anti-immigrant
New SPLC Report: Nativists and the Environmental Movement
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 27th
Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center has released a new report, “Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism and the Hypocrisy of Hate.” The report documents a sweeping, renewed attempt by anti-immigration activists to convince environmentalists that they, too, must oppose immigration if they are to save the environment from the ravages of a growing population.
Because such efforts typically have been organized by anti-immigration activists whose leading concern is not the environment — men and women who attempt to recruit conservationists and other “progressives” to their cause, sometimes even while simultaneously working with nakedly anti-environmental forces — this strategy has come to be known as “greenwashing.” The efforts are essentially cynical, aimed at deflecting charges of racism by cloaking anti-immigrant views in green.
This recent campaign is not the first. For years, nativists have been trying to manipulate environmentalists and, in 2004, anti-immigrant activists came close to achieving a majority on the Sierra Club’s board of directors, a catastrophe that would have drastically altered the mission of America’s largest environmental organization. The continued efforts reveal how persistent nativists are in trying to recruit environmentalists to their cause by blaming immigrants for a host of environmental ills.
Latest Nativist Horror Story: Once More, It’s a Fairy Tale
originally posted by Larry Keller for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 26th
It had the makings of a dramatic story: Members of a Mexican drug cartel on Saturday took control of two ranches in Laredo, Texas, as the ranch owners fled for their lives.
If only it were true.
The tale, reported by Dan Amato, a Pennsylvania anti-immigration blogger, gained traction throughout the blogosphere. Amato, who blogs under the name of Digger, claimed that members of Los Zetas — dangerous Mexican gunmen heavily involved in the international drug trade and other criminal activities — had crossed from Mexico into Texas and taken over the two ranches in the border city of Laredo. “The source is law enforcement in the area,” Amato wrote from his perch some 1,800 miles away.
In truth, Amato’s source was Jeff Schwilk, the bellicose leader of the virulent San Diego Minutemen anti-immigration group, as Amato subsequently revealed. Schwilk’s home base is about 1,300 miles from Laredo. And Schwilk’s source? Another San Diego anti-immigration diehard, Kimberly Dvorak. She wrote on Saturday at Examiner.com that the so-called ranches takeover “could be deemed an act of war against the sovereign borders of the United States.”
No such pronouncements were forthcoming from the White House or the State Department. Perhaps that’s because the Amato-Schwilk-Dvorak troika appears to be trafficking in pure fiction.
At least a few real-life reporters contacted local authorities about the supposed international incident. Haven’t heard a word about it, said the Laredo Police Department. Same here, said the Webb County Sheriff’s Department. Ditto, added the U.S. Border Patrol.
As Amato began fielding skeptical queries later on Saturday, he disclosed that contrary to his moniker of “Digger,” he did no digging at all to determine the veracity of the story. Instead, he relied on second-hand and third-hand information, first from Schwilk, then Dvorak. The latter supposedly “had made multiple confirmations within the Laredo Police Department.” At that point, Amato said, “the story to me … was 100% confirmed.”
Amato had a simple explanation as to why local law enforcement said they knew nothing of the brazen actions by Los Zetas. With the deluge of media phone calls, “there may indeed by (sic) a bona-fide news blackout as they try to resolve the situation,” he wrote. “The story is still developing and I’ll report more as I find out,” the Digger added on Saturday.
Amato did not immediately respond to an email from Hatewatch today asking if he still stands by his story. Apparently, the “story” is still developing.
The FAIR Files: Marielitos are ‘Criminals, Homosexuals, and Mentally Defective Persons’
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 23rd
Sometimes, pictures really are worth a thousand words.
In the 1980s, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — a restrictionist group that insists it is not bigoted despite a small mountain of evidence to the contrary — put out an untitled, undated booklet of cartoons that featured on the cover what looks like Fidel Castro strangling the Statue of Liberty and lighting his cigar in the flaming torch she holds.
Not surprisingly, given FAIR’s track record of demonizing immigrants, the group’s pamphlet is filled with provocative drawings by professional cartoonists that are accompanied by often bigoted or defamatory subtitles written by FAIR. FAIR’s commentary is particularly vicious when discussing refugees who arrived in South Florida from Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.
In the graphic below, FAIR presents the Marielitos as “Havana Defectos” and described them as “40,000 criminals, homosexuals, and mentally defective persons,” a phrase that is remarkably similar to the Nazis’ descriptions of their own enemies. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of thing from FAIR. In 1990, a board member of FAIR’s legal arm used nearly identical language to describe the Marielitos.
Here, Miami is depicted as looted and destroyed by the Marielitos. In the accompanying commentary, FAIR blames the Cubans for causing “chaos and crime” that “crippled Florida’s tourist trade.” But the reality is that only about 2%, or 2,746, of the 125,000 refugees were ultimately determined to be serious or violent criminals. Large numbers, in fact, were simply people who disagreed with aspects of the Castro regime. Economist David Carr also found that the boatlift entailed no negative effect on wages for any groups in Miami.
And here is yet another example of FAIR’s anti-Cuban fear-mongering. FAIR claims that other countries see our “inability to control our borders as a weakness to be exploited.”
Other parts of FAIR’s booklet portray undocumented immigrants as a tidal waving swamping the U.S. or as mooches on the system who siphon up social services. This depiction comes regardless of the fact that most economic studies have found a net economic benefit to the U.S. from immigration.
In another cartoon, FAIR makes the claim that Spanish-speakers are destroying economic opportunity for black Miamians. “Employers prefer to hire Spanish-speaking employees who can communicate with Spanish-speaking customers,” FAIR alleges. Sowing discord between minority groups is a tactic FAIR has used more than once. At one point, FAIR even organized a fake front group called Choose Black America (CBA) that supposedly represented blacks concerned about immigration. FAIR paid for CBA’s “members” to attend their first — and only — press conference and the group’s spokesman was a white employee of FAIR. The group quickly fell apart and is now defunct.
The pamphlet ends with a cartoon that suggests the U.S. will be inundated with life forms from throughout the universe — a graphic that more or less sums up the intensely xenophobic, bigoted ideas that animate America’s largest and most powerful nativist organization.
The FAIR Files: Attacks On Multiculturalism Will Help
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 14th
In 1991, Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) sent a report to his board of directors under the subject line: “The Defenders of American culture Rise to the Call to Arms.” In the memo, which is archived at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, Stein, who was then FAIR’s executive director and today is the organization’s president, celebrated a new “disdain” in the media and among intellectuals for “the political agenda of those who openly attack the contributions of Western Civilization.” He was particularly happy that “multicultural and Politically Correct” school curricula had come under criticism.
Stein’s report expressed the hope that mounting criticism of multiculturalism would eventually lead to attacks on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended years of racist immigration policy (under a national origins quota system heavily skewed against non-whites and even darker-skinned Europeans) and initiated a wave of non-white immigration to the U.S. For Stein, the 1965 Act was “a key mistake in national policy” and a “source of error.”
Stein is not the only key FAIR leader concerned that today’s immigrants are harmful to Western civilization. FAIR founder and board member John Tanton has repeatedly made the argument that a declining white population will end in American cultural ruin. In a Dec. 10, 1993, letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor, he said: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” On Jan. 26, 1996, he wrote Roy Beck, head of the immigration-restrictionist group NumbersUSA (and then an employee of Tanton’s foundation U.S. Inc.), questioning whether Latinos were capable of governing California. Referring to the changing demographics in California’s public schools, Tanton wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California (85% of the lower-grade school children are now ‘minorities’ — demography is destiny) can run an advanced society?”
Tanton went so far as to propose creating a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research” or, to use Tanton’s acronym, LEADERs. LEADERs would defend “ourselves and our tradition against attacks,” counter “the denigration of Western culture” which Tanton wrote is “under siege,” and stop the “reduction of the European-American demographic and cultural majority to minority status.”
The way back to that promised land, apparently, is to erase the legacy of the 1965 Act. As shown in Tanton’s correspondence, which is stored at the Bentley Historical Library at University of Michigan, the FAIR founder is a big fan of the Immigration Act of 1924, which kept the vast majority of non-whites from immigration to the U.S. In a Nov. 3, 1995, memo to Stein and the entire FAIR board of advisers, Tanton mocked the idea that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the U.S. and ultimately was subsumed into the 1924 Act, was racist. He also defended the infamous “White Australia” policy that restricted non-white immigration into that country from 1901 to 1973, saying it was not racist, but intended to protect native-born labor. The Australians disagreed, passing the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act to outlaw racially based immigration quotas in the island nation.
Tanton has long lionized a principal architect of the 1924 Act, John B. Trevor Sr., a man with a seriously unsavory past. In the pre-World War II period, Trevor distributed pro-Nazi propaganda, drew up plans to crush uprisings of “Jewish subversives,” and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America. In addition to founding the anti-immigrant American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, Trevor was an adviser to the extreme-right, anti-Catholic Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis, who regularly referred to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as Communist documents.
No matter. Tanton has sent Trevor’s unpublished autobiography about his efforts to pass the 1924 Act to numerous friends, including, on Nov. 21, 2001, FAIR board member Donald Collins, who posts frequently on the racist website VDARE.com. In a cover letter, Tanton told Collins that the work of Trevor should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
One FAIR principal who wasn’t as optimistic as Stein in believing that attacks on multiculturalism signaled the beginning of the end for the 1965 law was Otis Graham Jr., who helped Tanton establish FAIR and now serves on the board of the Center for Immigration Studies, which was once part of FAIR. In a letter dated “97-98” in the Gelman archives, Graham told the FAIR board: “[W]e must remember history. The first immigration reform movement grew out of the 1880s and thus took 40 years to achieve success. And even with much agitation and publication and many groups, the reform movement still needed outside, ‘divine’ help,” which Otis identified as a world war, the Russian Revolution, and labor unrest.
What disasters does Graham suggest it will take this time? “Whatever FAIR does, we need help: an economic downturn or depression, disease from abroad, terrorist attacks on the U.S., Chinese or Haitian boats on the beaches, and much more.” Bring on the apocalypse.
Hate Groups Donate to Arizona Law’s Defense
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 13th
This morning, the white supremacist political party American Third Position (A3P) proudly announced its donation to the fund recently established by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to defend that state’s controversial new immigration law. “The American Third Position has just made a triple-digit donation to Arizona’s Border Security and Immigration Legal Defense Fund,” the group announced in an E-mail alert. In describing its own mission, A3P says it “exists to represent the political interests of White Americans.”
The statute that Brewer signed into law in April, commonly known as SB 1070, is a harsh anti-immigration ordinance that would make the failure of non-citizens to carry immigration documents a crime and that obligates police to check the immigration status of those people they come into lawful contact with if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they are undocumented immigrants. Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it would sue Arizona to block the law, saying it would encourage illegal racial profiling and also interfere with federal control over immigration policy. The new defense fund, which will help cover the state’s legal fees in the DOJ lawsuit, already has collected nearly $1 million, according to Brewer’s Facebook page.
Brewer claims SB 1070 will not target persons based on their skin color. But A3P begs to differ, seeing SB 1070 as a tool for the reinstatement of white political control. “We support all constructive endeavors by private citizens, businesses, local governments — or in this case a sovereign state — to stem and reverse the browning of America,” the A3P’s E-mail said. “Arizona’s enforcement statute represents the best current opportunity to reduce [brown-skinned immigration]. From its inception, A3P has been disseminating the nightmarish facts regarding the financial, social and demographic consequences of the unprecedented invasion from the south.”
The defense fund is also being pushed on Stormfront.org, the largest and oldest white nationalist forum on the Web. Under the headline “Jan Brewer Sets Up SB1070 Defense Fund,” “Adolf Hitlist” admonishes his fellow extremists, “Money where your mouth is time!”
Adolf’s fellow forum users have responded enthusiastically to his call for donations. “I’m going to send them 50 fat bucks,” writes “Mishko Novosel.” “[T]his might encourage Arizona to leave the Union, and this is why I’ll back them because something good will come of this.” “Axeman” celebrated the fund’s rapid increase: “Wow! At 1:30pm yesterday, AZ’s defense fund was roughly $163k, at 9am this morning it was $363k. Keep it up!” “KuKluxKlan—SoCal” chimed in with, “Donated.”
It’s not surprising that these racists and extremists are enthusiastic about SB 1070. After all, the law originated with the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose founder John Tanton has written, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” That is exactly what A3P believes.
The Ongoing Trial (and Tragicomic Tribulations) of Fallen Minuteman Leader Chris Simcox
originally posted by Alexander Zaitchik for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 12th
In an Arizona Senate campaign in which immigration and border security have been center stage issues, it’s no surprise that Chris Simcox managed to insert himself back into local headlines. Since reinventing himself in 2002 as the charismatic founder of the vigilante border-watch group Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. (MCDC), Simcox has always found a way to command attention.
But the latest chapter in the Simcox saga has been more low-comedy soap opera than high-desert drama. It’s been years since Simcox was the subject of national media attention and a regular guest on Fox News and CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” He began his most recent attempt at a comeback with big ambitions, his goal nothing less than unseating sitting Republican senator John McCain. When his efforts went nowhere and he dropped out of the race, Simcox found himself back in the familiar position of issuing pleading E-mail messages to his remaining (and most gullible) supporters, begging them not to abandon him in his latest hour of financial and legal need.
As Hatewatch noted in early June, Simcox’s estranged wife, Alena Lyras Simcox, has accused him of threatening her and their children with loaded handguns on two occasions in late 2009. He also allegedly threatened to shoot police if his wife called them to their home in Scottsdale, Ariz. Although Simcox denies the allegations, in April a Phoenix judge ordered Simcox to move out of the Scottsdale house, surrender his guns and maintain a distance of 200 yards from his family. His next court hearing in the custody dispute is scheduled for August.
Now, in the July 9 edition of his increasingly self-pitying E-mail newsletter, “The Simcox Report,” Simcox accuses his wife of having been involved in an adulterous relationship with Stacey O’Connell, a former member of the MCDC with whom Simcox has been feuding for years, since November of 2009. (O’Connell has denied the allegation.) Simcox charges that ever since O’Connell was thrown out of the MDCD in 2007, the self-described (but unlicensed) “bounty hunter” has “been engaged in an obsessive, devious plan to ruin my personal life.” In mid-June, in fact, O’Connell’s Fugitive Recovery Services of Arizona issued a “Wanted” poster for Simcox, saying that O’Connell had been hired by Lyras to serve the protective ordered granted to Lyras by the court. In the E-mail, Simcox treats his supporters to a large selection of text messages he says O’Connell has sent him in recent weeks, including one taunting, “i chased your skinny little ass right out of the state, youre such a little man (sic).”
All of this seems to have pushed Simcox out of the border security game once and for all. His most recent E-mail includes news that the MCDC founder has decided to transition away from the crusade that has consumed his life for nearly a decade. His new interest, both professional and personal, is the other perennial issue of Southwestern politics: water. As described in his latest plea for prayers and funds, Simcox is training “in a technical field involving water purification systems that could hopefully one day soon bring clean affordable water to millions of families who struggle each day with finding clean drinking water to sustain life.”
Before a judge ordered him to stay clear of his wife and children, Simcox had a long history of family problems. As the Intelligence Report noted in 2005, Simcox’s first wife accused him of attempting to molest their teenage daughter. His second wife filed an emergency motion to obtain full custody of their teenage son because she thought Simcox had “suffered a mental breakdown and was dangerous.”
Some things, it seems, never change. Here’s hoping his new career as water savior calms his nerves.
Congressman’s Immigration Remarks Prompt Calls for Death, Torture
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jul 1st
Posters on neo-Nazi forums are publicly calling for the torture and murder of Congressman Pete Stark (D-Calif.) over comments he made on June 26 during a Fremont, Calif., town hall meeting. The Youtube video of the event has gone viral among racist and anti-immigration groups.
During the meeting, Stark mocked a questioner who identified himself as a Minuteman, the loosely organized movement that is best known for holding armed border-watch patrols, by saying, “Who are you going to kill today?” When the Minuteman claimed that border security was a disaster, Stark replied: “If you knew anything about our borders, you would know that’s not the case. Our borders are quite secure, thank you.” Stark’s remarks were met with jeers from the audience.
Stark’s assertion that U.S. borders are secure has been met with violent reaction in racist circles. On the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network forum, poster “Mike Todd” suggested the congressman be tortured to death by being “staked out along the border face up with his eyelids cut off to be eaten by ants.” In the same thread, “Fred” wrote, “Stark will have one rope reserved for him on the ‘Day of the Rope,’” a reference to a scene in the infamous race-war novel, The Turner Diaries, when “race traitors” are murdered and hung from lamp posts and trees.
“The incredible vitriol directed at Congressman Stark is really quite frightening,” said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which found and publicized the comments. “But these kinds of comments are not entirely limited to those on the radical right. In fact, the furious tone of many opponents of immigration has helped to unleash this kind of visceral rage.”
On Stormfront.org, which is the world’s largest racist forum and run by a former Alabama Klan leader, “EagerWarrior” wrote: “If there is any Justice in the World that ‘man’ will suffer a horrible slow death at the hands of the Mestizos he so obviously represents.”
The thread about Stark on the white supremacist political party American Third Position’s website is particularly nasty. A poster going by the name “Robert Jones,” who is described as a leader and senior moderator of the party’s forum, wrote: “Treason, may his death be protracted and his suffering severe. We do have laws for dealing with such treachery if only we can gain the political power to enforce them.” “Marcius” pitched in with “His acts can only be described as verging on treason.”
Gaining political power is what the American Third Position is all about. This past January, ATP co-founder William Daniel Johnson said that he intended to qualify “high-level people,” meaning prominent white nationalists, for campaigns on the ATP ticket in a large number of states. The party, which says it exists to represent “the political interests of White Americans,” is currently attempting to gain ballot access in California by registering the required 88,991 voters, which would allow the party to field candidates on that state’s ballot.
ATP is a relatively new group, established just this past year. But given the group’s explicitly anti-immigrant platform, it establishment is part of a larger trend. Demographic change, propelled largely by immigration, is one of the major factors driving an explosion in hate groups. In 2009, the number of hate groups reached an all time high of 932, up from 602 groups in 2000. That represents a more than 50% rise in the number of such groups over the course of the last decade.
MCDC Founder Simcox Reported on the Run
originally posted by Mark Potok for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jun 14th
Chris Simcox always wanted to be famous. Now, in a manner of speaking, he is.
Late last week, Fugitive Recovery Services of Arizona (FRS) released a “Wanted” poster asking for information about the location of Simcox, who it says readers should consider “ARMED & DANGEROUS.” The bounty hunters are seeking Simcox, co-founder of the anti-immigration Minuteman movement, so that an order of protection obtained by his estranged wife in April can be served. There is no warrant for his arrest and he is facing no criminal charges.
Alena Simcox was granted a protective order after telling a court that her husband had threatened her and her three children, aged 2, 3 and 8, with a loaded gun, and suggested that he would kill police officers if they interfered. The document orders Simcox to vacate the house in Scottsdale, Ariz., the couple shared, stay 200 yards away from his wife and children, and turn in any weapons to police.
“Simcox is known to be hiding, possibly staying in hotels, or with known associate Carmen Mercer in Tombstone AZ,” the poster says. Mercer long worked with Simcox in his Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, and took it over when he left to run for an Arizona Senate seat long held by John McCain (he dropped out of the race earlier this year). She folded the organization in March. (Mercer is also a defendant in a recent Arizona attorney general’s lawsuit alleging a property tax scam.)
FRS is offering $500 for information about Simcox’s whereabouts.
The FAIR Files: Founder Proposed ‘European-American Defense’ Group
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jun 10th
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has fiercely defended the group’s founder and current board member, John Tanton, despite his long history of racism. Just this past September, Stein told The Washington Post that Tanton is a “Renaissance man” of wide-ranging “intellect.” Stein’s comments were part of a general defense of FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group (for a summary of the reasons, see here).
Stein’s comments came despite the fact that Tanton has questioned the “educability” of Latinos, written that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” and wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California … can run an advanced society?” No matter to Stein, who told the Post that attacks on Tanton for these and similar comments “are out of context and “simply do not reflect the true character of the man.’”
But documents stored in George Washington University’s Gelman Library by Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who currently serves as a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), make the point about Tanton’s interest in race one more time. Most instructive is a Tanton plan in the files to create what he called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research” or, to use Tanton’s acronym, LEADERs. In a 1993 cover memo attached to his LEADERs plan, Tanton, who is white, wrote to Graham: “For a decade or more, I have been musing about the drift in our society back toward organization along group lines, all the while realizing that there was no group for me – no legitimate group that I could join to further or defend my own particular social, cultural or linguistic interests.”
A serial creator of organizations, Tanton, who by then had already funded and founded an array of anti-immigration groups that included FAIR and CIS, added that “with the establishment of several national organizations behind me, I need to pick my targets carefully and in a way that reinforces what has gone before.” The plan makes clear that Tanton saw LEADERs as bolstering his anti-immigration work.
The document offers an argument as to why LEADERs, which is clearly a “European-American” (read: white) version of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, is needed: “[T[here is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests. Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… . For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”
If it had come into being, LEADERs would have had several areas of concern, including defending “ourselves and our tradition against attacks,” countering “the denigration of Western culture” which Tanton writes is “under siege,” and stopping the “reduction of the European-American demographic and cultural majority to minority status.” On this last point, Tanton is adamant. “This is unacceptable; we decline to bequeath to our children minority status in their own land,” Tanton writes. “Thus immigration must be sharply reduced.”
The LEADERs idea had more than a passing similarity to former Klan leader David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), which Duke founded in 1981. Now defunct, NAAWP was a white supremacist group that nevertheless portrayed itself as a mainstream civil rights organization that hated no one but was devoted to the defense and welfare of whites and “their” culture. (Among other actions, the group held in 2000 “Operation Appalachia,” a program it said was designed to “deliver the basic staples of life to … the deserving folks of Appalachia … particularly among Whites of European extraction.”)
Tanton was well aware of Duke’s activities, as is made clear by a 1991 letter he wrote to Otis Graham. Tanton was interested in Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana that year, which Tanton described as based on “the excesses of affirmative action and illegitimate pregnancy.” Tanton told Graham that “there is a lot going on out there on the cultural and ethnic (racial) difference” front and added, in a hopeful tone, that it was “all tied to immigration policy. At some point, this is going to break the dam.”
Though FAIR officials have steadfastly denied Tanton’s racism, the 1993 LEADERs document makes crystal clear that Tanton’s concerns about immigration have long been driven by the non-white skin color of today’s immigrants, most of whom come from Latin America. No wonder Tanton’s hero is John Trevor Sr., founder of the racist American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and a key architect of the racially restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. Trevor also distributed pro-Nazi propaganda and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America. Tanton once said that Trevor should serve as FAIR’s “guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
It’s hard not to wonder how Stein, who did not respond to a request for comment today, would view Tanton’s LEADERs idea. Would he claim Tanton’s plan was being described “out of context?” Or might Stein consider that LEADERs actually represents Tanton’s “true character?” Whatever Stein may think, Tanton’s plan lays bare the fact that he is against immigration because today’s immigrants aren’t white like him.
Minuteman Co-Founder Accused of Threatening Family
originally posted by Heidi Beirich for Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center [click here]
Jun 4th
Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minuteman movement and a principal nativist leader, threatened to kill his wife and family last year, according to a petition filed in Maricopa County Court in mid-April by his estranged spouse, Alena Simcox.
According to Phoenix New Times’ Steve Lemons, who broke the story yesterday, a Maricopa County court commissioner granted the petition April 16 and ordered Simcox to remain 200 yards away from Alena, their two children, and Alena’s child from a previous relationship. The order prohibits Simcox from possessing, receiving or purchasing firearms or ammunition.
The filing describes several violent incidents, Lemons reports. On Nov. 29, 2009, Alena alleges, Simcox was “drinking” and threatened her “with a gun. Repeatedly pointed it at me, saying he was going to kill me, and my kids, and the police. Kids were present and saw him. Very verbally abusive to me throughout the incident.”
On Aug. 22, 2009, Alena alleges, Simcox again confronted her with a weapon: “On our wedding anniversary, he was drinking and angery [sic]. Got a revolver gun and loaded with kids present. Then proceeded to ask me to ‘shoot him.’ I said ‘no,’ so then he said he would shoot entire family and cops.”
In late April, Alena Simcox file a petition for divorce from Simcox after five years of marriage. She was temporarily granted legal custody of the children, pending resolution of the divorce. A reply to the court, filed by Simcox’s lawyer John Acer, denies the allegations of domestic violence. The two were married in late 2005, when Simcox was 44 and Alena was 25.
This isn’t the first time Simcox has been accused of violent and bizarre behavior by a spouse. In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that Simcox’s second wife, Kim Dunbar, had filed an emergency appeal in September 2001 to obtain full custody of their teenage son because she feared that Simcox had suffered a mental breakdown and was dangerous.
In a sworn affidavit, Dunbar testified that throughout their 10-year marriage, Simcox was prone to sudden, violent rages. “He once took a knife from the kitchen and threatened to kill himself,” she testified. “When he was angry, he broke furniture, car windows, he banged his head against the wall repeatedly and punched things.”
Dunbar also said that when their son was 4 years old, Simcox slapped him so hard that a mark remained on his face for two days. Another time, she testified, she grabbed her young son in her arms and jumped out a window because Simcox was throwing furniture at them.
In addition, in 2005, Simcox’s first wife Deborah Crews told the SPLC that Simcox “tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated… . When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea.” At the time, Simcox refused to comment, telling SPLC, “My personal life has nothing to do with” the Minutemen and the SPLC was trying to discredit the movement.
The Minuteman movement, which Simcox co-founded with Jim Gilchrist, was a big media hit in 2005, when volunteers from across the country traveled to Cochise County, Ariz., for a “border watch” event. Simcox and Gilchrist soon split, and Simcox for several years headed a group he christened the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC). Though it came in with a bang, Simcox’s organization disbanded with a whimper this past March when Carmen Mercer, a defendant in the Arizona attorney general’s recent lawsuit alleging a property tax scam, shut it down. MCDC had been plagued by infighting and legal difficulties.