The News-Times reported on the rise in supremacist anti-immigrant groups in the United States. As a supplement to the article, I strongly encourage everyone to check out the well-recognized non-partisan Southern Law Poverty Center where you can monitor the activities of most (if not all supremacist) groups.

Contary to the beleives of the voices of the delusionals who try to make "a point" by pointing to conservative extermists who supported the Japenese internment camps of World war II as well as racial profiling, they're are well-documented ties between the Minuteman Project and neo-Nazi organizations as the SPLC carefully explains.

For months, Jim Gilchrist promised that his Minuteman Project would peacefully observe the Arizona border as a protest against illegal immigration. Volunteers — he said there would be 1,300 of them — would be carefully screened, with FBI help, to keep out white supremacists and racists. No one would be allowed to bear guns except those who had permits to carry concealed weapons.

Gilchrist said that critics who called his group "vigilantes" — naysayers who included President Bush — were absolutely wrong about his volunteers.

Indeed, Gilchrist told USA Today, these men and women sought only to bring attention to a major social problem. Most were "white Martin Luther Kings."

Maybe so. But Gilchrist's accuracy has been less than sterling.

As the month-long April project started, some 300 volunteers showed up — a thousand fewer than predicted. An FBI official denied that the agency was screening Gilchrist's or any other private group's members. At least four-fifths of volunteers did carry weapons, and almost none were checked for permits. Racist talk abounded. And at least some neo-Nazis and other racists did join in Gilchrist's project.

On April 2, as the month-long effort got under way, 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.

The presence of Alliance members was not much of a surprise, and there were likely more than that pair. "We're not going to show up as a group and say, 'Hi, we're the National Alliance," Alliance official Shaun Walker told a reporter in the run-up to the protest. "But we have members ... that will participate."

In fact, 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."

Many other white supremacists had promised to attend, including members of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, but it was difficult to know if they showed up.

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.

[...]

Back in March, Gilchrist had also warned that he had been told that leaders of an extremely violent gang made up of Salvadorans — the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 — had ordered its members to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers. As it turned out, however, no frightening, brown-skinned gangsters showed up.

But the National Alliance was certainly there.

As this new site continues to develop. I'll bring you more information on more documented ties between the Minuteman Project and Neo-Nazi organizations, as well as a bunch of other goodies.

UPDATE: Oh hell, I can't resist. Going after the Minuteman Project is too easy.

First, lets go back to an earlier post I did on the Minutemen and their ties to neo-organizations back in December.

The first clip is from a appearance Gilchrist did on Fox News Hannity and Colmes where he defended white supremacists groups. (via Media Matters)
Here's a partial transcript:

COLMES: Recently, the white supremacy group Aryan Nation has recruited for the Minuteman Project, promoting the protest as a white pride event. This is who you're participating with here.

GILCHRIST: I have -- Alan, I have no control over someone posting an e-mail. I know what you're talking about. I've been to that Stormfront website. I have put a warning on our website -- you are not welcome here if you're a member of any supremacist group, whether it be of any color, race or creed.

Alan, there are supremacist groups out there of all races, colors and creeds. It's not just white supremacists. Why are you picking on them? There are brown. There are purple. There are red.

Amazing.

Now, I'll offer this video for the cherry on top. Not long ago, Gilchrist made an appearance at Columbia University which caused a huge counter protest by students who stormed the stage and held banners against the Minutemen.

Now, here's where Gilchrist and his defenders tried to lie to the public.

Gilchrist tired to make it seem like HE was being attacked by the students when in fact it was his Minutemen goons who attacked the students with one of Gilchrist's goons kicking a student in the head.

Well, Gilchrist came on Democracy NOW and tried to debate the head organizer of the counter student protest at Columbia and he suddenly cut the interview short when challenged about the incident and his ties to the National Alliance.

Watch the video and see the coward in action.

Now, lets take a look at the famous Minuteman anti-immigration rally held on July 30 in Laguna Beach CA. Note the neo-nazis proudly waving their flags along side members of the minutemen in the photographs.



Here's an account of the incident from the radical xenophobe site Stromfront.

The flags came out in the last few moments of the protest. The commies were chanting "Nazis Go Home" for hours on end non-stop, so I and everyone present on the street in the hot sun, facing hostile commies, browns, and who-knows-what greenlighted the flag idea. We will stand behind our decision.

If anyone wants to do it differently, come with us and tell us then and there.

Besides, this is America and if they can fly their commie flags, burn the US flag, fly their brown flag, we can fly anything we want.

The award-winning blog Orcinus has been documenting the Minutemen and their racist supporters and goes into further detail about the incident as well as other ties between the Minutemen and neo-nazi organizations.

Well, I've been saying all along that the Minutemen's core demographic is constituted of right-wing extremists, including many outright racists.

At a recent anti-immigrant rally in Laguna Beach, the connection was made explicit.

The rally was held July 30. It apparently was a follow-up of sorts to a similar rally held in the same locale on July 16, in which a local anti-immigration activist decided to protest a local arts festival's financial support for a day labor center for undocument workers. This rally drew the participation of the Save Our State campaign (an ostensibly mainstream anti-immigration organization) and the Minutemen's Jim Gilchrist. It also drew a contingent of neo-Nazis.

[...]

What's going on, of course, is that the Minutemen provide an ideal opportunity for white racists to "mainstream" their agenda, using the relatively benign "average citizens" that Lou Dobbs exclusively observes in their ranks as just so much cover. An online report from the July 16 rally discusses this in some detail:

By OCAngel's accounts, the rally she worked hard putting together was indeed a smashing success. More than sixty people showed up, while only five counterdemonstrators appeared to oppose them. Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, an Aliso Viejo resident, dropped by for awhile to pay his respects. Barbara Coe, the venerable Chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) and co-author of Proposition 187, was also there. And Don Silva (aka "OldPreach"), one of Joe Turner's close allies, was running around dressed in camouflage again, waving around an American flag (for matter of record, the rally itself was not officially endorsed by S.O.S.). {3}

But members of the National Alliance, an avowedly white supremacist organization, appeared to be out in full force that day. In fact, somebody who calls herself occutegirl, perhaps unbeknownst to her at the time, posted a photograph she took of two reputed members of that group on the "Save Our State" website. The photo shows a young woman (alleged to be "dixieland_delight" on the Stormfront White Nationalist Community website) and a man suspected of being her boyfriend holding up a blue banner reading, "DEPORT ILLEGAL ALIENS," with the words, "http://www.SaveOurState.org," emblazoned just underneath them in much smaller type. {4}

After realizing that a good number of "white nationalists" had attended her rally, OCAngel, to her credit, took some steps to distance herself from them. In one cryptic posting on the "Save Our State" website, she hinted publicly to a person who apparently had sent her a private message that they had "an agenda I do not agree with" and would "have preferred your group [possibly the National Alliance] to set up further and separate from us [on Saturday, July 16th], and not aligned yourselves with us in any way. I appreciated that you did not openly flaunt your views ..." {5}

But the truth is, despite OCAngel's apparent despair over all the National Alliance members who showed up to her Laguna Beach rally, evidence is rapidly mounting that white supremacists from across Southern California are trying to work hand and glove with "Save Our State" and its members in every protest and demonstration they organize; in fact, in some circumstances, it appears some white supremacists are active members of that group.

None of this should be terribly surprising. I've long held that immigration reform is an important issue that requires serious discussion, but I don't believe for a moment that scapegoating and harassing border crossers is going to provide any solutions. My experience has been that if you scratch beneath the surface of those who do, you quickly find that they are more likely to be concerned with Latino (or any nonwhite) immigration, not illegal immigration per se, though of course they pay lip service to the latter.

Trust me, I'm just getting started and at a later time, I'll make the connection between the Minutemen, and anti-immigration groups in Connecticut who are exploiting the situation in Danbury for their own political and financial gain.