Chris Matthews and Dana Loesch (Video)

Chris Matthews refuses to let go of his belief that the Tea Party movement is grounded in racism and sexism.

On Monday's Hardball, Matthews continued the drumbeat -- Tea Partiers are angry and unruly. They're racist and sexist. According to Matthews, at the root of their protests is the fact that they are mad about having a black president.

With all due respect, Matthews is loony and so is Melissa Harris Lacewell, a Princeton professor who was Matthews' guest on Monday. She was there to validate Matthews' theories about intolerance, racism, and the Tea Parties.

Dana Loesch, a conservative talk radio host and Tea Party organizer, was also on Matthews' show. She shredded the arguments of Matthews and Lacewell.

Video.


Geoffrey Dickens, NewsBusters, provides the transcript.

CHRIS MATTHEWS AT TOP OF SHOW: Plus what are the tea partiers really angry about? Health care reform or the fact that it was an African-American president and a woman Speaker of the House who pushed through major change?

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MATTHEWS: The passage of health care reform last week unleashed a rage on the right but New York Times columnist Frank Rich says that it wasn't health care reform itself that stoked the anger but instead a shift, in this country, toward more diversity that has left some in the diminishing majority anxious. Melissa Harris Lacewell is a professor of Politics and African-American Studies at Princeton. And Dana Loesch is a radio talk show host and tea party organizer. Let's take a look at the New York Times column that's caused all this conversation. Frank Rich wrote this, quote: "If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. This same conjunction of a black president and a female Speaker of the House, topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman - it would have sown seeds of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country, no matter what the policies were in play." Professor, your thoughts. Is this fight, from the tea party side, aimed at the, or ignited by the health care defeat last week they suffered, about ethnicity and gender and orientation, sexual orientation or is it about the substance of the issue? The fiscal policy, the social policy involved. Which is it?

MELISSA HARRIS LACEWELL: Well I don't know that we can be quite so dichotomist as to suggest which is it. But certainly what we can see is that the tone, or the strategies, the language used about the policy has ended up having overtones around all of these anxieties about diversity that Rich suggests in that New York Times column. You know we know from, pretty much decades of social scientific research at this point, including some really terrific work by Karen Stenner, in a book called the Authoritarian Dynamic, that there are individuals that have sort of a pre-disposition towards intolerance. And when those individuals are in a society where things start changing very rapidly, particularly if things start feeling like, you know political leaders are fighting or if there's a lot of racial diversity or change, then that kind of ignites this anxiety and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we're seeing. So my bet is that, certainly part of it is about policy but also part of it is about the anxieties of this particular group and that's why we're seeing these expressions around racial and, and homophobic, sort of discourse.

MATTHEWS: So just to stay with you, for a minute, if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination last year and had won the general election against John McCain, and that's iffy but it's possible, we can imagine that happened, would the anger be as extreme as it's been with these placards, the people's faces, the contortion of anger that you see, not in every face but a lot of faces out there. Would it still be there? Had that been the case? Right now? Hillary not Barack.

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MATTHEWS: What do you make of the, what do you make of the signage? Some of it's pretty nasty and why don't people walk away from those signs? Why are they comfortable standing there when people have nasty signs up? Hitler mustaches, etc, etc.?

DANA LOESCH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Like they did with Bush and Hitler? Because they had that on the left as well. I mean I specifically, I specifically remember the RNC protests from the Republican National Convention that happened just a year, just a couple of years ago. There were Bush/Hitler signs. I, myself, have been at a protest in St. Louis where they've burned Bush in effigy. So, I mean, to kind of like portray it as just being on one side or and not the other isn't, isn't exactly fair because - I mean google Bush/Hitler and you'll get pages and pages of the same thing. But the bottom line too is we know that with any large group of people, you are going to have people who are on the fringe on both sides but the difference that I'm seeing is that a lot of people on the left like to sit here and portray that the fringe on the right represent the whole of the right and that's not accurate.

MATTHEWS: Okay did just see that sign? "Don't blame me I voted for an American." There's a big number of people out there led by Neugebauer of Texas and other congress people who challenge this president's birth right. They challenge that he's an American. If you look at a poll I saw, it shows they were largely bunched in the South. Those people who believed that he wasn't an American and you say that's not racial. Why would it be bunched in the South so heavily these people that believe he's not an American. What's that about?

LOESCH: Well do you mean the same way that the left tried to say that John McCain wasn't an American because he was born on a base in Panama?

MATTHEWS: No, no, no. Nobody made an issue, nobody made an issue about-

LOESCH: Because you could say that's racial too.

MATTHEWS: No, no, no Dana. No, don't chuckle about this. It isn't funny. And nobody-

LOESCH: It is funny!

MATTHEWS: Nobody made an issue of John McCain being born in another country, in the canal zone.

LOESCH: Well if you're asking me, whether or not, I'm a Birther the answer is no.

MATTHEWS: Nobody made an issue.

LOESCH: Oh yeah there was. There was headlines about that.

MATTHEWS: Why are there so many Birthers out there? Why are there so many Birthers out there?

LOESCH: I'm not a Birther so I'm not quite sure.

MATTHEWS: But why are they out there and why, and why are people comfortable having them in the-

LOESCH: Why are there so many people who deny 9/11 on the left? I mean, you know, I mean we could sit here and do this all day.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

LOESCH: But no there was that issue made about McCain too.

MATTHEWS: Well I don't think, I don't think the Truthers are a part of the Obama coalition. Do you think? Whereas the Birthers are a part of the tea party crowd.

LOESCH: Well let's see who was it?

MATTHEWS: Why are they comfortable in that group?

LOESCH: Who was it? John, maybe not John Cusack or Sean Penn. There was a celebrity who is a Truther that's, you know, talked about those.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, well, that's odd. Let me, let me bring the professor back and I want you to go at each other.

LOESCH: But I mean why can't we talk about the substance of this? Why do we have to constantly invalidate people who are for smaller government by saying that they're a racist. That is, I mean, I think it's actually an insult to the civil rights movement. And to say that people who oppose Nancy Pelosi are sexist.

MATTHEWS: Okay Professor you get in here. I have my reasons, they're based upon all these Birthers out there that I do think are challenging his Americanism.

LOESCH: This isn't about Birtherism! This is about big government.

LACEWELL: Well, well let me just suggest this. That the tea partiers by using the language of tea party have asked us to draw a parallel between their movement and the Revolutionary War movement. But I think if we look more carefully we'll see that in many ways the tea party movement resembles more closely the kind of secessionist feelings that were both part of the Confederacy before the Civil War and then also remained in the post-civil war Reconstruction era. So in other words-

LOESCH: It's about state sovereignty not secessionism. It's about 10th Amendment principles.

Loesch did a terrific job of refuting Matthews' points.

Matthews and those of his ilk continue to make fools of themselves by trying to paint the Tea Party movement as a fringe, radical group. They continue to make baseless charges about the participants and accuse them of despicable things.

It's just not true.

What's interesting about the Left's efforts to demonize and discredit this grassroots movement is that Americans are not buying into that Leftist propaganda. Tea Partiers are being called racists and nutjobs for simply voicing their opposition. It's clearly an attempt by the Left to stifle dissent, to get people to abandon the movement.

The Leftists are failing. Their plan isn't working.

If anything, it's backfiring on the Leftists. I don't see any signs that the Tea Party movement is fizzling out.

I think the attacks on its participants actually serve to energize them and ultimately grow the opposition, encouraging more and more people to become politically active.

This is about "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

It's about freedom.

It's not about Obama's skin color or Pelosi's gender.

Good grief.

I am really sick of Obama and the Democrats, as well as their big mouth-pieces in the lib media, like Matthews, bashing these Americans and trying to intimidate them.

The Left is overtly trying to shut the movement down and shut the people up.

Talk about a chill wind!