The Kids Were All Right

Yesterday in New York, some students at Columbia University leaped on to a stage and interrupted a speech by Jim Gilchrist, founder and leader of the Minutemen. (The group’s visit was sponsored by the College Republicans.) Today, New York Mayor Bloomberg, and the media, resoundingly condemned the disruptive students and supported the Minutemen’s right to freedom of speech.

It’s one thing to defend a hate group’s right to free speech. It’s another thing not to acknowledge that it is a hate group. Nowhere in the article in the New York Times, for example, is there a single mention of the fact that the Minutemen are widely believed to have ties to neo-Nazis. Go to the Southern Poverty Law Center web site (www.splcenter.org) and do a search on the Minutemen, which the Center has been monitoring. There seems to be ample evidence that much of its membership draws from white supremacist groups. There is information about this all over the worldwide web, where you can also find pictures of Minutemen rallies with guys waving flags with swastikas on them.

The Minutemen were founded in late 2004 by Gilchrist, a former CPA from California. They are, by their own description, a “citizens’ vigilance project,” “Americans doing the job Congress won’t do.” They like to hang out at the Mexican border and bag people trying to sneak across. By their own charter—and U.S. law—they aren’t supposed to be armed, but many reports say they are. They have conferences across the country where they recruit people for their “border patrols.” They have rallies where they talk about how “immigrants,” code word for non-whites, of course, are “ruining America.” They hold demonstrations at places like churches that help fight for immigrants’ rights. They show up at places that employ day laborers to initimidate them. They have the INS on their speed dial.

I’d just like to say thanks to the Columbia students who protested their appearance.

According to an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center from 2005, “On April 2…the Minuteman Project held a protest across the street from the U.S. Border Patrol headquarters in Naco, Ariz. Prominent among the demonstrators were two men who confided that they were members of the Phoenix chapter of the National Alliance — the largest neo-Nazi group in America. One of the two, who sat in lawn chairs throughout, held a sign with arrows depicting invading armies of people from Mexico — a sign identical to National Alliance billboards and pamphlets, except without the Alliance logo.

“National Alliance pamphlets were distributed in Tombstone and this predominantly Hispanic community just two days before the Minuteman Project got going. ‘Non-Whites are turning America into a Third World slum,’ they read. ‘They come for welfare or to take our jobs. Let's send them home now’…

“One well-known extremist did appear. Armored in a flak jacket and packing a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, Joe McCutchen joined other volunteers patrolling the barbed wire fence separating the United States and Mexico near Bisbee, Ariz.

“McCutchen is the recently appointed chairman of Protect Arkansas Now, a group seeking to pass legislation that would deny public benefits to undocumented workers in that state. More to the point, he was identified by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens as a member in 2001 — a charge he denies, though he admits that he did give a speech that year to the group that has described blacks as ‘a retrograde species of humanity.’ As recently as summer 2003, McCutchen wrote anti-Semitic letters to his hometown newspaper in Fort Smith, Ark.

“‘A lot of these people coming in, they're diseased,’ McCutchen told one group of fellow volunteers, who treated him like a visiting celebrity. ‘They've got tuberculosis, leprosy. I mean, you don't even want to touch them unless you're wearing gloves. So why the hell should we pay our taxes to cure them?’

“‘They're turning our country into a Third World dumping ground,’ he said. ‘We're losing our language to them, losing our culture. They're taking over, and if we don't stop [immigration], our society will not survive. That's why I'm here.’

“’We understand why Gilchrist and [project co-organizer Chris] Simcox have to talk all this P.C., crap,’ said one. ‘It's all about playing to the media. That's fine. While we're here, it's their game and we'll play by their rules. Once Minuteman's over, though, we might just have to come back and do our own thing.’”

In an article entitled, ‘The Anti-Minutemen Five,’ in March 27, 2006, from CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org/jacobs03272006.html), Ron Jacobs
Reported on a Minutemen conference held in Arlington Heights, Illinois in later 2005. A protest of the event resulted in five “rather brutal arrests.”

Said one of the arrestees: “The Minutemen are a group of vigilantes who seek to hunt, trap, and put a terrible chill on immigrant communities across the country—and they're on the rise. They have gained praise numerous times from the governor of California as well as U.S. Congress people. They recently held a rally on Capitol Hill, with national media attention, and it seems like every day they're popping up in interviews on the radio, in print, or on television. I think there's a very strong connection between groups like the Minutemen and the whole onslaught of vicious attacks on immigrants we're seeing today—the round-ups and detentions in the dead of night without due process, and House Bill 4437 that would make it a felony to be an undocumented person in this country or to give any aid, including in an emergency to an undocumented person (we're talking about millions of people suddenly becoming felons).

"It was also recently revealed that the U.S. government is granting nearly $400 million to a subsidiary of Halliburton to build immigrant detention centers that could hold tens of thousands of people in case of an ‘immigration emergency’ (pretty scary with House Bill 4437 already having passed the House, and this being authorized and run by the same Administration that brings us Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.) In this climate come the Minutemen, who I think represent the semi-official shock troops of this anti-immigrant agenda. While people on high levels of government make ominous changes in the law, vigilante groups like this represent the more ‘radical face’ that take supposedly ‘more extreme’ actions on the ground to further legitimize the legislation and further the chill being put on immigrant communities, those who support them, and (as in the case of the persecution of the Anti-Minutemen 5)those who would oppose this whole direction.”

Said another one of the arrestees: “Many of the supporters and allies of Save Our State and the Minutemen are U.S. Neo Nazi organizations such as National Vanguard, and the National Alliance. Also, there is a strange connection between what David Duke and his lackeys were doing in the late 1970's called ‘Klan Border Watch’—it was a complete KKK sponsored border watch, not unlike what the minutemen are doing today. California Border Watch said in 2005 that they no longer support the Minutemen Project, along with numerous other projects, simply because many of their members and allies were of racist or fascist origin. The original Minutemen of the San Diego KKK in the 1930's had similar ideas and ethics of today’s Minutemen.

“Many of the people that oppose the Minutemen definitely put them in the same groups as the Klan and Nazis, but I think they can get away with a much higher profile because they operate on a façade. They adamantly proclaim that they are not a racist group and that their views have nothing to do with race and all to do with the law and 'securing our country'. Now a group like this, can in fact, be much more dangerous. They're basically doing the same thing as the Bush administration when it says they want to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, whilst bombing the crap out of the place.

"So the Minutemen are taken much more lightly than Nazis and are featured in news segments, and features like the recent huge article about it in the (Chicago) Reader. One of their favorite lines is about the head of the Illinois Minutemen being a Mexican woman as if that automatically negates any racist accusation. That's like saying that Condoleeza Rice will do wonderful things for women and African Americans just because she's a black woman. She can be as racist and sexist as anyone else. And being a person who is of color I definitely know there is something called internalized racism. People have to look at what the Minutemen are doing, first of all, and that's where we get the racist and fascist conclusion. Also if you look at their websites and forums they are way worse at being pc, and openly make racist and ignorant comments, as well as talk very hatefully towards immigrants and 'socialists' i.e. protesters like us.

“But it tells something about the political and social climate we're in with these Minutemen getting by so easily. And it definitely should be seen in light of these Nazi rallies, the horrible anti-immigrant bill, the renewal of the Patriot act, the unending 'war on terror', and more.”

The Counterpunch piece goes on and is well worth reading. What it made me think of was another group of Minutemen—no, not the original ones whose name they deface, but the ones they most resemble: those in Sinclair Lewis’ brilliant 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

It Can’t Happen Here, published just two years after Hitler came to power, envisions what was to come in Germany—but set in America. Lewis’ “Minutemen” are a nationwide army of vigilantes who wreak havoc on behalf of the folksily fascist president, “Buzz” Windrip. They evolve into his S.S., essentially.

Lewis was a great writer. Oprah should make It Can’t Happen Here her next Book Club selection. That would spark a national debate worth having.