In the vast Potomac Ballroom of the Gaylord hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held March 14-16, started as a well-choreographed effort to present a softer, more diverse, conservative movement. Beyond the main hall, however, the carefully crafted façade melted away. In the many conference rooms that the Tea Party dominated, events featured blatant racism, homophobia, sexism, and Islamophobia. Despite the efforts of organizers to sweep it all under the rug, this year’s CPAC showed a conservative movement riddled with white nationalists, and others long a pillar of the farthest edge of the far right.  The conservative sense of white dispossession at the core of this new conservative movement, bore little resemblance to the high and mighty elites of the Reagan and Bush years.

Based on the uttering of one self-identified “Exalted Cyclops,” a mass of television, internet, and print reporters have declared that Klansmen will be coming to Memphis, Tennessee and protest the renaming of several Confederate memorials in that city.  The number “5,000” is usually floated along with this “fact.”

The article below ran in the January 2013 edition of Searchlight, an anti-racist, anti-fascist magazine published monthly in London with international distribution.  It analyzes Klan, neo-Nazi and Tea Party activity during 2012, and recounts some of the movement's most violent episodes.  At the end, please note the data that points towards problems in the future.

2012: A Year in Review

By Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart

The year began with whimpers from white nationalists about the decay of their supposed civilization.  And it ended with a bang from gunners screaming about their rights after yet another mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. Election year events dominated the ebb and flow of the far right, the racists and the bigots.  In between, skinheads and assorted Aryan-types were arrested and convicted in multiple instances of horrific violence. 

On Monday, January 28, 2013, in Topeka, Washburn University’s Center for Kansas Studies asked IREHR president Leonard Zeskind to give a presentation for their main “Kansas Day” commemoration.  The following is an excerpt from that speech.

Monday, January 21, is the national holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday anniversary. If he had not been horribly murdered by an assassin in 1968, or struck down in some other fashion, he would be 84 years old. Across the country, in every major city and most medium-sized towns there will be at least some kind of event. In Kansas City, where I am now sitting, multiple events have already happened as I write these words.

As a reminder that white nationalist activity remains a problem in the Northwest, last week Idaho's only black lawmaker received a hand-addressed application to join the Ku Klux Klan. 

Rep. Cherie Buckner-Webb, told the Associated Press that childhood memories of a cross burning on her lawn on Boise's north end were rekindled when she opened the hand-addressed application form to join the Harrison, Arkansas-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "It conjured up a lot of things for me that weren't very comfortable – not fear, but sometimes we get to thinking things are settled," she said. Responding to why she may have received the mailing, she added, “My first inclination was someone wants me to know the Klan is still around.”

Excerpts from presentation by Leonard Zeskind to the "Annual Civil Rights Town Hall Meeting" held by the Kansas City, Missouri branch of the NAACP on January 28, 2012.

Karen Pack is the leader of the Tea Party Patriots local group, the Wood County Tea Party. She is also listed as a member of Tea Party Patriot and the 1776 Tea Party factions. 

A 30-year old resident of of Winnsboro, Texas, Pack describes herself as "a Christian, a Tea Party Member, a Constitutionalist and a Patriot." Missing from that description, however, is Karen Pack's history with the Ku Klux Klan.

In IREHR's Special Report, Tea Party Nationalism, the leader of a Tea Party Patriots group in Woods County, Texas, Karen Pack, was cited on three counts: The first was the simple fact that the Woods County group was one among several others who had sponsored events featuring Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who has become one of the main advocates for organizing armed militias. The second count pointed to Pack's apoplectic view that Christianity was under attack by an unnamed, yet "evil" enemy. Her corollary belief that there is no separation of church and state in her obviously Christian America was also noted. A third count noted that Ms. Pack had once been listed by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan as an "official supporter" and a subscriber to its tabloid, White Patriot.

In response, Ms. Pack has signed a letter that claimed there was a hole in the report's story. She was 16 years old at the time she subscribed, she said. On this point her letter needs to be quoted: "I know that is no excuse for being involved with the KKK who, as you point out, tried to gear their message to a more Christian audience in the early 90s. At the mature age of 16, I should have easily read through the lines and known that a 'Christian Patriot' was a code term for the KKK."

{jb_quoteright}I know that is no excuse for being involved with the KKK who, as you point out, tried to gear their message to a more Christian audience in the early 90s. At the mature age of 16, I should have easily read through the lines and known that a 'Christian Patriot' was a code term for the KKK.     --Karen Pack{/jb_quoteright}

Actually, IREHR agrees with Ms. Pack on one point: there is no excuse for being involved with the KKK. As the accompanying graphic demonstrates, however, there were no "code" words involved, and no holes in the report's story. The name of the Ku Klux Klan publication in question was "White Patriot," not Christian Patriot. The Klan name was emblazoned front and center. And in the pictured edition, distributed in 1996 when Ms. Pack would have seen it, the Knights harken back to their founder, David Duke. An extended article inside this edition details Klan activity over the previous years. There is nothing obscure about what this Klan group was doing in the mid-1990s. Any 16 year old with enough savvy to subscribe to the White Patriot could see what they were getting in to.

In the end, however, it is not what Ms. Pack did in 1996 that rendered her into a subject in IREHR's report, Tea Party Nationalism. What ultimately counts now is the vitriol that she has helped inject into the Tea Party bloodstream. It is a symptom of something much larger and more dangerous that needs to be opposed forthrightly by all people of good will. On this point, the silence of the Tea Party Patriots national organization is extremely telling. 

At a Glance

Headquarters: Woodstock, Georgia.

Website: TeaPartyPatriots.org

Online Membership: 115,311 | 74,779 (social networking site)

Chapters: 2,369

Notable: