Tea Party Express Doesn’t Help Image With Tancredo Endorsement

By Sally Kohn
Sally is Founder and Chief Education Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, a grassroots popular education organization.

In case you were harboring any lingering doubts about extreme racist elements within the Tea Party, the Tea Party Express endorsement of  Congressman Tom Tancredo, Constitution Party candidate for Governor of Colorado, might ease those doubts.

This is the same Tom Tancredo who, during a Tea Party convention speech, said “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.” Evoking the racist literacy tests that once barred African-Americans from the polls, Tancredo called for a civics test for all voters. Never mind the fact that new immigrants have taken civics tests to become citizens whereas those born in the United States may be the ignorant ones…. The statement very clearly echoed enforcing racial hierarchy and excluding certain Americans from democracy.

The same Tom Tancredo who, regarding Islam, said, “I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours.”

The same Tom Tancredo who has launched a vitriolic one-man attack on undocumented immigrants, claiming “the barbarians are past the gate.”  “The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences,” Tancredo wrote in his anti-immigrant fear-mongering book In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security.

Advice to the Tea Party: If you’re falling over yourself to deny the existence of racism in your ranks, don’t start handing out endorsements to candidates marked by perceived racist statements.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.