One of the popular signs spotted at Tea Party protests across the country over the past year goes like this: “It doesn’t matter what this sign says. You’ll call it racism, anyway!” It’s a pithy, perfect rejoinder to the fusillade of attacks that limited-government activists have weathered from their Democratic detractors and a hostile national media. Committed Alinsky-ites never let reality get in the way of a good Tea Party-bashing narrative.

The radical acolytes of Chicago’s late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky also understand the importance of manufacturing demons. “Before men can act,” Alinsky preached, “an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.” This explains the left’s relentless campaign to sabotage the anti-tax, anti-bailout movement from Day One.

President Obama’s community organizing allies whispered “racist,” “fascist” and “fringe” in the earliest days of the stimulus demonstrations in January and February 2009, when hundreds of first-time protesters turned out on the streets in Washington State, Colorado, Arizona and Kansas. The whispers turned to hysterical screams as hundreds became thousands and thousands became millions of peaceful marchers who gathered for the first nationwide Tax Day Tea Party. Some fringe, huh?

The latest effort to smear Tea Partiers involves self-appointed agents provocateurs who are organizing a “Crash the Tea Party” campaign to discredit the April 15 Tax Day Tea Party by making up bogus racist signs and providing false portrayals of grassroots activists to the press. An online punk, Jason Levin, is spearheading the infiltration effort to “act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities” and “damage the public’s opinion of them.” Never mind that public opinion polls now show that the majority of Americans stand with the core principles of fiscal responsibility espoused by Tea Party activists.

Levin may be a lone wolf operator, but he has many fellow travelers in the Democratic establishment and left-wing fever swamps. And their efforts wouldn’t be possible without friendlies in the press who have openly insulted Tea Party activists with endless vulgar sexual taunts and Taliban comparisons.

A few months ago, Craig Varoga – a Washington-based Democratic political operative and overseer of a convoluted, money-shuffling web of political action committees – launched “TheTeaPartyisOver.org” to target Republicans who supported the Tea Party movement. The site declared that it would prevent the “radical” and “dangerous” fiscal accountability agenda from “gaining legislative traction.” Varoga’s money funneling is designed to obscure the Big Labor/progressive funding of his enterprises under the umbrella of his “American Public Policy Center (APPC).”

After conservative blogs and Fox News exposed his deceptive web of grassroots groups, Varoga password-protected his website so that the Democratic plotting against Tea Party activists could be conducted out of view.

I speak from direct experience about the underhandedness of Tea Party smear merchants. On Feb. 17, 2009, at one of the country’s first tax revolt rallies in Denver, a man approached me amid a throng of bona fide anti-stimulus protesters and thrust a camera in my face. I obliged cheerfully, as I usually do after such speaking events. I later learned from the character assassins at Progress Now, a left-wing outfit that just happened to be there and just happened to snap a close-up photo of the interaction, that the man pulled out a sign at the last minute (which I didn’t see until later) sporting Obama’s name with a swastika on it. He held the sign away from me, but in direct view of the Progress Now cameraperson.

That cameraperson just happened to be a former CNN producer, whose blog post on the photo just happened to be immediately disseminated by the local press and to the hit men at the radical-left Media Matters website. The narrative was set: A conservative supporter of the nascent Tea Party movement posed for a photo with a man holding up a swastika at a protest against out-of-control spending! Ergo, the anti-stimulus protesters and the entire Tea Party membership are all racist, fascist menaces to society!

Fast-forward to April 2010. Alinsky’s avenging angels have declared open warfare on April 15. Will they be enabled again by “mainstream journalists” who have turned their Tea Party reporting assignments into search-and-destroy missions? The signs point to yes.

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