Mother of Simcox’s Alleged Victim Recounts Nightmare Scenario in the Court System

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Ever since that night in May 2013 when her daughter told her that her friend’s daddy – the seemingly ordinary guy who hung out with the kids in the neighborhood, but who turned out to be former “Minutemen” leader Chris Simcox – had molested her the previous February, Michelle Lynch’s world has been an endless limbo of uncertainty while wrestling with her daughter’s pain.

It’s a feeling, she says, that has only been worsened by her experiences with the court system as she awaits the day when Simcox will stand trial more than two years after the event.

Lynch says her daughter, now seven, was a happy and well-adjusted little girl before that night in 2013.

“Before this event, [she] fell asleep with no problems and slept through the night,” explained Lynch in a letter to the trial judge, Superior Court Judge Jose Padilla. “She was very trusting; any complaints of feeling sick were far and few between and were due to true illnesses, and she was only emotional/angry when the time was ‘right,’ which was determined by your typical 7-year-­old child.

“She now has nightmares and does not fall asleep without complaining of her stomach hurting. She also complains of being ‘sick’ when I have to leave her. She does not sleep through the night and most nights she finds her way into my room, even though she has her own room and bed. She worries about the doors being locked and asks over and over if they have been secured.”

In her letter, Lynch went on to describe a litany of changed emotional behavior, including “extreme sensitivity” and frequent crying, as well as extreme anger and occasional hitting. She described what should have been a fun trip to Disneyland transformed into a series of panic attacks.

“I realize that nightmares and separation anxiety may be typical of a young child’s behavior and that many children will exhibit periods of emotional sensitivity and anger; these behaviors were never existent in [my daughter] prior to this happening to her,” she explained.

Lynch wrote her letter because she faces the horrifying prospect of having her daughter be cross-examined by Simcox himself, a prospect that very nearly became a reality when Padilla approved Simcox’s request to represent himself at his trial. Late last week, the Arizona Supreme Court intervened.

Lynch wrote the letter in March, hoping to persuade Padilla to agree to a prosecution request that Simcox be required to only cross-examine the girls through a court-appointed associate attorney.

“Her father and I continually do our best to help [the girl] through all of this by providing her with comfort, consistency, and other avenues that encourage her to work through this in a positive manner to where her daily life isn’t effected,” Lynch wrote. “Allowing Mr. Simcox the ability to address my daughter, I fear, will only set [her] back in her healing and quite possibly exacerbate her symptoms and anxiety/panic attacks.”

However, Padilla ruled in Simcox’s favor, telling Lynch and the other mother in the case that their letters did not constitute evidence that the girls would be traumatized: “With all due respect,” he said, “[the mothers] are simply not qualified to make that assessment.”

That ruling, and the subsequent decision by the state appeals court to allow the trial to proceed even as it considered the legal propriety of allowing a pro se defendant to cross-examine his alleged victim, was in many ways a culmination of Lynch’s nightmarish experience with the court system since Simcox’s arrest.

In interviews with Hatewatch, Lynch has described feeling “left hung out to dry” by both the judge and the prosecutors in the case. She’s especially harsh in her assessment of the performance of the county’s victims’ rights advocates unit, which she says “has just not done their job.”

At one point, Lynch became furious with prosecutors when Simcox was offered a plea bargain that would let him out of prison after 10 years, in exchange for not forcing the girls to testify. However, Simcox himself dismissed the offer, and it was eventually taken off the table.

Lynch was also outraged at the way evidence was handled in the case, particularly the fact that Phoenix detectives failed to seized Simcox’s computer – the one on which he allegedly showed Lynch’s daughter pornography. Prosecutors reportedly explained it away by saying that he was only watching adult porn, a legal activity, on the computer, and so no search warrant for it was ever issued.

Lynch described feeling abandoned by the system. “Over the whole two-year process, victims’ rights in general have just not been followed,” she said. “I’ve gotten more information from reporters and television than I’ve even had with my own victim’s advocate. And I do all the reaching out to them, they never reach out to me.

“My daughter has only met her two times, for a maximum of two hours. So Padilla wants the victim’s advocate to be up on the stand with my daughter, but that’s a stranger too. So you want a stranger to sit with my daughter so that a man who has hurt her can question her. It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“You know, she’s not going to want to reach for somebody she doesn’t know, while somebody she does know who hurt her gets to talk to her.”

Lynch did, however, credit Phoenix New Times reporter Stephen Lemons with keeping her informed on the case, saying Lemons texted her with vital updates on the various court rulings and had apprised her of other developments in the trial as they occurred. At other times, she said, she was informed through the social media grapevine.

“I found out about Chris representing himself two weeks after it was filed and approved, through a television news picture that my boyfriend sent me,” she said. “I had a panic attack at work, because nobody had told me about it.

“I went on the county website and found that it was all there, but no one had given me a heads up,” she added. “I should have gotten a phone call the day that he filed to represent himself. I shouldn’t have to do all of that work. I shouldn’t have to become my own legal aide.”

The most difficult part, she says, has been helping her daughter – who gets counseling weekly – heal from her trauma.

“It’s definitely no fun,” she said. She described the recent upheaval in the case as especially trying, since her daughter had not yet been told that Simcox would be asking them questions.

Her daughter was shocked. “She was hysterical. She started crying. She didn’t want to talk to him, and she cried herself to sleep in the car. And then it was an hour later that the advocate texted me and said there was nothing going to happen on Thursday and the judge was going to wait until Monday. So after all that I had to go in and tell her it wasn’t going to happen.”

She is elated that Phoenix attorney Jack Wilenchik (who had been referred to her by Lemons) was able to stop the train wreck from happening, at least for now, by persuading Arizona Supreme Court Justice John Pelander that, in the words of his petition, “if the court allows the child victim to be subject to cross-examination by her abuser, then the victim’s constitutional right [under the Arizona Constitution] to be free from harassment and intimidation will be permanently violated.”

“It’s been really, really difficult,” Lynch said. “I honestly am pleased about the delay, because it’s about making sure that my daughter doesn’t suffer more trauma than what she has been going through."

Why SeaWorld's Ads Claiming 'Our Whales Live as Long As They Do in the Wild' Are False

J2, aka 'Granny, estimated to be over 100 years old, plays in the kelp

A lot of my non-dorca friends have been remarking about how frequently they have been seeing the SeaWorld counteroffensive to the #Blackfish Effect on their teevee sets these days, especially on sports and news programs.

What they mostly remark on, in fact, is just how utterly insincere the people they are putting onscreen are coming off. "There are people who believe the crap that Sea World says," says my friend Michael Rogers. "The people in the ad are not two of them."

That's just the tell, though. If you dig into the factual content of these ads, what you'll discover is that they are deeply misleading, bordering on the outrageous.

See for yourself. Here's the most frequently seen ad, featuring a SeaWorld veterinarian and the company's animal-rescues chief, Pedro Ramos-Navarrete (which is kind of weird, considering that SeaWorld has never rescued an orca nor does it support people such as New Zealand orca scientist Ingrid Visser, who actually is engaged in orca-rescue work).




You'll notice that Ramos-Navarrete says the following:

"And government research shows they live just as long as whales in the wild!"

This, over a text that reads:

"Survival in the wild is comparable to survival in captivity." -- Wall Street Journal

Note the little sleight of hand there? The first statement actually describes longevity -- how long the whales live. The second statement in fact is about survival rates -- that is, the likelihood of a whale surviving any given year. These are completely different things.

Then there's the longer SeaWorld propaganda ad addressing the same topic, appended to the above video. It features Chris Dold, SeaWorld's head veterinarian, holding forth to a confused member of the Twitter public, deriding their critics' claims that SeaWorld whales don't live as long in captivity as "false":

You don't need to take our word for it. Some of the best marine mammal researchers in the world work for the federal government at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. You know what they found? That killer whales that live at SeaWorld live just as long as killer whales in the wild. One of the authors of that report told the Wall Street Journal, "Survival in the wild is comparable to survival in captivity."

You'll note that it indulges the same sleight of hand -- assuming that people will believe that survival rates determine how long a whale lives. But they are completely separate measures.

SeaWorld's claim, you see, rests entirely on the work of Alaska scientist Doug DeMaster, who has been compiling statistics on annual survival rates. These are handy numbers and probably give us an accurate picture of the likelihood of any given orca surviving the year, both in the wild and in captivity.

Back in 1995, DeMaster and his partner found that there was a significant difference in those rates between orcas in captivity and those in the wild, favoring wild orcas by a large percentage (as differences in these rates go). But by 2013, he explained to Politifact, he had found their annual survivorship rates to be comparable. That's the study cited in the WSHJ piece as well.

But what SeaWorld isn't telling you is that there's a caveat to DeMaster's observation, and it's a big one:

"[A]s long as you use data from 2005 to 2013."

That's an eight-year data sample to assess how likely an orca is to survive in an institution that has been in operation for over fifty. In statistics, that's what we call a "skewed sample", or more precisely, an "inadequate sample.

That's SeaWorld saying, "Hey, we may have been insanely awful in how we handled orcas before, but we've been doing much, much better the last eight years!"

More to the point, annual survivor rates won't tell you how long the animals will live -- which is, of course, exactly what both Dold and Ramos-Navarette were claiming. All that number gives you is a kind of snapshot of the current health of the population, how likely their animals are to live through the year. If you want to know how long the animals will live, you need to look up longevity statistics.

Now, let's be specific: We don't really have a complete longevity picture for the orcas in SeaWorld's care, in part because they have only been in business for a little over fifty years now, and orcas in the wild (particularly females) are known to live often into their eighties, and even beyond. Atop the post, you'll see my 2013 shot of Granny, the matriarch of the Southern Residents' J clan orcas who is believed to be over 100 years old (though her age is in fact an estimate).

A whale whose age we know a little better is this one: L-25, believed to be about 85. She is also believed to be the mother of Lolita, the L-pod female who has been held captive at the Miami Seaquarium for the past 45 years and counting.

The oldest SeaWorld orca, by contrast, is the female Northern Resident orca Corky, who was captured as a 2-year-old calf from the A5 pod, whose whereabouts remain well known (though in fact her mother has since passed away). She is 47 years old.

The next oldest are the Icelandic orca females captured on the same day in 1978, Katina and Kasatka, who are estimated to be 39 and 38 years old, respectively. The oldest male in the collection, Ulises (another Icelandic capture) is 37.

Those are, however, the outliers when it comes to longevity at SeaWorld to date. The bottom line is much more grim.

As Naomi Rose has explained in detail, SeaWorld is even distorting the annual-survival-rate (ASR) data, which still does not favor SeaWorld:

However, the most recently presented ASR – not peer-reviewed, but presented at a scientific conference (Innes et al. in prep – this is for the period 2005-2013) – calculated from captive killer whale data in the Marine Mammal Inventory Report is lower, at 0.983, than the Alaskan ASR for both sexes aged 1.5-2.5 (0.997), females aged 15-19 (0.996), both sexes aged 10.5-14.5 (0.992), both sexes aged 3.5-5.5 (0.991), females aged 25-29 (0.990), both sexes aged 6.5-9.5 (0.989), females aged 20-24 (0.987), and even males aged 15-19 (0.986). It is higher than all other age classes (mixed and single sex) in Alaska. The Matkin et al. paper did not calculate an overall ASR, so none of these comparisons (a mixed age/mixed sex group vs. a specific age/sex class) is actually valid. Regardless, they are not similar. (Note: the MMIR ASR for the decade 1995-2004 was 0.968, lower than most of the Alaskan values.)

Meanwhile, as she notes, the average life expectancy for wild orcas is “around 50-90 years for females and 30-70 years for males."

So what does it look like for SeaWorld orcas?

I've compiled a database of SeaWorld orcas, living and dead, wild- and captive-born. I've specifically left out other marine parks' orcas from the database, given that the record there is downright horrific, particularly during the 1960s and '70s, and granting SeaWorld's argument that its superior care should not be tainted by what occurs in other parks. Nor does it include the many calves who died stillborn.

Here's the final tally:

-- Over the years (since 1965, beginning with the first Shamu), SeaWorld has possessed a total of 66 live killer whales. Of those, 29 are still alive. Shamu died after six years in captivity, a victim of SeaWorld's dubious breeding program.

    -- Wild-born captives have both fared the worst and lived the longest. Of the 32 wild-born orcas in their collection, only six remain alive. Those six, as noted above, are also SeaWorld's longest-lived orcas. The average age of death for wild whales at the park is 14.5 years.
  
    -- The average length of captivity of all of SeaWorld's wild whales, including those still alive, is 15.375 years. And the average longevity for all 66 of SeaWorld's whales tallies out at 14.03 years. For males, the average longevity of all orcas living and dead is 14.78 years; for females, it is even lower, at 13.92 years (the reverse of what occurs in the wild, where females enjoy much longer average lifespans).

-- Captive-born orcas have been a mixed bag. Of the 37 who have survived infancy, 11 have died. Those deceased orcas have averaged 9.8 years alive. Of the 26 remaining in SeaWorld's collection, the oldest -- Orkid and Kayla -- are 27 years old. The average age of all their current captive-born orcas is 14.1 years (the number drops to 12.76 if deceased captive-born orcas are factored in).

In other words, it should be obvious that captive wild killer whales have not fared well historically at SeaWorld, especially when compared to the wild. There, the Southern Resident killer whale population that founded SeaWorld has, while officially endangered as one of the effects of that capture period, at least maintained relatively stable numbers. In contrast, 81 percent of SeaWorld's wild population has died, all at ages well below what is considered a normal lifespan in the wild.

And while SeaWorld loves to tout its now-increased standards of veterinary care and husbandry as the reason for arguing "Hey, we've done lots better in the last eight years!", there really is no guarantee that these short-term gains of the recent past will translate into actual longevity for the orcas, including those born in captivity.

They still are subject to the extreme stresses caused by their sterile and extremely limited environment and the obliteration of orca-society norms that they have been wired for over millions of years. They still lead the lives of slaves. There's no doubt the company has light years to go before it can even come close to replicating the complexity of environment and surroundings, as well as the multiple layers of orca social organization, that they can experience in wild waters, even if (in the case of the captive-born whales and damaged goods like Tilikum) that only means life in a seapen similar to Keiko's.

I've always felt the real bottom line for orca captivity lies in the complete history of the affair, and as I note in Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us: 

Study after study has demonstrated that whales in captivity are more than two and a half times more likely to die than whales in the wild. All the care in the world cannot compensate for the stress brought on by placing a large, highly mobile, highly intelligent, and highly social animal with a complex life into a small concrete tank.

Of the 136 orcas taken in captivity from the wild over the years, only 13 still survive. The average lifespan in captivity so far is about eight and a half years. In the wild, the average rises to thirty-one years for males and forty-six for females. Then there is the upper end of the spectrum. In the wild, males will live up to sixty years, and in the Puget Sound, there is a matriarchal female named Granny who is believed to be a hundred years old.

And let's remember one last stark number: Of the 55 whales the SeaWorld and other marine parks removed from the Southern and Northern Resident populations from 1964-1976, exactly two remain alive. One is at SeaWorld: Corky. And the only surviving Southern Resident is Lolita. She's not even in SeaWorld's collection.


Full database here.

Did SeaWorld Send Out 'Social Communism' Trolls With Signs at Protest?

Anyone know what 'Social Communism' is? From Ric O'Barry's Dolphin Project.

They held a nice protest out in front of SeaWorld Florida in Orlando on Saturday, and some uninvited guests showed up. Actually, they apparently were invited -- by someone associated with SeaWorld.

"Support Social Communism" the signs read. They featured both a Russian hammer and sickle and a Chinese star. Or something like that.

The invitations came with paychecks to go stand among the protesters with signs that would at once make the protesters look bad and simultaneously express the company's opinion of the dirty hippies marching out front.

Soooo .... does anyone know exactly what "Social Communism" is? Ever hear of it? Me neither.

And neither, apparently, had the people carrying the signs. Lincoln O'Barry, writing over at his dad's Dolphin Project website, and one of the people protesting, asked the guy carrying the sign if he actually knew of any communists:

When Dolphin Project spoke with one of them, the unnamed Communist admitted to “just doing this as a job to make so extra money.” When we asked him to actually name a communist, he “couldn’t.”

We also noted that the pre-made sign he was holding was manufactured in Texas. When we suggested that this might, ” not look good to some,” should he try to get a job or decide to run for office in 10 years, he began to hide.

Hey, if I had worn black socks with shorts in public, I would try to hide too.

Via Facebook.

Mind you, the sign carriers never openly admitted to being paid by SeaWorld to stand there with those signs. But who else would do that -- with prefabricated signs made in Texas, no less? Certainly the other protesters had their opinion about whose work the "Social Communists" were engaging.

So, let's check the scoreboard on SeaWorld's continuing attempts to push back against the "Blackfish Effect," the rising tide of anger over the clearing understanding that orca and dolphin captivity constitutes animal cruelty.

-- The response website, "The Truth About Blackfish": Epic fail.


-- The proposal to make their sterile pools bigger: Epic fail.

-- The "Ask SeaWorld" Twitter campaign to change their image. Epic, hilarious, profoundly embarrassing fail.

-- Their attempts to push back against ex-trainer John Hargrove with a cheap video smear: Epic and disgusting fail that makes them appear stupidly evil.

I think I'm detecting a pattern here.

Now SeaWorld and its defenders are making clear that the fight over orca and dolphin captivity is becoming your classic Culture War battleground. They're casting their critics into the same basket as LGBT and civil-rights defenders and themselves upon the same pedestal as the geniuses who run Indiana.

Yeah, that should do wonders for their stock price.

Arizona Supreme Court Intervenes, Delays Simcox Trial to Mull Victims’ Testimony

Chris Simcox during an earlier court hearing

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The Arizona Supreme Court intervened in the child-molestation trial of onetime Minuteman leader Chris Simcox on Thursday afternoon, calling a halt to the proceedings until it can consider whether Simcox – who is insisting on his right to represent himself at trial – should be permitted to cross-examine the young girls he is accused of molesting.

KPHO-TV in Phoenix reported that Justice John Pelander of the state’s high court granted a stay in the trial at the request of Phoenix attorney Jack Wilenchik, who is representing the parents of one of the girls pro bono. Wilenchik had filed an emergency motion on behalf of the victim with the Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday night, after the state appeals court declined to stop the trial while it considered whether or not it was appropriate to allow Simcox to cross-examine the girls.

Maricopa County prosecutors had asked Superior Court Judge Jose Padilla, who is overseeing the trial, to require Simcox to cross-examine the girls through court-appointed associate counsel, but Padilla had refused. And when the appeals court declined to prevent the trial from proceeding while it waited to consider the prosecutors’ arguments, Wilenchik stepped up with what he admits was “a Hail Mary pass,” in an interview with Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times.

“If the court allows the child victim to be subject to cross-examination by her abuser,” Wilenchik argued in his motion, “then the victim’s constitutional right [under the Arizona Constitution] to be free from harassment and intimidation will be permanently violated.”

Justice Pelander agreed, ruling that “the stay shall take effect either immediately or upon completion of the ongoing jury selection process in superior court.” Jury selection in Padilla’s courtroom ended Thursday with only five jurors having been examined, four of those rejected. The trial is now expected to resume sometime after the end of this month.

“Simcox caused this all himself,” Wilenchik told Lemons. “It was him who decided after two years of pending charges to make the decision to represent himself a month and a-half before trial. I think the prosecution moved pretty quickly to ask for this accommodation that [Simcox] not cross-examine his own molestation victims.”



Victims’ rights advocates had earlier voiced their outrage to KPHO reporters about the possibility that Simcox might cross-examine his alleged victims. Daphne Young of Childhelp, an Arizona nonprofit that advocates for abused and neglected children, told the reporters that permitting such a situation would be a gross mistake.

“When a potential predator has the opportunity to cross-examine a child victim of sexual abuse, there’s a great risk for intimidation, manipulation and re-victimizing of that young victim,” Young said. “When you consider all the verbal and non-verbal cues that a predator uses to groom a young victim, there’s a lot that can happen under the nose of the judges and even experts in the field because of the intimate relationship that abusers use to create silence.”

In this case, the girls were ages 6 and 5 when the alleged incidents occurred, in 2013. They are 8 and 7 now.

Simcox was originally charged with also molesting a third little girl, whom Simcox allegedly bribed with candy to expose her genitals, but those charges were dropped after the grand jury chose not to indict him in that case. However, that girl is expected to be a prosecution witness as well.

According to the papers filed by prosecutors, Simcox “is alleged to have digitally penetrated his biological daughter’s [vagina] on two occasions, penetrated her vagina with an object on [one] occasion and to have fondled the genitals of his daughter’s friend on two occasions.”

Simcox had initially been offered a plea bargain that would have required him to serve 10 years in prison, but he refused and insisted on taking the case to trial. Eventually, after months of disputes with his court-appointed attorneys, Simcox decided to assert his constitutional right to defend himself in court. Padilla granted him that.

Simcox rose to national notoriety in the early part of the previous decade by leading vigilante border watches that attracted a steady stream of media attention, culminating in the 2005 Minuteman Project event at the border that he and cofounder Jim Gilchrist promoted as a national anti-immigration event.

All along, however, there were allegations of sexual misbehavior. A 2005 report by the SPLC noted that Simcox had been previously accused by an older daughter of attempting to molest her, and his third ex-wife – mother of his current accuser – obtained a restraining order during their 2010 divorce.

Arizona Judge Rules That Simcox Can Cross-Examine Young Alleged Victims

Chris Simcox during his border-watching days.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The oft-delayed Arizona trial of erstwhile Minuteman leader Chris Simcox on child-molestation charges has blown up once again, thanks primarily to Simcox’s insistence on having the right to personally cross-examine his alleged victims — two young girls aged 7 and 8.

Simcox had previously raised the possibility that this might occur when he announced that he intended to represent himself at his trial, something he has a constitutional right to do. However, Maricopa County prosecutor Yigael Cohen requested before the trial began that Superior Court Judge Jose Padilla require that Simcox’s two “advisory” attorneys question the girls, one of whom is Simcox’s daughter.

Now, according to a report by Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times, Judge Padilla has conceded to Simcox’s counter-argument — namely, that he should be permitted to directly cross-examine the two girls because doing so is “a crucial cornerstone of his desire to present his best defense.” Padilla ruled in a hearing Thursday afternoon that Simcox would be allowed to question the girls, who were 5 and 6 years old when the crimes allegedly occurred.

But Padilla refused to remove himself from the trial, which Simcox had also requested.

According to The Associated Press, prosecutors plan to immediately file an appeal of Padilla’s ruling, meaning the trial — which had already been delayed nine times since Simcox’s arrest in July 2013 — is likely to last into the summer. Lemons reported that deputy county attorney Kelli Luther argued strenuously against allowing Simcox to “control his own victims in the courtroom,” pointing to U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate court rulings allowing for special accommodations to be made in similar instances.

However, Padilla said he would need evidence that the children are traumatized at the prospect of being interrogated by their alleged molester, and brushed aside letters from the girls’ mothers attesting to that effect: “With all due respect,” he said, “[the mothers] are simply not qualified to make that assessment.”

In the filing made this week, Simcox argues that the children “were never subjected to … harm in the first place,” so the county attorney is “asking the court to find the defendant guilty … before the trial has even begun.”

Simcox was originally charged with also molesting a third little girl, whom Simcox allegedly bribed with candy to expose her genitals, but those charges were dropped after the grand jury chose not to indict him in that case. However, that girl is expected to be a prosecution witness as well.

Simcox’s trial was most recently scheduled to begin March 24. However, when attorneys gathered in Padilla’s courtroom that day, they were informed that Simcox was in the hospital, for reasons that could not be disclosed under medical-privacy laws, and would be there for a week. At a pretrial conference on Thursday, Judge Padilla scheduled jury selection to begin on April 6.
But if the prosecutors proceed to take the ruling on the girls’ testimony to an appeals court, that schedule seems unlikely at best.

During his heyday as a Minuteman leader, Simcox
liked to pose for reporters with a gun down
the front of his jeans.

These developments are the latest in a long and twisted road to trial for Simcox, who previously had suggested he would present a “grand conspiracy” defense that he had been targeted for prosecution, and the evidence against him invented, because of his prominent role as a leader and co-founder of the nativist extremism group called the Minutemen. The judge later informed him that such a defense would not be allowed.

At the height of the border vigilante movement, Simcox was president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a nationwide, anti-immigration organization that led armed “citizen border patrols” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, along with a smattering of states on the Canadian border where Minutemen had deployed to protect America from northern invaders. Never modest, the cigar-chomping Simcox was a hyper and relentless self-aggrandizer who came across with the smug egotism that quickly earned him the nickname “The Little Prince.”

He was known for over-the-top claims, like his repeated assertion that he had seen Chinese Red Army men at the Mexican border, preparing to attack the U.S. Nevertheless, he was featured repeatedly on Lou Dobbs’ CNN show and a plethora of shows on Fox News, where he was treated as a serious critic of immigration policy.

But even then, there were allegations of sexual abuse. As the SPLC reported in 2005, Simcox was accused by his first wife of molesting another daughter when she was a teenager, although no complaint was ever made to police. His second wife also sought custody of their teenage son because, she said, Simcox had become violent and unpredictable. His third wife — the mother of his current accuser — took out a restraining order against Simcox in 2010 when she divorced him.

Paranoid Anti-Obama Ad Keeps Calling Alarm On Ammo Proposal Even After It’s Withdrawn

 
[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Beneath ominous music, the voice of the narrator strikes a strident chord, feverishly warning viewers: “Attention! President Obama is exercising another executive power grab! And this time, he is going directly after your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms!”

Sounding for all the world like an Alex Jones or Oath Keepers production, the video ad then launches into a paranoid description of Obama’s supposed plot to destroy the Second Amendment.

“The Obama administration was unable to impose gun restrictions and confiscation through the legislative process, so now it’s trying to ban commonly used ammunition through regulation. Obama must be stopped now! If we allow Obama to ban ammunition through executive fiat now, it will lead to the loss of our Second Amendment rights by the time Obama leaves office!”

Of course, as with most similar efforts at fearmongering over the Obama administration’s handling of gun rights and gun control, the reality regarding the supposed plot to destroy Americans’ gun rights is a far cry from what’s depicted in the ads: There was never an executive order being considered about the ammunition, as the ad suggests; and the brief consideration by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of altering regulations of a narrow bandwidth of armor-piercing bullets had already been abruptly abandoned several weeks ago.

Indeed, with only 19 months remaining in office, the long-feared Obama “gun grab” that gun-rights and antigovernment “Patriot” groups (not to mention Jones and Co.) have feverishly warned the public against since at least 2008 appears far from ever materializing. The organization behind the ads, however, is not a run-of-the-mill far-right “Patriot” group, but presents itself as a mainstream gun-rights group, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).

The regulation in question – actually an ATF proposal to alter its regulation framework for certain types of ammo used in AR-15 semi-automatic weapons, especially those such as armor-piercing types that seemed unlikely to be used “primarily for sporting purposes” – was met with fierce opposition in early March by the Second Amendment Foundation, who launched the ad campaign with the incendiary video in early March.

However, the ATF recoiled quickly from the negative response generated by the video ad, and on March 10 withdrew the proposal and closed off comments by noting that “the vast majority of comments received to date are critical of the framework.”

Nonetheless, the SAF’s ads have continued to run, appearing on national media outlets such as CNN and Fox News, as well as at conservative outlets such as The Blaze. They direct viewers to an 800 phone number that, if dialed, collects the callers’ names and adds them to an SAF petition opposing
any regulatory change for the ammunition, as well as the outfit’s potential donor database.

SAF spokesman David Workman told me that the non-profit organization had invested “several hundred thousand dollars” in the campaign, and the ads would cease appearing once the ad buy had expired, probably in early April. And besides, he added, his organization didn’t believe that the administration had fully retreated yet.

“When ATF pulled back on it, they didn’t say the idea was dead,” Workman said. “They’re going to go back and re-examine it, see how to present it to the public so it doesn’t generate 310,000 comments. We don’t believe this is a dead idea.”

ATF spokeswoman Danette Seward told the Washington Post that the proposed "green tip" ammo ban came from the ATF's decision to review all ammo exemptions to a 1986 law that had sought to crack down on “cop killer” bullets. Seward said the agency had seen a recent increase in the number of "sporting purposes" exemptions requested by ammunition manufacturers for the AR-15 ammo. Moreover, she said, the agency wanted to strip the “green tip” armor-piercing ammo because AR-15 handguns capable of firing the rounds have recently become available.

The White House had issued a statement calling the regulation change “common sense,” but at no time did it ever indicate that the president would make the regulation through executive action. Press Secretary Josh Earnest, likewise, had told reporters that this was an action by the ATF under its standard procedures, noting: “I’d put this in the category of common-sense steps that the government can take to protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans while also making sure that our law enforcement officers who are walking the beat every day can do their jobs just a little bit more safely.”

Workman explained that the seemingly hysterical conclusion of the ad’s narrator that the failed change in rules for the AR-15 ammunition could doom every citizen’s guns rights could be seen as rational, if one saw any gun regulation at all as a kind of slippery slope.

“If people can be convinced that it’s OK to ban one type of ammunition, it will be easier to sell the idea that it’s OK to ban another type of ammunition,” Workman said. “And then we’ll get right back to where we were before, he’ll want to ban a whole class of firearms. They’ve tried to do that before.”

He thought that raising fears about an Obama plot against citizens’ gun rights was legitimate, regardless of Obama’s prior lack of action on gun control. “You can go ahead and think what you want, but there are a lot of people out there who are very concerned about this administration’s designs on gun control,” he said. “Whether it starts with an ammunition ban or some other sort of regulation, it is still viewed by millions of people as an attempt to erode their basic right to keep and bear arms.”

Thanks in no small part to a barrage of misleading ad campaigns.

Going Clear, SeaWorld Style

Trainers and orcas perform at SeaWorld Orlando's G Pool,
the tank where Dawn Brancheau was killed.

An odd thing happened the other night at Seattle's Town Hall, during John Hargrove's appearance in support of his superb new expose, Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish.

Midway through the Q&A, a woman no one knew stood up and waved some papers and asked Hargrove if he had been arrested for domestic violence and assault against his sister. Hargrove made clear to everyone that this was a baldfaced falsehood. There were some boos, and the woman shrank away into the woodwork. 

Mind you, I am friends with some authors who attract controversy -- especially Rick Perlstein and Max Blumenthal -- and so of course there are always some kooks at their public speaking appearances, at least in Seattle. But they're usually of the black-helicopter variety, if you know what I mean. I'd never seen anyone try to smear an author in public with an unprovable and ugly accusation that had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Well, let me correct that: I have seen this kind of intimidation by smear campaign previously. It's the kind of thing that everyone who has ever dealt with Scientology has had to confront, particularly when it comes to former members exposing their secrets.

And make no mistake: Hargrove has been scoring consistently against SeaWorld, particularly as he discusses the difficulties orca trainers face, embodied by the 2010 death of his colleague Dawn Brancheau at the hands of the largest orca in captivity, Tilikum, at SeaWorld Orlando. His appearance with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show was also a smash hit:

The Daily Show
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All the week I had been making jokes on Facebook comparing SeaWorld to Scientology -- a timely comparison, given the appearance of the documentary Going Clear on HBO. The film is in many ways just a distillation of Lawrence Wright's magisterial work of investigative journalism of the same title. "I'm becoming convinced that SeaWorld is the theme-park equivalent of Scientology: a cult that relies on abusive practices and intentional self-delusion/prevarication to sustain itself," I wrote. OK, I wasn't really joking.

And then on Monday night, there was that strange woman trying to smear him with an accusation that, even if true, has not a single freaking thing to do with the issue that Hargrove has been confronting -- namely, the abusive and coercive and ultimately inhumane practices in its treatment both of its captive killer whales as well as the people who have the jobs of handling and caring for them. 

Analogy confirmed. In spades.

And the craziest part is that the smear artists were just getting started.

The very next day, one of the more pestilent corners of the wingnutosphere posted a video showing a drunken John Hargrove harassing a friend on the phone with the repeated and thoughtless use of the N-word, delivered with a Texas twang. Within the day, even as one San Diego area bookstore canceled Hargrove's appearance, the video was then being promoted to various media outlets avidly by none other than Fred Jacobs, SeaWorld's chief communications officer.

SeaWorld spokesman Fred Jacobs said in [an] email that “we believe it is important that you see this video we received just this weekend from an internal whistleblower.”

“Anyone interviewing the “Blackfish” star should certainly be aware of it,” Jacobs said in the email. “We are offended by John’s behavior and language. The video is particularly reprehensible since John Hargrove is wearing a SeaWorld shirt. SeaWorld would have terminated Hargrove’s employment immediately had we known he engaged in this kind of behavior.”

Hargrove was appropriately embarrassed, as well he should have been. It's a video that shows him at his worst -- thoughtless, arrogant, ignorant, and mean. And his initial response -- "I remember parts of that night and drinking, and you can clearly tell we definitely had a lot to drink. But that video is taken completely out of context. There’s not a proper beginning or end" -- was inadequate.

But he's since been more forthcoming, more like the John Hargrove most of us who have met him know now. He told KPBS: “I don’t think that it will for the people who truly know me ... It’s certainly offensive language and it should’ve never been used. I was so heavily intoxicated — I barely recall any of those events. Clearly, it’s not funny.”

Last night on Naomi Rose's Facebook page, Hargrove went into even greater detail: 

First I will make clear I take full responsibility for my actions and I cringed when I watched the video from 5 years ago- a night I barely remember when it happened and even less of 5 years after the fact. There is no place EVER for the N word. This is a word tied with a horrific history that as a white person I cannot even fully understand the depth of pain this caused black people. I certainly regret my actions that night. I would not expect anyone to defend that conversation where I used the N word. I am extremely disappointed that my words could cause more pain to a minority group. Regardless if you are in a private home and drunk and think you are harmlessly being funny- this word should never be used.

... Tonight at my book signing in LA, I had an exchange with an black man that will stay with me for the rest of my life. He was intelligent, articulate, and completely genuine. He began by saying that he and his friends have followed and supported me from the beginning I began to speak out and admired my courage by doing so. They believe in what we are all fighting for and have held me in high regard and respected me but when he saw the video he looked me straight in the eyes and said that it truly hurt him and wanted to hear directly from me what I had to say regarding that video and if I was willing to personally apologize to him. 

I was both impressed and humbed and felt even worse actually seeing a face of this young black man who respected me but had now been hurt by me. This was an amazing human being and without hesitation or making any excuses I sincerely apologized to him to his face and explained as I said earlier that even though I know it is NEVER acceptable to use this word that as a white man I don't pretend to ever be able to fully understand the pain this word has caused him personally or any other black person.

He had already bought my book and stayed to go through the line to have me sign his book. We shook hands and had a real and genuine understanding and forgiveness in the end. I was humbled and had so much respect for him in how he chose to conduct himself. I will never forget that exchange. He deserved my answers and my apology and he accepted them and chose to forgive me. And for that I am very grateful. That exchange was truly powerful and witnessed by a packed room in the book store.

As someone whose regular business entails confronting racism, there's nothing amusing about the video or Hargrove's participation in it. But as someone whose work also entails assessing evidence regarding whether someone is a serious racist, I have only one question: What, are you freaking kidding me?

This video was recorded five years ago. Hargrove is clearly intoxicated. He clearly thinks he is being amusing. The only other person who seems to think he's amusing is the person recording the thing, who we can all similarly presume to be the person who leaked the video of their onetime friend. Clearly the woman on the other end is not much amused, especially as Hargrove makes fun of her for dropping the N-bomb as well. 

This is ugly stuff, but I can also assure you that it is common, everyday stuff that a million thoughtless white Americans privately indulge every single day. It's also an extraordinarily transparent smear attempt with "gotcha" video, the kind that actually sheds little light on the issue of racism and its institutionalization, and in the end is a shallow distraction that does more to dilute a serious discussion of the underlying issues. It's certainly not the kind of talk that would attract the attention of organizations such as the SPLC or the ADL, which are dedicated to combating hate speech and racial extremism in its many manifestations, and are logically and necessarily focused on dealing with hatemongers who spew hate over the public airwaves to large audiences every day. This is small-time, petty racism that is meaningless unless it can somehow demonstrate that Hargrove is a practicing racist today (not likely) or that it reveals a character flaw that he has never outgrown.

Part of the story that Hargrove has to tell, in fact, is all about his personal growth and the immense changes in attitudes that he has undergone. At one time, Hargrove was the consummate Company Guy, happily shilling the SeaWorld official line about the killer whales in their care and dedicating his body and his physical well-being to a company that saw him and the whales as commodities, for years at low salaries made endurable by their idealism and the ego satisfaction that came with the job. He made fun of the dippy hippies who used to protest outside SeaWorld venues for the freedom of the animals in his care, including one of the oldest wild whales in captivity, the Northern Resident (A5 pod) Corky.

And then, like someone awakening from an abusive cult because the personal toll -- including the death toll of friends and colleagues -- began to mount, Hargrove grew up and out of the corporate cocoon he had placed himself in. To say that the Hargrove you see onstage today is nothing like the punk in the video is an understatement. In fact, it's also clear that this Hargrove -- the cocky, thoughtless racist -- is the Hargrove who also defended orca captivity to the hilt.

In the end, it reflects far more directly in a negative way on SeaWorld's culture, because the Hargrove in the video is the Ultimate SeaWorld Guy. And that same culture seems to think that smearing him with the video -- given that it has zero bearing on his knowledge of the company's orca-captivity programs -- will convince people that Hargrove has a credibilty problem.

No, it's the company that would trot out that kind of petty, crude, ham-handed smear that has a credibility problem (and note that they don't even have enough class or smarts to do it on the sly, letting their defenders in the wingnutosphere do the dirty work for them; no, their comms chief is the guy out there on the front line, openly circulating the smear). Especially because it reminds us all so closely of how Scientology, the ultimate fear-driven cult, has operated for years.

What Wright's book details exhaustively is how the church assiduously gathers information, especially lots of private information, on all of its members and recruits, especially through the ritual "audits" conducted by the church that are essentially tell-all confession sessions, and then exploits that information and their insecurities to drive them deeper into the cult, making it so that the threat of cutting them off from the cult is like cutting off their air. Tellingly, Hargrove's book describes a culture among SeaWorld employees that worked in similar ways.

And woe betide anyone who should fall from favor in the cult of Scientology. They would be subjected to all kinds of ritual humiliations, demotions and even abusive degradation. Again, not entirely dissimilar from SeaWorld.

Eventually, some would try to break away, but if they ever tried to reveal to the public the facts they had learned they would be confronted with the most ferocious personal attacks, in which literally nothing was out of bounds. Of course, they would first mine all the personal information revealed during the church's "audits," which then were used in attempts to blackmail their critics into silence. If that failed, the church often resorted to even more frightening personal attacks.

In the end, the phrase "going clear" is now a stand-in for anyone overwhelmed by Scientology's fraudulent spiritual nonsense, someone who believes in the church's overtly insane theology without question as an act of pure gullibility. The church itself is shrinking, but it's intensifying its hold on the believers it has remaining.

SeaWorld isn't as deeply deformed as Scientology, perhaps because its pseudo-religious components are limited, as is its reach. But it's become abundantly self-evident that SeaWorld's self-contained and rapidly collapsing bubble of badly constructed reality is approaching its final throes as well. And lashing out as it does so. 

It's an ugly sight, really. Much uglier than a stupid video.

What 'Religious Freedom' Really Means

The Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, aka the Aryan Nations, at Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 2000.

The furor over recent "religious freedom" bills being passed in various states -- particularly Indiana, with similar viruses festering in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas -- has caught the attention, I'm sure, of a certain class of religious believers.

Namely, the people whose own religious faith, such as it is, dictates a belief in the supremacy of the white race and the diminution and demonization of all non-white races. They are real, they do exist, and they go by such names as the Christian Identity movement or its Church of Jesus Christ-Christian, or the Creativity Movement, aka the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC).

Each of these and a dozen other similar "faiths," while all considered "fringe" faiths, nonetheless lay claim each to being legitimate religions, and while their numbers have been steadily shrinking over the years, they do nonetheless claim a certain number of followers.

And they have been told, consistently, over many years by every authority in the United States, that while they may be perfectly free to hold and preach these beliefs, they do not have the right to act upon if they are involved in the business of providing public goods and services. They are not permitted to discriminate according to race or religion even if it is counter to their private religious beliefs, because the law does not permit such discrimination in the public square. Period.

So when they hear mainstream conservative Republicans proclaim "religious freedom" as an excuse to permit people to discriminate against the LGBT community, you can bet that they are paying close attention. Because the language of these bills is vague enough to apply not to only to the religious beliefs of the anti-LGBT activists behind these bills (and trust me, these crypto-fascist faiths are every bit as virulently homophobic) but also their own beliefs.

After all, if discrimination by religious belief is permissible under Indiana law -- or to be precise, if someone's (including businesses' and corporations') “exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened” by anti-discrimination laws, then they can use the law as “a claim or defense… regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding” -- then it stands to reason that this would include religious beliefs that discriminate against blacks, Jews, and all other nonwhites.

That's where it's helpful to know what these beliefs look like. These are belief systems that still exist in places like Indiana and Illinois and Montana and California, dotted in small pockets all around the country. And the new spate of "religious freedom" legislation is like a dream come true for them. The essential argument is the same one they have been making for years -- that the law shouldn't require them to serve or do business with people their religious beliefs forbid them from engaging with.

Let's take, for example, the World Church of the Creator, aka the Creativity Movement. It was founded by the man who invented the wall-mounted electric can opener: Ben Klassen, a Florida real-estate salesman and a German immigrant.

Most of us know about the WCOTC's exploits after Klassen voluntarily joined the Great White Father in the sky in 1993 via an overdose of sleeping pills. At that point, there was a brief struggle for control of the church, which eventually wound up in the hands of the current Pontifex Maximus, Matthew Hale.

Hale's main bases of operations were Illinois and Montana, both of which had relatively small cores of followers who were extremely active in spreading the word of their faith, which is explicitly hostile to both Christianity and Judaism, instead laying claim to an independent belief in white people as the ultimate divine creation of God.

One of the better-known disciples who acted on his religious beliefs in a very public way was Benjamin Smith, a close associate of Hale's who went on a three-day murder spree targeting various minorities, including a former college basketball coach, a number of Orthodox Jews, and a Korean economics student. He shot himself when cornered by police.

WCOTC is a particularly vile religion, embodied by the various "Gospels" left behind by Klassen, who enjoyed a couple of terms in the Florida Legislature. His foundational text, Nature's Eternal Religion, is one of the most nakedly vicious and hate-filled pieces of eliminationist trash ever written. It doesn't help that Klassen's writing style, beyond the shock value of its viciousness, is actually quite anodyne and dull-witted.

Here's an excerpt from his No. 2 text, The White Man's Bible. This excerpt comes from "Creative Credo No. 29: Who Needs Niggers? Or, Elimination of the Black Plague:"

The present-day scourge in the form of the Black Plague in the midst of the White Race has no such beneficial compensations. Today's Black Plague is spelled niggers. It is more menacing, more deadly and persistent than the Black Death of the middle ages ever was. Today the niggers in America (also England and elsewhere) are multiplying at an explosive and unprecedented rate. In America the heart of most of the formerly great cities, built by thee genius of the White Man, are being taken over by niggers. ... Our once proud capital, Washington D.C., has deteriorated to the point where it is nearly totally black. It has turned into a dangerous, crime infested black jungle, in which the black animals prowl and prey. Crime is rampant and unchecked, and the once White inhabitants who built the city have long since fled to the outlying suburbs. Even the Congressmen who must commute to the center of the government must do so at dire risk to life and limb.


... Niggers Are Niggers. We use the term "nigger" deliberately in this book and recommend its usage in general conversation and writings by members of our church. As we have stated in a previous chapter, the second dumbest creature on the face of the earth is one who can't or won't recognize its enemies and the dumbest of all is that creature which will actively collaborate with its enemies for the destruction of its own race.

Deadly Enemies. We, of the Church of the Creator, recognize niggers as the foremost amongst our deadly enemies, with the Jews taking top priority. We regard all the colored races as a grave menace to our further existence on this planet whether they be black, yellow, or brown. In summation we will use the term "mud races" in contrast to the White Race throughout this book. ... Nature has made them eternally our mortal enemies, whether we now realize it or not. It is the task of the Church of the Creator to make the White Race acutely aware of this fact, and arouse it to action.

Bottom of the Ladder. Among all these races, the black niggers of Africa are undoubtedly at the lowest scale of the ladder dubiously called the human race. We of the Church of the Creator disclaim any common racial denominator with the niggers, the same as we do regarding monkeys. We regard them as either sub-human or humanoid, and recognize them as being closer to the animal kingdom than any species of humanity as exemplified by the White Race. We firmly vow to deliberately excrete them from the body of the White Racial Community and to forever prevent any penetration and admixture with our racial body. Any society that fails to excrete its wastes soon dies. To us, niggers are black poison, and we regard the Jewish goal of pumping the black blood of Africa into the veins of White America as the most dastardly crime ever committed in all of history.

This is the Pandora's Box the blinkered, hate-driven advocates of "religious freedom" bills -- which in the end should be more accurately labeled "bigotry legalization bills" -- have opened. Lots of luck putting it back in.

Arkansas Man, Florida Vet, Improbably Claim They’re Building Militias to Fight ISIS Overseas

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

While most militia organizers in the United States focus their energies on combating what they see as domestic enemies — particularly the federal government and other alleged participants in a nefarious “New World Order” scheme to enslave Americans — in recent weeks there have been a handful of so-called “Patriots” who have decided it’s more worthwhile to focus their attention overseas. They say they are organizing to fight Islamic State (ISIS) radicals in the Middle East.

The men behind of these efforts — one based in Arkansas, one in Florida — claim to be forming armed squads of militiamen to fly into ISIS hotspots in Iraq and Syria and combat the enemy on the ground. Neither, however, appear to be anything more than a fundraising operation built around pure fantasies.

Their grandiose claims verge on the utterly ridiculous. One promoter, a man who will only identify himself by the alias Swandog, says he’s building a multi-billion dollar operation, will soon have a force of 7,000 specialized military and intelligence operators, and will pay each of them more than $100,000. There is not a shred of known evidence to suggest there’s anything real behind the swaggering talk.

Swandog, a “commander” so brave he refuses to identify himself by name, described for a credulous local Arkansas TV news report his plans for assembling a multi-billion-dollar effort to combat ISIS with volunteers to his “private militia.” With a straight face, the TV station asserted that Swandog “reportedly already has men on the ground in the Middle East” and has raised “tens of millions of dollars.” It even presented a local “expert” who said the effort “seems to be genuine” and could work. In the report, the designated expert, a local criminology professor and former Green Beret, offers no evidence at all for his belief.

“Team Swandog currently numbers just under 500. We are recruiting actively,” Swandog told KTHV-TV reporters from nearby Little Rock. “Right now we do have six advance teams in the theater of operation; they’re in non-combat roles just doing prep work for our arrival.”
He told the reporter that he is recruiting former Special Operations and intelligence personnel, as well as snipers, medics and support staff. He also claimed that he was offering them a base annual salary of $120,000.

Swandog, aka David Paul Brennan of Searcy, Ark.

Swandog makes some big claims about money: “Most of our funding comes from businesses and churches, we don’t do very much individual fundraising at all. Depending on how fast we want to do this operation, we can do it in the course of two years on about $10 billion, now that’s going to be a fraction of the cost of a full-fledged military operation.”

Without a hint of irony, he also claimed that the team was being selective about just who could sign up. “The challenge is: we deal with a lot of posers, we deal with a lot of people who claim to be a former Navy SEAL or former CIA and we can weed them out just through the interview process,” he said.

Swandog could be describing himself. After a little sleuthing, Hatewatch learned that Swandog’s real name is David Paul Brennan, and he is a Searcy, Ark., man who has at various times in his career has described himself as a “professional badass” and boasted about his supposedly high intelligence-test scores, but who has in fact never served in the military, and has never worked for any intelligence-gathering service.

Brennan acknowledged all this in an interview with Hatewatch. “I do not have a military background,” he said. “About all I’m willing to put out there is having ties to the intelligence community.”

He claimed that he actually represents a team of more than two dozen people who have worked together to formulate a citizens’ strategy for defeating ISIS overseas. “We kind of all met a few years back. We didn’t even know each other until a few years ago; we met at a tattoo shop — the core group — and then kind of added to our little group since then. And when we noticed what was going on with the Islamic State, and we started to research it and realize that everything America does plays into exactly what it is that radicalizes these people and makes more of them, we felt like we needed to try to do something about it.”

Brennan claimed that the group has so far assembled more than $40 million in support from his network, and has already deployed some of its team into the “theater of operations” in the Middle East.

“We are putting together an actual combatant force, which is going to be 3,000 strong, and we’ll have 2,000 in reserve here plus a support element, for a total of 7,000 paid positions for us. And when you get an operation that large, it does take a lot of funding.

“We have raised a considerable amount of money that is funding our advance teams that are in the theater now. And they’re pretty well getting the lay of the land for us. … It’s a pretty robust human-intelligence operation. And that is ongoing. That has funding through the end of April.”

Brennan said these advance-team members are all American citizens. “Most of them come from either the intelligence community, whether it’s defense intelligence agencies, Central Intelligence Agency, or one of the other agencies, or they come from a private security background,” he told Hatewatch.Brennan has created a “Team Swandog” website that lays out their strategy. In a video posted to the site, he described the grand strategy in greater detail.

“We are rising up to destroy the Islamic State and eradicate radical fundamentalist Islam from the face of the planet and we have a strategy to do it with a relative handful of guys compared to a full-scale military invasion. We’re going to do it with a strategy of unconventional warfare, guerrilla tactics,” he boasts.

“Now how do we destroy the Islamic State? We do it by using guerrilla tactics—by unconventional warfare. That’s how we do it. We go in with very inferior numbers as to what is on the ground there to the number of Islamic State fighters there are. But we use superior tactics and superior training. Now our strategy will result in the destruction of the Islamic State by three avenues. One, by tactical victories on the ground; two, by eroding the morale of the Islamic State; and three, by undermining the legitimacy of the Islamic State.”

Calling the fight against ISIS a “religious war,” he continued: “I’m asking you to help Team Swandog on behalf of the United States of America, on behalf of a people who have lost faith in their government to protect them. I’m asking you to help us destroy the Islamic State now. Sooner rather than later, and eradicate this evil ideology of radical fundamentalist Islam from the face of the earth.”

He made a plea for volunteers, too: “Even if you’re just a good old boy who happens to be really good with a high-power rifle, I need you. I can put you to work as a sniper, killing these Islamic State douchebags.”

Brennan, who harshly criticizes the Obama administration on his Twitter feed, says this strategy is the only way to defeat ISIS. “This is how it’s going to get done,” he claims in the video. “This is how the Islamic State is going to be destroyed and the evil ideology of radical fundamentalist Islam is going to be eradicated from the planet. It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take every patriot getting involved and doing what they can do.”

Brennan explains that he calls his group a “militia” in order to avoid being designated as mercenaries, who he says have no protections under the Geneva Conventions. “We’re not a militia like the militia groups you guys have experience with. We’re not antigovernment,” he says. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m just a guy that has been around the block and has a lot of connections. We just couldn’t see doing nothing about the Islamic State.”

The second effort to organize a team of American veterans to fight ISIS overseas originates with a Jacksonville, Fla., man named Sean Rowe. His organization, called Veterans Against ISIS, was featured in similar news stories from WTLV-TV and WPXI-TV, in which Rowe described his strategy to form a team of veterans to combat the spread of Islamic radicalism.

“We’re tired of seeing what’s going on, and it doesn’t look like anything is being done,” he said. “These guys are slaughtering and beheading people. We’re going over there to stop that; it’s not about the money.”

Unlike Brennan, Rowe is an actual Army veteran of eight years. He started up a website and a Facebook page for his group, asking veterans with combat experience to step up and join his group.

Yet another group that ostensibly seeks to defend America from ISIS attacks also calls itself Veterans Against ISIS; it had organized before Rowe, and is now considering legal action to trademark the name. “We are here in case of a domestic threat; we’re not a recruiting agency sending able bodies to Iraq,” said the group’s co-founder Andrew Brian, another Army vet.

Rowe said he sees no issue in using the same name: “We’re all Veterans Against ISIS, so it shouldn’t be a problem,” he told the Army Times.

Rowe is also more openly bigoted in his recruitment efforts. His Facebook posts have featured memes attacking the Koran as fakery, suggesting that Muslims have sex with goats, and calling President Obama the “worst president in the history of this great country.”

Rowe also tried putting together a GoFundMe site to raise money for his team. However, GoFundMe recently took down the page after it collected only $265 from various donors.

Since then, Rowe has apparently retreated in his strategy. A recent Facebook post explained that he was downshifting his grand plans: “The role of this organization has shifted to focus primarily on the uniting and coordination of veterans for a defensive deployment in support of the Christians in Syria against ISIS, and, secondarily, on the raising of funds for necessities. Therefore, at this time we must decline any interest from veterans wishing to deploy, unless they are able to fund their own travel over there.”

On the team website, he now lists eight would-be participants by their aliases.

In contrast, Brennan claims to be having real success recruiting participants. “Right now, we’ve got an even 90 people signed up for this,” he told Hatewatch. “It’s not a huge number, by any stretch of the imagination. But these are people who have military experience, a lot of them are special operations, and they talk to me and they understand that this is not a situation where everything is just decided by me and that’s it. That everybody really has input, we’ve got an open-door policy.”

Brennan said he understands that people will be skeptical: “If people say it’s just a guy from Arkansas doing this, well, it’s not just a guy from Arkansas,” he said. “In fact, if I was gone tomorrow, this would still go on without me. Certainly, it doesn’t really depend on me.

“You know, nothing ever happened without people starting something. Nothing great ever started out great. Everything great starts out small. And that’s where we’re are, in that fairly small stage.”

And how.

Seattle Forum Focuses Concern on Anti-LGBT Hate Crimes in Key Neighborhood

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, right, and his husband, Mike Shiosaki, left

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Shaken by a year-long spike in LGBT-bashing crimes in their predominantly gay neighborhood, community leaders from Seattle’s Capitol Hill area organized a public forum this week that drew several hundred participants, as well as the city’s mayor.

Ranging from an attempt to kill hundreds of people packed into a bar on New Year’s Eve to a steady stream of assaults and robberies motivated by anti-LGBT animus, the spike in hate crimes on Capitol Hill appears to be a violent backlash against recent gains in LGBT rights in Washington state, including the approval given to same-sex marriage by the state’s voters in 2012.

“I used to live on Capitol Hill, but I don’t anymore,” said Debbie Carlsen of LGBTQ Allyship, a local rights organization, to the crowd on Tuesday, echoing a number of other speakers. “And when I go to the Hill, I don’t feel culturally safe. It’s not a place that I feel safe anymore.”

A number of residents described to the crowd the kinds of assaults that they have endured in the past year, including verbal harassment escalating to physical assaults as they walked through the neighborhood, as well as one alleged assault by a police officer. One man stood up and removed his hat, revealing a large healing wound on his forehead, saying he had been attacked only a week before and had been unable to identify his assailants, “but they were all calling me names.”



Most of those who testified agreed that the worst, most violent attacks seemed to be directed at transsexual people of color.

The meeting, organized by Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant, featured a number of speakers offering a range of solutions. Some proposed more citizen patrols, while others opposed that step as potentially dangerous. Some argued for greater police involvement, while others blamed the police as part of the problem. Sawant spoke at length about how economic disparities often fuel the conditions that make the crimes possible.

Seattle’s openly gay Mayor Ed Murray, who attended the gathering with his husband, said he will help take the lead on this issue. “I think if people don’t feel safe, if they perceive they’re not safe, then we have a problem,” he said. “And we as a city and we as a community have to respond.”

Murray told KING 5 News that he believes the problem is real and substantial. “I think there is an increase,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been here before, we’ve seen this right on this very street before, back in the late ’80s and early ‘90s, when I was a young person. And we’re seeing it again.”

Shaun Knittel, the founder of Social Outreach Seattle, and one of the people who helped douse the attempted arson at Neighbours Bar on New Year’s Eve 2014, an act that eventually brought a heavy 10-year sentence for the perpetrator, told the crowd that it needed to resolve some of its internal differences if the community is going to form an effective response to the challenge.

“We have a perfect storm here on the Hill,” said Knittel, noting the split between people who support the police and those who blame the police. “What kind of message does that send to people who want to do harm to us?”

“We also have a nightlife culture here where everyone that’s opening a business here seems to think they need to be either a bar or a nightclub. How many do you need in one neighborhood?”

Knittel urged victims of bias crimes to resist the temptation to not report the matter to police at all, noting that doing so just encourages repeat offenses and escalation.

“We need to understand better about reporting, and we need to talk about what that looks like,” he said. “If you fear going to the police to report, we understand that. But please, reach out and find and advocate and let people help you report what’s happened. Because I can guarantee you that you’re not their first victim.”

Most of all, he noted, the community needs to make it clear that “bashing queers” is not a free sport for haters anymore.

“We need to lean into this notion that you can come up here and mess with us and we won’t do anything back,” he said. “Those days are over.”

Tales of the Montana Freemen: The Girl and Her Dog

The Freemen's cabin near the town of Roundup

Here's a story a collected while reporting on the saga of the Montana Freemen in the 1990s. I have always thought it was a revealing (not to mention disturbing) instance of the far-right "Patriot" mindset, particularly in how they viewed the world and the way children should be raised.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, published by WSU Press in 1999. The chapter is primarily about the activities of the Freemen prior to their infamous armed standoff with the FBI of 1996, especially Ur-Freemen Rodney Skurdal and Leroy Schweitzer, in the little town of Roundup.

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A sign on the Freemen property.

While their legal defeats were coming in rapid succession, the Freemen’s recruiting was going well. Another key follower showed up at the Freemen ranch that fall: Dale Jacobi. A Canadian businessman who had moved from Calgary in the 1980s south to Thompson Falls, Montana, Jacobi became involved in the radical right while operating a propane-gas business in the little Clark Fork River logging town just a few miles east of Noxon. He fell in with John and Dave Trochmann, and also became acquainted with another local Constitutionalist, John Brush.

Brush decided to move to Musselshell County in 1994, partly to be closer to the Freemen, so he bought a parcel of land out in the distant woods and set about raising and training horses with his wife and daughter. Jacobi, who became a Freemen follower after Trochmann recommended their four-day courses in the Militia of Montana newsletter that spring, sold his business and moved onto Brush’s land, living in a trailer on the property.

In one afternoon that fall, though, Brush not only disavowed Dale Jacobi but the Freemen as well. He later explained why to John Bohlman, the Musselshell County prosecutor: One morning, Brush told Bohlman, when he drove into town for supplies, Jacobi took Brush’s 8-year-old daughter, with her dog in tow, out to a remote part of their land. He carried with him a stool and a piece of rope. Under a tree, Jacobi set up the stool and placed the little dog on it. Then he made a noose with the rope, placed it over the dog’s neck, and slung it over the tree. He pulled the open end of the rope tight and held it at a distance from the dog, then told the girl to come stand in front of him. Call the dog, he told the girl. She did. It jumped off the stool and hung itself as Jacobi held the line taut.

The girl was in hysterics when her father returned home. Enraged, he asked Jacobi why he did it. Jacobi told him he felt the girl needed some toughening up, and that this would help her. Brush screamed at Jacobi to leave and never come back. Jacobi packed his things into his car and left.

He found an open room at [Rodney] Skurdal’s ranch, and soon was named one of the group’s constables. Brush announced he wanted nothing more to do with that bunch -- and asked Bohlman to remove the arms cache Jacobi had left behind. Bohlman and a deputy went out to Brush’s place and found PVC pipes hidden under some brush, stuffed with a few guns and a massive load of ammunition, reloading tools, powder and bullets, enough to make thousands of rounds with. Brush also told Bohlman he knew of similar caches like this in strategic spots throughout the Northwest.

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Of course, none of this ended particularly well for any of the participants, most of whom wound up doing federal prison time after engaging the FBI in a record-setting 81-day standoff at another ranch outside the town of Jordan, a couple of hours north of Roundup. One hopes that John Brush's daughter eventually recovered. And that her daddy got a clue.