where members distributed two boxes of their newsletter and 250 Council business cards. The CofCC is the political face of the white power movement. Their mission statement declares that they "oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people."

Last November, neo-Nazi J.T. Ready started a fight by unfurling a Hitler flag at an Arizona Tea Party. In the recent documentary, "White Power USA", Ready describes the Tea Party movement as "the beginning of a really good awakening." White supremacists believe that they are only the tip of an iceberg, the visible aspect of a more universal hatred. The documentary suggests that white supremacists sees Tea Parties as "the best chance in decades to cross over into mainstream American politics."


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