The most recent attempt to protest federal immigration policies by
shutting down the nation’s ports of entry along the Mexico border has,
to no one’s great surprise, turned out to be another fizzle.
Calling itself a coalition of antigovernment “Patriot” groups angry about immigration enforcement, “Shut Down All Ports of Entry”
had attempted to organize a protest Saturday morning at a number of the
United States’ border crossings wherein participants would drive up to
the port, turn off their trucks and cars, and walk away from them.
“There has been an unsubstantiated threat of mass violence to
attendees, along with very suspicious activity on the Facebook site,”
wrote organizer Satsyi Barth. “These two items are more than enough for
me to immediately stop any protest that was going to occur. Your lives,
and the lives of our law enforcement, are more important than any
protest.”
According to one news report, however, a small group of six
protesters comprising three small cars did arrive at the port of entry
in Brownsville on Saturday.
Local law-enforcement officials, meanwhile, were less than happy
about the whole affair. Omar Lucio, the sheriff of Cameron County,
Texas, told the Valley Morning Star
in Brownsville that he and state and federal law-enforcement officials
had prepared a significant response on Saturday to the protest, all for
naught.
“We paid people overtime,” Lucio said. “Yes, I hate to waste that
kind of money. As law enforcement, you never know what’s going to come
up. You use these resources and other resources. We take care of people
in the U.S.”
Lucio said that about 30 sheriff’s deputies, including a 15-man SWAT
team, and a number of Texas Rangers and FBI officers were present at the
Veterans and Gateway bridge crossings on Saturday.
It is unclear whether actual threats against the protest were
delivered by Mexican drug cartels, or there simply was not enough
support for the protest. Though the organizers called themselves a
“coalition” of “Patriot” groups, Hatewatch could not find any other
groups aligning themselves with the protest or publicly supporting it. Organizers told Hatewatch that members of other “Patriot” groups planned to participate, but could not name them.
Barth told the right-wing Breitbart website that the protest shut down because of threats:
Cartel threatening mass blood shed. One of the guys in
Texas was followed into a Walmart, on the freeway, then approached at
his hotel. At the same time, I got a bunch of requests to join the
[Facebook] page from Sonora Mexico. I grabbed as many as I could, but
realized it was getting out of control fast and I didn’t want them to
see who the attendees were. This is after it was requested that we avoid
certain areas, because of the recent border threats, unrelated to us.
The cartel has people at every port listed..waiting for us, so I was
told.
Two previous “Patriot” attempts at shutting down key U.S.-Mexico border crossings–one led by radio host Pete Santilli in July, and another in August by the Santilli-led “Border Convoy”–ended as non-events with similarly dismal turnout.
A self-described coalition of antigovernment groups is hoping to
organize yet another attempt at shutting down the U.S.-Mexico border at
major commercial crossings this weekend, calling the event “Shut Down All Ports of Entry”.
But this particular attempt, scheduled to take place Saturday, has
set off warnings among law enforcement personnel, including a local
sheriff’s office in Texas and Border Patrol officials, who say they are
prepared for just such an attempt.
A spokesman for event told Hatewatch that, despite concerns, the
protest will not be violent or involve any radical behavior. “We have
told everybody that’s called, keep your military gear, your rifles, and
that stuff at home,” Rob Chupp said in a phone interview. “This is not a
military operation, this is a peaceful protest.”
The group’s Facebook page details their plans:
We are a representation of Americans who are unsettled
and deeply concerned with our current Administration, in all branches of
Federal and State governments. Our mission is to Shut Down, every
United States’ Port of Entry on the Southern Border, until our Goals are
met.
The website and a message at the group’s hotline asserts that the
protesters will remain in place until their demands are met. There are
eight “non-negotiable” demands, including the termination of all medical
and financial for non-documented immigrants.
“CBP has contingency plans ready to put into place in the event of
any protest or a temporary blockage of traffic at our international
border crossings,” CBP spokesman Ralph DeSio told the Times.
A report from a southern Texas TV station also warned that “militias”
were planning to block traffic on the international bridges this
weekend, and quoted Rio Grande Mayor Ruben Villarreal as he voiced his
concern.
“What can we expect? I don’t know. The unknown becomes an issue that
we really got to prepare for,” Villarreal said, noting that any shutdown
would have significant impacts on businesses: “If they’re here to
block traffic, to be a hindrance between traffic and the port of entry,
that causes a problem. It’s a huge safety issue.”
However, Rob Chupp, an Indiana man who participated in the border
militia watch at “Camp Lone Star” in Texas last month, insists that
there are no militias directly involved in the protest.
"We are not a militia group,” Chupp told Hatewatch. “None of the
organizers or the event staff is part of a militia. We have housewives,
I’m a business owner. That’s who we have. We don’t have militia.”
Chupp claims that authorities are well aware of their plans and have
actually been supportive: “We’ve talked to Homeland Security, Border
Patrol, Texas Rangers, and for the most part, everybody’s on board with
us,” he said. “Border Patrol is happy that we’re doing it. We have
sheriffs that are telling us, ‘OK, here’s where you’ve gotta go, this is
what you’ve gotta do. Don’t worry about this port, this is a better
port.’ So we have a lot of support across the board.”
The shutdown protest appears to be the brainchild of a California woman named Stasyi Barth, a self-described 41-year-old disabled housewife
and mother of three from Lake Elsinore, who says she has become
increasingly concerned about immigration and decided to organize
citizens to stop it.
However, while they describe themselves as “coalition” of Patriot
groups, Chupp could not name any other organizations that have actually
signed on to support their Saturday protest. Instead, he indicated that
people involved in other Patriot groups such as the Oath Keepers and
anti-immigration groups such as Overpasses for America would be there as
participants.
“We’re coming together as The People,” Chupp said. “We’re not coming
together as any particular group. We don’t want to say, OK, here’s this
group and this group and this group. … Because once you start naming
this person or that person, it becomes about them. We want it to be
about our national security and our sovereignty. It’s about the people
in general.”
Barth said that the plan is for participants to simply arrive at the
border, get in the requisite traffic lanes, and then turn off their cars
and walk away.
“You get out of your car and take your keys with you,” she told the Times last
week from her home. “You stand there and wave your American flag and
try to get the message to D.C. that they need to close our border.”
Though he has been largely exiled from the mainstream media in the wake of his nakedly racist remarks following the armed showdown he led against federal agents, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy manages to keep popping up on the political scene in Nevada, still spouting his far-right antigovernment “Patriot” views.
Most recently, Bundy made an appearance in Reno on behalf of Nevada Republican congressional candidate Russell Best, who is running for the state’s 4th District congressional seat under the banner of the fringe Independent American Party.
The incumbent, first-term Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford – who demanded federal action when Bundy supporters reportedly began stopping residents at roadway checkpoints near the Bundy ranch – is favored to win, according to race handicappers, against GOP candidate Crescent Hardy and Best.
Bundy’s speech to the Reno campaign gathering was a fairly
boilerplate affair: “Basically, fight for liberty and freedom, and we’re
fighting against a federal government that’s overreached,” Bundy told
the crowd, estimated at about 50 people, at the Bonanza Casino.
Later, he again told reporters for KRNV-TV
that he still wanted to see local sheriffs disarming federal agents in
their jurisdictions – and warned that armed revolution would follow if
they failed to act.
“I did speak for ‘We the People’ when we said take away the arms from
the federal government,” Bundy said. “Later I thought of that and each
county sheriff should be taking these arms away from these federal
bureaucracy. I did say if we don’t do that, if we don’t rein back this
federal government, then we the people are going to have to fight we the
people, and that would be a revolution that I sure don’t ever want to
see happen.”
Bundy admitted to feeling cooped up at his ranch, even as the crowd
of his Patriot supporters has dwindled in the wake of an outbreak of
infighting.
“I can’t say I really enjoy it,” he said when asked how felt about
being a national figure. “I fight for freedom and yet I feel like I’m
sort of locked up in the surroundings and not much freedom for me and my
family.”
Bundy, his sons, and a number of participants at the ranch standoff remain under investigation by the FBI for their potentially criminal behavior during the standoff
Self-described “sovereign citizen” David Darby wants everyone to know
that he has no intention of getting involved in any armed standoffs with
any law enforcement officers from Clark County, Wash., where he lives.
He says he just wants his day in court – even though, whenever he has
had one of those, he has lost.
Most recently, the 69-year-old Darby – a longtime antigovernment
“Patriot” movement activist, dating back to the 1990s, and political
gadfly – was informed by a Superior Court judge
that his 4.7-acre property in rural Amboy would be put up for auction,
following foreclosure proceedings brought against him by Clark County
for failure to pay his taxes.
“It’s all constitutional,” he insists. “Everything I’ve done is
constitutional. If it’s not constitutional, then all they have to do is
prove it. And I will stop this. I will pay the taxes. But because they
have not done this, I would not pay the taxes. And I cannot get this
into federal court until I am hurt. So once they actually sell my
property, I’ve been hurt. Then I will file in federal court.”
Darby has only a few days left to wait. The auction of his property
is scheduled to take place between 8 and 11 a.m. on Sept. 16.
Darby, claiming that he is a “citizen” exempt from such duties,
stopped paying his taxes in 2008, beginning a long-running dispute with
the Clark County Treasurer’s office that culminated in 2013 with
foreclosure proceedings on his rural home – a mobile home on raised
blocks — and its accompanying wooded acreage.
However, as Darby made clear back then,
he purposely forced these proceedings as part of his strategy to get
the issue of his claims to a “land patent” on the property heard in a
federal court. “I’ve been setting up the strategy to do this because no
one has ever gotten sovereign ownership of land in the courts,” Darby
said. “The only way to set it up was to go into foreclosure. … This
isn’t about my land; it’s about the [state] constitution.”
Indeed, Darby claims
that the current Washington constitution, passed in 1889, is not valid –
and that the state’s proper constitution is actually one that was drawn
up in 1878, when statehood was first suggested. He also characterizes
this document as explicitly creating sovereign citizenship for state
residents, as well as outlawing property taxes and liens on property.
“We were already a state before they did the 1889 constitution,” he insists.
He claims he went through a complicated legal process of filing
various affidavits and making public proclamations that resulted in him
owning a “land patent” on his property.
“Anyone who buys my land has a big problem because I have a lawful title to my land,” he told a reporter.
Darby has been active in far-right circles in Washington state since
the 1990s, when he was the Clark County representative of the U.S.
Militia Association, a “constitutionalist” militia-organizing outfit
directed by an Idaho man named Samuel Sherwood.
It was then, Darby told Hatewatch, that he first became interested in
“common-law courts” and other sovereign citizenship theories. He says
he was originally drawn to far-right “constitutionalist” legal theories
by Sherwood and other far-right figures, but then became so thoroughly
devoted to sovereign citizen theories.
“I found out about [sovereign citizenship] once I found out that the
Constitution does not apply to U.S. citizens, it only applies to
citizens of the United States of America, which ended in 1861 when
martial law was instituted by Lincoln,” Darby says. “I’ve actually
studied the law, the legislation, and I’ve been studying this now ever
since those days, and I’ve figured it out for myself. It’s not that I’m
listening to anybody else, I’ve figured it all out.”
Darby told reporter Tyler Graf of the Daily Columbian
that anyone who buys the property will have to force him to leave.
“We’ll have to see what happens,” Darby said. “I don’t plan on leaving. I
don’t know what they’re going to try. … They know I am very serious
about this. All I want is my constitutional rights protected, like every
other citizen in Washington.”
That means the matter may eventually come down to a sheriff’s deputy
arriving with an order to remove Darby. But Darby told Hatewatch that if
matters get that far, he intends to leave peacefully.
“I’m not going to do anything radical or anything,” he avers. “I have no intention of anything like that.”
However, he said that things won’t get that far, because he intends
to file a federal lawsuit against Clark County this week – as soon as
they put his property up for auction: “I’m getting ready to file another
suit, now that they’ve hurt me, in Superior Court,” he told Hatewatch.
Darby has written about his beliefs about sovereign citizenship at length and posted several lengthyexegeses on the Internet about them. According to a study published about his filings, Darby has claimed to have received financial backing from an anonymous East Coast organization.
Darby says he understands that people espousing sovereign citizen
beliefs have gotten into armed standoffs and shootouts with
law-enforcement officers over situations like his. Those people, he
says, are not like him.
“The problem is that they don’t understand that the officers and all
these are only doing what they’re told to do,” Darby says. “We
understand that. We’re not going to have any armed confrontation. We
don’t want anybody hurt. I would rather have my day in court. And that’s
all I’ve ever wanted.”
Border militiamen like to tell the public that they offer a simple
solution to a complex problem – putting “boots on the ground” along the
United States’ border with Mexico as a way to deter would-be immigrants
from making illegal crossings, or as they are more inclined to put it,
“stopping the illegal invasion of America.”
But already, federal agents have found that their unsought presence
in recent weeks on the border in Texas and Arizona is making a difficult
job much more complicated and possibly lethal. In some cases, agents
are drawing down on the border vigilantes, and in one incident actually
fired upon them. Another confrontation involved bat scientists who
happened to be gathering field data when they encountered the armed
militiamen.
A recent Associated Press report from Christopher Sherman
described an incident along the Rio Grande involving an outfit calling
itself the Texas Militia, who showed up unbidden at the midnight arrest
of a group of border crossers in a canal near the Texas river. At first,
the story reported, the Border Patrol officers assumed the men were
part of a state-run tactical squad, but then were stunned to find that
these well-armed men had “no law-enforcement training or authority of
any kind.”
“The situation ended peacefully with the immigrants getting arrested
and the Border Patrol advising the militia members ‘to properly and
promptly’ identify themselves anytime they encounter law-enforcement
officers,” the story reported. “But the episode was unsettling enough
for the Border Patrol to circulate an ‘issue paper’ warning other
agents.”
Indeed, the story appeared only two days after another border-militia outfit calling itself “Camp Lonestar” posted a video on YouTube
showing a group of border crossers swimming the Rio Grande, while the
self-described member of the “citizen militia” shooting the video
verbally harassed them and told them to go back to Mexico and cross
legally. The crossers appeared to be two men and a woman, and the
militiaman described the men as “coyotes” – human smuggling operators.
Last Friday in a wooded area near the border outside of Brownsville, a
Border Patrol agent in pursuit of a group of fugitive immigrants fired four shots at a camo-clad militiaman who happened to appear in the vicinity. The man dropped his gun and identified himself as a militia member to the border agent. An incident on the Arizona border
near Sonoita, in rural Santa Cruz County, last week was even more
chilling. A group of scientists conducting counts of the bats occupying
Onyx Cave was hit with a spotlight as they walked back to their vehicles
in the dark, then shouted at in Spanish by men who identified
themselves as militia members out “protecting the border.” After
identifying themselves, the scientists walked back to their campsite and
met the apologetic militiamen in person.
While the presence of border militias – which initially stumbled when they were announced last month, but have finally picked up steam in recent weeks,
with as many as 13 different units reportedly operating on the border
in Texas now – is ostensibly about making the border more secure, the
presence of untrained, utterly anonymous gunmen with no accountability
to anyone has been an increasing concern for law-enforcement
professionals working the border.
Last month, officials at Customs and Border Protection issued a statement
intended to warn the militias away: “Customs and Border Protection does
not endorse or support any private group or organization from taking
matters into their own hands as it could have disastrous, personal and
public safety consequence,” the statement said.
“CBP appreciates the efforts of concerned citizens as they act as our
eyes and ears. Securing our nation’s borders can be dangerous.
Interdicting narcotics and deterring and apprehending individuals
illegally entering the U.S. requires highly trained law enforcement
personnel,” the statement said.
Right-wing radio host Pete Santilli spent time, while on his trip to
Texas as part of the failed “Border Convoy”, with one of these border
militias – namely, the participants at “Camp Lonestar.” Santilli took
footage of the patrols of the border these vigilantes made in their
vehicles.
The man claiming to run this militia is an Arizona man named Joe O’Shaughnessy, who Santilli had profiled on YouTube in an extended interview
a few weeks previously. O’Shaughnessy said he and several others moved
their border-watching operations to Texas in recent weeks as the call
went up among his fellow antigovernment “Patriot” movement believers to
try to stop the flow of refugee children over the Texas border.
O’Shaughnessy and several of his fellow “Camp Lonestar” participants
described their activities to Santilli, and described their motivations
for prowling the desert borderlands.
Most of these motives revolved around “patriotic” duty to defend the
homeland, and a belief that the nation is being “invaded” by an “enemy.”
Some cited the supposed presence of Middle Eastern border crossers,
while others described at length the various foul diseases being
transported into the United States by the child refugees.
Notably, most of them claimed that the Border Patrol officers they
encountered actually welcomed their presence as “another set of eyes on
the border.”
Other militiamen have made similar claims in other news accounts. In a piece by Maxwell Barna for Vice,
a militiaman named Parris Frazier – the self-described leader of a
border unit called Whiskey Bravo, which patrols a stretch of the border
in Arizona – claimed that his men are friendly with Border Patrol
agents.
“Every day when I’m driving to and from Sierra Vista down here to
where I’m at, I get stopped, I shake their hands, and we talk, but we
don’t really talk about what’s going on,” Frazier said, speaking from an
area east of Nogales, roughly a half mile inside the Arizona border.
“Every now and then I’ll ask a question and they’ll give me a nod yes or
no.”
However, CBP officially maintains that heavily armed wannabe border
patrolmen are not particularly welcome in sensitive areas where they are
encountering dangerous situations on a daily basis.
And local law enforcement are apparently inclined to agree. According to the Los Angeles Times,
when a border militia recently camped out near an international bridge
to Mexico in Pharr, Texas, local sheriffs marked their presence by
circulating a bulletin among each other warning of the men’s presence.
Some sheriffs directly declined the militia’s help, while others simply
remained silent.
“How do they identify themselves? Do they have badges? How do we know who they are?” asked J.P. Rodriguez,
a spokesman for the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office. “If they’re all
just dressed in camos, it’s kind of hard to distinguish whether they’re
law enforcement or not. … There’s a lot of potential for stuff to go
wrong.”
In recent weeks, it has seemed as
if the American Family Association—already listed by the SPLC as an
anti-LGBT hate group—has been on a mission to transform its public image
from that of ordinary family-values advocates to a pack of wild-eyed
radicals foaming at the mouth about their perceived enemies.
AFA spokesperson Bryan Fischer has been leading the way. In recent weeks on his radio program, Fischer has:
Written an article
in which he wonders if Robin Williams will go to heaven and insults
Williams’s mother’s belief system (she was a Christian Scientist,
Fischer says, and that is “a counterfeit form of religion that is
neither Christian nor scientific”)
It’s not just Fischer, though. A couple of AFA analysts recently decried the recent editorial direction of Archie Comics, saying they now promoted “the occult and homosexuality.”
But as absurd as all these declarations might be, Fischer and his AFA cohorts may have been outdone in making such spurious claims. Kevin McCullough, a
fellow AFA pundit who contributes at the organization’s commentary site,
The Stand, recently published the following headline and article:
The ALS Challenge is a wildly popular fundraising stunt for the ALS Association
in which people are encouraged to pour a bucket of ice water over their
heads, record it on social media and then challenge other people to
otherwise join them or make a donation to the association.
The stunt has become an Internet sensation,
with participants including movie stars, pop singers and politicians,
as well as a wide range of others. It has also inspired some moments of accidental low comedy on the Web.
But according to McCullough, the fun and frivolity is overshadowed by
his view that “this very challenge is contributing to the on going
destruction of human life – intentionally.”
The ALS association is actively now funding embryonic
stem cell research and admitting that they likely will continue to do so
in the future.
The funding of embryonic stem cell research means that children are
created and at their earliest stages of life they are destroyed so that
the stem cells (from usually the base of the brain) can be harvested to
perform tests with.
Embryonic stem cell research has proven zero percent effective in
combating diseases like ALS and other neurological degenerative
diseases.
Stem cell research has proven to be a controversial issue for years, with many conservative Christians, including the Southern Baptist Convention, viewing it as akin to abortion. The embryos used for the research are fertilized in the laboratory, and there has never been a baby born or created in such conditions.
The ALS Association also claims to have produced substantial scientific research
that, contrary to the AFA’s claims, indicates progress toward finding a
cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the progressive and fatal
neuromuscular malady commonly known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
ALS afflicts about 30,000 Americans, with about 5,600 new cases
diagnosed annually. More than 5,000 people die each from the disease.
The ALS Association reports that so far more than $31 million has been raised by the ice-bucket challenge.
Pete Santilli insists that militiamen saved his life from drug
cartels trying to assassinate him during his “Border Convoy,” a
publicity stunt held earlier this month to focus anger about Central
American refugee children arriving in the United States.
But his fellow participants are not so sure, leading to a far-right
internecine feud between Santilli and his chief cohort in the convoy, a
longtime Tea Party organizer named Eric Odom, who Santilli has accused
of “co-opting” and “psy-opping” the event and smearing him with
accusations of alcoholism, and Odom dismissing Santilli as a “borderline
lunatic.”
While problems trailed the convoy
along its entire route through the Southwest, tensions culminated in an
early morning panic whipped up by militiamen warning that the hotel in
Van Horn, Texas, was surrounded by drug cartels preparing to ambush the
convoy.
As the convoy described events in a press release, “most convoy
members didn’t even know ‘Operation Secure Our Border’ Citizen Militia
groups were watching over them for their own protection. But thanks to
the quick and decisive evacuation ordered by the Texas Citizen Militia
groups, convoy members may very well have been protected from
potentially dangerous and deadly outcomes.”
However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo ridiculed the report and said it was most likely “fake.” “Nothing of that nature happened here,” he said.
According to the El Paso Times,
Carrillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and
could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred. Carrillo also
noted that there was no Comfort Inn in Van Horn. (Odom now said that the
press release misidentified the hotel. It was the Quality Inn in Van
Horn, not the Comfort Inn.)
“This Border Convoy thing was an absolute bloody train wreck, by
design,” he told listeners last week. “It was designed that way. It was
designed to be train wrecked. You were designed to be co-opted. Your
original concept of stopping buses was so powerful that it drew the
likes of probably one of the most disgusting co-opters in the Tea Party
and Conservative movement, in my opinion, and his name is Eric Odom.”
Santilli went on to describe Odom as a “functioning alcoholic,” and
implied that he was a puppet sent in to wreak havoc with right-wing
causes, saying “his job is to destroy” such efforts. He also decried the
convoy’s organization, noting that its itinerary was kept a secret,
which made it difficult for would-be supporters to join in along the
way.
Odom, Santilli told his listeners, revealed his true character when
the militia came knocking on their door, warning them they were about to
be ambushed:
He was an enemy and a bastard. And when it mattered most,
and we had to evacuate the hotel, and we had women in there, and we had
innocent people that could have been harmed. Forget about who may or
may not have surrounded the hotel. We were in a dangerous situation that
the militia had deemed to be — that we were in a hot zone and we had to
go. And at a moment, a critical moment, he said, ‘Look, I’m drunk right
now. This is just too much for me to handle. I’m outta here. You guys
are on your own.’ And he left and went back to his hotel room, and had
us blocked in.
But while Santilli had concluded that the militias “were the true
patriots of the day,” Odom offered Hatewatch a markedly different
account of events.
“We had gotten in to the hotel at 2 a.m. from El Paso, and yeah,
everyone had a couple of beers because it had been a long day, and there
was nothing wrong with that,” Odom told Hatewatch. “My response when I
came out was that I had only slept for two or three hours. I didn’t see
any cartel around. All I saw was heavily armed militia guys in bandanas
and AR-15s. And I didn’t want to leave the rest of our convoy there at
the hotel. So what I said was that I was going back in to make sure that
the rest of our guys were ready. And we’re going on to San Antonio.”
Odom said that the militiamen produced no evidence that they were
being set up for an ambush by the cartels, and that he was hesitant to
follow orders to bug out. But he stopped short of completely dismissing
the threat. What he did say was that the panic created an opportunity
for his group from Murrieta to separate themselves from Santilli and his
militiamen.
“We just wanted to get away from Santilli and the rest of those guys
that came with the militia as quick as possible, because that was
derailing us from what we wanted to do,” Odom said. “We had a different
agenda that we wanted to accomplish, and it didn’t involve Pete
Santilli’s show.”
Now that Santilli has taken to the airwaves to attack him and his
fellow convoy organizers, Odom said he is trying to avoid responding and
moving on to create new methods of protesting the border situation. He
has issued a statement at the Convoy website
addressing the “spin” created by Santilli, who goes unmentioned by
name: “This individual runs a radio talk show and is desperate for
attention and listeners, and has constantly sought to poison the well
along the way.”
“Pete Santilli in my opinion is a borderline lunatic,” Odom told
Hatewatch. “The reason that he’s on this personal campaign of fantastic
lies is because we actually separated from him halfway through the
convoy just to get away from him. He’s just taken it very personally,
he’s obviously slandering and trying to defame me personally. There’s
not an ounce of truth to what he’s saying.”
Odom added that Santilli had said the convoy was going to Austin to
try to steal some of conspiracist Alex Jones’s listeners by pulling a
stunt in front of Jones’ office. “So this is exactly why we parted ways
with him, and his RV went out on its own on the convoy,” Odom said.
Odom added about Santilli: “He leaves a path of destruction. Everyone
that I’ve contacted that’s had anything to do with him has had the same
outcome, where he turns on them for whatever reason to try to get
attention and create controversy that he can go and try to sell people.”
Shares of SeaWorld Entertainment plunged 33% Wednesday after the company's earnings missed Wall Street expectations.
The
Orlando, Fla.-based company also conceded for the first time that
attendance at its theme parks has been hurt by negative publicity
concerning accusations by animal-rights activists that SeaWorld
mistreats killer whales.
It was almost funny, watching the stock analysts like Jim Cramer scratching their heads.
"This is just an aberration. I've never seen a just, a complete collapse in EBITDA," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." "And they've got to do something. I don't know what they're going to do."
Cramer and his cohost both acknowledged what we call "The Blackfish Effect" -- the devastating power of Gabriella Cowperthwaite's documentary on orca captivity. "The documentary have to had played a big role," Cramer finally concluded.
Immediately SeaWorld responded with a PR move that had clearly been months in the making already -- it was going to expand the orcas' pools:
The company plans to upgrade the killer whale tanks at three
of its theme parks, beginning with the San Diego location. The new
enclosure in San Diego will be almost double the size of the current
one, holding about 10 million gallons of water and extending to a depth
of 50 feet. The company wouldn't specify the cost of the upgrades, only
saying it would be several hundred million dollars.
And ooooh!!! They'll also add some new exercise equipment:
The San Diego facility will include a "water treadmill"
system letting the whales swim against a stream of moving water,
allowing them more exercise but also opening the door to new research
into how the animals burn energy. The system will be the first of its
kind in the world, the company says.
And the whales will never use it, of course, unless coerced.
This is just plain old LAME. This just means these killer whales will have a larger acoustically sterile space to occupy.
These are the most acoustically sophisticated animals on the planet;
their echiolocation, in the wild, is their primary sense. Sticking them
in these pools is like putting a human in a plain white room. Making it
larger doesn't help.
Atchison and his execs also seem completely unaware of (or deliberately
blind to) the fact that the plan to build larger tanks is a de facto
admission that the current enclosures are inadequate. Saying otherwise
makes the entire gesture insulting to anyone’s intelligence – it turns
what could have been perceived as a better-late-than-never
acknowledgment that they need to do better for these animals into a
cynical waste of money. If the current enclosures are enough to allow
the whales to thrive (as SW insists), then how can the company possibly
justify the millions of dollars this expansion will cost, when it just
admitted that 2014 has so far seen, and will continue to see, poor
financial returns? On Wednesday SW said it would start a cost-cutting
program to increase dividends for its shareholders and then on Friday it
announced an extraordinarily expensive expansion program that will be
paid for…how? How can this proposal possibly be justified except by an
open, honest admission that Shamu Stadium is not adequate to safeguard
the orcas’ welfare?
Rose has been saying all along that SeaWorld eventually is going to have to rethink its business model. It can't get away anymore with being a kid-friendly orca-circus theme park with a faux-educational front. It will need to become a genuine agent for conservation and education, and it will have to begin by rehabilitating its wild-born orcas and figuring out adequate living arrangements for its captive-born orcas. It will have to stop breeding. And it will need to assess its handling of all marine mammals, especially other dolphins.
These corporate folks always express reverence for the market and say they listen when it speaks. Well, the market is speaking loud and clear: SeaWorld's old way of making millions off the exploitation of animals unsuited to captivity are over.
Pete Santilli keeps trying –– and failing –– to organize protests
that will shut down border crossings between the United States and
Mexico. What’s more, he hasn’t been completely honest about it.
The latest effort by the extremist right-wing radio host was a multi-state “Border Convoy” campaign
that featured protests at various stops along the multi-day route.
Participants signed a petition declaring that they “oppose Barack
Obama’s foreign invasion of our country” and demanding that authorities
“secure our border.”
But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to Santilli.The
idea was for a string of vehicles, beginning on Aug. 1, to travel from
Murrieta, Calif., and follow the border through Arizona and Texas,
ending at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, on Aug. 9. Murrieta
was the point of departure for Santilli’s earlier botched attempt to
shut down the border, largely because the town has been the focal point
of anti-immigrant protests directed at the influx of child refugees from
Central America. A recent report from the Center for New Community
details how these protests were orchestrated by a coalition of white nationalists and various nativist extremists.
But along the way, the protest was largely ignored until the convoy
began encountering resistance from counter-protesters at their stops.
After departing California, the convoy headed for Phoenix, Ariz., and descended on the offices
of Republican Sen. John McCain, whose moderate stances on immigration
have drawn the ire of the nativist extremists. While at McCain’s
offices, Santilli led the crowd in chanting against legislation McCain
has cosponsored to end the crisis with Central American refugees,
apparently because it makes it illegal to identify where the refugees
are being transported. However, McCain was not at the office that day,
and the gathering quickly broke up.
Then the convoy headed for Texas, where it began encountering stiffer
resistance. In El Paso, someone driving a black pickup truck joined the
convoy and began slowing the group’s progress. When police intervened
and pulled the convoy over, the people in the pickup complained to
police that someone in the convoy had pointed a rifle at them.
The El Paso Times
reported that El Paso activist Miguel Juarez was among the
counter-protesters, and he filed a claim that someone in the convoy had
pointed a rifle at them. The convoy later filed a police report accusing
Juarez of filing a false claim, as well as another claim that the
protesters had tried to force them off the road.
“I told him I was not lying that
the rifle episode had occurred and that we had witnesses,” Juarez said.
“We felt threatened by the convoy member with his rifle and felt a duty
to report it to police,” Juarez said in a written statement.
And what would a right-wing border protest be without the concocted
claims that drug cartels had targeted their activities? There was plenty
of paranoia and phony claims of persecution.
In Van Horn, Texas, according to reports,
convoy members were forced to evacuate a hotel at 4:30 a.m. by members
of the “Operation Secure Our Border” militia, who informed members that
they were being watched over by militia. Those same militiamen,
according to accounts, had determined that drug-cartel operatives had
surrounded the Comfort Inn hotel where the convoy members were staying
and were preparing to ambush them.
“Militia immediately acted to evacuate the property of convoy
vehicles and raced the convoy to an undisclosed location some 45 miles
away,” explained the convoy’s press release. “While convoy members were
initially rattled and concerned by the sudden move, the gravity of the
threat was later realized and Militia involvement was met with
widespread appreciation.”
The account also claimed that “county law enforcement” had confirmed
the presence of the threat. However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar
Carrillo ridiculed the report as “fake.”
According to the El Paso Times, Carillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred.
“There is no Comfort Inn in Van Horn,” Carrillo said. “We did follow
up with most of the motels here in town and none of the property owners,
who do reside on the property (of the motels), can validate they
(convoy members) even stayed in Van Horn, Texas.”
“It’s fine that they are here, but their message of hate and
ignorance is not welcome in the valley and they shouldn’t bring it with
them,” said John Michael Torres of La Union del Pueblo Entero, a pro-immigrant advocacy group.
The next day, led by a contingent of bikers affiliated with the
convoy calling themselves the “U.S. Defenders,” Santilli’s convoy
intended to conclude while “shutting down” the border crossing in nearby
Brownsville, Texas, where the object of the protest in was ostensibly
the arrest of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, whose continued
detention in a Mexico jail has become the latest cause celebre of the extremist right.
The protest managed to disrupt traffic briefly (for about 20 minutes) at the crossing, and the Border Convoy’s Facebook page
boasted: “We fully shut down the main lane of traffic coming through
the entry port into Brownsville, TX this am. Thanks to the Brownsville
group and Border Convoy travelers for demanding our Marine be allowed to
come home!”
Again, the convoy encountered a contentious and large number of
counter-protesters. “These people are coming out an disrupting our
communities, and that’s what we don’t want,” one counter-protester told a KGBT-TV reporter.
A number of commenters at the convoy’s Facebook page also claimed that
even the attempt to stop traffic was a failure: “Didn’t shut anything
down, liars,” said one. “You simply stood in the way as folks drove around you.”
According to the Dallas Police Department blog,
the man –– a 60-year-old Corinth resident named Douglas Lee Leguin ––
began taking shots at Dallas firefighters on Monday as they arrived near
the scene of a reported Dumpster fire in the well-to-do neighborhood.
The firefighters were not hit and put out a call for assistance.
In short order, the Dallas SWAT team and a host of police officers
descended upon the scene, and the man continued to fire shots. However,
no officers were injured in the incident. Eventually, negotiators
persuaded the man to surrender.
Leguin was charged with seven counts of aggravated assault. According to the Denton Record-Chronicle,
he had placed a number of explosive devices around the property where
he engaged police in the standoff. Those devices were defused or
detonated. Reportedly, the same man had encountered a babysitter in the
neighborhood with an 8-year-old girl and had threatened both of them
before starting his rampage.
[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne has been accused by his
political opponents of being a “chameleon.” But not even they could
predict the company he would one day keep.
Horne, once a Democrat, is a featured guest at tonight’s “Liberty on Tap” monthly
social at a Scottsdale brewing company, where he will share the stage
with far-right antigovernment “Patriot” movement luminaries including Richard Mack and Ammon Bundy, the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.
Stephen Lemons at Phoenix New Times reports that Horne’s campaign team is aware of the presence of the other participants. Ammon Bundy is best known as the Bundy son who was hit by a Taser during a skirmish outside the Bundy Ranch,
an event that served to animate much of the antigovernment Patriot
response that resulted in an armed standoff with federal authorities. He
later served as a family spokesman on several national news broadcasts.
Mack was also a major player on the scene at the Bundy Ranch standoff, where he suggested to Fox News that
the strategy of the day was to have women in the front of the protest
crowd. “If they’re going to start shooting, it’s going to be women
that are televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue
federal officers,” Mack said.
Horne, a close ally of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who endorsed Horne again this year), has suffered a number of scandals associated
with his office in recent years, including campaign-finance charges and
allegations that he left the scene of a fender-bender after a lunchtime
sexual tryst.
Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, recently told a Tea Party gathering in California that he considered resorting to the “sovereign citizens” tactic
of calling for a so-called “citizens grand jury” while he was
conducting an investigation of the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth
certificate.
The subject came up during an
Arpaio speech on July 27 to a gathering of Tea Party conservatives in
Ramona, Calif. A video taken by an audience member shows Arpaio being
questioned about calling for a “sovereign citizens” tactic to be applied
in a Maricopa County “fraud” case that “involved not only the
perpetrator, Obama, but the senators, and congressmen, and … your
secretary of state. Why don’t you form a citizens grand jury to bring
indictments against these people, and when you get no response from it,
then you can form a citizens trial court — ?”
The sheriff interrupted the man’s question.
ARPAIO: I heard about that. You know what I was looking
at? It wasn’t for that. I was looking at it for the birth certificate.
If I was gonna do a citizens grand jury, it would be because of that.
It’s a little tough. Legally, it’s a little tough. You know, I am the
sheriff, but I still have some restrictions. I gotta use a little
common sense.
Now, don’t think I’m chicken. I can take on the president, I think I have a little …
The questioner interrupted Arpaio to inform him that he would move
from California to Maricopa County free of charge just so he could head
up such a grand jury.
“Citizens grand juries” are an integral part of the “common law
court” system devised as part of the often convoluted and complex system
of beliefs of the sovereign citizen movement, and references to them often appear when assorted antigovernment “Patriot” movement members (who are closely aligned with the sovereign citizen movement) are involved in legal actions, including criminal cases.
Arpaio grabbed headlines in 2011
when he went “birther” –– that is, he announced that not only did he
subscribe to various conspiracy theories claiming that President Obama
was not born in Hawaii and thus is not an American citizen, he intended
to investigate the matter of the president’s birth certificate, and he announced in 2012 his investigators had determined that it was “definitely fraudulently.”
The investigation, crowd pleasing as it may have been for his arch-conservative audience, went nowhere –– although Arpaio did recently announce that he may have determined who the person was that forged the president’s birth certificate.
As the Minuteman Project attempts to restore its influence amid what
some feel is a new crisis brewing on the border, the project’s
co-founder Jim Gilchrist has been barnstorming media outlets in an
effort seemingly aimed at saving a public image marred by criminality as
he works to rebuild the project.
On VCY America’s “Crosstalk” show Tuesday, for example, Gilchrist felt free to tell his interviewer
that hundreds of thousands of Central American children were going to
form the “vanguard” of a “Trojan-horse invasion” of the United States,
and even sympathized with a caller who suggested gassing the children to death at the border.
But the more difficult realities of the Minutemen came during an interview with Ed Berliner, host of Newsmax’s “MidPoint” program. Rather than serve up softball questions as
one might expect from the frequently far-right media outlet, Berliner
challenged Gilchrist about the original incarnation of the Minutemen,
noting that the movement unraveled amid “criminal charges against some
of the people involved, and that includes the former leader, Chris
Simcox,” who now faces trial on three counts of child molestation.
Those “criminal charges” Berliner referenced also included the cold-blooded killing of a 9-year-old girl that landed one of Gilchrist’s onetime associates, a Washington state woman named Shawna Forde, on Arizona’s Death Row.
Gilchrist said:
GILCHRIST: Yes, there have been a couple of incidents of
some very serious embarrassment, uh –– this conduct was not committed by
anyone within the Minuteman Project but in rogue groups that used the
Minuteman movement as a veil, essentially, to carry out sinister and
criminal activities.
But Berliner was persistent, asking Gilchrist to set the record straight regarding just how closely tied he was to those crimes.
BERLINER: So the people, then, who used the Minutemen
effort before, the people then who basically brought disrepute to the
Minutemen, were not people that you would have given rise to, that you
would have given any sort of legality to, or any sort of notice to. They
weren’t part of your group, is what you’re saying.
Gilchrist deflected:
GILCHRIST: No, no, they weren’t card-carrying members of
the Minuteman Project. We don’t have card-carrying members. We have
anyone who agrees that we should be a nation governed by laws, not mob
rule, that mob being 30 million illegal aliens, is an honorary member of
the Minuteman Project. That gives me 280 million members. Not all of
them agree with me, but I look at the movement itself as having 280
million members out of the 310 million population, who want our
immigration laws enforced.
It is at least nominally true that Gilchrist’s operation doesn’t have
“members” per se, and by that definition, at least, Shawna Forde was
not a member of the Minuteman Project. However, virtually everything
else Gilchrist told Berliner was false.
Shawna Forde was an associate of Gilchrist’s beginning in the spring
of 2007, culminating in February of 2009, when he named Forde his
“director of border operations.” Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project site
avidly promoted Forde’s operations –– conducted under the name of her
own group, “Minuteman American Defense” –– and he defended her from
critics within the nativist anti-immigrant movement.
Their association dates back to June 2007, when Forde organized an
“Illegal Immigration Summit” in Everett, Wash., featuring Gilchrist as
the keynote speaker. At the time, Forde was no longer a member in good
standing with the state detachment of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,
operated by Simcox, Gilchrist’s former cohort. Within the month, Forde
had formed MAD and cultivated her relationship with Gilchrist, first
sponsoring the “summit” in Everett featuring herself and Gilchrist that
June. Forde cultivated the relationship further that summer of 2007 by
organizing border watches in Arizona, alongside such other nativist
leaders as Glenn Spencer. She was photographed that summer with
Gilchrist, admiring Spencer’s remote-controlled airplane and scanning
the horizon in search of border crossers.
Forde kept in touch with Gilchrist and subsequently arranged for him
to make an appearance in February 2008 at Central Washington University
in Ellensburg, about a hundred-mile drive from Seattle. Gilchrist at the
time was embroiled in heated lawsuits and disputes with his former
board of directors over ownership of the Minuteman Project, and he no
longer had any functioning presence on the borders; Forde offered to
step up and take on the job. Gilchrist became so enamored of Forde that,
on February 9, he directed his staff to “put Shawna in the website as
our border patrol coordinator.”
But Forde’s involvement would become a grave liability in a matter of a few short months.
Shortly after midnight on May 30, 2009, Forde and a group of three
men invaded the home of a small-time marijuana smuggler named Raul
“Junior” Flores in rural Arivaca, Ariz., and shot its three occupants:
Flores, his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, and his wife, Gina Gonzalez.
However, Gonzalez was not fatally wounded and, after playing dead, she
drove the gang from her home in a hail of gunfire that lightly wounded
the chief gunman, a white supremacist serial killer from Washington
state named Jason Eugene Bush.
The day after the murders, Forde posted on the Minutemen Project
website, boasting of having “boots on the ground” in Arizona, and citing
the deaths at the Flores home as part of a fundraising pitch, in
Forde’s inimitable semi-literate style: “A American family was murdered 2
days ago including a 9 year old girl. Territory issue’s are now
spilling over like fire on the US side and leaving Americans so afraid
they will not even allow their names to be printed in any press
releases.”
So it was with a hint of irony, in his interview with Berliner, that
Gilchrist explained he would continue to rely on his former protocols
when it came to making this new iteration of the Minutemen different
than the previous one: “It is only by one rule that I would expect
people to present themselves and participate, and that one simple rule
is: Whatever you do, you stay within the rule of law. And there are no
exceptions.”
Gilchrist continued to refer reverently to “the rule of law” when
Berliner pressed him on the issue: “How are you going to be able to
control everybody and make sure that the people representing the
Minutemen and along the border are indeed all within the letter of the
law, and aren’t getting in the way of the U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol, or even the National Guard, who’s now there in Texas?”
“I broadcast one message,” Gilchrist replied, again after
a long pause. “Like me, you are an independent, American sovereign
person. You have the right, the irrevocable right, supposedly, to freely
and peaceably assemble on U.S. territory and bring your grievance
forward. It’s each man, woman, and child for him- and herself, on their
own, under their own recognizance, their own responsibility. If they go
beyond the rule of law, they can [to be] expect arrested, cited, and
prosecuted, it’s as simple as that. And it’s something we should be
doing to the illegal aliens that come into this country, not to innocent
American citizens who simply want to present their grievance. “
The irony here is that Shawna Forde, too, regularly preached about
“the rule of law,” and how the “illegal alien invasion” was a slap in
its face. Indeed, she even placed the words “Rule of Law” at the center
of the logo she had designed for her MAD website.
Musab Mohammad Masmari, the man who
tried to burn down a popular gay bar in Seattle on a packed New Year’s
Eve, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The sentence, handed down on Thursday, was considered exceptionally stiff, after Masmari had agreed to a plea bargain on arson charges only, meaning he would not face the federal hate-crime charges that were considered in the case. According to the Seattle Times, the sentence more than doubled the time agreed to in the plea bargain.
Masmari, a 30-year-old American
citizen of Libyan extraction and upbringing, was caught on camera as he
carried a container filled with gasoline through Neighbours, a popular
bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, on New Year’s Eve. Shortly
afterwards, patrons smelled smoke and found the container on the landing
to a set of stairs engulfed in flames; their prompt action quickly
doused the fire.
An estimated 750 people were in the bar at the time, and the matter quickly became a hate crime investigation.
“It was just a great thing that people acted as fast as they did to put
out the fire,” a police spokesperson said. “We could have had mass,
mass casualties, and we’re very lucky that that didn’t happen.”
Some of the people present at the bar that night were in the
courtroom during Masmari’s sentencing hearing on Thursday. Shaun
Knittel, a Seattle LGBT-community activist, said he and others in the
community were “disgusted” with the plea bargain’s five-year sentence.
Neighbours, he said, was packed that night with “people who are
irreplaceable to us.”
“This was a blatant attack on our lives,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez told the courtroom he would use
his discretion to impose the exceptional sentence because Masmari had
clearly targeted his victims because they were gay, and because of the
possibility of a huge loss of life.
Masmari, who claimed in a presentencing statement that he had blacked
out that night after drinking a bottle of whiskey, did not speak during
the hearing. His attorney said the stiff sentence was not entirely a
surprise, “due to the political nature of this case.”
The San Antonio Express-News
published a report this week that listed some of the groups that have
been involved in the patrols and included numerous photos of the
militiamen.
Strikingly, the patrols are being organized secretively, and all the militiamen involved have insisted on anonymity.
The photos published with the report show dozens of men wearing
camouflage gear and carrying a variety of semi-automatic weapons,
patrolling areas of the border of southern Texas. In some cases, the men
are wearing masks; in others, their faces have been blurred by photo
retouching.
The individual who provided the photos insisted on blurring the
visible faces of participants, saying they need anonymity to protect
against retaliation by “cartel and gang members.” Nonetheless, some of
the men in the photos contacted the paper and demanded that it remove
the images, blurred or not, from the website.
Kolten Parker, the reporter who handled the story, told the SPLC that
he and his editors tried to independently confirm as many details as
possible, given that the militias have been secretive about who they are
and when and where they are conducting patrols.
“We’ve spoken with ranchers in the area where these patrols are
occurring, and we’ve seen plenty of evidence that they are,” Parker
said. Judging from the 30 or so photos that the paper ran, he said that
so far the patrols are being conducted in a well-organized manner.
Barbie Rogers of the Patriot Information Hotline told the paper that there are 10 “operations on the ground in Texas” this week.
When the militia patrols were first announced last month, the chief
spokesman – a 37-year-old truck driver from Von Ormy named Chris Davis –
stirred up concerns about potential violence by explaining, in a
now-deleted video, how to solve the border problem: “How? You see an
illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes, and you
say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot.’”
Davis shortly disappeared from view, closing down his operation and
refusing any further media interviews. It shortly emerged in the
Express-News that Davis had been discharged from the Army in 2001 “under
other than honorable conditions in lieu of trial by court-martial,”
according to a summary of his military service.
Another news report from Texas, from KBMT-TV in Beaumont, Texas,
featured an “unorganized militia” in Southeast Texas. The group’s
self-described “commander” is a middle-aged man named David Smith.
The news report buys into Smith’s claim that his militia bears no resemblance to militias in other countries and utterly ignores the long association of militias with radical antigovernment “Patriot” movement extremists.
Notably, however, Smith insists that his militia isn’t going to be running around too far from home. “If they can take care of their community along that border, that’s fine,” he said, “but if we leave our communities to just go running down to the border, then we leave our communities unprotected.”
A new “statewide” militia group that is attempting to organize in
Arizona has been careful to portray itself to would-be recruits and law
enforcement as a non-radical, mainstream organization that cooperates
with local authorities. Calling itself the Arizona State Militia (ASM), the group claims to have successfully recruited a number of veterans of the U.S. military.
But as with similar efforts in Idaho and elsewhere, if you scrape a bit at the façade, the same old antigovernment paranoia and conspiracy theories are lurking in plain view.
ASM is operated by a pair of men who insist on maintaining anonymity
by using pseudonyms – one calls himself “Colonel Reaper,” while the
other calls himself “Colonel Kratos.” This ongoing lack of transparency
stands in stark contrast to the openness with which they carry their
guns in public.
No one from the group responded to requests for comment from Hatewatch.
The militia made headlines when it appeared at a recent anti-immigrant demonstration in Arizona. None of the militiamen spoke on camera, but they were described by others as providing “security” for politicians and public figures who appeared at the demonstration.
ASM insists that all of its members must undergo a background check
before they are admitted. This is a claim we’ve heard from militia and
related groups in the past, notably the Minuteman Project. It often
later emerged that their background check process was deeply flawed and
their ranks were filled with people with long criminal records (in the
case of the Minutemen, the most notorious example was onetime leader Shawna Forde).
ASM has a code of conduct and sworn oath
for its members that includes a ban on “illegal activity” and “racism
or discrimination based on race, sex, or ethnicity” (evidently, a bias
based on sexual orientation is still permissible). Most of all the
militia insists that it is not an “anti-government group” but rather
hopes to work cooperatively with local authorities.
“We are not here to over-throw or restructure the government,” ASM’s website proclaims. It continues:
As Arizona State’s premier group of law-abiding, Constitutional
Patriots- living, working, and training throughout the state; we strive
to improve our community and to help our members hone and sharpen their
defensive skills. We will use these skills to help our local communities
in cases of emergency, natural disaster, or war. We pride ourselves on
the fact we are an open group accepting all races and genders with open
arms. In life as well as the fight for freedom we are all equal are we
not?
The group made a stab at establishing their community bona fides in
May by taking part in a home building project with Habitat for Humanity
of Central Arizona, posting pictures and text about it at their blog.
ASM claimed that “they invited us to join the build” and said they’d be
involved in a June build and promised to post photos. So far, those
have not appeared on the website.
Hatewatch’s inquiry with Habitat for Humanity of Central Arizona about ASM’s involvement went unanswered.
ASM also hopes to establish its bona fides with testimonials on its website
from military veterans who have supposedly joined the militia, some of
whom say they are combat veterans. (Of course, since the organization
insists on anonymity, these claims are impossible to check out.)
In September of last year, TV station KPHO in Phoenix ran an investigative report
from a correspondent who went undercover to an ASM meeting and found
that its recruiters were offering advice to veterans and military
contractors about how to get around military prohibitions against
militia involvement.
As the KPHO report noted, Arizonans have reason to be suspicious of
anyone calling themselves a militiaman and setting out to patrol the
American border, since the state has been home to a number of criminal
cases arising from the activities of so-called border watchers,
including Forde’s horrific murders. More recently, Minuteman cofounder Chris Simcox was arrested and currently awaits trial on three counts of child molestation.
“Colonel Kratos” told an interviewer from a Montana-based, antigovernment Patriot radio show that he believes a lot of militias have gone astray after becoming distracted by what he called “side issues.”
“It defines a lot of them when they get involved with things they
really shouldn’t get involved in,” he told the interviewer. “And it
becomes a mindset. The individuals that run this organization have the
mindset that we are a strict constitutional militia. When you allow
personal opinions or personal things to get in the way of the bigger
picture, it creates havoc for any organization.”
“And what we don’t allow in our organization is power struggles,” he
continued. “We all understand what our role is. It isn’t about any one
of us. It’s about the organization as a whole, and the community and the
state.”
He advised people looking to join a militia to avoid any organization
that describes itself as radical or involved with fringe concerns. “If
they’re involved with positive community things that help those
communities, and they’re staying out of those social issues and they’re
not portraying themselves as an antigovernment organization, one that is
simply there to exert their belief in the Constitution and the state’s
rights, that’s somebody you want to take a serious look at,” he said.
Despite these claims, it’s clear that ASM is fueled in no small part
by the paranoid conspiracy theories that help fuel the broader militia
and Patriot movements, including a belief in an overwhelming “New World
Order” plot to enslave Americans. This is referenced in several places
on the militia’s website.
Likewise, ASM’s Code of Conduct,
rather than offering a reassuring explanation that all militiamen will
be civic-minded in their approach to their duties, instead focuses – at
least in the first half – on how the militiamen should behave if
captured by their enemies: “I will evade answering further questions to
the utmost of my ability. I will not make any oral or written statements
disloyal to my beloved state and its citizens, or harmful to their
continued struggle for liberty and freedom as prescribed in the
constitutions of Arizona and the United States.”
The second half of the Code, as it happens, is a nearly verbatim
recitation of the Ten Orders We Will Not Obey that form the heart of the
credo of the Oath Keepers, another Patriot organization that revels in conspiracies and paranoia, and whose radical ideology was on display at the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada this spring.
ASM appears to be just another radical antigovernment group in the
vein of the many militia and Patriot groups that have come and gone
before them.
