AUSTIN, Texas — Tea party activists are “liars and charlatans,” said Kim Locus, the campaign manager for Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican representing a Dallas area district. Locus has jumped into the front lines of the battle between the Republican establishment and grassroots tea party activists, posting several other inflammatory comments on social media that are raising eyebrows, including calling tea party activists the “Fundamentalist Taliban Tea Party” and taunting supporters of Speaker candidate Rep. Scott Turner.
Screen caps of closed Facebook groups for several Texas tea party organizations were provided to Breitbart Texas. In one post in the Garland Tea Party page, a woman named Mary posted the phone number to Sessions’ Congressional office and said “Pete just better listen to us! Make him listen!” Locus posted a reply, “Mary, he listens to you every day, quit listening to liars and charlatans.” This comment drew rebukes from other group members to “Stay classy Kim” and “Name calling should be left to the Left.”
In another post on the Garland Tea Party page, Locus got into a dispute with other members about the race for the Speaker of the Texas House, which pits current Speaker Joe Straus against Rep. Scott Turner, who enjoys high favorability with the tea party but likely will not have the votes to defeat Straus. Locus apparently objected to the Dallas County GOP endorsing Straus, which Breitbart Texas previously reported. Locus posted a taunting, “Sadly for you both, Scott Turner will never be speaker.”
Perhaps the most inflammatory of Locus’ comments was on the Dallas County Republican Party page. In response to a post that said the definition of the “Ultimate RINO” (Republican in Name Only) was “Republicans who get elected with no intention of doing what they were elected to do: govern” and a hashtag, “#FundamentalistTalibanTeaParty, Locus wrote, “#FundamentalistTalibanTeaParty are the RINO’s.”
Sessions survived a primary challenge from Katrina Pierson, an activist with the Garland Tea Party, that drew national headlines but ultimately came well short at the ballot box, with Sessions winning 63.6 percent of the vote to Pierson’s 36.4 percent. During the primary, Sessions drew criticism from conservative activists who were unsatisfied with his voting record, and it appears that some of the tension from that race still remains between the tea partiers and Sessions’ campaign manager.
These are not Locus’ first controversial social media posts. Back during the primary between Sessions and Pierson, bloggers took note of her retweeting a parody account that attacked Pierson, as well as getting into similar skirmishes on Facebook.
An attempt was made to reach Congressman Sessions for comment, but Breitbart Texas did not receive a reply as of press time.
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter @rumpfshaker
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