Connecting the right-wing dots

[Hannah Bell]

Daryle Lamont Jenkins is the founder of One People's Project, a group based in New Jersey that came together to organize a counter-demonstration against a Ku Klux Klan rally in 2000, and that has carried on since, documenting the activities of far-right organizations and the individuals involved in them. He spoke to Alexander Super about developments on the right today, including connections to the so-called Tea Party "movement."


INTERVIEWER: CAN YOU talk about how white supremacists try to implant themselves within more mainstream conservative politics?

JENKINS: THEY RUN the anti-immigrant movement. This Russell Pearce, the state senator who drafted the racist Arizona SB 1070 law, has associations with white supremacist circles. Dan Smeriglio, an activist with many white supremacist connections from Pennsylvania, organized the first rally organized in support of Arizona's law in Phoenix. Pearce tried to deny that he knew Smeriglio, and we produced a video of Smeriglio standing behind Pearce and Tom Tancredo during a press conference in Newark, N.J.

The white supremacists are too entrenched in that movement to try to sell it any other way. Sprinkling some members of color through the crowds can't divert attention from the fact that the main support for these rallies for SB 1070, Secure Communities, etc., is coming from neo-Nazi groups...In many respects, the Tea Party doesn't represent a growth of the right. It's the same people who've been around forever. There were these two guys at a Tea Party rally in Virginia for that we recognized immediately. We could go back in our archives and see them as militia members in 1995, as Minutemen in 2005, and now they're Tea Baggers in 2010.

The right hasn't really grown--they've just gotten more funding and better p.r. people...

http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/10/connecting-right-wing-dots