[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
As the Minuteman Project attempts to restore its influence amid what
some feel is a new crisis brewing on the border, the project’s
co-founder Jim Gilchrist has been barnstorming media outlets in an
effort seemingly aimed at saving a public image marred by criminality as
he works to
rebuild the project.
On VCY America’s “Crosstalk” show Tuesday, for example, Gilchrist
felt free to tell his interviewer
that hundreds of thousands of Central American children were going to
form the “vanguard” of a “Trojan-horse invasion” of the United States,
and even
sympathized with a caller who suggested gassing the children to death at the border.
But the more difficult realities of the Minutemen came
during an interview with Ed Berliner, host of Newsmax’s “MidPoint” program. Rather than
serve up softball questions as
one might expect from the frequently far-right media outlet, Berliner
challenged Gilchrist about the original incarnation of the Minutemen,
noting that the movement unraveled amid “criminal charges against some
of the people involved, and that includes the former leader, Chris
Simcox,” who now faces trial on
three counts of child molestation.
Those “criminal charges” Berliner referenced also included
the cold-blooded killing of a 9-year-old girl that landed one of Gilchrist’s onetime associates, a Washington state woman named Shawna Forde, on Arizona’s Death Row.
Gilchrist said:
GILCHRIST: Yes, there have been a couple of incidents of
some very serious embarrassment, uh –– this conduct was not committed by
anyone within the Minuteman Project but in rogue groups that used the
Minuteman movement as a veil, essentially, to carry out sinister and
criminal activities.
But Berliner was persistent, asking Gilchrist to set the record straight regarding just how closely tied he was to those crimes.
BERLINER: So the people, then, who used the Minutemen
effort before, the people then who basically brought disrepute to the
Minutemen, were not people that you would have given rise to, that you
would have given any sort of legality to, or any sort of notice to. They
weren’t part of your group, is what you’re saying.
Gilchrist deflected:
GILCHRIST: No, no, they weren’t card-carrying members of
the Minuteman Project. We don’t have card-carrying members. We have
anyone who agrees that we should be a nation governed by laws, not mob
rule, that mob being 30 million illegal aliens, is an honorary member of
the Minuteman Project. That gives me 280 million members. Not all of
them agree with me, but I look at the movement itself as having 280
million members out of the 310 million population, who want our
immigration laws enforced.
It is at least nominally true that Gilchrist’s operation doesn’t have
“members” per se, and by that definition, at least, Shawna Forde was
not a member of the Minuteman Project. However, virtually everything
else Gilchrist told Berliner was false.
Shawna Forde was an associate of Gilchrist’s beginning in the spring
of 2007, culminating in February of 2009, when he named Forde his
“director of border operations.” Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project site
avidly promoted Forde’s operations –– conducted under the name of her
own group, “Minuteman American Defense” –– and he defended her from
critics within the nativist anti-immigrant movement.
Their association dates back to June 2007, when Forde organized an
“Illegal Immigration Summit” in Everett, Wash., featuring Gilchrist as
the keynote speaker. At the time, Forde was no longer a member in good
standing with the state detachment of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,
operated by Simcox, Gilchrist’s former cohort. Within the month, Forde
had formed MAD and cultivated her relationship with Gilchrist, first
sponsoring the “summit” in Everett featuring herself and Gilchrist that
June. Forde cultivated the relationship further that summer of 2007 by
organizing border watches in Arizona, alongside such other nativist
leaders as Glenn Spencer. She was photographed that summer with
Gilchrist, admiring Spencer’s remote-controlled airplane and scanning
the horizon in search of border crossers.
Forde kept in touch with Gilchrist and subsequently arranged for him
to make an appearance in February 2008 at Central Washington University
in Ellensburg, about a hundred-mile drive from Seattle. Gilchrist at the
time was embroiled in heated lawsuits and disputes with his former
board of directors over ownership of the Minuteman Project, and he no
longer had any functioning presence on the borders; Forde offered to
step up and take on the job. Gilchrist became so enamored of Forde that,
on February 9, he directed his staff to “put Shawna in the website as
our border patrol coordinator.”
But Forde’s involvement would become a grave liability in a matter of a few short months.
Shortly after midnight on May 30, 2009, Forde and a group of three
men invaded the home of a small-time marijuana smuggler named Raul
“Junior” Flores in rural Arivaca, Ariz., and shot its three occupants:
Flores, his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, and his wife, Gina Gonzalez.
However, Gonzalez was not fatally wounded and, after playing dead, she
drove the gang from her home in a hail of gunfire that lightly wounded
the chief gunman, a white supremacist serial killer from Washington
state named Jason Eugene Bush.
The day after the murders, Forde posted on the Minutemen Project
website, boasting of having “boots on the ground” in Arizona, and citing
the deaths at the Flores home as part of a fundraising pitch, in
Forde’s inimitable semi-literate style: “A American family was murdered 2
days ago including a 9 year old girl. Territory issue’s are now
spilling over like fire on the US side and leaving Americans so afraid
they will not even allow their names to be printed in any press
releases.”
So it was with a hint of irony, in his interview with Berliner, that
Gilchrist explained he would continue to rely on his former protocols
when it came to making this new iteration of the Minutemen different
than the previous one: “It is only by one rule that I would expect
people to present themselves and participate, and that one simple rule
is: Whatever you do, you stay within the rule of law. And there are no
exceptions.”
Gilchrist continued to refer reverently to “the rule of law” when
Berliner pressed him on the issue: “How are you going to be able to
control everybody and make sure that the people representing the
Minutemen and along the border are indeed all within the letter of the
law, and aren’t getting in the way of the U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol, or even the National Guard, who’s now there in Texas?”
“I broadcast one message,” Gilchrist replied, again after
a long pause. “Like me, you are an independent, American sovereign
person. You have the right, the irrevocable right, supposedly, to freely
and peaceably assemble on U.S. territory and bring your grievance
forward. It’s each man, woman, and child for him- and herself, on their
own, under their own recognizance, their own responsibility. If they go
beyond the rule of law, they can [to be] expect arrested, cited, and
prosecuted, it’s as simple as that. And it’s something we should be
doing to the illegal aliens that come into this country, not to innocent
American citizens who simply want to present their grievance. “
The irony here is that Shawna Forde, too, regularly preached about
“the rule of law,” and how the “illegal alien invasion” was a slap in
its face. Indeed, she even placed the words “Rule of Law” at the center
of the logo she had designed for her MAD website.
