WASHINGTON — NAACP leaders have a message for the Tea Party movement: We’re watching you.
The civil-rights group has partnered with three liberal media websites to form a “Tea Party tracker” intent on monitoring “racism and other forms of extremism” within the Tea Party movement.
The online project has already drawn strong criticism from Tea Party supporters, who have said repeatedly that racism plays no role in their movement.
Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, said the project was started because NAACP leaders kept hearing from its members that they were seeing racist signs, T-shirts and commentary coming from the Tea Party movement.
“The site is set up to be utilized as a tool to track activities as they come up,” Shelton said. “I do not want to suggest that the Tea Party is a hate group, but there are some disturbing elements within.”
The conservative website Daily Caller first reported the story about the site, which features a blog, a breaking-news section and the tagline “a watched pot never boils.”
The Washington Post
