Christopher Hitchens offers "White Fright / Glenn Beck's rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity" about Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally (at Slate: slate.com/id/2265515 ).

A few comments:

1. The leaders and many of the followers of the tea party movement are all about the money. Those like Dick Armey (of FreedomWorks) and Grover Norquist aren't in any way white nationalists; in fact, both strongly support massive immigration (whether those following them know it or not and whether their followers even know who they're following or not). Their policies are the opposite of that which Hitchens thinks the 'partiers want.

2. The reason the teapartiers keep denying being racists isn't so much because they're racist but because of what their opposition does. Practically the only argument the Democrats have been able to come up with against them is to call them racists. The tea partiers - because they're incompetent - respond by repeating the smear, denying it, and attempting to show how "diverse" they are by bean-counting. The latter is a far-left concept, and it's one that the teapartiers are giving more power to. (Like I said: they're incompetent).

3. There are countless counter-examples to Hitchens' penultimate paragraph, and here's one from 2004: A Vietnam war hero was disallowed from giving a speech on July 4th in the California Assembly due no doubt to the fact that many members of that body had divided loyalties (such as Fabian Nunez).

4. In the face of oftentimes-hostile far-left racial power groups ( such as National Council of La Raza or the even worse League of United Latin American Citizens and MALDEF) what would Hitchens have white people do? If, for instance, ten million Americans moved into Mexico and sought race-based power, whose side would Hitchens be on?