I really think it must be a slow news week. The entire country, it seems, is all in a tizzy about John Mayer’s use of the word ‘nigger’ in a Playboy article. When I read fellow Nashvillian Molly Secours’s latest Huffington Post article in which she takes Mayer to task, I honestly thought it was satire. It had to be, right? How else can a writer launch into a diatribe in which she heaps coals on the heads of all white people for being racist?

In an attempt to be subtle, I suppose, she begins her piece with a rather superior rumination on young pretty women. It’s the first of many confidently declared prejudices in an article laced with gleeful snobbery.

Yesterday I was musing about the unconscious arrogance of pretty young women who believe they will enjoy the world of privilege and power afforded to them by beauty — forever. It seems all it takes is a 40th birthday to notice the expiration date on the ‘all access pass.’

Not unlike wealthy men who cannot conceive of operating in the world without the limitless advantages of the double platinum American Express — until it is revoked.

Wow. Bold, Molly. Bold. I wonder what has caused her to live with such a classist mentality? Let’s boil this one down: “Racism is awful, and also I group people into easy stereotypes and ridicule them for the thoughts I assume are running through their heads.” It staggers the imagination.

Suffice it to say Mayer’s words were symptomatic and indicative of white arrogance.

I suppose Secours feels she can be so bold in her declarations of white arrogance because she’s white. (Maybe she’s revealing her own racial proclivities? One has to wonder.) She apparently holds to the notion that one cannot be racist about their own race. Sane people argue, on the other hand, that making sweeping derogatory statements about a group of people because of their race is the very definition of racism. Being a member of the group in question provides no exemption. The baseless comment is ignorant regardless.

Perhaps she’s speaking specifically of one person and his tendency toward racial slurs? Not even close. Without wasting time, she ropes all whites in together as racists.

Mayer is exhibit ‘A’ when illustrating that racism resides within all white people. No exception. Sorry. Whether you are a hip, young liberal white guy who has played music with famous black musicians or a guy working at a factory in a rural Kentucky.

Mayer is just another white man of privilege who has not wrestled with the harsher realities still facing many black and brown folks or the arrogance depicted by his words. I doubt he has struggled with his identity as a white man of privilege and how his own behaviors have unconsciously contributed to reinforcing white supremacy.

So due to a major social faux pas in which John Mayer played a bit too familiar with a culturally charged word, this silly writer responds with a literary garbage heap that has become home to some of her most cherished prejudices. So forward thinking.

If we need further evidence that Ms. Secours does not live in reality, we need look only to her bio.

In 2000, she presented an intervention to the United Nations in Santiago, Chile, proposing that the U.S. “repudiate the official histories and language(s) that maintain the hegemonic and unearned privileges accorded to those who are identified as “white”.

No need for comment.

Brooks Bayne writes a scathing review of the National Tea Party Convention scandal. He’s quite right in noting how there are no known and respected Tea Party activists involved with this convention.

The problem is, as I’ve stated many times on Twitter, the Tea Party wasn’t involved with this convention. There may have been a couple local Tea Party folks participating, but none of the real players in the movement were involved. If you’re asking how I have the inside skinny on all this, then you haven’t been paying attention to the movement over the last year.

This “convention” was about one guy, attorney Judson Phillips, and, in my opinion, his attempt at personal gain. What was he thinking? Just because Phillips was the guy who reviewed Michael Leahy’s ridiculous lawsuit filing (not ridiculous that it was filed, it needed to be. much of the substance of it, however, was ridiculous. I question Phillips’ capacity as an attorney if he greenlit that filing) against some Internet trolls last year, he’s suddenly part of the movement? Uh…I don’t think so.

He ends his post with this:

“You shall know them by their fruits.”

I suppose that’s the best way to approach this convention at this point– focus extra scrutiny on what comes out of this convention and where the money goes afterward.

Is the convention still going to happen? I certainly hope so. A lot of good, well-meaning people paid a lot of money just to hear Palin speak. I personally think that’s a giant waste of $549 plus travel expenses, but regardless, it would be much worse if this whole thing shut down and left the Phillipses walking away with a cool $300,000 in non-refundable ticket sales.

Mostly, I expect we’ll see a lot of really underwhelmed convention goers. And since I’ve personally experienced Judson’s ineptitude in event planning — for a man who merely showed up at the eleventh hour to the Tax Day Tea Party rallies in Nashville and Franklin last year, he sure has some C.O. Jones to take credit for it all — I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing complaints coming from convention goers themselves once this weekend gets started.

In another blow to the National Tea Party Convention, The Tea Party Express has now announced that they will no longer support the event. This comes after several waves of event sponsors and speakers pulled their support.

Phillips still claims the event is planned to provide training, networking, and inspirational speeches, but the ability to make good on that promise appears less and less likely with several speakers pulling out along with two of the sponsors who were to provide training dropping their support.

On a personal note, I should mention this: while Mr. Phillips has claimed that the press isn’t asking him for comment, absolutely every single one of the reporters I’ve spoken to has expressed frustration in their inability to get in contact with Mr. Phillips despite repeated attempts.

Judson can continue to use his tried excuse of “blame the liberals” all he wants, but he’s brought this debacle on himself. His zeal for personal gain unchecked by prudence has led him to all sorts of negligence, not the least of which includes an egregious violation of labor laws.

I suppose we’ll continue to watch this implosion to see how it all shakes down. His choices may well prove detrimental to the tea party movement, though I pray Americans see this for what it is: a movement with the purest of intentions attempting to oust the cancer that resides within. Perhaps Mr. Phillips will think about the gravity of his actions next time he attempts to assume the helm of something so much larger than himself.

Looks like another former member of the Tea Party Nation has come forward, this time calling for a boycott. Like so many others, Shane Brooks was banned from Tea Party Nation’s website for offering an opposing viewpoint, and today yesterday he published a very revealing exchange with Sherry Phillips, wife of Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips.

Portions of note from Sherry:

Your membership was suspended yesterday based on your threats toward TPN (TPN is in my “crosshairs”) and encouraging TPN members to move to another site (GOOOH).

Judson was disappointed that we had to suspend you as he said you contributed a lot of great information to TPN and our instant survivalist group.

Portions of note from Shane:

It seems that any personal attacks on members are usually addressed handled very quickly by TPN so long as the one attacked is on message w/TPN.

[...]

Then Pam Farmsworth came in and deleted my comments that had no personal attacks, swear words or anything that violated TPN policy but rather a passionate defense of my arguments and myself … The discussions have become so butchered and edited that it looks like your members arguing with themselves for no reason, it’s pathetic.

[...]

TPN claims to have open and thoughtful debates and an exchange of ideas. However, if you have the opinion that it is too late to save a deaf GOP and favor the 3rd party idea or anything other than your belief in the GOP, then it is open season to allow your members to ridicule, belittle and offer up scathing sarcasm disguised as a rebuttal. There is no real honest debate on this and several other issues at TPN. It appears to be tow the TPN line or be quiet, have your post removed and be banned.

Instead of quenching the thirst for freedom, the TPN leadership is attempting to squash members’ attempt at freedom. To be honest, I’m not at all surprised. I personally experienced this kind of “freedom” of thought and opinion displayed by the Tea Party Nation leadership beginning the day Judson announced he was the sole owner of Tea Party Nation.

Brooks also released this video calling for tea partiers to boycott the upcoming National Tea Party Convention.

If you’re just arriving at this controversy, you may want to get up to speed on the back-story. Here’s the blog that started things up last week.

In an interview with NBC News, Judson gave a classic politician’s answer to my allegation that he used his wife’s personal PayPal account to accept donations in the days immediately following the April 15th “Tax Day Tea Party” in 2009.

“That’s completely false,” Phillips said. “There’s a PayPal account that goes for the corporation. The money goes into a corporate account that is held in the name of Tea Party Nation, Incorporated.”

He further elaborated in a Tennessean article published today.

PayPal payments were always directed to a Tea Party Nation bank account, not a personal account, he said.

Smith and others might have thought they were misdirected because his wife, who keeps records for the company, set up the account to send e-mail confirmations of transactions directly to her, Phillips said.

Nice little jab by Phillips, insinuating that a web professional misunderstands how PayPal works, but it seems like the more this guy opens his mouth, the worse things get for him.

This has become a hot-button topic with the press in recent days because co-mingling of personal funds with donated funds is never permissible. In every interview so far, he’s answering a different question than the one that’s been asked. My allegation was that he used his wife’s personal PayPal account in April 2009 to accept donations for Tea Party Nation. The PayPal account he claims he has always used for all ticket sales and donations wasn’t even set up until August 21, 2009– well after the donations that occurred in April. This lovely screenshot of the PayPal member information panel for Tea Party Nation’s business account proves it. (If you have a PayPal account, you can corroborate this yourself.)

I dug deeper today, and found something that I missed the first time around.

Below is a screenshot sent to me by someone who donated to Tea Party Nation on April 17th, 2009, during the time-frame that I allege Judson and his wife were funneling donations through her personal PayPal account. It’s an email received by this donor as a receipt for the donation. (Identifying information has been blacked out to protect the donor from retribution.) But look at the email address attached to the PayPal account…

The PayPal account that was being used to accept donations in April of 2009 for Tea Party Nation was, in fact, a PayPal account with an email address from Judson’s law practice. So was it her personal PayPal account? Or was it a PayPal account she administered on behalf of “Judson Phillips, Attorney at Law”? Given his comment that sherry@teapartynation.com’s PayPal account was a business account with her email attached to it, perhaps the same is true of the PayPal account for sherry@judsonphillips.com. Of course, one is no better than the other. Judson and his wife have a lot of explaining to do. (The description in the email above is auto-populated by ChipIn, the free service that was used to show a donation meter widget on the site. Given that I was the webmaster, I had set up this ChipIn account, thus why it shows my former TPN email address. As is stated on the ChipIn website, “Your contributors chip in via PayPal and the money goes directly into your PayPal account.” All donations went directly into the PayPal account owned by sherry@judsonphillips.com.)

Throughout last week, even more questions regarding Judson’s financial dealings have come to light. It was reported Friday that Phillips filed personal bankruptcy in 1999 and has since had three federal tax leins against him for more than $22,000. RedState’s Erick Erickson smelled something fishy on Monday. Then following Melissa Clouthier’s explosive article uncovering Phillips’s desire to make a million dollars from the Tea Party movement, Erickson had some advice for Phillips.

Just as a “for instance,” were I still practicing law I’d advise clients to have their 501(c)(4) or 527 already set up before taking people’s money. Saying the organization will turn around and pour the collected money into an as of yet unformed 527 or 501(c)(4) is questionable, if only from a tax standpoint.

I haven’t practiced law in a few years, but this was the area in which I practiced. If the fact are as reported, there is something questionable going on.

Sure, people make mistakes in life, but sometimes those mistakes carry with you for years in the form of a lack of trust. A person in this position must take extra steps to prove that all financial dealings are above board and properly organized, yet even Judson’s behavior last week in print and on radio arouse suspicion.

So here’s the challenge, Judson. There are a lot of hard questions out there to which the convention attendees, your sponsors, the speakers, and certainly Sarah Palin deserve the answers. You called me a liar, so prove it. Tea Party Nation should immediately open its financial books for inspection with records dated from April 2009 to the present. Show the tea partiers that you’ve already set up the 527 that you claim will be receiving profits from the National Tea Party Convention. If there is truly nothing unethical going on here, then you’ve got nothing to hide. However, given the questions raised about your inability to properly handle finances in the past, it only seems right that you should take the extra effort to show funds aren’t being mismanaged this time. Sarah Palin — whose answer to the question of a speaking fee you foolishly refused to confirm — and the other speakers are trusting you with their political futures, and they deserve your honesty here.

Nothing wrong with transparency, openness, and fiscal responsibility, right? After all, it’s the very thing you claim to be demanding of government.

It’s confirmed: Judson Phillips gives the worst interviews ever.

You folks should see what it’s like to press him for information in private! Backed into a corner—and without a radio audience—this man has naught but to retreat, eject the offending party, and threaten to sue. More on that soon…

As a result of the brouhaha Anthony Shreeve and I have been causing these last few weeks with the release of inside information regarding Tea Party Nation and the National Tea Party Convention, Judson and his newest generation Advisory Board were forced to release a statement late, late last night. Aside from the slap in the face they delivered The Wall Street Journal by grouping it alongside World Net Daily in their exclusive, limited list of media organizations approved to cover the event, the group tried to downplay those of us who are now coming forward to expose corruption as some kind of minor, disgruntled employees.

Between last February and the present, Tea Party Nation has seen members come and go. We have tried to deal fairly with our present and former relationships, however, not without some criticism. This criticism has been unfortunate and we believe, unwarranted. However, it is the policy of Tea Party Nation not to focus on past challenges, but to stay focused on the task of advancing the conservative cause and defeating liberalism.

With that in mind, we will not be making any comments regarding former members.

Well, I’m glad to see they’ll be taking the high road now; up to this point Judson’s had a nasty proclivity to eject employees and threaten lawsuits following dissent within the ranks. It warms my heart to see… wait, what’s that? You mean to tell me that less than 12 hours after “taking the high road,” Judson went on record to call me a liar?

In a conversation with NationalJournal.com, Phillips, a Nashville attorney, called Smith a “liar” and defended the legitimacy of the organization. He said that ticket sales for the convention are going to a PayPal account owned by Tea Party Nation corporation.

I suppose it would’ve been nice for the author of the article to at least attempt to reach me for comment, but I’m not really all that worried. (After all, his best response is akin to playground trash-talk.) I’m much more interested in this– Do you see that nice little trick Judson played? He defends TPN and its handling of finances by saying that ticket sales are going into a PayPal account owned by TPN rather than someone’s personal account, but that was never the accusation I made. I know nothing firsthand about their current state of affairs. From my post yesterday (emphasis added):

The suggestion then was made by several in our little tea party group that we needed to set up a donation box online as we would need funding very, very soon to pay for things like the leased server, the printed Tea Party Nation banner, etc. We couldn’t wait for advertising revenue to roll in. We quickly set up a ChipIn box on the site and tied it to Judson’s wife’s PayPal account. Admittedly, I thought this was odd. I told Judson that this would make many, many potential donors really uncomfortable, but he assured me that it was just temporary since he hadn’t yet been able to get us a bank account or a PayPal account.

This occurred back in late April 2009.

See? His defense is to set up a straw man and rip it to pieces. Notice I said nothing about the convention. The truth is, donations in April 2009 to Tea Party Nation absolutely went into Sherry Phillips’s personal PayPal Account. Any of the more than 160 donors from that time period can attest to this.

Since my post on Tuesday, more and more former associates of Judson have been contacting me with information about the inner workings of Tea Party Nation in recent months. Just a suggestion: you may want to keep checking this blog over the next few days.

UPDATE: From the comments, Wanda says:

I can tell you I have an email sent to me from Sherry Phillips, that tells me how to pay for my sponsorship for the convention, and it says to send it to the Paypal account of sherry@teapartynation.com so that sounds to me like it is still a personal account not one for the organization.

No doubt this looks shady, but it’s certainly possible that this is merely the result of an extremely poor business decision to make Sherry the owner of the legitimate PayPal Business account for Tea Party Nation. I say it’s a poor decision because a publicly-facing method for accepting payments should feature more official contact information such as paypal@… or tickets@… But then again, I’m not sure Judson has been accused of making great decisions lately.

UPDATE II: Judson tells MSNBC that I’ve just got “an ax to grind.” (Glad to see we can trust him to keep his own promises, especially ones that were made only a day before.) “He’s got a motive for doing this.”

You know what? He’s absolutely right. I made my motive pretty clear in my post a few days ago:

I was approached by one of my fellow liberty-loving friends who reminded me that fraud, corruption, and deceit like this exists in Government because good men who are fully aware never stand up and say anything. How can I honestly object to this same behavior in my Government and demand they clean up Washington when I am unwilling to risk the personal and political injury it takes to expose the fraud, corruption, and deceit to which I am privy?

So to be clear:

I cannot reiterate strongly enough that this is the cancer that can take this movement down if we let it. We are not just searching for something “good enough” to beat the current powers-that-be. We hold ourselves to a higher standard, and corruption from the inside will not be tolerated.

This is the story of the tea party movement in Nashville and the duplicitous behavior, dishonesty, authoritarianism, and downright fraud that this movement is trying to ferret out of our Government. Unfortunately, this particular case comes from the inside. It’s lengthy, but important. What began as a short blog post has become a novella. I left out as many extraneous details as I possibly could and this is the boiled-down result.

In February of 2009, Rick Santelli let out the now famous rant during a segment on CNBC calling for Americans frustrated with Obama’s mortgage bailout “solution” to stand up, make their voices heard, and do something about it. In the days and weeks that followed, thousands of Americans answered his call for a new tea party, in the spirit of the Boston tea party, to present a show of force that the country wasn’t entirely in lockstep with Obama’s plans. Numerous organizations attempted to cultivate the outrage into something politically useful. While the national Republican Party and its like-minded lobbying groups would have liked immediately to lead the parade of opposition, they were woefully unprepared. That wouldn’t be the case many months later, but at least initially, the popular demand for tea party rallies sprang up in the larger cities like Nashville with such swiftness that the de facto local leader was the first moderately organized and connected person to the table. In an age of social networks and 24/7 access to the Internet, this meant that the yet uncreated position was open to almost anyone. In Nashville, the first man out of the gate was Judson Phillips.

Judson sent the word out on Facebook to the myriad groups created in reaction to Santelli’s rant that he was planning a tea party rally on February 27th at Legislative Plaza in Downtown Nashville. Anyone who could throw in and help was invited to contact him. He specifically needed someone to photo document the event so that this event could get some media coverage. I know my way around a camera, and I knew a nice SLR that I could borrow from a friend. I volunteered.

When I arrived at the plaza, I had to call him to find him in the already sizable crowd. As the phone was ringing in my ear, I saw a middle-aged man in a suit reach into his pocket and retrieve his cell phone. I hung up instead of waiting for him to answer and walked over to greet him instead. He smiled, and I introduced myself. I handed my business card to both him and the man to his left that he had been speaking with. Judson looked at my card and smirked. “hearSAY,” he said. “Well of course I like that.” In return, he handed me his business card: Judson Phillips, Attorney at Law. He patted me on the shoulder and added, “Don’t take the test. Call me in the morning.” I must have looked like some kind of lush. Apparently he was the kind of attorney that works to alleviate drunk drivers of their responsibility to the community. He was also, I would later come to discover personally, the kind of attorney who would regularly use his status as a legal professional to threaten and intimidate people into giving him what he wanted.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. More…

I generally have a tiny bit more respect for local Republican organizations than for the national party leadership. Typically speaking, they are a fitting analogy for why government works best on the local level: the GOP leaders living in your community—most of them are not professional politicians—probably have a pretty good handle on the needs and desires of the community while the national leaders have long since removed themselves from ordinary life. If we have any chance to forestall this slide into “acceptable” Socialism, it will require a strong champion of liberty in the form of a political party. It will require the Republicans to stop believing that America really just wants a lite version of the Democrats. It will require a principled Republican Party. It will require Republican leaders willing to risk failure in order to defend Liberty.

It’s unfortunate, then, to see our Davidson County Republican Party bowing to the pressure of party loyalty when given the chance to stand on principle and send a strong message to the independents, the lovers of Liberty, and the overwhelming majority of America that raged against the bailouts. They would much rather oust one of their own.

Matt Collins, the First Vice Chairman of the DCRP, stood up to Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp for his support of the bailouts. Matt apparently has the gall to defend Liberty and our Constitution over the desires of the Party, and this routine has more than irked the rest of the party leadership in Davidson County. Despite disclaimers attached to his personal opinions, they’re upset that he, quite literally, will not toe the party line. At the most extreme, his actions should have garnered a censuring. I would hope, though, that a majority of GOP leaders would recognize the need for outspoken critique of officials and candidates who oppose fiscal conservatism and limited government. The Republican Liberty Caucus sees this as a problem beyond Davidson County:

“This is the third state in the last year in which party insiders have tried to purge grassroots activists belonging to the Republican Liberty Caucus,” said Dave Nalle, National Chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus. Purges also took place in Marion County, Indiana, where RLC member Liz Karlson was removed from her Ward Chair position, and in Florida, where five Republican Liberty Caucus members were removed from the party for criticizing party leadership or opposing candidates with a history of fiscal irresponsibility and raising taxes.

Thankfully, we always know where Matt stands, even when we disagree with him. We don’t need more yes men. Matt Collins is exactly the kind of person that the American people wants to see in leadership. The DCRP leadership has begun the process of removing Matt from his position, but this would be one instance where I would be more than thrilled to see the GOP fail its follow-through.