TPMDC

Mark Williams Slams Tea Party Group For Kicking Him Out

Tea Party activist Mark Williams.

In a long post on his personal blog — the site of the astounding post last week about the NAACP that may prove to be the undoing of his career as a tea party leader — the Tea Party Express’ Mark Wiliams slammed the Tea Party Federation for kicking the Express out of the Federation because of him.

The Tea Party Federation voted unanimously to boot the Tea Party Express out of the organization on Saturday after a week of negative press coverage following Williams’ anti-NAACP screed. Yesterday, Williams took aim at Tea Party Federation David Webb, who discussed his group’s removal of Williams and his group on CBS’ Face The Nation.

“Apparently I have offended the tea party ‘leadership,’” Williams wrote. “Mind you, there is no tea party leadership; every tea partier is a tea party leader. But something happens when the stronger egos and personalities in a movement begin to feel a sense of ownership. It is not long before they act to claim and defend that feeling.”

Williams, who until a month ago was a national chairman of the Tea Party Express, claimed that Webb was trying to make a name for himself by taking on Williams.

“It is a crying shame,” Williams wrote. “We are fighting for the future of not just this nation but for the future of Mankind. That’s just a little more important than my fat head, or the apparently even fatter head [Webb] on Face the Nation Today [sic] who misrepresented himself as the tea party ‘leader’.”

Williams also wrote that he understood the criticisms of his anti-NAACP blog post, which he removed after the controversy started to brew. Williams now acknowledges that the post was “inflammatory” and “arguably over the top.” But he claimed the Tea Party Federation was trying to raise its profile on the back of his mistake:

“I am refusing all media requests on this,” Williams wrote. “I do not wish to widen the fracture and exasperate the damage done to our movement by the National Tea Party Spokesman.”

Mark Williams
Evan McMorris-Santoro

Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.

Editor & Publisher

Josh Marshall

Managing Editor

David Kurtz

Senior Associate Editor

Paul Werdel

Associate Editor

Sara Libby

Assistant Editor

Igor Bobic

Reporters

Brian Beutler

Carl Franzen

Sahil Kapur

Eric Kleefeld

Eric Lach

Nick Martin

Evan McMorris-Santoro

Ryan J. Reilly

Benjy Sarlin

Front Page Editor

David Taintor

Poll Editor

Kyle Leighton

News Writer

Pema Levy

Video Editor

Michael Lester

Polling Fellow

Tom Kludt

Video Fellow

Clayton Ashley

Publishing Fellow

Christopher O’Driscoll

Research Interns

Michael Brooks

Publishing Intern

Miles Read

General Manager & General Counsel

Millet Israeli

VP, Ad Sales

Mary Cadwallader

Bob Edmunds

Bruce Ellerstein

Waldo Tibbetts

Manager, Ad Operations and Sales Support

Versha Sharma

Deputy Publisher

Callie Schweitzer

Director of Technology

Eric Buth

Designer/Developer

Ni Mu

Matthew Wozniak

Tech Fellow

Dennis Cahillane