Who's Your Grand Daddy

by digby

Dave Neiwert points out that the Teabaggers have been organizing against immigration for a lot longer than on health care and "Hitler" and are therefore far better prepared for that fight. (In fact, nativism is the very essence of right wing populism.)

But they still aren't very bright:

This weekend, the nativist right-wingers at the National Policy Institute organized a series of "Tea Parties Against Amnesty.

However, at the rally in Minneapolis, the demonstrators got punk'd by a young man who called himself "Robert Erickson". ..



It's funny, although reports of the event from BlueStemPrairie say that these guys really, really didn't like being mocked this way and some violence ensued.

But I have always wondered if the larger issue about illegal European immigration, which is common in any regions which have large Eastern European populations, might be a problem. Tom Goeghegan mused in his book The Secret Lives of Citizens that one of the main reasons Chicago (which also has one of the largest Hispanic immigrant populations in the country)has far less anti-immigrant sentiment than many other places possibly because it also has a very large illegal European immigrant population. Maybe there's more sympathy to the situation or maybe they are just afraid of rocking the boat. Either way, when people talk about "illegal immigrants" it's almost always about Latinos and it's about some kind of cultural change.

This event shows that these anti-immigrant teabaggers don't want to talk about European immigrants. And one of the things that makes those types the most angry is being exposed for the bigots they really are. I'm not quite sure what to do with this, but it is a fault line that seems exploitable.


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