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Gandhi's vision of nonviolent protest, as seen by the North Texas Tea Party

The North Texas Tea Party has been making some interesting commentary about the thousands of Texans who came out in opposition to Senate Bill 5 last week as a way to rally their base in the next round of the War on Women at our capitol. This group, following in the footsteps of Perry and Dewhurst, are going to great lengths to delegitimize the diverse coalitions of pro-choice Texans with a few key messages they are repeating in press releases, social media, and talk radio.

They want to deny the existence of pro-choice Texans and dehumanize the group as a mob, all while employing their usual misrepresentation of history and the legacies of revolutionaries who have come before.

See how the North Texas Tea Party is reinforcing these messages below the jump.The North Texas Tea Party is working to convince their base that the opponents of anti-women legislation couldn't possibly live within the same borders as they do. They are now claiming that our supporters are being bussed in from out of state.

From their Facebook:





It's one thing to disagree, but another to be in complete denial. The far-right is so afraid of their inevitable demise that they believe the best way to challenge this is to deny that pro-choice Texans even exist.

The North Texas Tea Party group has also posted on how they will be engaging in Monday's activities. The group claims they will be using “Gandhi-style tactics,” to describe how they will react to pro-choicers at the Capitol (or what they call, mobsters). This confusing invocation of Gandhi shows their unsurprising eagerness to appropriate historical, cultural, and even racial touchstones when it suits them.

This is yet another example of the self-serving privilege of the right-wing: pick and choose what historical figure you want to channel, overlook what causes they actually represented, and manipulate their image and tactics so that they serve your cause.

I'm not about to say what Gandhi would have or wouldn't have done. But I don't think he'd endorse those who condemn a group of nonviolent actors who have been consistently denied recognition by their government. In the end, the public erupted in a non-violent yet forceful demonstration the likes of which the capitol has never seen. And while not being an expert, I would still propose that what occurred on the night and morning of June 25/26, was one of the purest examples of Gandhi's concept of 'satyagraha', sometimes translated as the 'insistence on truth'. Tea partiers can't be bothered to make these kinds of connections, though, and choose to dehumanize us instead.

This group paints the thousands of non-violent actors at the Capitol as 'mobsters.' They condemn those of us at the capitol who were participating fully in our democracy, even as the GOP leadership used their absolute voting power to suspend long-held rules and traditions to silence dissenting legislators and the people they represent. And as they appropriate Gandhi, these tea partiers also want to channel the legacy of colonial freedom fighters — and call on their supporters to “defend representative democracy.” Because only if you resemble their notion of a revolutionary – most likely a wealthy white man who owned slaves and resented paying taxes, then do you have the right to challenge a tyrannical government.

If instead, you are a group that is multi-racial, multi-ethnic, differently abled, representing different ages and genders from every region of the state, then according to the North Texas Tea Party, you are not fighting for democracy, you are just a mob.

Thank you to Chris Ledesma for contributing insight on the Tea Party's creative interpretations of Gandhi.