Thanks to everyone for having me. It’s been fun, as always.

When you review our history, I think it becomes inescapable that there is a great beast called nativism that has been loose for generations, wreaking bloody havoc and leaving a legacy of misery. My chief objective in writing this book was to grapple with that beast. Shawna is a classic exponent of it, but she is only the face of a much larger and more fearsome creature. So the apocalyptic pale rider is a kind of symbol of all she represents.

You’ll note that I also included an epigraph from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the first pages, featuring a speech from the character known as The Judge, who is a mythic and violent figure whose ethos expresses the heart of nativism. And that’s why I included that.

The coming debate over immigration reform will be most amusing when it hits the House, don’t you think? These Republican Senators have learned how to say the right things, but it’s different story in TeaBaggerville.

Actually, I should expand on this a bit: The post-apocalyptic scenarios have really become rampant on the right in the past years, heightened especially after Obama’s re-election. So now we have outfits like the Citadel popping up, preparing for the End Times.

Also, we’re getting a proliferation of Patriot-themed “novels” favored by the Glenn Beckians and Alex Jones addicts about bands of Patriot warriors who save America after it descends into totalitarian dictatorship at the hands of Obama.

So yes, we are actually getting a fresh wave of it. It’s just new skins for old wine.

Black-helicopter conspiracism been a component of this segment of the right for decades. It’s not growing in terms of its overall presence within the movement, but it has grown insofar as the paranoid Patriot right has expanded its reach. Which it has done significantly under the guise of the Tea Party.

Wealthy folks like Coors at el have for year and years and year been feeding nativist groups and far-right groups of various other stripes as well (most notably anti-abortion and fundamentalist orgs). I know for a fact that they helped subsidize portions of the militia movement in the 1990s.

Patriot movement organizations, many of whom have sugar-daddy funding from various far-right gazillionaires or local construction/real-estate millionaires, have always been about inflaming the Culture Wars on steroids. They love to divide and conquer, and whip up the people who they’ve made sure have crappy educations and lousy jobs under the thumbs of some pointy-haired nimrods.

It could be. This is remarkably brazen.

Mind you, the 211 Club is more a prison crime gang than a group of ideological warriors, as far as I can tell. They may in fact become domestic terrorists, but I’m not sure that’s what these crimes were yet.

They will never be satisfied. At least not until they round up all the brown people and ship them back to Mexico. And then build a big electrified, laser-beam-monitored citadel wall along the entire Mexican border.

Shawna was a doer in organizational terms: She put together events, publicized them, got people together, made things happen. Worker bees like that are the lifeblood of “volunteer” organizations like the Minutemen, and she made herself very well known to leadership figures, most notably Chris Simcox early on, in the process. It was Simcox’s adoption of her as his new Washington Minuteman chief that propelled her into their ranks.

I haven’t checked recently on the status of her appeal. Last I heard it was about two years out.

I’ve always said that right-wing extremism is the product in America, as it is in the rest of the world, of people who have been left behind by modernity. Many of these are people who are caught up in the cycle of poverty, or who are living on the economic margins being created by corporate malfeasance. (I’m thinking specifically here of Chris Hedges’ recent excellent book, Days of Destruction Days of Revolt.)

So yes, you are right about how nativism is bred by corporatism, which feeds it intentionally, I believe, as a means of keeping working and middle classes divided. All of these organizations get plenty of mainstream conservative support.

BTW, if anyone wants to read an excerpt, they’re running the entirety of Chapter Twelve over at AlterNet today.

There’s a powerful symbiotic relationship: Forde decided to become active in the Minutemen after listening to right-wing talk radio. It was a milieu she was very fluent in. As I observe in the book:

A significant aspect of the scapegoating rhetoric common to right-wing nativist movements—rhetoric that is almost wholly structured around building outrage and anger in their audience and overwhelming rationality—is a kind of competitive escalation: the more outrageous and inflammatory the rhetoric, the greater influence you wield, and the greater following you attract. In a can-you-top-this political environment, a lifelong topper like Shawna will always flourish. And she did.

They empowered her, and she made things happen for them. Where one started and the other ended is hard to say.

Interestingly enough, people who study ethnic crimes (especially hate and bias crimes) and similar phenomena such as this and other nativist activities have concluded that there is actually very little correspondence between economic downturns/upturns and the rate of this violence.

The big correlation factor is demographic shifts — which then can be inflamed by economic downturns. But the spikes in this violence have also been observed during economic good times.

I think Gilchrist is still living off the gigantic wad of cash they made off the Minutemen in its first few years of existence. He’s down to five chapters now, with no discernible activity.

He did get all worked up about my earlier, distilled version of the investigative component of this book that was published last year by AlterNet. If you go to the bottom of the comments there you can see him foaming at the mouth.

He hasn’t contacted me to threaten me yet, but he did call up Leah Nelson at the SPLC and rant and rave at her several times when she reported on all this.

Well, I think you can just turn to the collected works of Rep. Steve King for a prime example of the way hateful nativist rhetoric was a staple of the Republican right for years. Or the GOP primaries where immigration was debated.

Even more insidious, frankly, was the work of “mainstream” organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies. These outfits regularly issued academic-appearing “reports” and “studies” for their gullible subscribers, including many members of the mainstream press, in which they learned various awful things about immigrants: that they were bringing diseases to our shores, that they were creating a wave of criminality, that they were costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

Not only were these things simply not true, they actually were inversions of reality (immigrants, for instance, commit crime at a significantly lower rate than average American citizens).

Even worse, they combined to tell a story about immigrants that fueled the haters and gave them mainstream cover, the right to rant about those dirty, disease-ridden criminal Latinos who were stealing welfare money. Spreading the hate in a legitimate-seeming guise. And that’s why we have the degraded state of discourse on immigration that we’ve seen from the Right for years and years now.

That is a deep question, and one for which there are no simple answers. But fearfulness and paranoia are the products of ignorance and brutality, and many of the worst of these folks have pretty brutal upbringings steeped in ignorance.

I will say this about people like Shawna Forde: She envisioned herself in a heroic light, like an action movie star, out to save America. That’s really common to right-wing extremists (as opposed to seemingly apolitical actors like James Holmes). Indeed, the heroic self-conception is central to their ability to justify their own acts to themselves.

Exactly correct. Locals generally don’t see immigration as a course of much violence, but that is changing somewhat, especially as the cartels have taken over much of the human-smuggling trade as well. Many of the drug mules people see now are immigrants who have been told they have to carry a bale safely over the border in order to make it. Moreover, the presence of cartel figures in the bigger daisy-chain smuggling operations means they are more ruthless: more people are left behind to die, and any pursuit by Border Patrol can turn violent and lethal for the unlucky passengers aboard the fleeing vehicles.

Kirk, I skirted that material, in part because though Shawna had a horrific childhood, that alone doesn’t explain her nature. Her mother said that she gave people “the creeps” with her cold-bloodedness even when she was little. Some of this was wired in.

I do discuss psychopathy in this context, and how in many regards this is a splendid example of the intersection of psychopathy and politics.

There have been some imitators who’ve tried to spring up, but they seem to be burning out. Still, we know there remain some active border-watch vigilantes out there, and they’re a lingering issue.

They took another hit recently when J.T. Ready, the neo-Nazi border watcher, killed his girlfriend and her family and then himself. Even more recently, a former Minuteman pal of Shawna’s became a notorious fugitive who had absconded with a local teenager. Those cases combined with this one really sent these guys into the woodwork.

Still, most of the Minutemen remain active in border issues — as participants in the Tea Party, into which they have more or less seamlessly melted.