Antigovernment Figures Rally Behind Arizona Attorney General Horne

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
 
Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne has been accused by his political opponents of being a “chameleon.” But not even they could predict the company he would one day keep.

Horne, once a Democrat, is a featured guest at tonight’s “Liberty on Tap” monthly social at a Scottsdale brewing company, where he will share the stage with far-right antigovernment “Patriot” movement luminaries including Richard Mack and Ammon Bundy, the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

Stephen Lemons at Phoenix New Times reports that Horne’s campaign team is aware of the presence of the other participants.

Ammon Bundy is best known as the Bundy son who was hit by a Taser during a skirmish outside the Bundy Ranch, an event that served to animate much of the antigovernment Patriot response that resulted in an armed standoff with federal authorities. He later served as a family spokesman on several national news broadcasts.

Mack, a former Graham County sheriff, is a longtime speaker and organizer in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement. In recent years, he has focused his efforts on organizing law enforcement officers behind a banner of Patriot beliefs through his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

Mack was also a major player on the scene at the Bundy Ranch standoff, where he suggested to Fox News that the strategy of the day was to have women in the front of the protest crowd. “If they’re going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers,” Mack said.

Horne, a close ally of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who endorsed Horne again this year), has suffered a number of scandals associated with his office in recent years, including campaign-finance charges and allegations that he left the scene of a fender-bender after a lunchtime sexual tryst.

Arpaio Considered ‘Citizens Grand Jury’ for Obama Birth Certificate Probe, But ‘It’s a Little Tough’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, recently told a Tea Party gathering in California that he considered resorting to the “sovereign citizens” tactic of calling for a so-called “citizens grand jury” while he was conducting an investigation of the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth certificate.

The subject came up during an Arpaio speech on July 27 to a gathering of Tea Party conservatives in Ramona, Calif. A video taken by an audience member shows Arpaio being questioned about calling for a “sovereign citizens” tactic to be applied in a Maricopa County “fraud” case that “involved not only the perpetrator, Obama, but the senators, and congressmen, and … your secretary of state. Why don’t you form a citizens grand jury to bring indictments against these people, and when you get no response from it, then you can form a citizens trial court — ?”
The sheriff interrupted the man’s question.

ARPAIO: I heard about that. You know what I was looking at? It wasn’t for that. I was looking at it for the birth certificate. If I was gonna do a citizens grand jury, it would be because of that.

It’s a little tough. Legally, it’s a little tough. You know, I am the sheriff, but I still have some restrictions. I gotta use a little common sense.

Now, don’t think I’m chicken. I can take on the president, I think I have a little …

The questioner interrupted Arpaio to inform him that he would move from California to Maricopa County free of charge just so he could head up such a grand jury.

“Citizens grand juries” are an integral part of the “common law court” system devised as part of the often convoluted and complex system of beliefs of the sovereign citizen movement, and references to them often appear when assorted antigovernment “Patriot” movement members (who are closely aligned with the sovereign citizen movement) are involved in legal actions, including criminal cases.

Arpaio grabbed headlines in 2011 when he went “birther” –– that is, he announced that not only did he subscribe to various conspiracy theories claiming that President Obama was not born in Hawaii and thus is not an American citizen, he intended to investigate the matter of the president’s birth certificate, and he announced in 2012 his investigators had determined that it was “definitely fraudulently.”

The investigation, crowd pleasing as it may have been for his arch-conservative audience, went nowhere –– although Arpaio did recently announce that he may have determined who the person was that forged the president’s birth certificate.

Jim Gilchrist Continues Denying Ties to Shawna Forde as He Tries to Revive Minutemen

 
[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.

Arsonist Who Attempted to Burn Down Gay Bar Gets Exceptional 10-year Sentence

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Musab Mohammad Masmari, the man who tried to burn down a popular  gay bar in Seattle on a packed New Year’s Eve, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The sentence, handed down on Thursday, was considered exceptionally stiff, after Masmari had agreed to a plea bargain on arson charges only, meaning he would not face the federal hate-crime charges that were considered in the case. According to the Seattle Times, the sentence more than doubled the time agreed to in the plea bargain.

Masmari, a 30-year-old American citizen of Libyan extraction and upbringing, was caught on camera as he carried a container filled with gasoline through Neighbours, a popular bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, on New Year’s Eve. Shortly afterwards, patrons smelled smoke and found the container on the landing to a set of stairs engulfed in flames; their prompt action quickly doused the fire.

An estimated 750 people were in the bar at the time, and the matter quickly became a hate crime investigation. “It was just a great thing that people acted as fast as they did to put out the fire,” a police spokesperson said. “We could have had mass, mass casualties, and we’re very lucky that that didn’t happen.”

Some of the people present at the bar that night were in the courtroom during Masmari’s sentencing hearing on Thursday. Shaun Knittel, a Seattle LGBT-community activist, said he and others in the community were “disgusted” with the plea bargain’s five-year sentence. Neighbours, he said, was packed that night with “people who are irreplaceable to us.”

“This was a blatant attack on our lives,” he said.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez told the courtroom he would use his discretion to impose the exceptional sentence because Masmari had clearly targeted his victims because they were gay, and because of the possibility of a huge loss of life.

Masmari, who claimed in a presentencing statement that he had blacked out that night after drinking a bottle of whiskey, did not speak during the hearing. His attorney said the stiff sentence was not entirely a surprise, “due to the political nature of this case.”

Secretive Texas Militias Now Patrolling Along Border, Paper Reports

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The San Antonio Express-News published a report this week that listed some of the groups that have been involved in the patrols and included numerous photos of the militiamen.

Strikingly, the patrols are being organized secretively, and all the militiamen involved have insisted on anonymity.

The photos published with the report show dozens of men wearing camouflage gear and carrying a variety of semi-automatic weapons, patrolling areas of the border of southern Texas. In some cases, the men are wearing masks; in others, their faces have been blurred by photo retouching.

The individual who provided the photos insisted on blurring the visible faces of participants, saying they need anonymity to protect against retaliation by “cartel and gang members.” Nonetheless, some of the men in the photos contacted the paper and demanded that it remove the images, blurred or not, from the website.

Kolten Parker, the reporter who handled the story, told the SPLC that he and his editors tried to independently confirm as many details as possible, given that the militias have been secretive about who they are and when and where they are conducting patrols.

“We’ve spoken with ranchers in the area where these patrols are occurring, and we’ve seen plenty of evidence that they are,” Parker said. Judging from the 30 or so photos that the paper ran, he said that so far the patrols are being conducted in a well-organized manner.

Barbie Rogers of the Patriot Information Hotline told the paper that there are 10 “operations on the ground in Texas” this week.

When the militia patrols were first announced last month, the chief spokesman – a 37-year-old truck driver from Von Ormy named Chris Davis – stirred up concerns about potential violence by explaining, in a now-deleted video, how to solve the border problem: “How? You see an illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes, and you say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot.’”

Davis shortly disappeared from view, closing down his operation and refusing any further media interviews. It shortly emerged in the Express-News that Davis had been discharged from the Army in 2001 “under other than honorable conditions in lieu of trial by court-martial,” according to a summary of his military service.

Another news report from Texas, from KBMT-TV in Beaumont, Texas, featured an “unorganized militia” in Southeast Texas. The group’s self-described “commander” is a middle-aged man named David Smith.



The news report buys into Smith’s claim that his militia bears no resemblance to militias in other countries and utterly ignores the long association of militias with radical antigovernment “Patriot” movement extremists.

Notably, however, Smith insists that his militia isn’t going to be running around too far from home. “If they can take care of their community along that border, that’s fine,” he said, “but if we leave our communities to just go running down to the border, then we leave our communities unprotected.”

The Arizona State Militia Says It’s Mainstream – It’s Not

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A new “statewide” militia group that is attempting to organize in Arizona has been careful to portray itself to would-be recruits and law enforcement as a non-radical, mainstream organization that cooperates with local authorities. Calling itself the Arizona State Militia (ASM), the group claims to have successfully recruited a number of veterans of the U.S. military.

But as with similar efforts in Idaho and elsewhere, if you scrape a bit at the façade, the same old antigovernment paranoia and conspiracy theories are lurking in plain view.

ASM is operated by a pair of men who insist on maintaining anonymity by using pseudonyms – one calls himself “Colonel Reaper,” while the other calls himself “Colonel Kratos.” This ongoing lack of transparency stands in stark contrast to the openness with which they carry their guns in public.
No one from the group responded to requests for comment from Hatewatch.

The militia made headlines when it appeared at a recent anti-immigrant demonstration in Arizona. None of the militiamen spoke on camera, but they were described by others as providing “security” for politicians and public figures who appeared at the demonstration.




ASM insists that all of its members must undergo a background check before they are admitted. This is a claim we’ve heard from militia and related groups in the past, notably the Minuteman Project. It often later emerged that their background check process was deeply flawed and their ranks were filled with people with long criminal records (in the case of the Minutemen, the most notorious example was onetime leader Shawna Forde).

ASM has a code of conduct and sworn oath for its members that includes a ban on “illegal activity” and “racism or discrimination based on race, sex, or ethnicity” (evidently, a bias based on sexual orientation is still permissible). Most of all the militia insists that it is not an “anti-government group”
but rather hopes to work cooperatively with local authorities.

“We are not here to over-throw or restructure the government,” ASM’s website proclaims. It continues:

As Arizona State’s premier group of law-abiding, Constitutional Patriots- living, working, and training throughout the state; we strive to improve our community and to help our members hone and sharpen their defensive skills. We will use these skills to help our local communities in cases of emergency, natural disaster, or war. We pride ourselves on the fact we are an open group accepting all races and genders with open arms. In life as well as the fight for freedom we are all equal are we not?

The group made a stab at establishing their community bona fides in May by taking part in a home building project with Habitat for Humanity of Central Arizona, posting pictures and text about it at their blog. ASM claimed that “they invited us to join the build” and said they’d be involved in a June build and promised to post photos. So far, those have not appeared on the website.

Hatewatch’s inquiry with Habitat for Humanity of Central Arizona about ASM’s involvement went unanswered.

ASM also hopes to establish its bona fides with testimonials on its website from military veterans who have supposedly joined the militia, some of whom say they are combat veterans. (Of course, since the organization insists on anonymity, these claims are impossible to check out.)

In September of last year, TV station KPHO in Phoenix ran an investigative report from a correspondent who went undercover to an ASM meeting and found that its recruiters were offering advice to veterans and military contractors about how to get around military prohibitions against militia involvement.



As the KPHO report noted, Arizonans have reason to be suspicious of anyone calling themselves a militiaman and setting out to patrol the American border, since the state has been home to a number of criminal cases arising from the activities of so-called border watchers, including Forde’s horrific murders. More recently, Minuteman cofounder Chris Simcox was arrested and currently awaits trial on three counts of child molestation.

“Colonel Kratos” told an interviewer from a Montana-based, antigovernment Patriot radio show that he believes a lot of militias have gone astray after becoming distracted by what he called “side issues.”

“It defines a lot of them when they get involved with things they really shouldn’t get involved in,” he told the interviewer. “And it becomes a mindset. The individuals that run this organization have the mindset that we are a strict constitutional militia. When you allow personal opinions or personal things to get in the way of the bigger picture, it creates havoc for any organization.”

“And what we don’t allow in our organization is power struggles,” he continued. “We all understand what our role is. It isn’t about any one of us. It’s about the organization as a whole, and the community and the state.”

He advised people looking to join a militia to avoid any organization that describes itself as radical or involved with fringe concerns. “If they’re involved with positive community things that help those communities, and they’re staying out of those social issues and they’re not portraying themselves as an antigovernment organization, one that is simply there to exert their belief in the Constitution and the state’s rights, that’s somebody you want to take a serious look at,” he said.

Despite these claims, it’s clear that ASM is fueled in no small part by the paranoid conspiracy theories that help fuel the broader militia and Patriot movements, including a belief in an overwhelming “New World Order” plot to enslave Americans. This is referenced in several places on the militia’s website.

Likewise, ASM’s Code of Conduct, rather than offering a reassuring explanation that all militiamen will be civic-minded in their approach to their duties, instead focuses – at least in the first half – on how the militiamen should behave if captured by their enemies: “I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will not make any oral or written statements disloyal to my beloved state and its citizens, or harmful to their continued struggle for liberty and freedom as prescribed in the constitutions of Arizona and the United States.”

The second half of the Code, as it happens, is a nearly verbatim recitation of the Ten Orders We Will Not Obey that form the heart of the credo of the Oath Keepers, another Patriot organization that revels in conspiracies and paranoia, and whose radical ideology was on display at the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada this spring.

ASM appears to be just another radical antigovernment group in the vein of the many militia and Patriot groups that have come and gone before them.

Jim Gilchrist Announces Grand Vision for New Minuteman Border Patrols in 2015

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist recently announced that he was “considering” reviving the nativist border watch group. And now he’s made it official, announcing that he will organize a Minuteman border patrol in May of 2015.

Gilchrist clearly hopes to capitalize on the mounting right-wing outrage over the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico involving Central American refugee children.

Gilchrist’s effort – dubbed “Operation Normandy” – is not lacking in grandiosity. The announcement at the Minuteman Project website declares:

The Minuteman Project’s “Operation Normandy” has been launched as of 1200 hours Monday, July 7.

This event will dwarf the original Minuteman Project of 2005. I expect at least 3,500 non-militia volunteers to participate, plus uncounted groups of militias from all over the country.

If you are familiar with the Normandy invasion of France in 1944, then you have an idea how large and logistically complicated this event will be. However, there is one difference. We are not going to the border to invade anyone. We are going there to stop an invasion.

Our federal, state, and community governments have failed to address and fix this calamity. In the spirit of our nation’s Founding Fathers, it is once again time to bring unprecedented national awareness to the decades-long illegal alien crisis jeopardizing the United States.

Participation is open to everyone and there is only one rule:  whatever you do, stay within the rule of law.

It will take 10 months to recruit, organize, and launch this event, and it will cover the porous areas of the 2,000-mile border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas.  

D-Day: 1 May, 2015. 

Gilchrist’s announcement so far has produced relatively gullible news reports from two entities: FoxNews.com, which posted a fluffy account of the revival of the border watch movement, that had its last moment in the media sun back in April 2005. Notably, the story described only in brief and vague terms the causes of the first Minuteman movement’s downfall:

The Minuteman Project gained national traction in 2005, but internal turmoil, accusations of vigilantism and criminal charges against some of its key figures, including a former leader of the movement, Chris Simcox, led to its demise.

The more detailed, and fully accurate, description of the “criminal charges” against “some of its key figures” would include multiple murder charges filed against onetime Minuteman leader Shawna Forde, a close associate of Jim Gilchrist who on May 30, 2009, led a gang of killers into the rural home of an Arizona family and proceeded to murder a 9-year-old girl named Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul “Junior” Flores. They also shot the girl’s mother, a 30-year-old woman named Gina Gonzalez, who eventually drove them from her home in a hail of gunfire, and wound up providing the testimony that put Forde and her chief co-conspirator, Jason Eugene Bush, on Arizona’s Death Row.

The “criminal charges” against co-founder Simcox are only somewhat less disturbing: He is currently in the Maricopa County Jail, awaiting trial (now scheduled for September) on three counts of child molestation.

Another news account, filed by Phoenix CBS station KPHO, was even more devoid of factual information, characterizing Gilchrist (whose name the report misspelled throughout, as well as online) and his Minutemen as benign concerned citizens, with the only caveat being “that putting untrained, unarmed volunteers along the border could create more problems than it solves.”

But Gilchrist held forth at length for the KPHO reporter in a Skype interview, claiming: “We’re trying to recruit thousands of people to cover the porous border areas from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas,” and warning, as he has all along, that he will need 3,500 volunteers in order to be successful.

Gilchrist also promised that there would be no extremist violence or murderous plots emerging from this iteration of the Minutemen: “The rule of law means you do not put a hand on anyone. You do not talk to anyone. You do not confront anyone. You report to Border Patrol,” Gilchrist said.

He also defended the character of the militias that claim to be forming along the border even now. “They’re not these man eating ogres they’re made out to be,” Gilchrist said.
 

White Supremacist Accused of Shooting Cop Dies in Apparent Jail Suicide

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


James Sapp, the 48-year-old man accused of shooting a police officer during a traffic stop in Vancouver, Wash., on June 30, has died in what authorities are describing as a suicide in the local jail.

Sapp allegedly shot Vancouver officer Dustin Goudschall seven times after being pulled over for a traffic violation, then fled the scene, wrecked his vehicle, and then assaulted an elderly man and carjacked his vehicle before finally being caught by police and arrested. Goudschall survived his critical injuries and was able to help identify his assailant. He is currently recovering from the wounds.

On Sunday morning, deputies found Sapp in his cell attempting to commit suicide and intervened. He was rushed to an area hospital but was pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m.

Sapp had a long history of claiming membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, dating back to previous arrests for other crimes. He was also involved in a 2012 case in Clark County involving an assault on a 12-year-old Latino boy and a relative.

Sapp’s family told the Vancouver Columbian through a spokesperson that even though Sapp “had a checkered background … he loved his family and wife.”

Rev. Michael Baca, the pastor of the church Sapp’s family attends, told the Columbian that Sapp’s issues seemed to have been triggered by a head injury he suffered a few years ago. Earlier this week, Sapp reportedly expressed remorse for what he had done.

“‘I need to make things right with God.’ Those are his exact words,” Baca said. “He knew he was going to be in prison for the rest of his life. He was accepting that. Obviously, (Thursday) something changed.”

The pastor asked for compassion for the man and his family.

“He’s not a monster. He was a person dealing with a lot of issues,” Baca said. “There was something inside of him that would click on that had very powerful control over him.”





 

Watch Pete Santilli’s Border Shutdown Protest Fail Spectacularly

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

 They had the motorcycles. They had the flags. And they had some people eager to protest child refugees coming over the border. What they didn’t have was a real plan.


That was the upshot of a failed effort by extremist radio host Pete Santilli and a group of bikers to shut down the Tijuana border crossing, south of San Diego, on July 5th.

The plan, as described by Santilli on his show, was for his antigovernment “Patriot” listeners to join forces with his biker friends to protest immigration policies and the imprisonment of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi in Mexico. So many bikers and “Patriots” would turn out, Santilli hoped, that the resulting traffic jam and commotion would shut down the border.

Except, that didn’t happen. Not even close.

One day before the planned border shutdown protest, Santilli was protesting in Murrieta, California, where he shouted at police officers on the scene, calling them “domestic terrorists.”
The next day, having met up with his biker buddies who have been rallying for Tahmooressi’s return, Santilli and his crew set out southbound on Interstate 5. About ten miles from their destination, however, a California Highway Patrol officer pulled over Santilli’s vehicle.

All of this was caught on Santilli’s live-streaming broadcast of the “event.” As Santilli’s car pulls off to the shoulder with the officer behind them, the bikers cruise on by and keep going.

It was the last that Santilli, or his supporters, were to see of them that day. That begs the question of whether the bikers are, in fact, working closely with Santilli or whether he’s simply trying to piggyback on their activities.

In the meantime, a smattering of protesters drawn by the Patriots Information Hotline website, and led by a conspiracist named Larry Murdock, had gathered in Tijuana to try to join Santilli’s protest. They too posted video of the non-event, comprised largely of two men wandering around trying to find a protest that wasn’t happening.

Murdock joked as he walked toward the Tijuana crossing plaza: “There’s people waiting to see what goes on in the world. They’re like, ‘Hey, you didn’t have sex with a hooker, did you? You idiot! That’s Mexico! That’s nasty!’ ”

In the meantime, Santilli’s traffic stop took 38 minutes – Santilli’s car had expired plates, though it was a rental, and he was ticketed for failure to carry proof of insurance – and he was left to fume for the rest of the way about the looming “police state” and to wonder paranoiacally if it had been part of a plot to disrupt the protest.

By the time Santilli arrived at the scene in Tijuana, the bikers were nowhere to be found (assuming that they were in fact headed toward the border). He and his crew could only find a couple of protesters. So they pulled the plug on the protest, got in their cars and went home.

One of the few protesters who showed up – Ernest “General” Lee of Santilli’s Guerrilla Media Network – was left to file a bitter report about the day’s “nonevent”.

“Was it not enough publicity?” he wondered. “Was it a bad weekend choice?”

Lee shook his head. “From a great event, to a non-event. I hate even filing this update.”

Militia Efforts to Converge at the Border Fizzle Out

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

What if militias announced a showdown with the feds and nobody came?

That’s pretty much what happened in Texas this week, after a handful of militia activists called on their fellow militia members to intervene in the increasingly fraught humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, involving large numbers of children from Central America who are straining the government’s ability to process their complicated cases.

For a Texas militiaman named Chris Davis, there was nothing complicated about it. In a video he posted at YouTube – which he has since been removed – he offered a simple solution for dealing with the young border crossers.

“How?” Davis asked rhetorically. “You see an illegal, you point your gun right dead at them, right between the eyes, and say ‘Get back across the border, or you will be shot.’ Simple as that. If you get any flak from sheriffs, city, or feds, Border Patrol, tell them look — this is our birthright. We have a right to secure our own land. This is our land. This is our birthright.”

Davis’s solution was part of his call to his fellow militia members to make their way to the Texas border near Laredo in order to prevent child refugees from crossing there. Late last week, he posted an “Action Alert” bulletin at various online forums, including his Operation Secure Our Border Facebook page. “All Texas & National Militia Available Please Converge Immediately,” it said.

The alert said the “mission” was to “close down Laredo Crossing for starters,” and that the operation would be “complete when border fence is in place and secure.”

It named a gathering point at a truck stop in Encinal, Texas, and concluded: “It’s time to bring down the thunder. Activating the Patriots willing to stand up for America GO GO GO. … Let’s share this like the brushfires of Liberty.”

However, Davis’ militia muster call quickly vanished into virtual thin air. Shortly after he began receiving media attention – including accounts in the  McAllenville Monitor, Brownsville Herald, San Antonio Express-News and Los Angeles Times – he not only took down all his YouTube videos and deleted his channel there, he also deleted his Facebook page and all its incendiary antigovernment content.

Davis told the Express-News that he removed the video Monday because it was taken out of context “by a newspaper that supports amnesty.”

“We’re here to supplement and be where law enforcement is not and help them support the border,” Davis told Los Angeles Times. “There’s nothing malicious, there’s no malicious intent — every person is vetted. We’re just here to serve freedom, liberty and national sovereignty.”

Davis described himself as a 37-year-old truck driver, saying he had served in the Army and National Guard, and had been involved in Open Carry Texas events. He told reporters that the militia was in “preliminary stages of recruiting and training volunteers” and would be showing up in Laredo “in a few weeks.” He wouldn’t say how many were involved.

He and a spokeswoman from North Carolina named Denice Freeman tried to quickly reshape the image of their campaign.

“This is not a ‘go-in-guns-blazing’ kind of thing,” Freeman told the Brownsville Herald. “This will be handled with the utmost professionalism and security and safety for everyone involved.”

One of Davis’ Texas cohorts, a militiaman from Rocksprings named Rick Light, told the Los Angeles Times that he was surprised by the video.

“I’ve never known Chris Davis to threaten anyone like that,” Light said. “There’s a lot of hype and Commander Davis is kind of being targeted.”

Light insisted that they plan to be a “productive, professional militia that just assists our law enforcement.”

Within a few days, though, Davis had dropped out of view entirely. Scheduled to appear on a web talk show on the conspiracist Truth Broadcasting Network called Death to the New World Order, Davis simply didn’t show up. The host, Harry Link, told listeners that he called Davis himself and was told he simply couldn’t do the interview.

Link was furious, and spent the bulk of his remaining hour-plus of airtime ranting against Davis, claiming that the militia presence on the border not only was “fake” but actually comprised a New World Order “psyops” program designed to fool true Patriots like himself.



Davis identified himself to a couple of reporters as a “III Percenter,” one of several antigovernment Patriot movement organizations. However, Mike Vanderboegh, one of the originators of the “III Percent” concept and something of a self-anointed kingmaker in the militia movement, wrote a scathing post about Davis’ plans on the border, concluding: “Based on what I know now, stay as far away from this incipient exercise in cluster coitus as you can.”

However, Davis was not the only right-wing extremist calling for militias to head for the Texas border. At the Free Republic – where one of the first “Operation Secure Our Border” bulletins was posted – publisher Jim Robinson posted his own call to action, this time for the California militias to get out there and help support the efforts in Texas.

“Ok, this is just the germination of the plan,” Robinson wrote. “We have independent units from the Bolinas Border Patrol and the Central Valley Citizens militia joining forces with independent citizens militia units of Texas to defend our southern border in Texas, to protest Obama’s lawless open borders policies and to rally support for Governor Perry to officially call out Guard units and Texas militia units at his disposal to defend the border!! Lawsuits will not cut it. The invasion is happening now. Action must be taken NOW!!”

That plan seems to have drawn roughly the same response as Davis’ muster – namely, none at all.
Likewise, another Patriot-movement site called “Patriot Information Hotline”, operated by a woman named Barbie Rogers, ran Davis’s original “Call to Action”, and then became a short-lived conduit for information about the Texas effort. She told an interviewer on Newsmax’s “MidPoint” show that this would be an ongoing effort: “This will continue for days and weeks to come” and spread “to other points” along the Mexico border, she said.

An Express-News reporter called Rodgers’ “Patriot Hotline” and was told that there were already “boots on the ground” in Laredo. The message at the hotline told callers to provide a name to perform a “criminal background check to make sure you don’t have any felonies”.

And then there was militia enthusiast Dyna DeRien, who posts at YouTube as 1HellOnHeels and calls herself the “CEO and founder” of “the American Anti-Federalist Patriot Party.” After Davis yanked all his videos from the Internet, hers were the only videos remaining on the web describing the militia plan of attack and the motivation for turning out on the border.

“We’re tired of those SOBs in Washington D.C. bringing all these illegals into our country and just spreading ‘em out with all their diseases all over the place,” she said.

A day later, that rant had been taken down, too.

Jim Gilchrist Eyes Reviving the Minutemen to Exploit Fresh Border Crisis

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Jim Gilchrist, the California-based cofounder of the nativist border watch group the Minuteman Project, was last in the news back in 2009, when one of his associates was arrested by the FBI for murdering a 9-year-old girl and her father in their Arizona home. But he’s bidding to make headlines again by reawakening the Minutemen around the growing controversy over the child refugee crisis at the border.

In an interview last week with the right-wing cable channel One America News Network (OANN), Gilchrist announced that he was considering restarting his moribund organization:

GILCHRIST: I have been toying with this idea for several years. I personally would like to organize another major massive assembly of Minute-men and –women along the entire border – not just Arizona this time, but the entire 2,000-mile border from San Diego, California, to Brownsville, Texas. I would need 3,500 volunteers to spend thirty days in certain areas of the unprotected border areas along that 2,000-mile-long border. It takes 10 months – it would take me until next May to organize such a huge effort.

And Gilchrist was casting about for support on the Minuteman Project website as well:

1. Should the Minuteman Project again call up volunteers to establish observation outpost
positions on the U.S. – Mexico border from San Diego, Ca. to Brownsville, Texas?

2. Would you volunteer to spend up to 30 days of your time staffing an observation outpost on the border?

Gilchrist’s tendency toward delusional grandiosity was on display in the OANN interview, when he veered into a comparison between organizing a month-long Minuteman protest to the Normandy invasion on D-Day:

GILCHRIST: For example, Normandy was not thought about and organized overnight. It took two years to organize and create the logistics and the ability for the Allied Powers in World War II to actually land at Normandy. Of course, this is not Normandy that I’m talking about, but it is an endeavor that’s just as full of tedium, day after day, logistics that have to be covered. I need lawyers, I need captains, I need personnel, I need law-enforcement liaisons, I need airwaves – Ham radio operators, I need about 300 of those. So on and so forth.

It’s not like you just say, well, ‘We’re the Minutemen and we’re coming to the border, and we’re gonna save the day and we’re gonna do it tomorrow.’ It doesn’t happen that way.

It seems to have escaped Gilchrist’s notice somehow that the original Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War from whom his group took its name were noted for their ability to respond to situations at a moment’s notice (thus their name). But that is among the lesser obstacles to a revival of the Minutemen by Gilchrist.

The most chilling aspect of the possible involvement of the Minutemen in the increasingly tense fight over how U.S. immigration officials handle the humanitarian crisis at the border involving large numbers of Central American children – who, under laws passed in 2002, cannot be immediately deported but must undergo complex hearings to determine if they warrant asylum – lies in their established track record. That record includes the cold-blooded murder of a Latina girl in Arizona.

Despite Gilchrist’s longstanding claims of “success” for the vigilante border watch group he cofounded with Arizonan Chris Simcox in April 2005, the entire effort splintered apart and both Gilchrist and Simcox fell under the shadow of claims of mismanagement and misappropriation of funds.

Even more significantly, the border watch movement became a major magnet for some of the most vicious and violent elements of the far right, including neo-Nazis and various white supremacists who participated in the initial April 2005 effort in Arizona.

Gilchrist is clearly cognizant of this problem, because he brought it up, and attempted to address it, in the OANN interview:

GILCHRIST: In all fairness, there is that two percent whacko rate that everybody has in the activist organizations, and they have to be vetted out. About two percent of the people will be bit strange and probably should be staying home.

We had that issue in the Minutemen assembly of 2005, and we handled it very well. No one was arrested, no one drew a weapon on anyone, there were no fights. It was very, very successful.

In reality, as David Holthouse reported for the Southern Poverty Law Center at the time, Gilchrist appeared on-camera at the Arizona gathering with a group of men who were avowed neo-Nazis without apparently realizing it – and proceeded to lecture the reporters about how their efforts were the modern equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaigns.

While both of the Minutemen organizations that emerged from the Simcox-Gilchrist split claimed in the ensuing years that they performed extensive background checks on all their officers and members in an effort to “weed out” the criminals, the reality was that the organization was plagued by criminality, culminating with the criminal rampage of Jim Gilchrist’s associate, Shawna Forde.

Forde – a onetime hairdresser and Boeing worker from Everett, Wash., who first became involved in the Minutemen during their short-lived effort to organize citizen watches on the Canadian border in an attempt to rebut accusations of racism for concentrating on the Mexico border – became the symbol of everything wrong with the border watch movement when she and a team of men invaded the home of a marijuana smuggler in the remote border town of Arivaca, Ariz., in the early morning hours of May 30, 2009.

Her team included Jason Eugene Bush, a white supremacist serial killer who had fooled his colleagues into believing he was an experienced combat veteran. Bush acted as Forde’s gunman and shot Raul “Junior” Flores, his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and their 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, as she pleaded for her life. Gonzalez survived her wounds, pretending to be dead, and eventually drove the invaders from her home in a fusillade of exchanged gunfire. Forde and two of her cohorts – including Bush and a local man named Albert Gaxiola, who had organized the “hit” – were arrested, tried, and convicted. Forde and Bush both are on Arizona’s Death Row.

Both Simcox and Gilchrist immediately tried to distance themselves from any association with Forde, and were largely successful in doing so in much of the mainstream press, including Fox News. However, as my investigation of the matter revealed, both men had extensive dealings with her at various times.

While it was Simcox who first promoted and empowered Forde at the state level, it was Gilchrist who most ardently adopted her when she formed her own border watch outfit, calling it Minuteman American Defense (MAD). After Forde sponsored two Gilchrist appearances in Washington state, she moved her operations to Arizona, and Gilchrist’s website began trumpeting Forde’s activities – in fact, he essentially outsourced all of his border watch activities to her, and anyone who approached the Minuteman Project asking where to go to stand guard at the border was referred to Forde. (Forde herself has hinted that it was Gilchrist who connected her with Jason Bush.)

Even after Forde committed the murders, she remained in contact with Gilchrist. On the day she was finally arrested nearly two weeks later, outside the ranch owned by another nativist extremist leader, Glenn Spencer, she had just finished firing off an email to Jim Gilchrist using Spencer’s computer.

Even though the Minutemen remained a leading name among nativist extremist groups for several years afterward, the steam quickly left the movement and most organizations stopped using the “Minuteman” moniker out of fear of being associated with Forde and her antics. In a fitting denouement, Chris Simcox was arrested last year and currently awaits trial on multiple charges of child molestation.

In the meantime, with a fresh border crisis to exploit, Jim Gilchrist is clearly hoping that everyone will have forgotten all this, and he will be able to return to those halcyon days when thousands of angry Americans were sending him checks.

Just as he did a decade ago, Jim Gilchrist is trying to organize a mass movement using conspiracy-minded fears of hordes of invaders at the border and the supposed decline of white America – attitudes that were raw material for violent haters such as Shawna Forde.

Maine’s Gov. LePage Offers Feeble Excuse for Meetings with Extremist Sovereign Citizens Group

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican elected in 2010 as a “Tea Party” candidate, admits that he held a number of meetings last year with leaders of an antigovernment sovereign citizen group, as revealed in a new book excerpt published this week.

But he now claims that the meetings were not an endorsement of the conspiracy theories and extremist politics that were discussed – rather, he was simply listening to his constituents.

The political storm over LePage’s dalliances with far-right radicals broke on Monday when Talking Points Memo published a key excerpt from As Maine Went: Governor Paul LePage and the Tea Party Takeover of Maine, a new book from political blogger Mike Tipping of Portland. The post described a series of eight meetings over nine months in 2013 that LePage initiated with members of the Constitutional Coalition, a sovereign citizens group based mostly in the state’s northern reaches.

Among the things reportedly discussed at these meetings was whether or not to seek violent retribution against key political opponents. A Coalition member named Jack McCarthy described the meeting on a radio program hosted by a small group of sovereign citizens calling themselves the Aroostook Watchmen:

We also discussed this there, that as far as I know, the penalty for high treason has not changed in 100 years. And, I did not say it, but the governor said it. I never – I never opened my mouth and said the word. The governor looked at us and looked at his buddy and said they are talking about hanging them.

LePage has vehemently denied that he ever discussed executing anyone, let alone his Democratic opponents, with the group, and a spokesperson characterized the meetings as a benign effort by the governor to listen to people across the political spectrum, saying that LePage has met with “hundreds of Mainers hearing thousands of ideas, concerns and suggestions,” adding that “hearing those ideas during constituent meetings does not translate to the governor endorsing the ideas of others.”

Yet as Tipping’s reportage reveals, LePage was more than a mere willing listener in these meetings. He initiated them after members of the Constitutional Coalition submitted a letter, in the wake of the December 2012 mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, complaining that the governor was violating the Constitution. LePage apparently took umbrage to these accusations and invited the group to a series of meetings.

The topics of these meetings evidently revolved around classic antigovernment “Patriot” movement conspiracy theories, including the belief that American dollars are phony “fiat” money and that the Federal Reserve is a hoax. One of the meetings was dominated by discussion, led by noted conspiracy theorist Michael Coffman, revolving around the notion that the United Nations is out to seize Americans’ private property rights and impose a New World Order environmentalist regime.

It’s unclear why the meetings ended, but as Tipping observes, these sessions constituted more of the governor’s time than he has yet accumulated in office speaking with members of the press.

Moreover, it’s unusual for any person holding public office to hold private meetings with members of radical groups of any stripe, since such sessions are seen as legitimizing these organizations and their politics. Had Gov. LePage held a similar private meeting with leaders of the state’s Ku Klux Klan, for instance – an organization that in reality is not significantly more radical than the Sovereign Citizens  movement – the inappropriateness of the governor’s sponsorship of these sessions would have been only slightly clearer.

Man with Alleged Aryan Brotherhood Ties Accused of Shooting Police Officer during Traffic Stop

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


A Washington state man with a long criminal history of legal entanglements – and who has claimed in the past to be affiliated with the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood prison gang – allegedly shot and critically wounded a local police officer Monday in Vancouver, Wash., during a routine traffic stop.

James Todd Sapp, 47, of Vancouver was arraigned this week on charges of attempted murder, robbery, and unlawful possession of a firearm after he reportedly opened fire on Vancouver police officer Dustin Goudschal, a six-year veteran who had pulled Sapp and a companion over in the black pickup Sapp was driving.

Sapp reportedly drove away after the shooting and wrecked the pickup a short distance away. His companion, another Vancouver resident named Timothy Plantenburg, told police he caused the wreck by grabbing the steering wheel, and that Sapp fired his gun at him as he fled the scene.

According to the police, Sapp then attempted to carjack a vehicle belonging to an elderly man, who resisted the robbery attempt and was aided by passersby. Sapp nonetheless was able to drive away in the man’s vehicle, and police caught up to him and arrested him a short time later.

Sapp has a long criminal record, including six prior felony convictions. He has claimed to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.
One of his previous run-ins with the law included a 2012 case in Clark County where Sapp allegedly assaulted a 12-year-old boy. The boy told a relative, who confronted Sapp, who allegedly punched the man in the face, breaking his nose, and called him a “stupid (expletive) Mexican.”

When police investigated, they allegedly found an illegal weapons cache at Sapp’s home, amid a room in which Sapp kept a doll collection. Sapp pleaded guilty to assaulting the boy and was given a prison term, but the weapons charges were eventually dropped.

Prosecutors noted at the time that Sapp claimed to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. However, even though Sapp indeed has tattoos of swastikas and one reading “White Power,” he does not have an Aryan Brotherhood tattoo, usually one of the signs of actual membership.

Sapp reportedly also told Gresham police, after a 2005 arrest, that he belonged to the Aryan Brotherood.

Officer Goudschal was originally listed in critical condition after the shooting, but was upgraded to stable condition on Wednesday.

Brother of ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Who Reportedly Shot BLM Ranger Traces a Loved One’s Transformation

Brent Cole, right, and his brother Marc in Alaska

 [Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


The younger brother of Brent Douglas Cole, the far-right extremist who now faces federal assault charges after his shootout with law enforcement officers in the northern California woods, isn’t sure where and when his elder sibling slipped into the surreal universe of “sovereign citizens.” But he believes his descent into right-wing extremism happened during his long residence in the woods of Alaska.

“He’s been up living life on his own for so long that he just doesn’t see it – that there’s rules that the rest of us follow for good reason,” Marcus Cole of Woodinville, Wash., told Hatewatch. “He’s used to just taking care of himself, and doesn’t understand why anyone wants to keep him from doing as he likes.”

Brent Cole remains in the custody of the Nevada County sheriff’s office while recovering from his wounds at a medical center in Roseville, where he is listed in stable condition. The Bureau of Land Management ranger and California Highway Patrol officer who both were wounded in the confrontation on Saturday near Edwards Crossing in the Sierra Nevadas were treated and released.

The Cole brothers grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the son of a nuclear engineer employed at what was then called the National Reactor Testing Station (later the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory). Brent Cole was one of the first graduates of the new Skyline High School in 1971, and promptly moved away – to the Sierra Nevadas, not far, his brother says, from the place where he got into the shootout.

Brent was married there a few years after high school, and the couple moved to Texas and had a son. They also shortly divorced, after which he moved to Alaska and took up life in the woods. He made his living through construction work.

“I visited him in Alaska in 1997,” says Marc Cole. “He was living in a cabin on the tundra and we had to hike a couple miles in across the swamp. I have a picture of him in his environment.  This is how he lived for 20 years, in a cabin far away from the modern world.”

Marc believes that the solitary lifestyle, combined with a contrarian and pugnacious personality, played crucial roles in shaping his brother’s radical political views.

“He got into this stuff because he has always liked being argumentative and contrary,” Marc said, adding that he doesn’t tolerate the radical talk when the two visit now. “But I figure, you know, he’s allowed to believe what he wants to believe. And he’s used to living in the outback and being that wild man.

“He’s frustrated. He’d like to think that his existence matters, like all of us do, and so he gets out there on these controversies thinking he’ll be like a beacon for the rest of us. He believes he’s going to do the world good. He thinks he’s going to save the world.”

Photo by Marc Cole of brother Brent working on a family home

Indeed, that kind of delusion of heroism is a theme running through much of Brent Cole’s online postings, including his page at the conspiracist United Truth Seekers site, where he declared that his purpose was to save the U.S. Constitution: “Let us document the breach of the terms of  that written contract, and seek redress, in international court if need be, against the United States (Company Corporation) for breach of the contract formed with the people .”

At another site, Cole declared himself a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States.”

Brent Cole moved back to the continental United States three years ago, after inflicting permanent damage on three of his fingers in a frostbite incident. His brother says he mostly lived by camping around the country in different locales during that time. In January of this year, he was arrested on weapons charges after sheriff’s deputies found a concealed gun in his pickup in a campground.

Cole responded by filing a series of classic “sovereign citizen” pseudo-legal filings. “I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the United States of America,” he wrote.

“Those postings make him look a lot worse than he really is,” says Marc Cole. He hosted his elder brother at his home this April for a couple of weeks, and Brent was instrumental in helping Marc fix a rotted deck in the back of Marc’s son’s home.

“Brent lives a simple life and doesn’t have many needs,” says Marc.  “If he could, he would spend all of his time surfing the Internet looking for causes to champion, and then go post about them, never leaving the house.”

He says that he isn’t aware of anything racist or anti-Semitic in his brother’s rantings, though in fact, as Devin Burghart detailed at IREHR, his Facebook postings are littered with anti-Semitic conspiracies and racist posts about President Obama.

“He isn’t a hateful person despite the causes he post about,” says Marc Cole. “He is looking to champion the little guy and fight the big corporations. In that he is quick to accept any conspiracy theory.”
Mostly, Marc Cole wants the world to know that despite it all, his brother isn’t a monster: “He still carries his guns like he was in Alaskan and is not sensitive to how tense things have gotten in view of all of the mass shootings and rhetoric. But he is not a terrorist.”

He says none of it would have happened if his brother hadn’t gotten into trouble over guns with local authorities. “I don’t know if he would have even been in the area if he hadn’t had the earlier confrontation. He was charged with misdemeanor possession of a loaded firearm at a campground. I had to bail him out on that one.

“In April, he was here visiting me, and he went down to Texas with his son and visited his grandkids, and I doubt he would even have gone back to California except that they had his guns, and it was just a misdemeanor. And they offered to let him plead guilty to something and they’d give him his guns back, but he had this thing in mind that he was going to prove that their jury instructions were illegal or something.”

Marc Cole says he’s tried reading his brother’s “gobbledygook” filings and can’t comprehend them, let alone what his brother sees in them. For the family members of people drawn into the sovereign citizen movement, this is a common refrain.

Full disclosure: The author attended school with Marc Cole in Idaho Falls, from fourth grade through high school.

‘Sovereign Citizen’ Wounded in California Campground Shootout with BLM Ranger, Highway Patrol Officer

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


A self-described “sovereign citizen” camping out in the woods of northern California was arrested following an armed confrontation with two law enforcement officers this weekend. All three men were wounded in the ensuing shootout.

The shootout began, according to news reports, when a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger contacted the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and asked for backup at a wooded campground near Nevada City, a few miles west of Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border, as part of an investigation involving vehicles at the site. As the two officers headed into the brush and began approaching a remote makeshift campsite, they were confronted by 60-year-old Brent Douglas Cole.

Brent Douglas Cole

Gunfire was exchanged, and Cole was hit by several rounds. The BLM ranger was wounded by a gunshot to his right shoulder, and the CHP officer suffered minor injuries. The two officers were treated and released at local hospitals; Cole remains in custody at Sutter Roseville Medical Center in Roseville, where he is listed in stable condition in the intensive care unit.

Cole, according to The Union in Nevada City, has had numerous run-ins with law enforcement, including several other weapons-related incidents. The most recent of these occurred on Jan. 26, when he was arrested by Nevada County sheriff’s deputies and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.

Cole also has a history of indulging in far-right conspiracies on the Internet. At one site, he described himself as a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States.”

On his Facebook page, he has posted a number of conspiracy-related stories, including pieces describing the so-called “Bilderburger conspiracy” to control the world and various “Federal Reserve” conspiracy pieces. Likewise, his Twitter account is full of posts with a similar conspiracist bent.

After his January arrest, Cole flooded the Nevada County Court clerk with a blizzard of nonsensical, pseudo-legal filings – a typical tactic of so-called “sovereign citizens.” In one of these, Cole spelled his name in lowercase letters and called himself “a natural born, flesh and blood, living man.”


Another of these documents claimed that his right to own weapons is guaranteed under the Second Amendment and that those rights nullify California gun laws.

“Officers acted without warrant or any probable cause to seize my person using a swat team style assault, and then started looking for something to charge me with,” he complained. “I was attacked and molested, unconstitutionally arrested, unlawfully incarcerated, repeatedly intimidated and coerced to plead guilty to having committed a crime, held in secret for five days, and my property and liberty taken from me since January 26, 2014. I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the United States of America.”

As soon as he recovers from his injuries, Cole will likely get to work on a new batch of “sovereign” legal filings.

West Virginia Klan Leader Claims Returning Military Will Help Them Train for ‘the Upcoming Battle’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


A British television crew filming a gathering of Ku Klux Klansmen in West Virginia this spring recorded one of the group’s leaders discussing a plan to use returning military veterans to train KKK members in combat techniques for “the upcoming battle” – presumably the “coming race war” that the Klan and other white supremacists have long predicted.

The nine-minute video documentary by Barcroft TV is a striking portrait of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization based in Pelham, N.C., with chapters throughout the South, including this one in West Virginia. It includes some appalling insights into their children’s upbringing and their certainty about a looming social apocalypse.

But most disturbing is the segment in which the hooded Klansman leading the rally tells the crowd about the group’s future plans:

We’re looking at something a little different for probably the next couple of years, trying to get our men and women ready for the upcoming battle that we’re about to take upon us. And this is something that no Klan has ever done, and we’re going to start it. All our boys are finally coming back home from the military, which is good. And we’re getting a lot more military members joining, which is good, as we’re going to start doing a lot more military training.

Now that we got our Marines and our Army back, they’re going to start showing us how to skin, how to survive off the land. We’re going to try to move in another direction with the Loyal White Knights, and that is starting armed training, hand-to-hand combat, and stuff like that, just for the upcoming battle.

The Klansman is not correct, of course – this has been attempted previously by other KKK organizations. Indeed, the presence of far-right extremists within the military is a longstanding problem and frequently involves a Klan recruiter joining the armed forces.
The plan described by the Klan leader in the video is exactly the type of scenario that the Department of Homeland Security warned about in a 2009 law enforcement bulletin:

Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

At the time, the conservative media erupted in anger, wildly distorting the bulletin’s contents on one talk show after another, notably at Fox News. The reportage there – or more precisely, the shouting from their pundits – described the bulletin as specifically singling out veterans and targeting them for suspicion of far-right extremism; claimed that there was no similar bulletin regarding Islamist extremists from the DHS (there was); and said the report was based on nothing but speculation. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly said the report was “unnecessary,” cooked up by a bevy of myopic “far-left” bureaucrats who chose to ignore Al Qaeda while pinning the terrorism label on ordinary conservatives.

Eventually, the furor drove DHS to disavow the report and discontinue its task force assigned to monitoring right-wing extremism. In the ensuing years, the DHS bulletin has nonetheless proven to have been remarkably on-target, particularly in the wake of such domestic terrorism incidents involving former military members as the massacre at a Sikh temple in 2012 and the formation of the murderous “FEAR Militia” in Georgia, all of whom fit the bulletin’s profile perfectly.

The Southern Poverty Law Center first drew attention to the issue in 1986, and after a period during which the military subsequently clamped down on extremists within its ranks, the problem returned during the Iraq War, as a 2006 SPLC report explained in detail. A later report in 2008 explored how the problem was worsening with racist skinheads signing up for service overseas.

The FBI drew up its own assessment in July 2008, and pinpointed the potential danger then: “The military training veterans bring to the [white supremacist] movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”

As criminologist Brian Levin explains in his interview with the Barcroft TV reporters: “I think the real danger does not lie with the Klan being some kind of widespread army that has tentacles across the United States. That’s not going to happen. But what we do have to worry about is individuals, autonomous cells, or duos committing terrorist acts on their own because they get training, they get inspiration, and they get knowhow from being in the orbit of these hate groups,” Levin said. “Loose radicals coming out of that orbit represent a threat of continuing terrorism here in the United States.”

Near the end of the video, one of the Klansmen expresses his own hopes for what they all call “the upcoming battle”: “White people, we’re all getting tired of the government,” he says. “And pretty soon you’re gonna see the government collapse. And when the government keeps on sending their money over to Israel and it finally collapses, you’re gonna see the Klan take it back, and we’re gonna make this nation the way it needs to be.”