This post by Pat Young is the first installment of a three-part series on the origins and development of the Minuteman movement, and is cross-posted from Long Island Wins:
If you first heard of the Minutemen when Shawna Forde, the head of Minuteman American Defense, was arrested two weeks ago for murder, you may have had trouble understanding the battles within the anti-immigrant movement over her that have at times spilled over onto our website, Long Island Wins. I thought I would prepare a little primer on the Minuteman movement, as well as its relationship with other anti-immigrant organizations, so that you can understand the way its history of violent division is now being played out against a backdrop of murderous violence.
The Minuteman movement took conservative America by storm just four years ago. It was born in a media deluge and midwifed by an anti-immigrant echo chamber at FOX News, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and The Washington Times. It was quickly endorsed by Republican elected officials and pundits.
Apart from the Right to Life movement, conservative activists have not had a lot of the same opportunities at popular participation in political action that those on the Left have. So, when Minutemen in military-style attire, carrying heavy weaponry, began appearing on television in 2005, they seemed to touch the John Wayne in the heart of many on the American Right. They carried the message that ordinary Americans with guns could do what Washington had failed to accomplish; halt the "Browning of America".
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has looked at hate groups for more than four decades, has been studying the Minuteman phenomenon since its beginnings. The Minutemen have splintered almost from their earliest days, according to the SPLC. Leadership rivalries have been accompanied by serious charges of racism and theft by and against its founders.
Minuteman itself, which seemed to come out of nowhere in 2005, can actually trace its origins back to the now-discredited "militia movement" of the 1990s. More than 40,000 Americans were in the ultra-conservative armed militias when the movement collapsed after associates of the Michigan Militia destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing took the lives of 168 people, including many children.
A close look at the leaders of Minuteman reveals its militia-related roots.
One of the two superstars of Minuteman was failed actor Chris Simcox. Simcox had a troubled past before he rose to prominence. He had a long history of erratic behavior that intensified after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Here is a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center: "Court records obtained by the Center's Intelligence Project show Simcox's second ex-wife, Kim Dunbar, filed an emergency appeal in September 2001 to obtain full custody of their teenage son because she feared that Simcox had suffered a mental breakdown and was dangerous. Dunbar declined to be interviewed for this article, but her sworn affidavits speak for themselves. In one, Dunbar testified that throughout their 10-year marriage, Simcox was prone to sudden, violent rages."
The report continues on to say that:
"[Simcox] once took a knife from the kitchen and threatened to kill himself," she testified. "When he was angry, he broke furniture, car windows, he banged his head against the wall repeatedly and punched things." Dunbar said that when their son was 4 years old, Simcox slapped him so hard that a mark remained on his face for two days. Another time, she testified, she grabbed her young son in her arms and jumped out a window because Simcox was throwing furniture at them.
After such episodes, she said, Simcox would become despondent. "He would stare at walls, mumbling to himself." In the affidavits, Dunbar said she repeatedly pressured Simcox to seek professional help and even tried to have him hospitalized. But he persistently refused treatment.
After the attacks, Simcox moved to the Arizona desert and purchased a small newspaper, The Tumbleweed, in Tombstone, Arizona. He formed a group originally referred to as the Tombstone Militia, which was eventually renamed the Civil Homeland Defense which was described in his own newspaper as a "committee of vigilantes".
"In January 2003, Simcox was arrested by federal park rangers for illegally carrying a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun in a national park", according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Simcox later came to Long Island at the behest of the Sachem Quality of Life organization, Suffolk County's premier anti-immigrant hate group. A reporter told me he had been given Simcox's business card which identified him as a "Militia Consultant". The Sachem group was looking at reorganizing itself into an armed militia group and looked to Simcox for guidance.
Long before Simcox became a national figure on the Right, he was already constructing conspiracy theories to explain illegal immigration and to justify the use of armed vigilantes to counter it. In spring 2003, Simcox told a California audience at a meeting of Barbara Coe's hate group, California Coalition on Immigration Reform (SPLC on Coe's group), to "take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary. There's something very fishy going on at the border. The Mexican army is driving American vehicles--but carrying Chinese weapons. I have personally seen what I can only believe to be Chinese troops."
The other superstar of the "movement" was Jim Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart and a master's degree in taxation. In October, 2004, he started Minuteman.
Gilchrist was so charismatic a figure in the early days of the so-called border protection movement, that when the Minutemen later organized a women's auxiliary, it was called the Gilchrist Angels.
At the beginning of 2005, things really took off for the Minutemen. Gilchrist and Simcox joined forces and the Minuteman Project was born.
A huge media focus on the group helped. There were 581 articles and editorials about their work between January 2005 and February 2006 in major newspapers. And many of the articles were of the cheerleading variety, which failed to focus a critical eye on the exaggerated claims of the Minutemen, while depicting them as the rightful heirs of the heroes of Lexington and Concord.
In spring 2005, the Minutemen began their first mass deployment along the border, which reporters touted as mobilizing thousands of volunteers. In fact, less than 200 Minutemen showed up for the first weekend of the Minuteman Project at the U.S./Mexico border. This deployment was in reality just a publicity stunt. For all the cool camping equipment and neat military gear, very little was done to stop illegal immigration in the U.S. I remember thinking that getting dozens of reporters to cover a couple of hundred Minutemen was a brilliant coup for Gilchrist and Simcox. After all, I've often mobilized a couple of hundred protesters and had a hard time getting anyone to cover it. Apparently the trick was to put guns in the hands of the political activists if you wanted media coverage!
Although President Bush called them "vigilantes", it seemed that Gilchrist and Simcox were made-to-order for the conservative media.
FOX's Sean Hannity took the unusual step of bringing his cable talk show to the border to stand with the Minutemen during their huge media event. In the fawning style he adopts when talking to heroes of the political right, Hannity interviewed Gilchrist and Simcox about their members, going so far as to call them "humanitarians". Hannity told his viewers that all Minutemen had been fully vetted, and only the best were accepted into the ranks. Here are excerpts from that Hannity special on the Minutemen:
HANNITY: I want to ask you. Early on there was talk about who are these people that are going to come here and there was concern by some opponents of yours. I would even argue that there were people waiting for you to fail. But you set up a rigid standard. You said, you know, if you want to be here, we're going to be humanitarians first. We're going to feed people that are hungry. We're going to offer water to people that are thirsty. You said there would be no contact. You have not deviated from that rule at all. And you also weeded out some people that maybe had ulterior motives. Tell us how — tell us how that process came into being?
GILCHRIST: Actually, the process came into being through Chris Simcox's model of screening. The only thing I did was add a heavy involvement of law enforcement. The last place someone with sinister motives wants to be is around a bunch of cops. And it worked fine.
HANNITY: There are a lot of cops because I met a lot of them.
GILCHRIST: Yes.
HANNITY: And what was the — you did not want people with ulterior motives. You did not want people that — that were not going to be humanitarians first?
SIMCOX: It was clear in our standard operating procedure, Sean, that it was clear from the beginning, you are to come, you are to sit, you are to observe, no contact, and the world is going to be watching, the weight of the responsibility is on your shoulders.
HANNITY: And you knew that right away. You knew one wrong move that the whole group would be tainted.
Hannity set the standard. He said that "one wrong move" would taint "the whole group". Over the next four years, not one, but many, "wrong moves" would be made by Gilchrist and Simcox. More on the Minutemen in Part Two of this series.
("Welcome to Arizona" photo by Jeremy Keith via Flickr and "Minuteman" photo by Ted Kerwin via Flickr)