Fake Tea Party Scandal in Boston (Updated with video)

Liberals everywhere are outraged by what happened at a Boston Tea Party. ThinkProgress and DailyKos have stories on it. The Huffington Post has two stories (here and here) on it. They all report that the speaker at a Tea Party event shouted: "We will not be silenced by faggots."

There are two things you should know about this scandal:

1. The first is that it wasn't at a real tea party. Well before the event, the Greater Boston Tea Party issued a statement (hat tip: Boston Globe) recommending that its members avoid the rally organized by an "unfamiliar" group and reaffirming that real tea parties are focused on fiscal not social issues:

   In keeping with the Greater Boston Tea Party’s tradition of welcoming all that want to preserve our Constitutional freedoms, we will be neither endorsing nor attending the rally on the Boston Common scheduled for Sunday, April 15, 2012. In fact, we encourage tea party activists to avoid the event. Sponsored by an unfamiliar “Mass Tea Party Coalition”, the lack of communication and collaboration with established tea party organizations concerns us that this is an organization bent on damaging the good name of the tea party movement.

   For nearly three years, Greater Boston Tea Party has been strongly focused on the serious fiscal issues facing the Commonwealth and this country. Our organization does not take positions on social issues, such as gay marriage or abortion. While these issues are important to many people, including some of our members, they do not apply to our mission of advocating for personal responsibility and individual Liberty.

   The statement about the rogue group being "bent on damaging the good name of the tea party movement" was quite prescient.


2. The second is that each of the stories alleging this use of the word "faggot" is sourced from DailyKos and DailyKos seemingly has a single source: an anonymous twitter user with the handle tulasana whose motto is "keep calm and smash patriarchy." DailyKos also admits that they don't even which speaker is supposed to have said it. Despite the claimed crowds at the event, no one claims to have a video of the alleged statement.

So there you have it: the left-blogosphere fuss is about a statement that one twitter user alleges to have been said but doesn't even claim to know who said it at a rally organized by such an odious rogue group that the event had been condemned by the Greater Boston Tea Party well before it happened.

When you see a poorly-constructed left-wing hit piece like this, you have to ask: how long before it is printed in the New York Times?

UPDATE: DailyKos' source lied. Scott Lively actually said "we will not be silenced by fascists." You can hear him say it quite clearly in the video below at about the 11 minute mark:

Thanks to anonymous for the video link.

Also, at the 13:13 mark, there is a speaker who, while supporting Lively, admits that Boston area tea parties objected to their misuse of the tea party name. (The speaker goes on, of course, to try to attack and belittle those tea parties.)

Fascism and Atheism

These days there is much discussion of Christianity being an irrational superstition. For perspective, Ed Driscoll points out that Mussolini and Hitler were both atheists. (Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao were also.) Just being free of superstition does make people virtuous.

"FRANKFURT'S BANKS STILL RUN BY JEWS" says New York Times headline, 1933

Another installment in our should-you-trust-the-MSM series: Hitler was not so bad says the 1933 New York Times. Thus, in a story printed on June 20, 1933, the Times wrote of German Jews: "Many Under Ban Look on Hitler as Less of an Evil Than Threatened Bolshevism." The NY Times reporter calls the physical attacks on Jews "only a dark detail." The Times says that Hitler's proposal to remove Jews from all bank directorates has been "already scrapped."

This story was written by the same reporter who earlier claimed that "Mussolini [was] eager to maintain peace."

NY Times: MUSSOLINI EAGER TO MAINTAIN PEACE

The news media assure us that Iraq is a disaster and that the UN represents the scientific consensus on global warming. The news media's accuracy is easy to assess in retrospect and it isn't good. Consider this New York Times headline from Jun 5, 1933:

MUSSOLINI EAGER TO MAINTAIN PEACE [caps in original]

Yes, this NY Times story, written by Anne O'Hare McCormick, claimed that the great fascist was "eager" for peace. The story ($$) continues:

Mussolini, the conciliator, is no longer the flaming captain who headed the young armies of blackshirts in the march on Rome. Rather, he is the sober statesman, striving to calm and reassure panicky nations which are as jumpy as a man with a toothache. ....

No one who meets him today can doubt his conversion to the cause of world peace.

If you believe that the news media are unbiased and have layers of editors and fact checkers, then you should believe that 1930s fascists were dedicated to the cause of world peace.