How Oil Drilling Is Like the "Civil Rights Revolution," And Other Gems From the Tea Party's Rising

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/niger-innis-core-congress-exxon-tea-party

How Oil Drilling Is Like the "Civil Rights Revolution," And Other Gems From the Tea Party's Rising Star


Niger Innis, a tea party activist who filed papers to run for Congress in Nevada last week, is best-known for filling up the conservative airwaves with race-inflected denouncements of the Obama administration. Last February, as the president mounted new gun control efforts, Innis said, "For black Americans, we know that gun control…sprouts from racist soil—be it after the, or during the infamous Dred Scott case where black man's humanity was not recognized." In October, Innis appeared on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show to decry food stamp assistance in the farm bill. "The slaves had food stamps, too," he said. "It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'"

Innis, who announced in mid-January that he is running for Congress, has always had this flair for hyperbole. When he kicked off his campaign for the Republican nomination in Nevada's sprawling fourth district last week—if chosen, he will challenge first-term Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford—Innis cast himself as an outsider waging war on "go-along, get-along Republicans." But only recently has the 45-year-old gained very much name recognition, with most of that star power owing to his role as a sound-bite-ready strategist for TheTeaParty.net. "[Innis] has not been active in Republican politics until recently, clearly as a prelude to his congressional run," says Jon Ralston, a longtime Nevada political reporter and commentator. "Today he's this aggressive media hound…Nobody in Nevada could have told you who Niger Innis was a year ago." Indeed, Innis maintained a much lower profile in the job that preceded his tea party work: spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights legacy institution which helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and the Freedom Rides.

But if the average Nevadan would not have known who Innis was one year ago, the average environmental activist certainly would have. Before he was a Fox News go-to, Innis spent a decade-plus as the face of various anti-environmentalist campaigns paid for by the country's largest energy corporations. These campaigns deployed an unusual line of attack against environmental activists: rather than simply arguing that climate change fears were overblown or insupportable, Innis' campaigns accused green groups of pushing policies that devastated the poor—particularly poor blacks.

Innis made those accusations mainly through his work with CORE, which his father, Roy Innis, has controlled since 1968. CORE swung hard to the right under the leadership of the elder Innis (who is on the National Rifle Association's board of directors). Its many pro-business campaigns have moved prominent civil rights figures to accuse CORE of renting out its reputation to any corporation that will pay. One frequent CORE patron was ExxonMobil. Using data from Exxon's annual giving disclosures, Greenpeace calculated that CORE received more than $300,000 from Exxon—some of which was earmarked for "climate change outreach efforts"—from 2003 to 2008.

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1. Gun control what?

I don't see that. Gun control stems from a desire to have fewer shootings, for goodness' sake.