Letter to the Congressional Black Caucus from Tea Party Federation: Please Provide Evidence
I first heard of the Tea Party movement when my best friend and his wife (he is white; she is yellow) invited me and my black ex-roommate to come.
The first time I heard the allegation that the Tea Party movement was racist was the day the newspaper printed a photo of one of the tea partiers carrying a rifle over his back. The man in the picture was black, and his head was carefully cropped out of the photo, so that you could only see the scary gun he was carrying.
The second time I heard the allegation was when a man named Alfonzo Rachel (a hero of mine) was denouncing the allegations. Zo happens to be black. He was speaking at a Tea Party Rally at the time.
The third time I heard about this allegation was when I head Andrew Breitbart in unambiguous wrath offering a healthy reward of money to anyone who could produce a video from an event — there were apparently many handheld cameras there, including countless cellphones — of someone using a demeaning racial epithet against the Black Caucus, who paraded around on the day in question perhaps hoping for just such an word to be spoken. Breitbart said that when no such word was spoken, the servile main stream media merely proceeded with the “narrative” without any evidence, without feeling the need to produce any evidence.
(If his theory is true, it would be evidence of the type of integrity one can expect in a post-scientific, post-philosophical, post-rational culture. If you live in a world-view where only feelings, not facts, matter, then evidence, which conveys knowledge of facts and therefore has sovereignty over feelings, is not merely unrelated to feelings, evidence is an obstruction to The Cause and demanding evidence is a breach of good manners.)
I am curious whether the polite requests for some evidence about this incident will result in any evidence. I am beginning to suspect this is merely an easy slander: but time will confirm or abolish that suspicion. I am willing to await the facts, and conform my emotional reaction on fact, not on “narrative.”
Here is the letter from the Tea Party Federation to the Congressional Black Caucus.
FINAL National Tea Party Federation – CBC – ALL_SIGS v1.0 –
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
