Dick Armey’s conservative organization FreedomWorks is readying for the launch of a comprehensive political program aimed at debunking the NAACP’s race-charged attacks on the Tea Party movement.
FreedomWorks President and CEO Matt Kibbe said the organization will roll out Diverse Tea, a platform and advertising campaign that will showcase diversity in the Tea Party movement, sometime this week or early next week.
“The idea is to create a platform for African-American Tea Party leaders, Hispanic Tea Party leaders and Jewish Tea Party leaders to get out there and talk about why they’re involved and why these issues matter so much to them,” Kibbe said.
Kibbe said the NAACP is trying to change the conversation from the “failed policies of the stimulus and they don’t want to talk about unemployment and they sure as heck don’t want to talk about a government takeover of health care.”
The NAACP is just one of the many left-wing organizations that fear the Tea Party, Kibbe explained.
“It’s ironic that the left that so eagerly celebrates the notion of diversity is attacking what I believe to be the most diverse political movement in my lifetime,” Kibbe said. “They [the left] are afraid of the Tea Party and, frankly, they’re afraid of the diversity of the Tea Party. If you actually take the time to get to know the people in the Tea Party movement, you see an amazing amount of diversity – not just different skin colors but people literally from all walks of life that have united around the idea that the government is too big and is spending too much money it doesn’t have.”
As a part of FreedomWorks’ overall counter to the NAACP’s teapartytracker.org, former Garland, Texas NAACP chapter president and current Tea Party leader, The Rev. C.L. Bryant, is developing a feature-length documentary called “Runaway Slave.”
Bryant, who left the NAACP because he was upset with what he perceived to be the organization’s focus on liberal politics and lack of interest in civil rights, said the film will show viewers how organizations like the NAACP use their clout to keep people under their control. He says he’s a “runaway slave” in modern terms because he isn’t accepting the status quo.
The whole idea behind the film, Bryant said, is to encourage Americans to “flee economic slavery, run toward the blessing of liberty.”
“Two Octobers ago, when John McCain and then-Senator Barack Obama came off the campaign trail to sign onto to TARP, I realized that this was going to enslave the American people,” Bryant said.
Bryant said the film is going to take on the ideas of the current left establishment by showing viewers stops along the Underground Railroad between Atlanta and Delaware.
“There are people in the world who do have shackles on them, but here in America, a person has full rights of the Constitution, regardless of their skin color,” Bryant explained. “In fact, I defy anyone to name one thing in this country at this point in time that would hinder you from being whatever you want to be because of your skin color – it just does not exist.” Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ director of federal and state campaigns, can’t believe the NAACP would say the Tea Party is racist – he says he has been to numerous Tea Party rallies and hasn’t met a single racist yet.
“Al Sharpton and his National Action Network doesn’t have any real support among the American people,” Steinhauser said. “There’s a very stark contrast in what we’re doing – everyone pays their own way, they organize the buses locally, they fly in and pay their own way, they stay in hotels and pay their own way.”
Kibbe doesn’t think the left will ever stop trying to taint the Tea Party movement. If it’s not charges of “racism,” it’ll be something else.
“Racism is the latest in a long series of attacks trying to discredit the men and women of the Tea Party movement,” Kibbe said. “First, they were ‘fake,’ then they were ‘puppets’ for some corporate interest and, then, when those didn’t work and reporters went out and actually started to talk to these folks and realize that they were real and their concerns were real, then they started with the more nasty stuff.”
Bryant said he’s hoping the documentary will be done by next spring. He is currently waiting on donations to start flowing into FreedomWorks from the general public to get the rest of production completed.
