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President Barack Obama’s state of the union address Tuesday night will be a “Hitlerian screed attacking Republicans, Conservatives, The Tea Party, and anyone who dares to disagree with him,” Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, warned in an essay posted to the group’s website Tuesday. “Liberals,” he argued, “are the new Nazis.”
Tea Party Nation, which also sent Phillips’ screed to its email list, calls itself the “leading Tea Party organization in the nation.” But the group, which is a for-profit corporation, is most famous for a sparsely attended, $549-per-person tea party convention (featuring Sarah Palin) that Phillips held in Nashville in 2010. Since then, Phillips has become embroiled in several legal battles, including one with a former investor who told Mother Jones Phillips snookered him into paying Palin’s speaking fee. Last August, a judge ordered Phillips to pay a Las Vegas casino $748,000 for a 2011 tea party convention he planned and then canceled.
Phillips is also known for inflammatory comments: in 2011, he said that “the Left” had “killed a billion people in the last century.” He has also argued that the Founding Fathers’ original plan to only allow property owners to vote “makes a lot of sense.” And in calling for the ouster of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) a couple of years ago, Phillips cited Ellison’s Muslim faith: “There are a lot of liberals who need to be retired this year,” he wrote in a post picked up by the Maddow blog, “but there are few I can think of more deserving than Keith Ellison. Ellison is one of the most radical members of congress. He has a ZERO rating from the American Conservative Union. He is the only Muslim member of congress.”
Tuesday, Phillips said the Boy Scouts are an example of how liberals are like Nazis:
The Boy Scouts are… [a] good example of what happens to groups that dare to defy the liberal orthodoxy. The Boy Scouts, for very good reasons, exclude gays as scoutmasters and volunteers. For two decades the left has been engaged in a full frontal assault against the Boy Scouts for their position of not allowing homosexual scoutmasters…
This is the tyranny of the left. There is no room for disagreement. If liberals disagree with the Boy Scouts’ policy they could start their own group. They could create the gay scouts or the diversity scouts or what ever else they wanted to call it.
But no, liberals do not want to do that. They want to destroy anyone or anything that dares to offer a contrary opinion.
Tea Party Nation is the only tea party group listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
