Oin Oakstar, 43, Key Figure in Shawna Forde Trial, Found Dead in Homeless Encampment

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The death of Oin Oakstar at the age of 43 was probably not a surprise to anyone familiar with the Arizona man’s drug-and-alcohol-fueled lifestyle.

What surprises many, however, is where he died: In a homeless encampment under a freeway overpass in Everett, Wash., more than a thousand miles from Arivaca, his longtime home near the border.

Police found Oakstar’s body on Wednesday in a tent near an area frequented by homeless people, on railroad property near Interstate 5. There were no obvious signs of how he died, though natural causes are suspected, and police say they are awaiting word on an autopsy, the Everett Herald reported.


Oakstar lived for many years in Arivaca, where he worked for a number of drug-smuggling operations and avidly partook in the products he sold, as he later testified in Pima County Superior Court. It was also in Arivaca that, in 2009, Oakstar met Shawna Forde, a self-proclaimed leader of a “Minuteman” border-watch operation in the Sonoran desert— Forde, as it happens, grew up and lived in Everett at the time she became involved in the Minuteman movement.

Forde, a 41-year-old former hairdresser and teen prostitute, who led a group of her “Minutemen”—aided by one of Oakstar’s employers, an Arivaca man named Albert Gaxiola—to the home of another local smuggler, a man named Raul “Junior” Flores, in the early-morning hours of May 30, 2009. There, Forde ordered her gunman, a Washington white supremacist named Jason Eugene Bush, to shoot Flores, his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia. Gonzalez survived, and, in a dramatic scene, eventually drove the invaders from her home with gunfire.

Oakstar was arrested the next day by Pima County Sheriff’s Office detectives on suspicion of involvement in the murders. Based in part on information that Oakstar gave them, detectives were able to arrest Forde, Bush, and Gaxiola within two weeks of the killings. Oakstar’s testimony in 2011, describing the events leading up to the killings, also helped put all three of those suspects away.
Forde and Bush are now on Arizona’s Death Row, and Gaxiola is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.

As Oakstar described it, Forde wanted to raid a “drug house” in the smuggling corridor where Arivaca sits and steal the smugglers’ drugs and money, all part of her plan to buy a borderland ranch and convert it into a training compound for her outfit, the Minuteman American Defense. Gaxiola obligingly provided her with the name of Flores—a local rival—and told her that there were several million dollars in the house. (The home invaders came away with nothing but handfuls of Gonzalez’ jewelry.)

Oakstar, who had a long criminal history related to drug dealing, testified that he had driven Forde and her gang past the Flores’ home earlier in the day. But when they came by to pick him up at his home for the robbery, they found him incapacitated by alcohol. Oakstar said it was a way out, since he thought he smelled a setup in Forde’s invasion plan, and he wanted nothing to do with hitting a rival where his family lived.

“Women and children are not part of it,” he testified. “There’s no reason to bring them into it.”

According to the Herald, Oakstar had been in the Pacific Northwest since at least this spring. He had been arrested in April 2014 by Seattle police for investigation for burglary and listed his address then as a Seattle homeless shelter.

Border Militiamen Detaining Immigrants, Sowing Fear Among Camp’s Neighbors

The border warriors of Camp LoneStar, heading out on patrol. Credit: Facebook

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Border militiaman K.C. Massey III was slightly apologetic about detaining three border-crossing immigrants during one of his outfit’s vigilante patrols awhile back—handcuffing the men behind their backs with zip ties—along the Rio Grande in southern Texas.

“Sorry we had to ‘Detain’ them,” Massey, one of the leaders of the militiamen that began gathering several weeks ago in Texas, wrote in a Facebook comment after video of the detentions was posted online. “[B]ut they were wore out and just fell down and gave up while the other 7-8 ran like gazelles!”

As the post explained, the militiamen detained the people—described as Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican—after they encountered a group of about 11 border crossers, most of whom took off through the brush. The three men they kept were “ziptied, debriefed, and given water,” and U.S. Border Patrol officers eventually arrived and took them away.

“WE DO NOT AIM TO DETAIN, we would much rather send them back into the river into Mexico and dissuade them and the cartel from crossing on the property we patrol,” the post explained. “All encounters were conducted in a humanitarian, professional fashion. Stay vigilant. Thank you for your support.”

But behind the guise of humanitarian treatment was a not-so-subtle smirking contempt. “One of the guys pissed himself!” remarked Massey. Another chimed in, “Dude pissed himself bad.”

A couple of Camp LoneStar's finest. Credit: Facebook.

Welcome to Camp LoneStar, a border militia outpost on the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas where antigovernment “Patriots,” heavily armed and hunting for immigrants, have seemingly taken the law into their own hands in recent weeks and made residents near their operation increasingly fearful and resentful.

The camp, a makeshift encampment, lies on the 21-acre property of a longtime Brownsville-area rancher named Cuban “Rusty” Monsees. Most of the participants pitch tents or park their vehicles there, then go out on patrols at nighttime or afoot in groups, always loaded with a variety of weapon. During the day, they use all-terrain vehicles to prowl along the border fence line or drive to overlooks along the Rio Grande, where they can catch people swimming across the river.

Indeed–just as the detention video post described–another video, posted by Massey on his Facebook page, showed the militiamen forcing border crossers who swam to the American side of the river to retrieve their belongings and swim back to the Mexico side. The video has no audio, but similar previous video from Camp LoneStar included the verbal harassment the border watchers were shouting at the swimmers.

Since it began, there has been a rotating cast of characters at the encampment. Initially, the self-described “commanding officer” at Camp LoneStar was an Arizona militiaman named Joe O’Shaugnessy, but he was eventually replaced by the more strident K.C. Massey.

Nearly all of the reporting on supposed militia activity on the Mexico border in Texas has emanated from the Monsees property, it seems. That includes early reporting from radio host Pete Santilli, as well as stories from the San Antonio Express-News and from Reuters, whose report included a detailed video profile. More recently, reporters from the Texas Observer spent time at the camp and came away with a scathing profile of Massey and his border watchmen.

The portrait of Camp LoneStar that has emerged in recent weeks is not pretty, depicting a camp awash in paranoia and testosterone, with feuds among participants and conspiracy theories flitting about like moths.




Massey and his fellow border watchers––including Monsees—are particularly paranoid about the Mexican drug cartels they claim are responsible for most of the human trafficking they observe—a claim that remains unsubstantiated. They insist on maintaining their anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the cartels; Massey told the Observer reporters that even disclosing how many men were there could endanger them.

“We don’t want cartel operatives knowing about our operation,” he explained. “Let’s just say if there were 10 of us, then the cartel would send 20 hit men to take us out.”

Likewise, Monsees explained to Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers in a phone interview that he was “No. 5” on the cartels’ hit list, a dubious story he has repeated to most of the “Patriots” in the camp. Monsees and his campers also have been promoting the claim that the Border Patrol has been arresting a large number of Muslims—including terrorists on the Most Wanted List—and then keeping the matter hushed up. This story has gained wide circulation among Tea Party members nationally, though more recently the concern has turned to paranoid worries that members of the ISIS have appeared at the southern border.




Indeed, one of the former participants at the camp—a “Patriot” named Rob Chupp, an Indiana man who was a participant in one of Santilli’s multiple interviews in weeks ago—said that he and others decided to leave the camp when it became clear that the overseers were not particular about whether or not felons could participate in the camp, nor whether illegal weapons might be in use there. It was a Camp LoneStar participant, John Frederick Forrester, who drew gunfire from a Border Patrol officer in pursuit of a fugitive recently. Forrester, in fact, is a convicted felon.
Chupp, who was involved in organizing an ill-fated “Patriot” border-crossing, said he and a number of other border watchers pulled out because of concerns about the legality of the operation.

“After the whole shooting thing, we figured out that some of them were felons,” Chupp told Hatewatch, “We asked several of the guys to leave that we found out were felons. Because yeah, we have a Second Amendment to protect your right to bear arms, but we are also a nation of laws, and there’s a reason we don’t let felons own guns. … And it came to be a problem, and it was loud, and ‘We don’t care what the gun laws are,’ and ‘If we want to have this weapon even if it’s illegal, we’re gonna have it.’ It just turned south, and we pulled out.”

Their neighbors are concerned too. Maria Cordero, an ACLU attorney whose home is just down the road from Monsees’ property, told The Observer that everyone in the neighborhood is fearful about the men in camouflage patrolling near their homes. “We don’t know who they are,” Cordero said. “Do they have criminal records? People are afraid, but more than that they are confused.”

Cordero’s husband described a neighborhood full of fearful families, unable to distinguish between the cartels, the militiamen, and real law enforcement.

“We don’t know who these people are. They’re carrying high-powered weapons. It makes us feel less safe, not more safe to have them here,” he said. “I just hope they leave soon.”

County Auctions Off Property of Washington ‘Sovereign Citizen’

David Darby. (The Columbian/Zachary Kaufman)

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

It may have taken three weeks, three auctions and a handful of headaches, but the Clark County, Wash., Treasurer’s Office was finally able to auction off antigovernment “sovereign citizen” David Darby’s property this week.

Trudy Rouse, a spokesperson for the treasurer’s office, told Hatewatch that the property had been successfully auctioned to a buyer from Richland for $52,445 on Tuesday.

“They’re kind of wondering, why would I jeopardize it for $22,000,” the amount in back taxes that he owes,” Darby told Hatewatch. “The reason is, I own the land. They did not even put a lien against my land. They just said that I owed money and then auctioned it off. Well, they can’t really do that. So I’m going to take it into court.”

He added: “I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t think I could win.”


Darby, an elderly man who has been active in far-right politics in Clark County since the 1990s, when he organized militias locally, says he believes filing the federal suit will entitle him to force his case into a “common law court.”

“That’s why they don’t want me to come in to court, because they know I will bring common law into the court,” he said. “Once we get into court, the judge is going to have to handle the court in the common law mode.”

Darby’s fight with Clark County dates back to 2009, when he stopped paying taxes after, he says, he discovered the “truth” about becoming a “sovereign citizen” and the supposed illegitimacy of both federal and state governments. Darby claims that Washington state’s original constitution, drafted in 1878 and containing clauses that negate state and local taxes, is the only legitimate ruling document for Washington, and not the 1889 constitution now observed by the state.

Darby’s property first was auctioned on Sept. 16, ending a long legal battle in which Darby’s claims were largely rebuked. However, that buyer turned out to be a friend of Darby’s, who attempted to pay for the property in cash, was refused, and then backed out when fees were added to his check payment.

That buyer, a Vancouver man named Richard Grady, told Hatewatch that he believed Darby had a legitimate claim. He said he had known Darby for several years because they both like to work on cars—Darby is a noted Jaguar collector—and “because he has been involved in the sovereign citizens movement.”

“He has a valid, legitimate claim based upon the original Washington constitution, and I agree with that argument because I’ve been involved in a similar case in Oregon,” Grady told Hatewatch.

A second auction was held on Sept. 23. Clark County Treasurer Doug Lasher said that the second buyers backed out after driving out from the Pasco area to view the property, telling him that the place reminded them of the horror film “Wrong Turn” (in which several young people become lost in a wooded area and area attacked by cannibals). “Their kids were crying because they didn’t want to be there,” he said.

Darby says that he is waiting for the new buyer’s title to become official, at which point he intends to sue Clark County for damages in federal court, which is what he claims to have wanted all along.

“I’ve got to get ahold of the new buyer, and I will sit down with him and show him that the county fraudulently sold the land,” he told Hatewatch. “They did not explain that there are two similar lawsuits over this, and he is going to have to prove that the deed of trust or anything in the color of law will actually trump a land patent.”

Land patents, a bogus legal technique once promoted by the Posse Comitatus as a way to erase farmers’ debts, are now widely used by the sovereign citizen’s movement.

In 2009, Darby filed a number of “sovereign citizen” documents with Clark County that he claims established his “land patent” on his property, something explicitly recognized under the 1878 Washington constitution that Darby claims is the state’s real ruling document.

What’s next? Darby earlier told Hatewatch that he would give up the property if he lost his case in federal court, and would not engage in armed action as other sovereign citizens have: “I’m not going to do anything radical,” he said. “I have no intention of anything like that.”

Organizer Behind ‘Wisconsin Poll Watcher Militia’ Says It Was A Hoax

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A self-described “militia” that supposedly was organizing to monitor polling places in Wisconsin to prevent felonious Democrats and African Americans from voting has turned out to be an apparent hoax.

The owner of the Facebook page that announced the “Wisconsin Poll Watcher Militia” recently changed the name of the page to “You’ve Been Trolled By Journalists With Zero Credibility” and has filled the page with posts describing how he created the page as a way to “troll liberals.”

The appearance of the Facebook page last week prompted a report at PoliticsUSA describing their efforts to organize Wisconsin conservatives to monitor the political activities of supposed felons. That in turn prompted news stories in the Madison Capital Times and elsewhere describing the “militia” and its activities, which included a supposed training session last Saturday.

Early this week, however, the page—originally a “Justice for Wisconsin” Facebook site—changed its content to make clear there was no militia, though it still claimed to be organizing poll-watching activities directed at Democrats.

Several posts made it clear that the “militia” was “fictional” and, indeed, just a one-person operation intended to spark liberal ire:

How to create a militia: start a facebook page

How to piss off a bunch of pathetic liberals: specifically name the page something to do with a militia and prey on them like the stooges they are.

You clowns are a joke and your “media” is a joke. Fact check? Why bother? Report fiction as news! Bloggers and idiotic fake journalists have ZERO CREDIBILITY these days.

To those people who do not realize they are easily manipulated, I hope this is a wake up call. You’re f’n morons!!!!

Earlier posts on the page described the “Wisconinsin Poll Watcher Militia” as “a group of individuals who are concerned about the amount of outstanding warrants and are going to take any opportunity available to get some of these people rounded up and thrown into jail.”

As the week went along, the person running the page announced that the group was changing its name to “the Wisconsin Association of Polling Place Monitors.” It described tactics for harassing people suspected of voting with felony convictions. “Do not hesitate to drop instigators like a sack of potatoes,” it advised.

And the page claimed that the organizers indeed had held a training session on Saturday: “We held the meeting at a member’s house and it was done through private invites only. You silly fools who thought we would go to a public restaurant so you weasels could harass us into punching your faces in…. didn’t happen!”

Written queries from Hatewatch to the page’s anonymous owner went unanswered.

Whitewashing History

The Sand Creek Massacre

I see that a claque of conservatives in charge of Jefferson County, Colorado's education board have decreed that learning about the complications and ugly side of American history will not be tolerated any longer:

The materials should not include selections or works that encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law. Violence, if it appears, should be treated in the context of its cause and consequence. It should not appear for reasons of unwholesome excitement or sensationalism.

(i) Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.

This is probably the kind of history they are wanting to eliminate:

--

The same year the Yana were exterminated [1864], settlers in Colorado, where gold had been discovered in 1858, embarked on a similar program. In this case, the tribes against whom they were arrayed, particularly the Cheyenne and Sioux, were considerably larger and more warlike than the Yana. Thus the conflicts with whites were even more inevitable, and again, the pattern repeated: depredations by whites provoked violent, often murderous retaliation from Indians, which in turn sparked wanton slaughter of any Indian in the vicinity.

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver led the campaign to wipe out local Indians, editorializing in March 1863: "They are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth." After a series of skirmishes and killings, the News, in August 1864 proclaimed that August 1864 settlers and troops must "go for them, their lodges, squaws and all."

Col. John Chivington

Enter John Chivington, a Methodist minister and self-proclaimed Indian hater, who helped Colorado Gov. John Evans organize a "volunteer militia" constituted once again of "concerned citizens" whose characters were formed more by saloons than by churches. As Dee Brown notes in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chivington made a public speech in Denver while organizing this militia in which he "advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even infants: 'Nits make lice!' he declared."

With his volunteer army in place, Chivington set out "on the warpath," as he put it, ordering his men: "Kill all the Indians you come across." When Indians attempted to negotiate, he was implacable, saying that he was not instructed to make peace, but only war.

When Cheyenne chief Black Kettle's peaceful band (which included some Arapahoes) traveled through Colorado en route to their new reservation in Oklahoma, they reported to Army officials at Fort Lyon, intent on avoiding conflict. Encamped at a site along a stream called Sand Creek, Black Kettle himself traveled to the fort in mid-November in hopes of securing their safe passage. The fort's new commander, Major Scott J. Anthony, met with Black Kettle in what appeared to be a friendly exchange.

As Brown describes it, "Several officers who were present at the meeting between Black Kettle and Anthony testified afterward that Anthony assured the Cheyennes that if they returned to their camp at Sand Creek they would be under the protection of Fort Lyon."

Whether Anthony was aware of Chivington's intentions or not -- and the evidence suggests he was -- his assurance had the effect of making Black Kettle's band sitting ducks. So certain were they of their security that they did not even set out watchmen to guard the camp at night.

Geoffrey Ward, writing in The West, describes what happened next:

Chivington and some 700 volunteers arrived at Fort Lyon on November 26, 1864, eager for a fight before their hundred-day term of enlistment ran out. Some officers protested that to attack the peaceable encampment would betray the army's pledge of safety. "Damn any man that sympathized with Indians," Chivington said. "I have come to kill Indians and believe it right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven ..."

At dawn on November 29, 1864, Chivington and seven hundred men, many of them full of whiskey they had swallowed to keep them warm during the icy all-night ride, reached the edge of Black Kettle's sleeping camp. "Kill and scalp all," Chivington told his men, "big and little; nits make lice." His men needed little encouragement.

One of William Bent's sons, Robert, was riding with them, commandeered against his will to show the way to the Cheyenne camp. Three of Bent's other children -- Charles, Julia, and George -- were staying in it. George Bent watched the soldiers come:

From down the creek a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot ... more soldiers could be seen making for the Indian pony herds to the south of the camp; in the camps themselves all was confusion and noise -- men, women, and children rushing out of the lodges partly dressed; women and children screaming at the sight of the troops; men running back into the lodges for their arms ... Black Kettle had a large American flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge, holding the pole, with the flag fluttering in the gray light of the winter dawn ...

All the time Black Kettle kept calling out not to be frightened; that the camp was under protection and there was no danger.

Robert Bent was watching it too:

I saw the American flag waving and heard Black Kettle tell the Indians to stand around the flag, and they were huddled -- men, women, and children. This was when we were within fifty yards of the Indians. I also saw a white flag raised. These flags were in so conspicuous a position that they must have been seen ... I think there were six hundred Indians in all ... [T]he rest of the men were away from camp hunting ...

The volunteers began firing into the lodges. Warriors did all they could to defend their families. "I never saw more bravery displayed by any set of people on the face of the earth than by these Indians," a regular soldier recalled. "They would charge on the whole company singly, detemined to kill someone before being killed themselves ... We, of course, took no prisoners."

"After the firing," Robert Bent remembered,

the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. I saw one squaw lying on the bank whose leg had been broken by a shell; a soldier came up to her with a drawn saber; she raised her arm to protect herself, when he struck, breaking her arm; she rolled over and raised her other arm, when he struck, breaking it, and then he left her without killing her. There seemed to be indisriminate slaughter of men, women and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were killed. ...

"In going over the battleground the next day," a regular army lieutenant testified later,

I did not see a body of a man, women, or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner. ... I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick; I heard another say that he had cut the fingers off an Indian to get the rings on his hand; according to the best of my knowledge and belief these atrocities that were committed were with the knowledge of J.M. Chivington, and I do not know of his taking any measures to prevent them; I heard of one instance of a child a few months old being thrown in a feedbox of a wagon, and after being carried some distance left on the ground to perish; I also heard numerous instances in which white men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in ranks.

Chivington and his men returned to Denver in triumph, claiming to have killed five hundred warriors -- instead of ninety-eight women and children and a handful of mostly old men. The Rocky Mountain News pronounced it a "brilliant feat of arms." "All did nobly," Chivington said, and one evening during intermission at the Denver opera house, one hundred Cheyenne scalps were put on display while the orchestra played patriotic airs and the audience stood to applaud the men who had taken them.

As word of these atrocities got out, there was a perhaps predictable outcry from white Americans with some vestige of human decency; but their outrage, as always, had no effect. The killers were downright gleeful about their "victory." David E. Stannard, in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, notes that the Rocky Mountain News declared that "Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east."

Still, there was an outcry in Congress, and a Senate report eventually declared Chivington's "battle" what it really was: "a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty." As Stannard notes [p. 134]:

One of them, a senator who visited the site of the massacre and "picked up the skulls of infants whose milk-teeth had not yet been shed," later reported that the concerned men of Congress had decided to confront Colorado's governor and Colonel Chivington openly on the matter, and so assembled their committee and the invited general public in the Denver Opera House. During the course of discussion and debate, someone raised a question: Would it be best, henceforward, to try to "civilize" the Indians or simply to exterminate them? Whereupon, the senator wrote in a letter to a friend, "there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield -- a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the opera house -- 'EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!' "

The committee, apparently, was impressed. Nothing was ever done to Chivington, who took his fame and exploits on the road as an after-dinner speaker. After all, as President Theodore Roosevelt said later, the Sand Creek massacre was "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier."

Trusting the word of such men was obviously a foolhardy proposition, but the Indians had little choice if they chose not to fight. As Black Kettle had found, making peace and trusting the word of white men was a mistake with broadly fatal consequences.

Incredibly, Black Kettle managed to survive the Sand Creek massacre, and his wife managed to survive nine gunshot wounds. But four years later, in 1868, they did not manage to survive their encounter with General Custer.
---

The only reason that conservatives want to eliminate students from learning about episodes such as this is that they make clear that the white-bread narrative of valiant white pioneers forging a greater America is a farce. Learning about Sand Creek might make young white Coloradans uncomfortable, just as learning about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II -- another subject likely to be dropped -- does.

And then these same folks turn around and complain about how education is being degraded these days.

Antigovernment Protest to ‘Shut Down All Ports’ Fizzles, Leaving Law Enforcement Waiting

Sheriff Omar Lucio at the Veterans International Bridge border crossing on Saturday.
(Credit: Maricela Rodriguez/Valley Morning Star)

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The most recent attempt to protest federal immigration policies by shutting down the nation’s ports of entry along the Mexico border has, to no one’s great surprise, turned out to be another fizzle.

Calling itself a coalition of antigovernment “Patriot” groups angry about immigration enforcement, “Shut Down All Ports of Entry” had attempted to organize a protest Saturday morning at a number of the United States’ border crossings wherein participants would drive up to the port, turn off their trucks and cars, and walk away from them.

But on Friday, the organization took down its Facebook page and removed all content from its website except for a notice announcing that the protest had been cancelled out of fears of retaliation by the drug cartels.

“There has been an unsubstantiated threat of mass violence to attendees, along with very suspicious activity on the Facebook site,” wrote organizer Satsyi Barth. “These two items are more than enough for me to immediately stop any protest that was going to occur. Your lives, and the lives of our law enforcement, are more important than any protest.”

According to one news report, however, a small group of six protesters comprising three small cars did arrive at the port of entry in Brownsville on Saturday.

Local law-enforcement officials, meanwhile, were less than happy about the whole affair. Omar Lucio, the sheriff of Cameron County, Texas, told the Valley Morning Star in Brownsville that he and state and federal law-enforcement officials had prepared a significant response on Saturday to the protest, all for naught.

“We paid people overtime,” Lucio said. “Yes, I hate to waste that kind of money. As law enforcement, you never know what’s going to come up. You use these resources and other resources. We take care of people in the U.S.”

Lucio said that about 30 sheriff’s deputies, including a 15-man SWAT team, and a number of Texas Rangers and FBI officers were present at the Veterans and Gateway bridge crossings on Saturday.

It is unclear whether actual threats against the protest were delivered by Mexican drug cartels, or there simply was not enough support for the protest. Though the organizers called themselves a “coalition” of “Patriot” groups, Hatewatch could not find any other groups aligning themselves with the protest or publicly supporting it. Organizers told Hatewatch that members of other “Patriot” groups planned to participate, but could not name them.

Barth told the right-wing Breitbart website that the protest shut down because of threats:

Cartel threatening mass blood shed. One of the guys in Texas was followed into a Walmart, on the freeway, then approached at his hotel. At the same time, I got a bunch of requests to join the [Facebook] page from Sonora Mexico. I grabbed as many as I could, but realized it was getting out of control fast and I didn’t want them to see who the attendees were. This is after it was requested that we avoid certain areas, because of the recent border threats, unrelated to us. The cartel has people at every port listed..waiting for us, so I was told.

Two previous “Patriot” attempts at shutting down key U.S.-Mexico border crossings–one led by radio host Pete Santilli in July, and another in August by the Santilli-led “Border Convoy”–ended as non-events with similarly dismal turnout.

Antigovernment Group Tries to Organize Mass Shutdown of Ports of Entry on U.S.-Mexico Border

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A self-described coalition of antigovernment groups is hoping to organize yet another attempt at shutting down the U.S.-Mexico border at major commercial crossings this weekend, calling the event “Shut Down All Ports of Entry”.

Previous attempts at shutting down traffic at key border crossings this spring have ended in spectacular failure—notably radio host Pete Santilli’s attempt to shut down the crossing in Tijuana with bikers, as well as the “Border Convoy” last month, which culminated in a only a brief interruption at Brownsville, Texas.

But this particular attempt, scheduled to take place Saturday, has set off warnings among law enforcement personnel, including a local sheriff’s office in Texas and Border Patrol officials, who say they are prepared for just such an attempt.

A spokesman for event told Hatewatch that, despite concerns, the protest will not be violent or involve any radical behavior. “We have told everybody that’s called, keep your military gear, your rifles, and that stuff at home,” Rob Chupp said in a phone interview. “This is not a military operation, this is a peaceful protest.”

The group’s Facebook page details their plans:

We are a representation of Americans who are unsettled and deeply concerned with our current Administration, in all branches of Federal and State governments. Our mission is to Shut Down, every United States’ Port of Entry on the Southern Border, until our Goals are met.

The website and a message at the group’s hotline asserts that the protesters will remain in place until their demands are met. There are eight “non-negotiable” demands, including the termination of all medical and financial for non-documented immigrants.

According to a report from Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times, both the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency are aware of the planned protest.

“CBP has contingency plans ready to put into place in the event of any protest or a temporary blockage of traffic at our international border crossings,” CBP spokesman Ralph DeSio told the Times.

A report from a southern Texas TV station also warned that “militias” were planning to block traffic on the international bridges this weekend, and quoted Rio Grande Mayor Ruben Villarreal as he voiced his concern.

“What can we expect? I don’t know. The unknown becomes an issue that we really got to prepare for,” Villarreal said, noting that any shutdown would have significant impacts on businesses:  “If they’re here to block traffic, to be a hindrance between traffic and the port of entry, that causes a problem. It’s a huge safety issue.”

However, Rob Chupp, an Indiana man who participated in the border militia watch at “Camp Lone Star” in Texas last month, insists that there are no militias directly involved in the protest.

"We are not a militia group,” Chupp told Hatewatch. “None of the organizers or the event staff is part of a militia. We have housewives, I’m a business owner. That’s who we have. We don’t have militia.”

Chupp claims that authorities are well aware of their plans and have actually been supportive: “We’ve talked to Homeland Security, Border Patrol, Texas Rangers, and for the most part, everybody’s on board with us,” he said. “Border Patrol is happy that we’re doing it. We have sheriffs that are telling us, ‘OK, here’s where you’ve gotta go, this is what you’ve gotta do. Don’t worry about this port, this is a better port.’ So we have a lot of support across the board.”

The shutdown protest appears to be the brainchild of a California woman named Stasyi Barth, a self-described 41-year-old disabled housewife and mother of three from Lake Elsinore, who says she has become increasingly concerned about immigration and decided to organize citizens to stop it.

However, while they describe themselves as “coalition” of Patriot groups, Chupp could not name any other organizations that have actually signed on to support their Saturday protest. Instead, he indicated that people involved in other Patriot groups such as the Oath Keepers and anti-immigration groups such as Overpasses for America would be there as participants.

“We’re coming together as The People,” Chupp said. “We’re not coming together as any particular group. We don’t want to say, OK, here’s this group and this group and this group. … Because once you start naming this person or that person, it becomes about them. We want it to be about our national security and our sovereignty. It’s about the people in general.”

Barth said that the plan is for participants to simply arrive at the border, get in the requisite traffic lanes, and then turn off their cars and walk away.

“You get out of your car and take your keys with you,” she told the Times last week from her home. “You stand there and wave your American flag and try to get the message to D.C. that they need to close our border.”

Cliven Bundy Stumps on Behalf of Nevada Fringe Party Candidate

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Though he has been largely exiled from the mainstream media in the wake of his nakedly racist remarks following the armed showdown he led against federal agents, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy manages to keep popping up on the political scene in Nevada, still spouting his far-right antigovernment “Patriot” views.

Most recently, Bundy made an appearance in Reno on behalf of Nevada Republican congressional candidate Russell Best, who is running for the state’s 4^th District congressional seat under the banner of the fringe Independent American Party.

The incumbent, first-term Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford – who demanded federal action when Bundy supporters reportedly began stopping residents at roadway checkpoints near the Bundy ranch – is favored to win, according to race handicappers, against GOP candidate Crescent Hardy and Best.
Bundy’s speech to the Reno campaign gathering was a fairly boilerplate affair: “Basically, fight for liberty and freedom, and we’re fighting against a federal government that’s overreached,” Bundy told the crowd, estimated at about 50 people, at the Bonanza Casino.

Later, he again told reporters for KRNV-TV that he still wanted to see local sheriffs disarming federal agents in their jurisdictions – and warned that armed revolution would follow if they failed to act.

“I did speak for ‘We the People’ when we said take away the arms from the federal government,” Bundy said. “Later I thought of that and each county sheriff should be taking these arms away from these federal bureaucracy. I did say if we don’t do that, if we don’t rein back this federal government, then we the people are going to have to fight we the people, and that would be a revolution that I sure don’t ever want to see happen.”

Bundy admitted to feeling cooped up at his ranch, even as the crowd of his Patriot supporters has dwindled in the wake of an outbreak of infighting.

“I can’t say I really enjoy it,” he said when asked how felt about being a national figure. “I fight for freedom and yet I feel like I’m sort of locked up in the surroundings and not much freedom for me and my family.”

Bundy, his sons, and a number of participants at the ranch standoff remain under investigation by the FBI for their potentially criminal behavior during the standoff

Washington State ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Plans Showdown Over His Property – But Only in Court, He Says

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

 Self-described “sovereign citizen” David Darby wants everyone to know that he has no intention of getting involved in any armed standoffs with any law enforcement officers from Clark County, Wash., where he lives. He says he just wants his day in court – even though, whenever he has had one of those, he has lost.

Most recently, the 69-year-old Darby – a longtime antigovernment “Patriot” movement activist, dating back to the 1990s, and political gadfly – was informed by a Superior Court judge that his 4.7-acre property in rural Amboy would be put up for auction, following foreclosure proceedings brought against him by Clark County for failure to pay his taxes.

“It’s all constitutional,” he insists. “Everything I’ve done is constitutional. If it’s not constitutional, then all they have to do is prove it. And I will stop this. I will pay the taxes. But because they have not done this, I would not pay the taxes. And I cannot get this into federal court until I am hurt. So once they actually sell my property, I’ve been hurt. Then I will file in federal court.”

Darby has only a few days left to wait. The auction of his property is scheduled to take place between 8 and 11 a.m. on Sept. 16.

Darby, claiming that he is a “citizen” exempt from such duties, stopped paying his taxes in 2008, beginning a long-running dispute with the Clark County Treasurer’s office that culminated in 2013 with foreclosure proceedings on his rural home – a mobile home on raised blocks — and its accompanying wooded acreage.

However, as Darby made clear back then, he purposely forced these proceedings as part of his strategy to get the issue of his claims to a “land patent” on the property heard in a federal court. “I’ve been setting up the strategy to do this because no one has ever gotten sovereign ownership of land in the courts,” Darby said. “The only way to set it up was to go into foreclosure. … This isn’t about my land; it’s about the [state] constitution.”

Indeed, Darby claims that the current Washington constitution, passed in 1889, is not valid – and that the state’s proper constitution is actually one that was drawn up in 1878, when statehood was first suggested. He also characterizes this document as explicitly creating sovereign citizenship for state residents, as well as outlawing property taxes and liens on property.

“We were already a state before they did the 1889 constitution,” he insists.

He claims he went through a complicated legal process of filing various affidavits and making public proclamations that resulted in him owning a “land patent” on his property.

“Anyone who buys my land has a big problem because I have a lawful title to my land,” he told a reporter.

Darby has been active in far-right circles in Washington state since the 1990s, when he was the Clark County representative of the U.S. Militia Association, a “constitutionalist” militia-organizing outfit directed by an Idaho man named Samuel Sherwood.

It was then, Darby told Hatewatch, that he first became interested in “common-law courts” and other sovereign citizenship theories. He says he was originally drawn to far-right “constitutionalist” legal theories by Sherwood and other far-right figures, but then became so thoroughly devoted to sovereign citizen theories.

“I found out about [sovereign citizenship] once I found out that the Constitution does not apply to U.S. citizens, it only applies to citizens of the United States of America, which ended in 1861 when martial law was instituted by Lincoln,” Darby says. “I’ve actually studied the law, the legislation, and I’ve been studying this now ever since those days, and I’ve figured it out for myself. It’s not that I’m listening to anybody else, I’ve figured it all out.”

Darby told reporter Tyler Graf of the Daily Columbian that anyone who buys the property will have to force him to leave. “We’ll have to see what happens,” Darby said. “I don’t plan on leaving. I don’t know what they’re going to try. … They know I am very serious about this. All I want is my constitutional rights protected, like every other citizen in Washington.”

That means the matter may eventually come down to a sheriff’s deputy arriving with an order to remove Darby. But Darby told Hatewatch that if matters get that far, he intends to leave peacefully.
“I’m not going to do anything radical or anything,” he avers. “I have no intention of anything like that.”

However, he said that things won’t get that far, because he intends to file a federal lawsuit against Clark County this week – as soon as they put his property up for auction: “I’m getting ready to file another suit, now that they’ve hurt me, in Superior Court,” he told Hatewatch.

Darby has written about his beliefs about sovereign citizenship at length and posted several lengthy exegeses on the Internet about them. According to a study published about his filings, Darby has claimed to have received financial backing from an anonymous East Coast organization.

Darby says he understands that people espousing sovereign citizen beliefs have gotten into armed standoffs and shootouts with law-enforcement officers over situations like his. Those people, he says, are not like him.

“The problem is that they don’t understand that the officers and all these are only doing what they’re told to do,” Darby says. “We understand that. We’re not going to have any armed confrontation. We don’t want anybody hurt. I would rather have my day in court. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Border Militiamen Complicate an Already Volatile Situation Along the Border

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Border militiamen like to tell the public that they offer a simple solution to a complex problem – putting “boots on the ground” along the United States’ border with Mexico as a way to deter would-be immigrants from making illegal crossings, or as they are more inclined to put it, “stopping the illegal invasion of America.”

But already, federal agents have found that their unsought presence in recent weeks on the border in Texas and Arizona is making a difficult job much more complicated and possibly lethal. In some cases, agents are drawing down on the border vigilantes, and in one incident actually fired upon them. Another confrontation involved bat scientists who happened to be gathering field data when they encountered the armed militiamen.

A recent Associated Press report from Christopher Sherman described an incident along the Rio Grande involving an outfit calling itself the Texas Militia, who showed up unbidden at the midnight arrest of a group of border crossers in a canal near the Texas river. At first, the story reported, the Border Patrol officers assumed the men were part of a state-run tactical squad, but then were stunned to find that these well-armed men had “no law-enforcement training or authority of any kind.”

“The situation ended peacefully with the immigrants getting arrested and the Border Patrol advising the militia members ‘to properly and promptly’ identify themselves anytime they encounter law-enforcement officers,” the story reported. “But the episode was unsettling enough for the Border Patrol to circulate an ‘issue paper’ warning other agents.”

Indeed, the story appeared only two days after another border-militia outfit calling itself “Camp Lonestar” posted a video on YouTube showing a group of border crossers swimming the Rio Grande, while the self-described member of the “citizen militia” shooting the video verbally harassed them and told them to go back to Mexico and cross legally. The crossers appeared to be two men and a woman, and the militiaman described the men as “coyotes” – human smuggling operators.



Last Friday in a wooded area near the border outside of Brownsville, a Border Patrol agent in pursuit of a group of fugitive immigrants fired four shots at a camo-clad militiaman who happened to appear in the vicinity. The man dropped his gun and identified himself as a militia member to the border agent.

An incident on the Arizona border near Sonoita, in rural Santa Cruz County, last week was even more chilling. A group of scientists conducting counts of the bats occupying Onyx Cave was hit with a spotlight as they walked back to their vehicles in the dark, then shouted at in Spanish by men who identified themselves as militia members out “protecting the border.” After identifying themselves, the scientists walked back to their campsite and met the apologetic militiamen in person.

While the presence of border militias – which initially stumbled when they were announced last month, but have finally picked up steam in recent weeks, with as many as 13 different units reportedly operating on the border in Texas now – is ostensibly about making the border more secure, the presence of untrained, utterly anonymous gunmen with no accountability to anyone has been an increasing concern for law-enforcement professionals working the border.

Last month, officials at Customs and Border Protection issued a statement intended to warn the militias away: “Customs and Border Protection does not endorse or support any private group or organization from taking matters into their own hands as it could have disastrous, personal and public safety consequence,” the statement said.

“CBP appreciates the efforts of concerned citizens as they act as our eyes and ears. Securing our nation’s borders can be dangerous. Interdicting narcotics and deterring and apprehending individuals illegally entering the U.S. requires highly trained law enforcement personnel,” the statement said.
Right-wing radio host Pete Santilli spent time, while on his trip to Texas as part of the failed “Border Convoy”, with one of these border militias – namely, the participants at “Camp Lonestar.” Santilli took footage of the patrols of the border these vigilantes made in their vehicles.



The man claiming to run this militia is an Arizona man named Joe O’Shaughnessy, who Santilli had profiled on YouTube in an extended interview a few weeks previously. O’Shaughnessy said he and several others moved their border-watching operations to Texas in recent weeks as the call went up among his fellow antigovernment “Patriot” movement believers to try to stop the flow of refugee children over the Texas border.

O’Shaughnessy and several of his fellow “Camp Lonestar” participants described their activities to Santilli, and described their motivations for prowling the desert borderlands.



Most of these motives revolved around “patriotic” duty to defend the homeland, and a belief that the nation is being “invaded” by an “enemy.” Some cited the supposed presence of Middle Eastern border crossers, while others described at length the various foul diseases being transported into the United States by the child refugees.

Notably, most of them claimed that the Border Patrol officers they encountered actually welcomed their presence as “another set of eyes on the border.”

Other militiamen have made similar claims in other news accounts. In a piece by Maxwell Barna for Vice, a militiaman named Parris Frazier – the self-described leader of a border unit called Whiskey Bravo, which patrols a stretch of the border in Arizona – claimed that his men are friendly with Border Patrol agents.

“Every day when I’m driving to and from Sierra Vista down here to where I’m at, I get stopped, I shake their hands, and we talk, but we don’t really talk about what’s going on,” Frazier said, speaking from an area east of Nogales, roughly a half mile inside the Arizona border. “Every now and then I’ll ask a question and they’ll give me a nod yes or no.”

However, CBP officially maintains that heavily armed wannabe border patrolmen are not particularly welcome in sensitive areas where they are encountering dangerous situations on a daily basis.

And local law enforcement are apparently inclined to agree. According to the Los Angeles Times, when a border militia recently camped out near an international bridge to Mexico in Pharr, Texas, local sheriffs marked their presence by circulating a bulletin among each other warning of the men’s presence. Some sheriffs directly declined the militia’s help, while others simply remained silent.

“How do they identify themselves? Do they have badges? How do we know who they are?” asked J.P. Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office. “If they’re all just dressed in camos, it’s kind of hard to distinguish whether they’re law enforcement or not. … There’s a lot of potential for stuff to go wrong.”

AFA Jumps the Shark: ‘ALS Challenge Kills Babies’

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

 In recent weeks, it has seemed as if the American Family Association—already listed by the SPLC as an anti-LGBT hate group—has been on a mission to transform its public image from that of ordinary family-values advocates to a pack of wild-eyed radicals foaming at the mouth about their perceived enemies.

AFA spokesperson Bryan Fischer has been leading the way. In recent weeks on his radio program, Fischer has:

• Declared it will be “the end of America” if Congress does not impeach President Obama.
• Denounced anyone who uses the word “racist,” then insisted that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are “racists.”
• Sided with radical Islamists in Iraq in calling Obama a “devil worshiper.”
• Suggested on Twitter that accepting homosexuality leads to people to commit acts of necrophilia.
• Said that LGBT people are inherently disqualified from holding public office.
• Written an article in which he wonders if Robin Williams will go to heaven and insults Williams’s mother’s belief system (she was a Christian Scientist, Fischer says, and that is “a counterfeit form of religion that is neither Christian nor scientific”)

It’s not just Fischer, though. A couple of AFA analysts recently decried the recent editorial direction of Archie Comics, saying they now promoted “the occult and homosexuality.”

But as absurd as all these declarations might be, Fischer and his AFA cohorts may have been outdone in making such spurious claims. Kevin McCullough, a fellow AFA pundit who contributes at the organization’s commentary site, The Stand, recently published the following headline and article:

 The ALS Challenge is a wildly popular fundraising stunt for the ALS Association in which people are encouraged to pour a bucket of ice water over their heads, record it on social media and then challenge other people to otherwise join them or make a donation to the association.


The stunt has become an Internet sensation, with participants including movie stars, pop singers and politicians, as well as a wide range of others. It has also inspired some moments of accidental low comedy on the Web.

But according to McCullough, the fun and frivolity is overshadowed by his view that “this very challenge is contributing to the on going destruction of human life – intentionally.”

The ALS association is actively now funding embryonic stem cell research and admitting that they likely will continue to do so in the future.

The funding of embryonic stem cell research means that children are created and at their earliest stages of life they are destroyed so that the stem cells (from usually the base of the brain) can be harvested to perform tests with.

Embryonic stem cell research has proven zero percent effective in combating diseases like ALS and other neurological degenerative diseases.

Stem cell research has proven to be a controversial issue for years, with many conservative Christians, including the Southern Baptist Convention, viewing it as akin to abortion. The embryos used for the research are  fertilized in the laboratory, and there has never been a baby born or created in such conditions.

The ALS Association also claims to have produced substantial scientific research that, contrary to the AFA’s claims, indicates progress toward finding a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the progressive and fatal neuromuscular malady commonly known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

ALS afflicts about 30,000 Americans, with about 5,600 new cases diagnosed annually. More than 5,000 people die each from the disease. The ALS Association reports that so far more than $31 million has been raised by the ice-bucket challenge.

Bizarre Early Morning Hotel Evacuation Ends in ‘Border Convoy’ Feud

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Pete Santilli insists that militiamen saved his life from drug cartels trying to assassinate him during his “Border Convoy,” a publicity stunt held earlier this month to focus anger about Central American refugee children arriving in the United States.

But his fellow participants are not so sure, leading to a far-right internecine feud between Santilli and his chief cohort in the convoy, a longtime Tea Party organizer named Eric Odom, who Santilli has accused of “co-opting” and “psy-opping” the event and smearing him with accusations of alcoholism, and Odom dismissing Santilli as a “borderline lunatic.”

While problems trailed the convoy along its entire route through the Southwest, tensions culminated in an early morning panic whipped up by militiamen warning that the hotel in Van Horn, Texas, was surrounded by drug cartels preparing to ambush the convoy.

As the convoy described events in a press release, “most convoy members didn’t even know ‘Operation Secure Our Border’ Citizen Militia groups were watching over them for their own protection. But thanks to the quick and decisive evacuation ordered by the Texas Citizen Militia groups, convoy members may very well have been protected from potentially dangerous and deadly outcomes.”

However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo ridiculed the report and said it was most likely “fake.” “Nothing of that nature happened here,” he said.

According to the El Paso Times, Carrillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred. Carrillo also noted that there was no Comfort Inn in Van Horn. (Odom now said that the press release misidentified the hotel. It was the Quality Inn in Van Horn, not the Comfort Inn.)

Santilli, however, has wasted no time denouncing Odom.

“This Border Convoy thing was an absolute bloody train wreck, by design,” he told listeners last week. “It was designed that way. It was designed to be train wrecked. You were designed to be co-opted. Your original concept of stopping buses was so powerful that it drew the likes of probably one of the most disgusting co-opters in the Tea Party and Conservative movement, in my opinion, and his name is Eric Odom.”

 

Santilli went on to describe Odom as a “functioning alcoholic,” and implied that he was a puppet sent in to wreak havoc with right-wing causes, saying “his job is to destroy” such efforts. He also decried the convoy’s organization, noting that its itinerary was kept a secret, which made it difficult for would-be supporters to join in along the way.

Odom, Santilli told his listeners, revealed his true character when the militia came knocking on their door, warning them they were about to be ambushed:

He was an enemy and a bastard. And when it mattered most, and we had to evacuate the hotel, and we had women in there, and we had innocent people that could have been harmed. Forget about who may or may not have surrounded the hotel. We were in a dangerous situation that the militia had deemed to be — that we were in a hot zone and we had to go. And at a moment, a critical moment, he said, ‘Look, I’m drunk right now. This is just too much for me to handle. I’m outta here. You guys are on your own.’ And he left and went back to his hotel room, and had us blocked in.

But while Santilli had concluded that the militias “were the true patriots of the day,” Odom offered Hatewatch a markedly different account of events.

“We had gotten in to the hotel at 2 a.m. from El Paso, and yeah, everyone had a couple of beers because it had been a long day, and there was nothing wrong with that,” Odom told Hatewatch. “My response when I came out was that I had only slept for two or three hours. I didn’t see any cartel around. All I saw was heavily armed militia guys in bandanas and AR-15s. And I didn’t want to leave the rest of our convoy there at the hotel. So what I said was that I was going back in to make sure that the rest of our guys were ready. And we’re going on to San Antonio.”

Odom said that the militiamen produced no evidence that they were being set up for an ambush by the cartels, and that he was hesitant to follow orders to bug out. But he stopped short of completely dismissing the threat. What he did say was that the panic created an opportunity for his group from Murrieta to separate themselves from Santilli and his militiamen.

“We just wanted to get away from Santilli and the rest of those guys that came with the militia as quick as possible, because that was derailing us from what we wanted to do,” Odom said. “We had a
different agenda that we wanted to accomplish, and it didn’t involve Pete Santilli’s show.”

Now that Santilli has taken to the airwaves to attack him and his fellow convoy organizers, Odom said he is trying to avoid responding and moving on to create new methods of protesting the border situation. He has issued a statement at the Convoy website addressing the “spin” created by Santilli, who goes unmentioned by name: “This individual runs a radio talk show and is desperate for attention and listeners, and has constantly sought to poison the well along the way.”

“Pete Santilli in my opinion is a borderline lunatic,” Odom told Hatewatch. “The reason that he’s on this personal campaign of fantastic lies is because we actually separated from him halfway through the convoy just to get away from him. He’s just taken it very personally, he’s obviously slandering and trying to defame me personally. There’s not an ounce of truth to what he’s saying.”

Odom added that Santilli had said the convoy was going to Austin to try to steal some of conspiracist Alex Jones’s listeners by pulling a stunt in front of Jones’ office. “So this is exactly why we parted ways with him, and his RV went out on its own on the convoy,” Odom said.

Odom added about Santilli: “He leaves a path of destruction. Everyone that I’ve contacted that’s had anything to do with him has had the same outcome, where he turns on them for whatever reason to try to get attention and create controversy that he can go and try to sell people.”

SeaWorld and Its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

Boy, did SeaWorld have a week it would like to forget.

Shares of SeaWorld Entertainment plunged 33% Wednesday after the company's earnings missed Wall Street expectations.

The Orlando, Fla.-based company also conceded for the first time that attendance at its theme parks has been hurt by negative publicity concerning accusations by animal-rights activists that SeaWorld mistreats killer whales.

It was almost funny, watching the stock analysts like Jim Cramer scratching their heads.



"This is just an aberration. I've never seen a just, a complete collapse in EBITDA," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." "And they've got to do something. I don't know what they're going to do."

Cramer and his cohost both acknowledged what we call "The Blackfish Effect" -- the devastating power of Gabriella Cowperthwaite's documentary on orca captivity. "The documentary have to had played a big role," Cramer finally concluded.

Immediately SeaWorld responded with a PR move that had clearly been months in the making already -- it was going to expand the orcas' pools:

The company plans to upgrade the killer whale tanks at three of its theme parks, beginning with the San Diego location. The new enclosure in San Diego will be almost double the size of the current one, holding about 10 million gallons of water and extending to a depth of 50 feet. The company wouldn't specify the cost of the upgrades, only saying it would be several hundred million dollars.         

And ooooh!!! They'll also add some new exercise equipment:

The San Diego facility will include a "water treadmill" system letting the whales swim against a stream of moving water, allowing them more exercise but also opening the door to new research into how the animals burn energy. The system will be the first of its kind in the world, the company says.

And the whales will never use it, of course, unless coerced.

This is just plain old LAME. This just means these killer whales will have a larger acoustically sterile space to occupy.

These are the most acoustically sophisticated animals on the planet; their echiolocation, in the wild, is their primary sense. Sticking them in these pools is like putting a human in a plain white room. Making it larger doesn't help.

Naomi Rose, as usual, has the best insight:

Atchison and his execs also seem completely unaware of (or deliberately blind to) the fact that the plan to build larger tanks is a de facto admission that the current enclosures are inadequate. Saying otherwise makes the entire gesture insulting to anyone’s intelligence – it turns what could have been perceived as a better-late-than-never acknowledgment that they need to do better for these animals into a cynical waste of money. If the current enclosures are enough to allow the whales to thrive (as SW insists), then how can the company possibly justify the millions of dollars this expansion will cost, when it just admitted that 2014 has so far seen, and will continue to see, poor financial returns? On Wednesday SW said it would start a cost-cutting program to increase dividends for its shareholders and then on Friday it announced an extraordinarily expensive expansion program that will be paid for…how? How can this proposal possibly be justified except by an open, honest admission that Shamu Stadium is not adequate to safeguard the orcas’ welfare?

Rose has been saying all along that SeaWorld eventually is going to have to rethink its business model. It can't get away anymore with being a kid-friendly orca-circus theme park with a faux-educational front. It will need to become a genuine agent for conservation and education, and it will have to begin by rehabilitating its wild-born orcas and figuring out adequate living arrangements for its captive-born orcas. It will have to stop breeding. And it will need to assess its handling of all marine mammals, especially other dolphins.

 These corporate folks always express reverence for the market and say they listen when it speaks. Well, the market is speaking loud and clear: SeaWorld's old way of making millions off the exploitation of animals unsuited to captivity are over.

Santilli and His ‘Border Convoy’ Stir Resentment, Fail to Close Border

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Pete Santilli keeps trying –– and failing –– to organize protests that will shut down border crossings between the United States and Mexico. What’s more, he hasn’t been completely honest about it.

The latest effort by the extremist right-wing radio host was a multi-state “Border Convoy” campaign that featured protests at various stops along the multi-day route. Participants signed a petition declaring that they “oppose Barack Obama’s foreign invasion of our country” and demanding that authorities “secure our border.” 

And while at least this time there were no problems with his vehicle’s license plates (unlike Santilli’s previous border-shutdown effort, which collapsed into a small heap of frustrated protesters), the campaign was once again notable for failing to achieve anything.

But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to Santilli.The idea was for a string of vehicles, beginning on Aug. 1, to travel from Murrieta, Calif., and follow the border through Arizona and Texas, ending at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, on Aug. 9. Murrieta was the point of departure for Santilli’s earlier botched attempt to shut down the border, largely because the town has been the focal point of anti-immigrant protests directed at the influx of child refugees from Central America. A recent report from the Center for New Community details how these protests were orchestrated by a coalition of white nationalists and various nativist extremists.

But along the way, the protest was largely ignored until the convoy began encountering resistance from counter-protesters at their stops.

After departing California, the convoy headed for Phoenix, Ariz., and descended on the offices of Republican Sen. John McCain, whose moderate stances on immigration have drawn the ire of the nativist extremists. While at McCain’s offices, Santilli led the crowd in chanting against legislation McCain has cosponsored to end the crisis with Central American refugees, apparently because it makes it illegal to identify where the refugees are being transported. However, McCain was not at the office that day, and the gathering quickly broke up.




Then the convoy headed for Texas, where it began encountering stiffer resistance. In El Paso, someone driving a black pickup truck joined the convoy and began slowing the group’s progress. When police intervened and pulled the convoy over, the people in the pickup complained to police that someone in the convoy had pointed a rifle at them.

The El Paso Times reported that El Paso activist Miguel Juarez was among the counter-protesters, and he filed a claim that someone in the convoy had pointed a rifle at them. The convoy later filed a police report accusing Juarez of filing a false claim, as well as another claim that the protesters had tried to force them off the road.




“I told him I was not lying that the rifle episode had occurred and that we had witnesses,” Juarez said. “We felt threatened by the convoy member with his rifle and felt a duty to report it to police,” Juarez said in a written statement.

And what would a right-wing border protest be without the concocted claims that drug cartels had targeted their activities? There was plenty of paranoia and phony claims of persecution.

In Van Horn, Texas, according to reports, convoy members were forced to evacuate a hotel at 4:30 a.m. by members of the “Operation Secure Our Border” militia, who informed members that they were being watched over by militia. Those same militiamen, according to accounts, had determined that drug-cartel operatives had surrounded the Comfort Inn hotel where the convoy members were staying and were preparing to ambush them.

“Militia immediately acted to evacuate the property of convoy vehicles and raced the convoy to an undisclosed location some 45 miles away,” explained the convoy’s press release. “While convoy members were initially rattled and concerned by the sudden move, the gravity of the threat was later realized and Militia involvement was met with widespread appreciation.”

The account also claimed that “county law enforcement” had confirmed the presence of the threat. However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo ridiculed the report as “fake.”

“Nothing of that nature happened here,” Carrillo said.

According to the El Paso Times, Carillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred.

“There is no Comfort Inn in Van Horn,” Carrillo said. “We did follow up with most of the motels here in town and none of the property owners, who do reside on the property (of the motels), can validate they (convoy members) even stayed in Van Horn, Texas.”

Finally, the convoy reached a kind of climax on Aug. 8 in McAllen, Texas, where Santilli led a protest against the supposed dumping of “illegal aliens” at the local bus station. There they encountered an even larger group of counter-protesters who outnumbered them.


“It’s fine that they are here, but their message of hate and ignorance is not welcome in the valley and they shouldn’t bring it with them,” said John Michael Torres of La Union del Pueblo Entero, a pro-immigrant advocacy group.

The next day, led by a contingent of bikers affiliated with the convoy calling themselves the “U.S. Defenders,” Santilli’s convoy intended to conclude while “shutting down” the border crossing in nearby Brownsville, Texas, where the object of the protest in  was ostensibly the arrest of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, whose continued detention in a Mexico jail has become the latest cause celebre of the extremist right.

The protest managed to disrupt traffic briefly (for about 20 minutes) at the crossing, and the Border Convoy’s Facebook page boasted: “We fully shut down the main lane of traffic coming through the entry port into Brownsville, TX this am. Thanks to the Brownsville group and Border Convoy travelers for demanding our Marine be allowed to come home!”

Again, the convoy encountered a contentious and large number of counter-protesters. “These people are coming out an disrupting our communities, and that’s what we don’t want,” one counter-protester told a KGBT-TV reporter. A number of commenters at the convoy’s Facebook page also claimed that even the attempt to stop traffic was a failure: “Didn’t shut anything down, liars,” said one. “You simply stood in the way as folks drove around you.”