The angry messages don't sit well with many mainstream immigration restrictionists, including leaders of the Minuteman Project, whose members will depart from Los Angeles on Wednesday on a cross-country lobbying tour for tougher border control. And the elected officials on the receiving end downplayed the anonymous messages, saying they get death threats from time to time on a range of issues.
The Minutemen Project crowd are white supremacists and xenophobes. But with the thinnest cover of rhetoric, and the assistance of Republican politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger who are eager to mainstream racist-fringe ideas, here they are on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle labelled as "mainstream" and portrayed as being disturbed by racism among their anti-immigrant compatriots.
The most charitable thing to say about this is that it's another sad example of the lazy, irresponsible brand of "this side says/the other side says" journalistic malpractice that has become so common. A few minutes of actual research should have shown the reporter that the Minutemen may be a lot of things - blowhard fools, for example - but nice egalitarian types they ain't.
David Neiwert, for instance, whose original reporting on far-right extremist groups over the years has made him one of the country's genuine experts on the topic, has been harping on this since the Minutemen started their border-guard schtick.
He has many posts on the Minutemen and the immigration issue and how it attracts white supremacists and violent bigots at his excellent Orcinus blog. For instance:
And those are only from the last week and a half. He has done many more that can be found in his blog archive.
Hendricks' article even cites the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on the anti-immigrant militants. Did it not occur to him to ask them about the Minutemen? This 04/01/05 article from the SPLC's Intelligence Project, for instance, gives a glimpse of the kinds of fans the Minutemen's anti-immigrant actions attract: Vigilantes gather to stop immigrant 'invasion'.
Neiwert's post "Oh, those merry Minutemen" linked above includes a quotation from an SPLC report about the Border Guardians, which Neiwert describes as "one of the Minutemen offshoots". The SPLC report calls its founder, Laine Lawless, "an original member of Chris Simcox’s vigilante militia before it morphed into the Minuteman Project in early 2005".
Lawless, the former high priestess of Sisterhood of the Moon, a lesbian pagan organization, has been heavily involved in anti-immigration extremism since 2004, when she joined Simcox's Civil Homeland Defense outfit, as it was then called. That same year, she invited militia members to her private ranch in Cochise County, Ariz. "I coordinate with Chris [Simcox], so anyone who wants to come is welcome," she wrote in a post to an online user group, "Border War" which was reposted on sites such as "A Well Regulated Militia."
Lawless was featured in numerous media reports on the first Minuteman Project campaign in April 2005, and has patrolled side-by-side with Minuteman vice-president Carmen Mercer. Lawless also traveled to Texas to join the Texas Minutemen in October, when she was quoted in The Austin Chronicle saying she gets an "intellectual and political orgasm" from spying on pro-immigration groups. In that interview, she accused one pro-immigration activist of inserting chants of "White Power!" into an audiotape of Minuteman rallies to discredit the movement.
A political orgasm?
Hendricks even talks about Laine Lawless in his report. It's really sloppy to have ignored her connections to the Minutemen who he ludicrously calls "mainstream". Well, maybe not so entirely ludicrous: they have become mainstreamed to a certain extent, at least in the Republican Party. He does add the fact that Lawless' former lesbian wicca coven was in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.
That New Agey wicca connection probably seems weird in the American context. In Europe, it's been the case for a long time that some occult groups were also radical rightwing in their politics. I don't know that there's any deep, special significance to that. It's just that American extremist groups have tended to look more to extremist Christianity like the Christian Identity movement for spiritual inspiration rather than occult doctrines.
This extreme end of the anti-immigration movement includes both anti-Hispanic hate groups masquerading as immigration reform groups as well as vigilante border patrol groups, who conduct armed patrols along the borders of the United States. Several border vigilantes have been arrested on weapons charges. Casey Nethercott, for example, associated with border vigilante groups such as Ranch Rescue and the Arizona Guard, is currently serving a five-year prison term on weapons charges stemming from a 2003 incident in which he and others confronted and assaulted two Salvadorans when on "patrol."
The vigilante border patrol groups have operated for several years but have expanded greatly in the past twelve months, spurred on by the media attention given to the so-called "Minuteman Project." In April 2005, Chris Simcox, who founded the Arizona-based Civil Homeland Defense, a border vigilante group, and Jim Gilchrist, based in California, joined forces to create the Minuteman Project, whose purpose was to gather thousands of volunteers for a month-long watch for illegal border crossers in Arizona. The project, which was highly publicized among right-wing extremists and white supremacists, attracted far fewer volunteers, many of them armed, during its first week. However, the publicity generated by the event resulted in numerous Minuteman chapters and spin-offs forming across America, even in states such as New York, Virginia, Vermont, and Illinois. These groups use the same radical rhetoric: that the United States is being "invaded" by Mexicans who must be stopped.
That message was clear at a three-day summit, "Unite to Fight Against Illegal Immigration," held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in May 2005. More than 400 anti-immigration activists gathered at the event to hear speakers describe illegal immigrants as "the enemy within" and "illegal barbarians," while suggesting that America was "at war" with illegal immigrants and urging people to "take America back."
Many of these anti-immigrant extremists have switched their focus from the border to day laborer centers, where they photograph Hispanics whom they assume are illegal aliens. This racial profiling has also occurred at fast food restaurants and other businesses where Hispanics are employed across the United States. White supremacist and anti-government groups continue to express interest and take part in these activities, and their rhetoric has become more and more confrontational.
Reports like the one in the San Francisco Chronicle are far too generous to groups like the Minutemen, whose white-supremacist nature is well known to those who bother to pay attention.
