"Big government is a threat, but that's not what the Tea Party cares about," Kennedy said. "They just don't want to pay their taxes. And they don't want, and they don't want, a black person to be president of the United States."

Later in the speech, Kennedy said the "whole Tea Party movement came out of the nostalgia for a plantation economy."

"Why is it that they—they all came out of those, you know, those dozen southern states that were part of the Confederacy?" Kennedy said. "This is the resurgence of the Confederacy."