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.
Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist recently announced that he was “considering” reviving the nativist border watch group. And now he’s made it official, announcing that he will organize a Minuteman border patrol in May of 2015.
Gilchrist clearly hopes to capitalize on the mounting right-wing
outrage over the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico involving
Central American refugee children.
Gilchrist’s effort – dubbed “Operation Normandy” – is not lacking in grandiosity. The announcement at the Minuteman Project website declares:
The Minuteman Project’s “Operation
Normandy” has been launched as of 1200 hours Monday, July 7.
This event
will dwarf the original Minuteman Project of 2005. I expect at least
3,500 non-militia volunteers to participate, plus uncounted groups of
militias from all over the country.
If you are familiar with the Normandy
invasion of France in 1944, then you have an idea how large and
logistically complicated this event will be. However, there is one
difference. We are not going to the border to invade anyone. We are
going there to stop an invasion.
Our federal, state, and community
governments have failed to address and fix this calamity. In the spirit
of our nation’s Founding Fathers, it is once again time to bring
unprecedented national awareness to the decades-long illegal alien
crisis jeopardizing the United States.
Participation is open to everyone and there is only one rule: whatever you do, stay within the rule of law.
It will take 10 months to recruit,
organize, and launch this event, and it will cover the porous areas of
the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas.
D-Day: 1 May, 2015.
Gilchrist’s announcement so far has produced relatively gullible news reports from two entities: FoxNews.com, which posted a fluffy account
of the revival of the border watch movement, that had its last moment
in the media sun back in April 2005. Notably, the story described only
in brief and vague terms the causes of the first Minuteman movement’s
downfall:
The Minuteman Project gained national
traction in 2005, but internal turmoil, accusations of vigilantism and
criminal charges against some of its key figures, including a former
leader of the movement, Chris Simcox, led to its demise.
The more detailed, and fully accurate, description of the “criminal charges” against “some of its key figures” would include multiple murder charges filed against onetime Minuteman leader Shawna Forde,
a close associate of Jim Gilchrist who on May 30, 2009, led a gang of
killers into the rural home of an Arizona family and proceeded to murder
a 9-year-old girl named Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul “Junior”
Flores. They also shot the girl’s mother, a 30-year-old woman named Gina
Gonzalez, who eventually drove them from her home in a hail of gunfire,
and wound up providing the testimony that put Forde and her chief
co-conspirator, Jason Eugene Bush, on Arizona’s Death Row.
The “criminal charges” against co-founder Simcox are only somewhat
less disturbing: He is currently in the Maricopa County Jail, awaiting
trial (now scheduled for September) on three counts of child molestation.
Another news account, filed by Phoenix CBS station KPHO,
was even more devoid of factual information, characterizing Gilchrist
(whose name the report misspelled throughout, as well as online) and his
Minutemen as benign concerned citizens, with the only caveat being
“that putting untrained, unarmed volunteers along the border could
create more problems than it solves.”
But Gilchrist held forth at length for the KPHO reporter in a Skype
interview, claiming: “We’re trying to recruit thousands of people to
cover the porous border areas from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas,” and
warning, as he has all along, that he will need 3,500 volunteers in
order to be successful.
Gilchrist also promised that there would be no extremist violence or
murderous plots emerging from this iteration of the Minutemen: “The rule
of law means you do not put a hand on anyone. You do not talk to
anyone. You do not confront anyone. You report to Border Patrol,”
Gilchrist said.
He also defended the character of the militias that claim to be forming along the border even now. “They’re not these man eating ogres they’re made out to be,” Gilchrist said.
Sapp allegedly shot Vancouver officer Dustin Goudschall seven times after being pulled over for a traffic violation,
then fled the scene, wrecked his vehicle, and then assaulted an elderly
man and carjacked his vehicle before finally being caught by police and
arrested. Goudschall survived his critical injuries and was able to help identify his assailant. He is currently recovering from the wounds.
On Sunday morning, deputies found Sapp in his cell attempting to commit suicide and intervened. He was rushed to an area hospital but was pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m.
Sapp had a long history of claiming membership in the Aryan
Brotherhood, dating back to previous arrests for other crimes. He was
also involved in a 2012 case in Clark County involving an assault on a 12-year-old Latino boy and a relative.
Sapp’s family told the Vancouver Columbian through a spokesperson that even though Sapp “had a checkered background … he loved his family and wife.”
Rev. Michael Baca, the pastor of the church Sapp’s family attends,
told the Columbian that Sapp’s issues seemed to have been triggered by a
head injury he suffered a few years ago. Earlier this week, Sapp
reportedly expressed remorse for what he had done.
“‘I need to make things right with God.’ Those are his exact words,”
Baca said. “He knew he was going to be in prison for the rest of his
life. He was accepting that. Obviously, (Thursday) something changed.”
The pastor asked for compassion for the man and his family.
“He’s not a monster. He was a person dealing with a lot of issues,”
Baca said. “There was something inside of him that would click on that
had very powerful control over him.”
They had the motorcycles. They had the flags. And they had some
people eager to protest child refugees coming over the border. What they
didn’t have was a real plan.
That was the upshot of a failed effort by extremist radio host Pete
Santilli and a group of bikers to shut down the Tijuana border crossing,
south of San Diego, on July 5th.
The plan, as described by Santilli on his show, was for his antigovernment “Patriot”
listeners to join forces with his biker friends to protest immigration
policies and the imprisonment of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi in
Mexico. So many bikers and “Patriots” would turn out, Santilli hoped,
that the resulting traffic jam and commotion would shut down the border.
Except, that didn’t happen. Not even close.
One day before the planned border shutdown protest, Santilli was protesting in Murrieta, California, where he shouted at police officers on the scene, calling them “domestic terrorists.”
The next day, having met up with his biker buddies who have been
rallying for Tahmooressi’s return, Santilli and his crew set out
southbound on Interstate 5. About ten miles from their destination,
however, a California Highway Patrol officer pulled over Santilli’s
vehicle.
All of this was caught on Santilli’s live-streaming broadcast of the
“event.” As Santilli’s car pulls off to the shoulder with the officer
behind them, the bikers cruise on by and keep going.
It was the last that Santilli, or his supporters, were to see of them
that day. That begs the question of whether the bikers are, in fact,
working closely with Santilli or whether he’s simply trying to piggyback
on their activities.
In the meantime, a smattering of protesters drawn by the Patriots Information Hotline website, and led by a conspiracist named Larry Murdock, had gathered in Tijuana to try to join Santilli’s protest. They too posted video of the non-event, comprised largely of two men wandering around trying to find a protest that wasn’t happening.
Murdock joked as he walked toward the Tijuana crossing plaza:
“There’s people waiting to see what goes on in the world. They’re like,
‘Hey, you didn’t have sex with a hooker, did you? You idiot! That’s
Mexico! That’s nasty!’ ”
In the meantime, Santilli’s traffic stop took 38 minutes – Santilli’s
car had expired plates, though it was a rental, and he was ticketed for
failure to carry proof of insurance – and he was left to fume for the
rest of the way about the looming “police state” and to wonder
paranoiacally if it had been part of a plot to disrupt the protest.
By the time Santilli arrived at the scene in Tijuana, the bikers were
nowhere to be found (assuming that they were in fact headed toward the
border). He and his crew could only find a couple of protesters. So they
pulled the plug on the protest, got in their cars and went home.
One of the few protesters who showed up – Ernest “General” Lee of Santilli’s Guerrilla Media Network – was left to file a bitter report about the day’s “nonevent”.
“Was it not enough publicity?” he wondered. “Was it a bad weekend choice?”
Lee shook his head. “From a great event, to a non-event. I hate even filing this update.”
What if militias announced a showdown with the feds and nobody came?
That’s pretty much what happened in Texas this week, after a handful
of militia activists called on their fellow militia members to intervene
in the increasingly fraught humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico
border, involving large numbers of children from Central America who are
straining the government’s ability to process their complicated cases.
For a Texas militiaman named Chris Davis, there was nothing
complicated about it. In a video he posted at YouTube – which he has
since been removed – he offered a simple solution for dealing with the
young border crossers.
“How?” Davis asked rhetorically. “You see an illegal, you point your
gun right dead at them, right between the eyes, and say ‘Get back across
the border, or you will be shot.’ Simple as that. If you get any flak
from sheriffs, city, or feds, Border Patrol, tell them look — this is
our birthright. We have a right to secure our own land. This is our
land. This is our birthright.”
Davis’s solution was part of his call to his fellow militia members to
make their way to the Texas border near Laredo in order to prevent child
refugees from crossing there. Late last week, he posted an “Action Alert” bulletin
at various online forums, including his Operation Secure Our Border
Facebook page. “All Texas & National Militia Available Please
Converge Immediately,” it said.
The alert said the “mission” was to
“close down Laredo Crossing for starters,” and that the operation would
be “complete when border fence is in place and secure.”
It named a gathering point at a truck stop in Encinal, Texas, and
concluded: “It’s time to bring down the thunder. Activating the Patriots
willing to stand up for America GO GO GO. … Let’s share this like the
brushfires of Liberty.”
However, Davis’ militia muster call quickly vanished into virtual
thin air. Shortly after he began receiving media attention – including
accounts in the McAllenville Monitor, Brownsville Herald, San Antonio Express-News and Los Angeles Times
– he not only took down all his YouTube videos and deleted his channel
there, he also deleted his Facebook page and all its incendiary
antigovernment content.
Davis told the Express-News that he removed the video Monday because it was taken out of context “by a newspaper that supports amnesty.”
“We’re here to supplement and be where law enforcement is not and help them support the border,” Davis told Los Angeles Times.
“There’s nothing malicious, there’s no malicious intent — every person
is vetted. We’re just here to serve freedom, liberty and national
sovereignty.”
Davis described himself as a 37-year-old truck driver, saying he had
served in the Army and National Guard, and had been involved in Open
Carry Texas events. He told reporters that the militia was in
“preliminary stages of recruiting and training volunteers” and would be
showing up in Laredo “in a few weeks.” He wouldn’t say how many were
involved.
He and a spokeswoman from North Carolina named Denice Freeman tried to quickly reshape the image of their campaign.
“This is not a ‘go-in-guns-blazing’ kind of thing,” Freeman told the Brownsville Herald. “This will be handled with the utmost professionalism and security and safety for everyone involved.”
One of Davis’ Texas cohorts, a militiaman from Rocksprings named Rick Light, told the Los Angeles Times that he was surprised by the video.
“I’ve never known Chris Davis to threaten anyone like that,” Light
said. “There’s a lot of hype and Commander Davis is kind of being
targeted.”
Light insisted that they plan to be a “productive, professional militia that just assists our law enforcement.”
Within a few days, though, Davis had dropped out of view entirely.
Scheduled to appear on a web talk show on the conspiracist Truth
Broadcasting Network called Death to the New World Order, Davis simply
didn’t show up. The host, Harry Link, told listeners that he called
Davis himself and was told he simply couldn’t do the interview.
Link was furious, and spent the bulk of his remaining hour-plus of
airtime ranting against Davis, claiming that the militia presence on the
border not only was “fake” but actually comprised a New World Order
“psyops” program designed to fool true Patriots like himself.
Davis identified himself to a couple of reporters as a “III Percenter,” one of several antigovernment Patriot movement organizations. However, Mike Vanderboegh, one of the originators of the “III Percent” concept and something of a self-anointed kingmaker in the militia movement, wrote a scathing post
about Davis’ plans on the border, concluding: “Based on what I know
now, stay as far away from this incipient exercise in cluster coitus as
you can.”
However, Davis was not the only right-wing extremist calling for
militias to head for the Texas border. At the Free Republic – where one of the first “Operation Secure Our Border” bulletins was posted – publisher Jim Robinson posted his own call to action, this time for the California militias to get out there and help support the efforts in Texas.
“Ok, this is just the germination of the plan,” Robinson wrote. “We
have independent units from the Bolinas Border Patrol and the Central
Valley Citizens militia joining forces with independent citizens militia
units of Texas to defend our southern border in Texas, to protest
Obama’s lawless open borders policies and to rally support for Governor
Perry to officially call out Guard units and Texas militia units at his
disposal to defend the border!! Lawsuits will not cut it. The invasion
is happening now. Action must be taken NOW!!”
That plan seems to have drawn roughly the same response as Davis’ muster – namely, none at all.
Likewise, another Patriot-movement site called “Patriot Information Hotline”,
operated by a woman named Barbie Rogers, ran Davis’s original “Call to
Action”, and then became a short-lived conduit for information about
the Texas effort. She told an interviewer on Newsmax’s “MidPoint” show
that this would be an ongoing effort: “This will continue for days and
weeks to come” and spread “to other points” along the Mexico border, she said.
An Express-News reporter called Rodgers’ “Patriot Hotline” and was
told that there were already “boots on the ground” in Laredo. The
message at the hotline told callers to provide a name to perform a
“criminal background check to make sure you don’t have any felonies”.
And then there was militia enthusiast Dyna DeRien, who posts at YouTube as 1HellOnHeels and calls herself
the “CEO and founder” of “the American Anti-Federalist Patriot Party.”
After Davis yanked all his videos from the Internet, hers were the only
videos remaining on the web describing the militia plan of attack and
the motivation for turning out on the border.
“We’re tired of those SOBs in Washington D.C. bringing all these
illegals into our country and just spreading ‘em out with all their
diseases all over the place,” she said.
Jim Gilchrist, the California-based cofounder of the nativist border
watch group the Minuteman Project, was last in the news back in 2009,
when one of his associates was arrested by the FBI for murdering a
9-year-old girl and her father in their Arizona home. But he’s bidding
to make headlines again by reawakening the Minutemen around the growing
controversy over the child refugee crisis at the border.
In an interview last week with the right-wing cable channel One America News Network (OANN), Gilchrist announced that he was considering restarting his moribund organization:
GILCHRIST: I have been toying with this
idea for several years. I personally would like to organize another
major massive assembly of Minute-men and –women along the entire border –
not just Arizona this time, but the entire 2,000-mile border from San
Diego, California, to Brownsville, Texas. I would need 3,500 volunteers
to spend thirty days in certain areas of the unprotected border areas
along that 2,000-mile-long border. It takes 10 months – it would take me
until next May to organize such a huge effort.
1. Should the Minuteman Project again
call up volunteers to establish observation outpost positions on the
U.S. – Mexico border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas?
2. Would you volunteer to spend up to 30 days of your time staffing an observation outpost on the border?
Gilchrist’s tendency toward delusional grandiosity was on display in
the OANN interview, when he veered into a comparison between organizing a
month-long Minuteman protest to the Normandy invasion on D-Day:
GILCHRIST: For example, Normandy was not
thought about and organized overnight. It took two years to organize and
create the logistics and the ability for the Allied Powers in World War
II to actually land at Normandy. Of course, this is not Normandy that
I’m talking about, but it is an endeavor that’s just as full of tedium,
day after day, logistics that have to be covered. I need lawyers, I need
captains, I need personnel, I need law-enforcement liaisons, I need
airwaves – Ham radio operators, I need about 300 of those. So on and so
forth.
It’s not like you just say, well, ‘We’re
the Minutemen and we’re coming to the border, and we’re gonna save the
day and we’re gonna do it tomorrow.’ It doesn’t happen that way.
It seems to have escaped Gilchrist’s notice somehow that the original Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War
from whom his group took its name were noted for their ability to
respond to situations at a moment’s notice (thus their name). But that
is among the lesser obstacles to a revival of the Minutemen by
Gilchrist.
The most chilling aspect of the possible involvement of the Minutemen in the increasingly tense fight over how U.S. immigration officials handle the humanitarian crisis at the border involving large numbers of Central American children – who, under laws passed in 2002,
cannot be immediately deported but must undergo complex hearings to
determine if they warrant asylum – lies in their established track
record. That record includes the cold-blooded murder of a Latina girl in
Arizona.
Despite Gilchrist’s longstanding claims of “success” for the
vigilante border watch group he cofounded with Arizonan Chris Simcox in
April 2005, the entire effort splintered apart and both Gilchrist and Simcox fell under the shadow of claims of mismanagement and misappropriation of funds.
Even more significantly, the border watch movement became a major
magnet for some of the most vicious and violent elements of the far
right, including neo-Nazis and various white supremacists who participated in the initial April 2005 effort in Arizona.
Gilchrist is clearly cognizant of this problem, because he brought it up, and attempted to address it, in the OANN interview:
GILCHRIST: In all fairness, there is that
two percent whacko rate that everybody has in the activist
organizations, and they have to be vetted out. About two percent of the
people will be bit strange and probably should be staying home.
We had that issue in the Minutemen
assembly of 2005, and we handled it very well. No one was arrested, no
one drew a weapon on anyone, there were no fights. It was very, very
successful.
In reality, as David Holthouse reported for the Southern Poverty Law Center
at the time, Gilchrist appeared on-camera at the Arizona gathering with
a group of men who were avowed neo-Nazis without apparently realizing
it – and proceeded to lecture the reporters about how their efforts were
the modern equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights
campaigns.
While both of the Minutemen organizations that emerged from the
Simcox-Gilchrist split claimed in the ensuing years that they performed
extensive background checks on all their officers and members in an
effort to “weed out” the criminals, the reality was that the
organization was plagued by criminality, culminating with the criminal rampage of Jim Gilchrist’s associate, Shawna Forde.
Forde – a onetime hairdresser and Boeing worker from Everett, Wash.,
who first became involved in the Minutemen during their short-lived
effort to organize citizen watches on the Canadian border in an attempt
to rebut accusations of racism for concentrating on the Mexico border –
became the symbol of everything wrong with the border watch movement
when she and a team of men invaded the home of a marijuana smuggler in
the remote border town of Arivaca, Ariz., in the early morning hours of
May 30, 2009.
Her team included Jason Eugene Bush, a white supremacist serial
killer who had fooled his colleagues into believing he was an
experienced combat veteran. Bush acted as Forde’s gunman and shot Raul
“Junior” Flores, his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and their 9-year-old daughter,
Brisenia Flores, as she pleaded for her life. Gonzalez survived her
wounds, pretending to be dead, and eventually drove the invaders from
her home in a fusillade of exchanged gunfire. Forde and two of her
cohorts – including Bush and a local man named Albert Gaxiola, who had
organized the “hit” – were arrested, tried, and convicted. Forde and
Bush both are on Arizona’s Death Row.
Both Simcox and Gilchrist immediately tried to distance themselves
from any association with Forde, and were largely successful in doing so
in much of the mainstream press, including Fox News. However, as my investigation of the matter revealed, both men had extensive dealings with her at various times.
While it was Simcox who first promoted and empowered Forde at the
state level, it was Gilchrist who most ardently adopted her when she
formed her own border watch outfit, calling it Minuteman American
Defense (MAD). After Forde sponsored two Gilchrist appearances in
Washington state, she moved her operations to Arizona, and Gilchrist’s
website began trumpeting Forde’s activities – in fact, he essentially
outsourced all of his border watch activities to her, and anyone who
approached the Minuteman Project asking where to go to stand guard at
the border was referred to Forde. (Forde herself has hinted that it was
Gilchrist who connected her with Jason Bush.)
Even after Forde committed the murders, she remained in contact with
Gilchrist. On the day she was finally arrested nearly two weeks later,
outside the ranch owned by another nativist extremist leader, Glenn
Spencer, she had just finished firing off an email to Jim Gilchrist
using Spencer’s computer.
Even though the Minutemen remained a leading name among nativist extremist groups for several years afterward, the steam quickly left the movement
and most organizations stopped using the “Minuteman” moniker out of
fear of being associated with Forde and her antics. In a fitting
denouement, Chris Simcox was arrested last year and currently awaits trial on multiple charges of child molestation.
In the meantime, with a fresh border crisis to exploit, Jim Gilchrist
is clearly hoping that everyone will have forgotten all this, and he
will be able to return to those halcyon days when thousands of angry
Americans were sending him checks.
Just as he did a decade ago, Jim Gilchrist is trying to organize a
mass movement using conspiracy-minded fears of hordes of invaders at the
border and the supposed decline of white America – attitudes that were
raw material for violent haters such as Shawna Forde.
