More patriots at work and play:
Minutemen groups, a surge in Border Patrol agents, and a tough new immigration law aren’t enough for a reputed neo-Nazi who’s now leading a militia in the Arizona desert.
Jason ”J.T.” Ready is taking matters into his own hands, declaring war on ”narco-terrorists” and keeping an eye out for illegal immigrants. So far, he says his patrols have only found a few border crossers who were given water and handed over to the Border Patrol. Once, they also found a decaying body in a wash, and alerted authorities.
But local law enforcement are nervous given that Ready’s group is heavily armed and identifies with the National Socialist Movement, an organization that believes only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be American citizens and that everyone who isn’t white should leave the country ”peacefully or by force.”
”We’re not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,” Ready said. ”This is what our founding fathers did.”
An escalation of civilian border watches have taken root in Arizona in recent years, including the Minutemen movement. Various groups patrol the desert on foot, horseback and in airplanes and report suspicious activity to the Border Patrol, and generally, they have not caused problems for law enforcement.
But Ready, a 37-year-old ex-Marine, is different. He and his friends are outfitted with military fatigues, body armor and gas masks, and carry assault rifles. Ready takes offense at the term ”neo-Nazi,” but admits he identifies with the National Socialist Movement.
”These are explicit Nazis,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. ”These are people who wear swastikas on their sleeves.”
When Jan Brewer and John McCain lie about the border issues and border crime, these are the folks they encourage. This isn’t some liberal projection, it is reality. Their words and deeds have an impact on the behavior of crazy people, and it is supremely irresponsible.
Radon Chong
I think I’ll wait for the WaPo to publish an op-ed piece from Jason Ready before I make up my mind.
Steve
If the New Black Panther Party deserves highly-publicized hearings every week, so do these guys, I reckon.
Svensker
And guess what? The McCains, Palins, Armeys, Roves, Becks, Limbaughs, etc. either don’t give a shit, or want to encourage it. Stupid or cynical — why not both?
Ginger Yellow
“’We’re not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,’’ Ready said. ‘’This is what our founding fathers did.”
O rly? Jefferson & Co roamed the desert looking for Mexicans? I must have missed that in my history class.
very reverend crimson fire of compassion
Remember when the Feds were impugning the honor of our men and women in uniform by suggesting that some vets were hooking up with terrorist/white supremacist organizations? Remember when they hated the troops? I’m glad we got that straightened out.
Zandar
And when they finally end up killing someone, it will be Obama’s fault for “failing to do his job on the border”.
El Cruzado
I wonder how long they’d last against actual Mexican cartel members (the ones that are crazy psychos but usually know better than to do anything brazen on the US side of the border).
ts
I can’t wait for Dave Weigel’s post about how it was bad form for the AP to write about these guys.
Loneoak
Um, these guys are a little confused about what colonial America looked like in 1776.
db
Not only do politicos like Brewer and McCain encourage this vile scum to emerge from under rocks, some local politicos openly condone this crap. check out the associations between Ready and the likes of Arpaio and SB1070 sponsor Pearce. The same hand that wrote that gestapo law shakes the hands of the gestapo henchmen.
Silver
@Loneoak:
There weren’t a lot of Mexicans, and niggers were in chains.
Wait a week, and it’ll be John McCain’s new policy goal.
Snowwy
I have to wonder how many people they’ve already killed and buried out there in the desert. Can’t tell me that it isn’t likely.
Chyron HR
Silly liberals, he’s a sociaIist, just like Obama! One of those left-wing infiltrators making the noble Tea Partriots look bad, you dig?
boonagain
On Sullivan’s blog yesterday, the esteemed Weigel used the false equivalency of the Black Panthers and Fox vs the Militias and the Left.
It is wrong in sooo many ways to equate the two.
John Arbuthnot Fisher
What do you think what happen if 100 members of the similarly armed, uniformed and also supposedly racist New Black Panther Party showed up at the border to prevent Mexican contamination of black racial purity?
scav
Ah,
OK then. A paleo-Nazi — I suppose that would be the more conservative position.
Suddenly, I’m not sure America actually won the Civil War or WWII. And the Revolutionary War is being twisted into all sorts of unexpected positions.
boonagain
I agree with Snowwy that I would be totally surprised if there are no bodies buried in the desert from this operation.
One of the more frightening stories I’ve read.
El Cid
Good luck taking on the narco-traffickers from Mexico who are shooting police and military forces in the street and beheading the same as well as politicians and journalists.
These brave souls should head into Mexico and take care of the problem at the root.
sparky
it’d solve all of these problems if the US just gave Arizona back and apologized for stealing it.
Regular Reader
After reading this story, most people are probably worried about the immigrants who will be hurt or killed by these idiots. Me, I’m worried about what will happen the first time one of the idiots gets hurt or killed. To quote Samuel L. Jackson in Die Hard with a Vengeance, “One white cop gets killed today, tomorrow, we’ve got a thousand white cops. All of them with itchy trigger fingers. Got it?”
Anoniminous
Pinal County? That’s a little ways southeast of Phoenix ’bout 200 miles from Agua Prieta, Drug Town Mexico, and the border. Be like guarding DC from New York City.
kdaug
Anyone else hear about the car bomb that went off yesterday, killing 3? Not in Iraq, silly. Not even Afghanistan.
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Directly across the border from El Paso.
Also turns out the cartels are now using US grenades that we sent down to Central America during the Cold War.
Good times.
bad hammock
As noted, JT Ready isn’t exactly a new name in AZ:
“Campaign literature distributed by some Gibbons supporters has claimed a close association between Pearce and Ready. One mailer shows Pearce and Ready standing side-by-side during a June 2007 anti-immigration rally at the state Capitol.
Pearce said last week he did not know of Ready’s neo-Nazi affiliations at the time of the rally.
A long list of endorsements on Pearce’s campaign Web site does not contain Ready’s name. Although Ready ran against Pearce in the 2004 legislative primary, Pearce endorsed Ready when the latter ran for City Council in the spring of 2006.”
Alex S.
Isn’t “nazi” the abbreviation of national socialist? Maybe he doesn’t like the “neo” part of the word “neo-nazi”.
JoePo
I’m picturing a hundred Henry Gibsons.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
How long as Tom Tancredo been doing this shit?
In July 2005, Tancredo proposed that America respond to any future terrorist attack by bombing Mecca and other holy sites.
Tancredo criticized the Denver Public Library system for purchasing reading materials written in Spanish and for offering space for classes to be held for these library users, on the grounds that putting Spanish-speakers in a ‘linguistic ghetto’ would delay their integration into American society.[54]
In a November 19, 2006 interview with WorldNetDaily, Tancredo referred to the city of Miami, Florida, as a “Third World country.”[73] His comments drew strong criticism from numerous political leaders and organizations, including Florida Governor Jeb Bush who, in a letter to the congressman, called Tancredo’s remarks “naive.”[74] Tancredo replied in a letter, “I certainly understand and appreciate your need and desire to try and create the illusion of Miami as a multiethnic ‘All American’ city,” he said. “I can also appreciate … that the cultural and ethnic diversity of the city offers many advantages to its residents. However, it is neither naïve nor insulting to call attention to a real problem that cannot be easily dismissed through politically correct happy talk.”[75]
On December 12, 2006, Tancredo was publicly announced by the Rotary Club of Miami as its guest speaker.[76] The next day, the event was canceled by the restaurant. News reports said, “The manager of the restaurant where Tancredo was to speak, the Rusty Pelican on Key Biscayne, said Wednesday that the owners didn’t want him to appear on Thursday in order to keep up the integrity and reputation of the business. The manager also said staff members objected to working the party where his immigration talk was supposed to be held, some customers threatened to boycott the restaurant, and the restaurant had received bomb threats.” Tancredo spokesman Carlos Espinosa said “What is more ‘Third World country’ than threatening to bomb the place?”[77] Tancredo referred to Miami as having been taken over by “thugs” and “separatists” and declared that “I knew speaking your mind could be dangerous in Havana — I guess it’s equally dangerous to do so in Miami. Apparently, there isn’t much of a difference between the two anymore.”[78]
etc etc etc etc
And Tancredo is just particularly visible … not particularly xenophobic.
The rightwing racism and xenophobic politics has been boiling for years, and not really getting that much attention, or not nearly as much as it deserved.
John McCain is pretty much a latecomer to this sick bandwagon. Just a couple of years ago he was talking about a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, insisting that we could not “just deport them.” Now that he changed his tune, suddenly he is the poster boy for this shit? Nobody hates McCain more than I do, or for more good reasons, but this is just bullcrap. McCain is a follower, not a leader, of this wave of anti immigration sentiment.
The GOP has basically shifted its demonization laser away from ragheads, who are boring all of a sudden, and from gays, who are even more boring and certainly more annoying, toward Hispanics, who are now rampaging along the border in the imaginations of the terror-fied Republicans and in the political noise products of the rightwing election machine.
I have an idea. Instead of focussing on somebody like McCain, for 24 years now the biggest schmuck and opportunist in Washington, maybe we could focus on the so-called leadership of the mainstream GOP and ask them some intelligent questions … such as …
How do you propose to “secure” something on the order of 9000 miles of land border (Canada and Mexico) that sees upwards of 450 million border crossings a year … a million and half a day, more or less ….. without turning America into an armed camp and spending itself into oblivion doing so?
And for that matter, without screwing the economies of all three countries, in the process?
(Tancredo material from Wikipedia)
Up in Canada
Don’t blame the Marines, they kicked J.T. out in lieu of court martial. And if these guys are guarding Pinal County, they are pretty distant from Mexico. The sheriff of Pima County, which actually borders Mexico, has said this entire invasion of the border is vastly overblown. Actually, crime is down in Arizona border towns, but the facts have no place in Republican politics.
licensed to kill time
These guys are KKK in different robes. And like all bullies, they like to beat up on those who are weaker (unless they happen to stumble across some REAL narcos, then good luck with that , dudes…someone else will be picking up your heads in the desert).
And, yea, it’ll get blamed on Obama for not ‘sealing the border’ with duct tape and Super Glue.
suzanne
Here. Check out how cuddly Ready and Pearce are.
blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2007/09/russell_pearces_willie_horton.php
Palling around with terrorists, indeed.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Up in Canada:
Correct, and the Sheriff in Santa Cruz County, which is really the epicenter of the border in Arizona, has joined the suit against SB1070. He knows that is a useless but expensive measure that will hamper his ability to do his job and do nothing but inflame politics.
This linked brief gives a good summary of all the legitimate reasons why this law is a dumb idea. The real knock on this law is not about “papers please,” a slogan invented by tv pundits, but that the law is just a very badly drawn monkey wrench thrown into the gears of law enforcement. It’s not only toothless, it is cumbersome and costly at the same time.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Yes, this information was on the ground back in April when the law first hit the news.
But the real story here is not the background on its creation, the real story is that the Republican Party has engineered this thing with one purpose in mind, which is to influence the 2010 elections. Forget the racist tools who rigged it up, look instead at the big moneyed interests who are bankrolling this assault on the Democratic majority in congress.
That’s the forest, Pearce and Ready are just trees.
Little Dreamer
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction! They are going to rile up the hispanics with this and energize the Democratic base. And you’re going to help… ;)
LikeableInMyOwnWay
@Little Dreamer:
That’s the plan! But fist shaking at McCain won’t get it done. What will get it done is staying on message:
The border is not out of control, but we need to be proactive and improve our management of this huge interface, north, and south.
Immigration is a complex issue and simple, wrong responses will make the situation worse, not better.
Anti immigration demagoguery is not useful, either in terms of security, or in terms of doing what’s right for the immigrants and the country.
SB1070 accomplishes nothing useful, but clogs up the wheels of good practice law enforcement already in effect along our border.
These morons with guns and flags that prowl the border looking for trouble really are not helping the professional and right-minded efforts to manage the border. They are a lynch mob, out there in the heat and an accident looking for a place to happen. And they have been doing this for years, it is not new. They probably will end up killing harmless immigrants who will get stranded or die of heatstroke and thirst thanks to the armed idiots getting in the way of professional patrols and humane relief efforts.
Martin
I hate
IllinoisArizona nazis.Lab Partner
Well then, you must not have gone to Glenn Beck University. I bet you feel stupid now!
Anya
The depressing discourse on racism and immigration reform, reminds me of this quote from Langston Hughes’, The Black Man Speaks
I swear to the Lord
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
D-Chance.
Becoming more of a Barney Frank fan everyday…
Death Panel Truck
Goddamned Founding Fathers, you’re to blame for this! If yuh’d just kept yer friggin’ mouths shut, these shitheads would have nothing to do!
R-Jud
@D-Chance.: Ah, Kathy Griffin. I used to date her brother. It runs in the family.
Dr. Squid
@Radon Chong: Not if CNN signs him first.
mclaren
Q: What do you call a heavily armed fanatic who denies that Obama’s birth certificate is legitimate and who shoots innocent people down on the streets for no discernible reason?
A: A police officer or a member of America’s armed forces.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@D-Chance.: Barney Frank is not only a better member of the House of Representatives than Kathy Griffin could ever be. He’s also a much better comedian than she could ever hope to be. Here’s a piece of advice: If your guest is better at your job than you are, don’t fuck with him.
Just Some Fuckhead
Any way we can start a shooting war between these goons and the AIPAC traitors?
kommrade reproductive vigor
This proves that Hispanics are the real racists!
Quiddity
Nutcase: