The Tea Party has attracted the worst of the far right crowd to its movement.  The voices of hate have found a home and a platform.   Slowly slipping from the TPM dialogue are political issues like lower taxes, immigration   reform and less spending.  The conversation has turned-- predictably, and now the inflammatory language of hate fuels the politics of fear.

The hardcore fringe element knows that Party leaders largely ignored them and their message, perhaps becasuse their numbers served the TPM agenda.  After all, the larger the crowd, the easier it is to get others to join.

We’ve seen this all before.

From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped white America into a frenzy of fear over the spectre of Communists on every corner.

It was just after the Second World War ended.  Communism was seen as a national  threat. McCarthy turned what was probably a legitimate inquiry into possible communist influence and espionage in America into a widespread campaign against the bogeyman.  McCarthyism morphed into a season of reckless suspicion based on nothing but unsubstantiated accusations fueled by little to no evidence bound up in ridiculous insinuations about people’s associations and beliefs.  Many people targeted by McCarthyism suffered loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and some were even imprisoned.

One would have hoped that the nation would never go down that dark road again, but here we are.  The proponents of fear are again spreading their unique brand of unpatriotic poison throughout the ranks of white America, and the latest target of this modern-day McCarthyism is Islam.  Muslims now officially join blacks and (Hispanic) immigrants on the list of folk targeted by the TPM.

The genesis of this modern-day Islam-is-the-enemy ethos became pronounced when then-President Bush jumped on Iraq for the 911 attack on the World Trade Center-- an act which nearly everyone knew was the work of a Saudi Arabian named Osama Bin Laden.  Even though he later made conciliatory public comments saying Muslims in America were not the enemy, when Bush pushed America into a war against Iraq, he was doing just that-- signalling to a scared white war machine that Islam-- not a group of Saudi Arabians-- was to blame.  Middle white America bought into it.  The war against Iraq was hugely popular when it began.  Muslims of all nationalities in America became concerned about possible personal attacks.  Even today you can hear the proponents of fear repeat the mantra of justification:  “America is at war.”

But not against a nation, mind you.  Against a religion.  The outcry against building a Mosque at Ground Zero spans every national identity.  For the folk outside parading and carrying signs and shouting obscenities, it matters not one bit what nationality the owners of the land might be.  It doesn’t even matter if they are fundamentalists or not.  The issue is that it is an institution representing a faith that demonstrators associate with “the enemy.”

Welcome to the new USA.

I’m curious, though.  Wasn’t Timothy McVeigh a Christian?  I never heard any of these very same folk suggest that Christians were the enemy of the state, or that no churches should be built near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

In the final analysis, sincere Tea Party movement members will want to make sure the group is not in fact more concerned with race and ethnicity than with government and political issues.  It took years for the nation to undo the damage done by McCarthy.  How long it will take us to weather this storm only time will ultimately tell.