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.

This section of the Special Report compiles opinion polling data, documents significant examples of racist vitriol on the part of Tea Party leaders, shows incidents where well-known anti-Semites and white supremacists have been given a platform by Tea Partiers, and analyzes the attempt by white nationalist organizations to find new recruits in Tea Party ranks.

Tea Party Nationalism is the first report of its kind. It examines the six national organizational networks at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express. This report documents the corporate structures and leaderships, their finances, and membership concentrations of each faction. It looks at the actual relationships of these factions to each other, including some of the very explicit differences they have with each other. And we begin an analysis of the larger politics that motivate each faction and the Tea Party movement generally.

After a year of fast-paced growth and increasing influence, the Tea Partiers suffered their first ever political defeat on Sunday when the House of Representatives passed health care reform. Remember, it was the Tea Partiers' protests at town hall meetings last August that slowed the legislative drive toward reform and effectively took the single-payer option out of the Democratic Party's playbook. Tea Partiers started to push "independents" away from the Democrats, and they pushed the Republican establishment into becoming the party of no-compromise opposition. Now a simple up or down vote has thrown the first roadblock in front of the Tea Partiers, and the question emerges: how will they respond over the next five months?

A former Marine with ties to Tea Parties and militias who talked openly about using his training “to become a domestic terrorist” has been charged in separate complaints with raping a child and possessing an unregistered grenade launcher. His arrest may signal that a wing of the Tea Parties is heading in a more militant direction.