Democratic Party hack Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has stooped to a new low in the demonization of Republicans in general, and the Tea Party in particular. On Monday, he sent out a fundraising email using the racist imagery of a burning cross and equating the Tea Party with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). However, Alan Grayson would do well to acquaint himself with which party is in fact the home of the KKK – and while he’s at it, he could perhaps explain why he is a self-described “spokesman” for the Nazi- and David Duke-backed Occupy Wall Street movement.

Though it is a regular occurrence among Democrats to reflexively label as “racist” anyone who disagrees with their agendas regarding virtually any policy supported by Barack Obama, most of them have enough awareness to steer clear of referring to the Ku Klux Klan in particular. There’s a good reason for that: it was a group of southern Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats who fought against the passage of every civil rights law beginning in 1860s, and continuing through 1950s and 1960s.

Furthermore, the late Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, was an actual member of the KKK, who led many of his fellow Democrats in an unsuccessful 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That would be the same Civil Rights Act supported by far higher percentages of Republicans than Democrats in both chambers of Congress. That same ratio held true the following year, when a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats endorsed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that ended many of the pernicious restrictions used by states to deny black Americans the right to vote.

And those would be the same Republicans whose party was founded in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, and who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Reconstruction Act of 1867. Republicans established the NAACP and affirmative action as well, when President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Philadelphia Plan put together a series of timetables and goals for its implementation. Republicans also founded many of the nation’s black Colleges and Universities.

If Grayson wishes to compare party track records on racism, he might be inclined to remember it was Democratic segregationists like Bull Conner who turned water hoses and dogs on black Americans, and Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox who employed axe handles to keep blacks from entering a restaurant, while Republicans like President Dwight Eisenhower were sending troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. It was Eisenhower who also appointed Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. The Warren court’s favorable ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education ended school segregation.

Despite this evidence and much more, Grayson prefers to wallow in his self-inflicted stupidity, with a special animus directed at the Tea Party. "Tea Party members have circulated countless altered pictures depicting President Obama and the First Lady as monkeys. Tea Party members also called my fellow Member of Congress, civil rights hero John Lewis, a ‘n—ger,’ and Rep. Barney Frank a ‘faggot,’“ said Grayson. "One could go on and on, because there is overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party is the home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation. If the shoe fits, wear it,” Grayson said.

Aside from the fact that, as Fox News puts it, much of Grayson’s “evidence” is found in the “bowels of the Internet,” his story about John Lewis is an outright lie debunked by the late Andrew Breitbart. Lewis claims that on the day he and his colleagues were voting on ObamaCare, the “N-word” was shouted at him as many as 15 times as he walked from his office to the Capitol.

Breitbart amassed several videos from multiple sources at the scene that showed nothing. Breitbart.com reporters spoke with Capitol Police who said they didn’t hear any racial epithets being used. Finally, Breitbart offed a $100,000 reward to anyone who had a video showing a Tea Partier making racist remarks. No one has claimed the money to date.

Grayson certainly has the right to vilify the Tea Party if that is his pleasure, even if it demonstrates his ignorance as a result. But Grayson’s ignorance is more than matched by his hypocrisy, exemplified by his support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. “The sheep are looking up, and they’re going to demand that Congress listens,” Grayson said during a 2011 appearance on MSNBC with host Al Sharpton. “And if that means Occupy Washington, D.C., that’s fine. If it means Occupy Wall Street, that’s fine, whatever it takes, because people just can’t take it anymore. And America needs to head in a different direction. They will have to listen.”

Americans did listen and watch as the OWS movement unfolded. What they experienced was a movement that went global on October 15, 2011 in more than 900 cities around the world. OWS protesters smashed windows of businesses and banks, burned cars, injured people and got arrested by the hundreds. They experienced an Oakland OWS protest where an American flag was burned and an anti-Semitic OWS pledge of allegiance was recited: "I pledge allegiance to a flag of the imperialistic, capitalistic dictatorship. And to the plutocracy for which it stands, privately owned central bank, under the Jews. With inequality and injustice for the 99.“

Americans saw a movement supported by the American Nazi Party and David Duke, decrying the "judeo-capitalist banksters who swindled the American taxpayers out of A TRILLION dollars,” and a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) willing to “play a role in offering more advanced programmatic ideas like nationalizing the banks and socialism.” They saw hordes of people behaving like low-lifes, such as a protester defecating against a police car in New York, numerous rapes, a Los Angeles OWS protester insisting that the “Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and the Federal Reserve…need to be run out of this country,” Portland protesters singing "F–K the USA,“ and innumerable incidents of assaults and vandalism perpetrated in cities such as Oakland, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Seattle, Cleveland, New York and several others.

What did Grayson see? "In the same way the Tea Party occupied all of our town hall meetings two years ago, now real people, real middle class people need, people who are suffering, experiencing the misery of having their Social Security taken away, their Medicare taken away, losing their pensions, their jobs, their homes, they’re going to speak up.”

“Real” middle class people? More like self-involved anarchists whose documented arrest totals as of September 13, 2013 reached 7,765. A search for the total number of Tea Party protesters arrested yielded 10, all of whom were detained during a rally against the healthcare bill on Capitol Hill in 2009.

On HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Oct. 7, 2011 writer P.J. O'Rourke made fun of Grayson for defending the Occupy Wall Street movement by calling him their spokesman. Grayson responded with a long-winded populist rant concluding with his declaration: “okay, I’ll be that spokesman.” Based on his latest rant against Republicans and the Tea Party, replete with exact same kind of mindless hate espoused by the OWS movement, Grayson is still that spokesman.

Originally published at FrontPage Magazine.