Thursday, April 20, 2006
Minutemen Minuet
I reported, the other day, that one of our Oregon legislators has flown down to Arizona to help keep our country safe against the brown hordes waiting to invade us—thirty or forty years ago, it was the yellow hordes, hiding in the Mexican mountains who were going to invade the USA; fifteen or twenty years ago it was UN troops waiting in Canada who were going to over-run the US and take control. There’s a thread running through almost all of this: the radical racist right seeing alien hordes trying to steal the country.
Maybe a Jungian would say it’s a national shadow-self: the Euro-Americans took the country by force and now they’re afraid their karma will come back and bite them. A big time guilty conscience. It’s essentially about race. And it’s essentially made up of paranoid and power-hungry folks, angry that their lives haven’t worked out the way they wanted them to, and by god, somebody’s going to pay for that.
I’ll be interested in just how many feet, yards, or miles of this projected Berlin Wall they will actually build. I don’t think the Tohono D’Odham people are going to like having it built on the reservation, since they’re still fighting for the US to honor the treaty rights that let Native people cross at will. I don’t think the Feds are going to allow any serious disruption of the desert landscape, either. The Minutemen are going to start building on Memorial Day; June, July, and August, not to mention September, are brutally hot down along the border—and they begin right after Memorial Day.
Here’s a press release from the Minutemen; it’s on a dozen or more web-sites and blogs. Chris Cox, “President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” who presumably wrote the release, is an interesting man. At the risk of getting into an ad hominum bog, here, I’ve posted below it a page from Dave Neiwert’s “Orcinus” blog. Dave Neiwert is a good reporter and a decent human being. Which is more than I can say about the president of a certain south-western band of wannabe vigilantes...
MINUTEMEN TO BUILD ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER FENCE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
MINUTEMEN TO BUILD ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER FENCE
(PHOENIX, AZ) April 20, 2006 – Chris Simcox, President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (“MCDC”), today announced plans by the MCDC to work with local Arizona land owners to build border security fencing on private land along the border with Mexico.
At present, six private land owners have partnered with the Minutemen for the commencement of construction of border fencing on their land. Surveillance cameras on the fencing will be monitored via computer by registered Minutemen across the country. We have chosen a fence design that is based on the Israeli fences in Gaza and on the West Bank that have cut terrorist attacks there by 95% or more. In order to be effective, a fence should not be easy to compromise by climbing over it with a ladder, cutting through it with wire cutters, ramming it with a vehicle, or tunneling under it undetected. No fence can be a 100% impenetrable barrier—but a good design will be time-consuming enough to get through that Border Patrol agents can be alerted to get to a point of attempted intrusion before the intrusion can be completed. Our design does this. You can see it at www.WeNeedAFence.com
Two construction companies to date have offered to inaugurate groundbreaking, coordinate volunteer construction crews and donate the use of the necessary heavy construction equipment.
The groundbreaking will begin in Arizona on Memorial Day weekend, unless in the interim President Bush deploys National Guard and reserve troops to immediately secure the out-of-control southern border.
The fencing will be built with privately donated funds, engineering and labor and will be used as an example to educate the public about the feasibility and efficacy of fencing to secure America’s borders from illegal incursion by aliens and international criminal cartels. A non-profit organization dedicated specifically to this purpose will facilitate and administer donations for construction of the fence. Monetary and in-kind contributions for this effort will go directly into building materials for this private, volunteer fencing project.
Simcox issued the following statement on the MCDC border fence project:
“President Bush once said he would not wait on events to act to protect our country. He has been president for over five years, and still he has not acted to secure our territorial frontier, even as his administration admits the United States government does not have operational control of our borders.
“On Memorial Day weekend, the American people will exercise their God-given rights to protect their lives and property by initiating construction of fencing along the border on private land unless President Bush immediately deploys National Guard and/or reserve troops along the breadth of the Southwestern border line with Mexico, thereby retaking the region from the international criminal cartels who presently are in operational control of the border. Additional support is available from military units presently training to guard the borders in other countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan and they should immediately relocate their training to the Southwestern border.
“The existing border crisis is a dereliction of duty by those entrusted with American security and sovereignty, leaving America vulnerable to terrorist infiltration and an unprecedented crime wave caused by drug smugglers, rapists, thieves, human traffickers and murderers who currently cross our border at will.
“President Bush and Congress have taxed the wages of the American people to pay for the protection of our country, and expended those dollars to subsidize millions of low-wage illegal workers with housing, education, medical care, and welfare benefits. Yet even the most basic level of national territorial integrity requires that our elected representatives secure the border. Should they continue to refuse to do their Constitutional duty, the Minutemen will again step into the breach and commence building the required border barriers on private land and with private donations.
“Should President Bush and Congress fail to fulfill their oaths of office, and meet their Constitutional obligation to protect these United States from invasion, we, the sovereign people of the United States, having suffered a long train of abuses at the hand of a willfully insolent government, do hereby declare that these States ought, should and will be protected by American Minutemen.”
###
We Need A Fence design:***
Orcinus
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/12/minutemens-father-figure.html
The Minutemen's father figure
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Suzy Buchanan and David Holthouse of the Southern Poverty Law Center went a-digging into the personal history of Minuteman leader Chris Simcox, and their final report reveals plenty of troubling information.
The portrait of Simcox that emerges is of a paranoid self-promoter who sees himself as an overlooked genius finally coming into his own. He also is prone to extremely unstable behavior:
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.
"He 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.
"Eventually," she said, "the only thing I could do was file for divorce."
Simcox and Dunbar initially shared custody of their son. There was no legal dispute until shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, when Dunbar suddenly filed a flurry of emergency appeals.
"While Chris has always been prone to strong opinions and ranting behavior, this last episode has gone even farther," she told the court. "I am convinced he has had some kind of mental lapse and I am now, more than ever, afraid for my son to be in Chris' care."
Dunbar grew frightened after Simcox left her a series of bizarre voicemail messages beginning that Sept. 13, in which he went on angry diatribes about the Constitution, patriotism, and impending nuclear attacks on Los Angles, and talked about training their 15-year-old son in the use of firearms.
"I will begin teaching him the art of protecting himself with weapons," Simcox said in one recorded message he left for Dunbar. "I purchased another gun. I have more than a few weapons, and I intend on teaching my son how to use them." Simcox added, "I will no longer trust anyone in this country. My life has changed forever, and if you don't get that, you are brainwashed like everybody else."
In phone conversations with his son that his ex-wife recorded and submitted to the court as evidence of Simcox's mental instability, he challenged the boy to become "a man and a real American."
"You better stop playing baseball, buddy, and you better do something real, 'cause life will never be the same," Simcox thundered. "I'm going to go down to the Mexican border and sign up for the government for border patrol to protect the borders of the country that I love. You hear how serious I am."
It's also quite clear that Simcox is motivated less by real concerns about border security than about the influx of Latinos into the United States:
In January 2003, while on patrol with Civil Homeland Defense, Simcox was arrested by federal park rangers for illegally carrying a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun in a national park. Also in Simcox's possession at the time of that arrest, according to police records, were a document entitled "Mission Plan," a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, and a toy figure of Wyatt Earp on horseback.
Two months later, in a speech to the California Coalition on Immigration Reform, a hate group whose leader, Barbara Coe, routinely refers to Mexicans as "savages," Simcox offered a dire warning to his audience.
"Take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary," he said. "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."
Of illegal immigrants, Simcox added: "They're trashing their neighborhoods, refusing to assimilate, standing on street corners, jeering at little girls walking on their way to school."
He also has been known to inflate his resume:
"When I'm asked by reporters if I'm a racist, I tell them, 'Why don't you go ask my black ex-wife and my biracial children and the members of the racial diversity committee I chaired whether I'm a racist?'" he said at the October conference.
Simcox, evidently, was never the chair of his school's diversity committee. Even more disturbing, however, is what comes next:
"When they ask me, 'Well, what do you have to say to people who call you a racist?' I come back at them with, 'What do you have to say to people who call you a child molester?'"
That's a strange rhetorical device given the accusations leveled at Simcox in the summer of 1998, when his 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage -- prior to his union with Dunbar -- came to live with him in Los Angeles.
In separate interviews with the Intelligence Report, two of Simcox's former colleagues at Wildwood and his first ex-wife gave the same account. They said that Simcox helped his daughter get a job babysitting for a Wildwood School employee and that one night, Simcox's daughter showed up unexpectedly at her employer's house, visibly upset, alleging that her father had just attempted to sexually molest her.
"He tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated," said Deborah Crews, Simcox's first ex-wife and the girl's mother. "When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea."
Contacted by the Report, Simcox refused to answer four direct questions about the molestation allegations. "I would never answer those questions to you. You can't ask those questions," he said. "You're on a witch hunt and you're trying to discredit our movement, which is to secure the borders. ... My personal life has nothing to do with anything that goes on here."
No charges were filed against Simcox, but Crews said she and her daughter immediately broke off all contact with him.
"He's a drastic, chaotic, very dangerous guy," said Crews. "I'm surprised he hasn't shot anybody yet. I see him on TV and I have to turn if off, because it makes me sick to see him getting all this attention."
If this is someone's idea of the leader of a "neighborhood watch," I'd be watching my neighborhood very closely indeed.
11:20 PM
Maybe a Jungian would say it’s a national shadow-self: the Euro-Americans took the country by force and now they’re afraid their karma will come back and bite them. A big time guilty conscience. It’s essentially about race. And it’s essentially made up of paranoid and power-hungry folks, angry that their lives haven’t worked out the way they wanted them to, and by god, somebody’s going to pay for that.
I’ll be interested in just how many feet, yards, or miles of this projected Berlin Wall they will actually build. I don’t think the Tohono D’Odham people are going to like having it built on the reservation, since they’re still fighting for the US to honor the treaty rights that let Native people cross at will. I don’t think the Feds are going to allow any serious disruption of the desert landscape, either. The Minutemen are going to start building on Memorial Day; June, July, and August, not to mention September, are brutally hot down along the border—and they begin right after Memorial Day.
Here’s a press release from the Minutemen; it’s on a dozen or more web-sites and blogs. Chris Cox, “President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps,” who presumably wrote the release, is an interesting man. At the risk of getting into an ad hominum bog, here, I’ve posted below it a page from Dave Neiwert’s “Orcinus” blog. Dave Neiwert is a good reporter and a decent human being. Which is more than I can say about the president of a certain south-western band of wannabe vigilantes...
MINUTEMEN TO BUILD ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER FENCE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
MINUTEMEN TO BUILD ARIZONA-MEXICO BORDER FENCE
(PHOENIX, AZ) April 20, 2006 – Chris Simcox, President of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (“MCDC”), today announced plans by the MCDC to work with local Arizona land owners to build border security fencing on private land along the border with Mexico.
At present, six private land owners have partnered with the Minutemen for the commencement of construction of border fencing on their land. Surveillance cameras on the fencing will be monitored via computer by registered Minutemen across the country. We have chosen a fence design that is based on the Israeli fences in Gaza and on the West Bank that have cut terrorist attacks there by 95% or more. In order to be effective, a fence should not be easy to compromise by climbing over it with a ladder, cutting through it with wire cutters, ramming it with a vehicle, or tunneling under it undetected. No fence can be a 100% impenetrable barrier—but a good design will be time-consuming enough to get through that Border Patrol agents can be alerted to get to a point of attempted intrusion before the intrusion can be completed. Our design does this. You can see it at www.WeNeedAFence.com
Two construction companies to date have offered to inaugurate groundbreaking, coordinate volunteer construction crews and donate the use of the necessary heavy construction equipment.
The groundbreaking will begin in Arizona on Memorial Day weekend, unless in the interim President Bush deploys National Guard and reserve troops to immediately secure the out-of-control southern border.
The fencing will be built with privately donated funds, engineering and labor and will be used as an example to educate the public about the feasibility and efficacy of fencing to secure America’s borders from illegal incursion by aliens and international criminal cartels. A non-profit organization dedicated specifically to this purpose will facilitate and administer donations for construction of the fence. Monetary and in-kind contributions for this effort will go directly into building materials for this private, volunteer fencing project.
Simcox issued the following statement on the MCDC border fence project:
“President Bush once said he would not wait on events to act to protect our country. He has been president for over five years, and still he has not acted to secure our territorial frontier, even as his administration admits the United States government does not have operational control of our borders.
“On Memorial Day weekend, the American people will exercise their God-given rights to protect their lives and property by initiating construction of fencing along the border on private land unless President Bush immediately deploys National Guard and/or reserve troops along the breadth of the Southwestern border line with Mexico, thereby retaking the region from the international criminal cartels who presently are in operational control of the border. Additional support is available from military units presently training to guard the borders in other countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan and they should immediately relocate their training to the Southwestern border.
“The existing border crisis is a dereliction of duty by those entrusted with American security and sovereignty, leaving America vulnerable to terrorist infiltration and an unprecedented crime wave caused by drug smugglers, rapists, thieves, human traffickers and murderers who currently cross our border at will.
“President Bush and Congress have taxed the wages of the American people to pay for the protection of our country, and expended those dollars to subsidize millions of low-wage illegal workers with housing, education, medical care, and welfare benefits. Yet even the most basic level of national territorial integrity requires that our elected representatives secure the border. Should they continue to refuse to do their Constitutional duty, the Minutemen will again step into the breach and commence building the required border barriers on private land and with private donations.
“Should President Bush and Congress fail to fulfill their oaths of office, and meet their Constitutional obligation to protect these United States from invasion, we, the sovereign people of the United States, having suffered a long train of abuses at the hand of a willfully insolent government, do hereby declare that these States ought, should and will be protected by American Minutemen.”
###
We Need A Fence design:***
Orcinus
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/12/minutemens-father-figure.html
The Minutemen's father figure
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Suzy Buchanan and David Holthouse of the Southern Poverty Law Center went a-digging into the personal history of Minuteman leader Chris Simcox, and their final report reveals plenty of troubling information.
The portrait of Simcox that emerges is of a paranoid self-promoter who sees himself as an overlooked genius finally coming into his own. He also is prone to extremely unstable behavior:
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.
"He 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.
"Eventually," she said, "the only thing I could do was file for divorce."
Simcox and Dunbar initially shared custody of their son. There was no legal dispute until shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, when Dunbar suddenly filed a flurry of emergency appeals.
"While Chris has always been prone to strong opinions and ranting behavior, this last episode has gone even farther," she told the court. "I am convinced he has had some kind of mental lapse and I am now, more than ever, afraid for my son to be in Chris' care."
Dunbar grew frightened after Simcox left her a series of bizarre voicemail messages beginning that Sept. 13, in which he went on angry diatribes about the Constitution, patriotism, and impending nuclear attacks on Los Angles, and talked about training their 15-year-old son in the use of firearms.
"I will begin teaching him the art of protecting himself with weapons," Simcox said in one recorded message he left for Dunbar. "I purchased another gun. I have more than a few weapons, and I intend on teaching my son how to use them." Simcox added, "I will no longer trust anyone in this country. My life has changed forever, and if you don't get that, you are brainwashed like everybody else."
In phone conversations with his son that his ex-wife recorded and submitted to the court as evidence of Simcox's mental instability, he challenged the boy to become "a man and a real American."
"You better stop playing baseball, buddy, and you better do something real, 'cause life will never be the same," Simcox thundered. "I'm going to go down to the Mexican border and sign up for the government for border patrol to protect the borders of the country that I love. You hear how serious I am."
It's also quite clear that Simcox is motivated less by real concerns about border security than about the influx of Latinos into the United States:
In January 2003, while on patrol with Civil Homeland Defense, Simcox was arrested by federal park rangers for illegally carrying a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun in a national park. Also in Simcox's possession at the time of that arrest, according to police records, were a document entitled "Mission Plan," a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, and a toy figure of Wyatt Earp on horseback.
Two months later, in a speech to the California Coalition on Immigration Reform, a hate group whose leader, Barbara Coe, routinely refers to Mexicans as "savages," Simcox offered a dire warning to his audience.
"Take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary," he said. "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."
Of illegal immigrants, Simcox added: "They're trashing their neighborhoods, refusing to assimilate, standing on street corners, jeering at little girls walking on their way to school."
He also has been known to inflate his resume:
"When I'm asked by reporters if I'm a racist, I tell them, 'Why don't you go ask my black ex-wife and my biracial children and the members of the racial diversity committee I chaired whether I'm a racist?'" he said at the October conference.
Simcox, evidently, was never the chair of his school's diversity committee. Even more disturbing, however, is what comes next:
"When they ask me, 'Well, what do you have to say to people who call you a racist?' I come back at them with, 'What do you have to say to people who call you a child molester?'"
That's a strange rhetorical device given the accusations leveled at Simcox in the summer of 1998, when his 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage -- prior to his union with Dunbar -- came to live with him in Los Angeles.
In separate interviews with the Intelligence Report, two of Simcox's former colleagues at Wildwood and his first ex-wife gave the same account. They said that Simcox helped his daughter get a job babysitting for a Wildwood School employee and that one night, Simcox's daughter showed up unexpectedly at her employer's house, visibly upset, alleging that her father had just attempted to sexually molest her.
"He tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated," said Deborah Crews, Simcox's first ex-wife and the girl's mother. "When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea."
Contacted by the Report, Simcox refused to answer four direct questions about the molestation allegations. "I would never answer those questions to you. You can't ask those questions," he said. "You're on a witch hunt and you're trying to discredit our movement, which is to secure the borders. ... My personal life has nothing to do with anything that goes on here."
No charges were filed against Simcox, but Crews said she and her daughter immediately broke off all contact with him.
"He's a drastic, chaotic, very dangerous guy," said Crews. "I'm surprised he hasn't shot anybody yet. I see him on TV and I have to turn if off, because it makes me sick to see him getting all this attention."
If this is someone's idea of the leader of a "neighborhood watch," I'd be watching my neighborhood very closely indeed.
11:20 PM
