Tea Party Tries to Backpeddle from Hiring boycott advice
As Right Wing Watch reported earlier this week, Tea Party Nation sent out to its members an email alert from member Melissa Brookstone calling on businesses to pledge to “not hire a single person” as a way to undermine President Obama.
Now, Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips is responding to the inevitable backlash. In an email today, Phillips writes that the boycott was just one idea of many from Tea Party members and accuses those who have decried the idea of trying to stifle free speech. The progressive backlash to Brookstone’s proposal, Phillips writes, proves that “liberalism is incompatible with liberty”:
We conservatives believe in the free market of ideas. We are not afraid of ideas. We debate ideas. We like ideas. Liberals do not like ideas because they are threatened by them.
…
At Tea Party Nation, we often talk about the need to defeat liberalism. Both stories are examples of why liberalism is incompatible with liberty and why it must be defeated. Liberalism is about the control of speech and thought and the suppression of any belief that does not agree with the liberal orthodoxy. Liberty means that we debate ideas and let the free market of ideas decide which one’s have merit and which ideas do not.
Tea Party Nation also sent a rambling message about the controversy from Brookstone herself, who claims that her article (which can be read here in its entirety) was taken “out of context” and that the “socialist left” raised “a literal crap storm aimed at me.” She goes on to say that now she is a victim of terrorism and that the left “seeks only to control and enslave all of humanity, as its grand goal”:
It must have touched quite a nerve with the socialist left, because it raised a literal crap storm aimed at me.