<p>I am a student assistant who works at the center that put on the conference, so I’m probably biased, but I’d say the Fox News, Glenn Beck reports were highly exaggerated. I think a fair majority of Brandeis kids were kind of proud that Glenn Beck and Fox News were criticizing Brandeis, sort of based on the idea that this must mean we are doing something right, given how many times I saw the link to the Fox News report being passed around among Brandeis people. Also, the offending posters were up for about a week and nobody really noticed them until a local conservative radio host found out about them. The conference itself was very academic with an emphasis on social science/sociology. One of my friends who is conservative was somewhat upset about the posters and the news reports, but I convinced him to come and he came back actually agreeing with a fair amount of what the presenter who discussed Tea Partiers had to say (my friend was far more upset by some stuff another campus visitor, a journalist, had to say two days earlier). Nothing on the poster or the center’s website drew an explicit connection between Nazism and Tea Parties. The conference was about right wing radicalism in Europe and in America, and so the symbol (which was negated on the poster) had some applicability at least to the European aspect of it.
There was high attendance at the event, more than is usual at the center’s events, and there were some tea party members there, but everyone stayed civil in spite of some sharper exchanges towards the end. And that I think made it a successful event, because you really had two opposite sides of a spectrum in the same room which you don’t really have. With the symbol, conference organizers were criticizing intolerance that some say exists among some Tea party members.
Here is some reading material about this:
[The</a> Justice](<a href=“Homepage - The Justice Online”>Homepage - The Justice Online)
[url=<a href=“http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/28/livebloggin-the-right-wing-radicalism-conference/]Innermost”>http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/28/livebloggin-the-right-wing-radicalism-conference/]Innermost</a> Parts Blog Archive Livebloggin’ the Right-Wing Radicalism Conference<a href=“from%20an%20activist%20student%20blog”>/url</a>
[url=<a href=“http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/22/party-time/]Innermost”>http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/22/party-time/]Innermost</a> Parts Blog Archive Party Time<a href=“more%20from%20the%20activist%20blog”>/url</a>
[url=<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Fox News Hoax Exploits Holocaust Link to Mask Racism in Tea Parties | HuffPost Latest News]Chip</a> Berlet: Fox News Hoax Exploits Holocaust Link to Mask Racism in Tea Parties<a href=“post%20from%20conference%20presenter%20whose%20paper%20topic%20caused%20all%20the%20trouble”>/url</a></p>