Texas Tea Party Candidate Fundraises Off Of Grayson KKK Email

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Congressional tea party candidate Katrina Pierson (TX) is fundraising off of Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) fundraising email in which he compared the tea party to the Ku Klux Klan. 

“Let me tell Congressman Grayson something: I don’t think I’d be too welcome at a Klan rally, but I’ve been cheered at a Tea Party rally,” Pierson, who is black, wrote in the email released Friday. 

Pierson, who is running for Rep. Pete Session’s (R-TX) seat, continued: 

I guess the congressman forgot that Rosa Parks was arrested by government-funded police officers on a government-funded bus because big-government Democrats passed segregation laws that went against the Tea Party notion that “all men are created equal.”

Grayson believes that “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.”

How can a limited government based on the Bill of Rights, which is supported by the Tea Party, be an instrument for big government policies like segregation? Freedom doesn’t group people by skin color.

We cannot let these false allegations stand. Will you join the fight against these outrageous lies?

It was the first Republican president that ended slavery and helped create “a new birth of freedom” and it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican to win Texas in decades, who led the fight against Jim Crow.

With your help, I’ll be able to bring those ideals back to Washington. It’s badly needed.

Grayson’s fundraising email caught national attention earlier in the week. He wrote in it that “at this point, the tea party is no more popular than the Klan.” The email also included a burning cross.

Grayson stuck by the email despite widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats

Pierson is a former Dallas tea party leader. She announced her candidacy for Sessions’s seat in September and was immediately endorsed by conservative group FreedomWorks.  

Photo credit: Katrina Pierson for Congress.

Latest Livewire
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: