We've seen these people standing on street corners and sidewalks here in Southern California, waving Nazi and Confederate flags -- as reported on la.indymedia.org complete with photographs.

The scumbags demand that they're not racists and not neo-Nazis yet they're photographed on sidewalks with Nazi flags and skinheads. These scumbags claim that their members, followers, supporters, and defenders screaming "Heil Hitler," "Seig Heil," and giving stiff-arm salutes to motorists while they wave Nazi and Confederate flags weren't "invited."

This has all been soundly exposed in the la.indymedia.org web site -- so much so that "Minutemen" a.k.a. "Save Our State" a.k.a. "National Alliance" a.k.a. "Storefront" people used to scream something aweful in the discussion pages on LA indy until the scumbags finally gave up.

My opinions only and only my opinions.

Yes! Clowns around the world!!!

But clowning is a serious bit of sillyness. I suggest getting together with some friends and going as a gaggle of clowns. Especially since the minutemen are so afraid of clowns, they're likely to pee on themselves when they see you, or try to marinate you the way they did to us when they wanted to EAT us!!! EEK!!!!

Training suggestions and info on starting your own clown gaggle, bridage or cadre are here:

YES! Clowns everywhere! Viva los clowns! Todos somos payas@s!!!

 http://clownarmy.org/rebelclowning/diy.html

email us at circa-sd at riseup d0t net for more training ideas!!!

Justice! Dignity! Hugs! Bubbles!!!

The Minutemen are not Nazis in any way shape or form. They are not even racist, unlike La Raza and MEChA.

Are there racists who go there? Yp. They are neither welcomed and are disavowed. Some are just idiots, others are part of the David Duke-run campaign to destroy non-racist immigration groups.

If we are going to talk about disavowing etc, when was the last time indymedia called for protests against mass-murdering communists?

"The Minutemen are not Nazis in any way shape or form. They are not even racist, unlike La Raza and MEChA."

The only people in the United States who talk about groups like "La Raza" and "Mecha" are white supremacists.

True there are occasional self-hating white supremacists of color like Michelle Malkin but for the most part if you hear someone pushing wild conspiracy theories about Mexican nationalists wanting to turn the Southwest into part of Mexico, chances are good that person's had some contact with the white power movement.

David Niewert at "Orcinus" has documented the connections between the white power movement and the minutemen as well as anybody. Worth checking out.

 http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

I don't know if "Ron" comes out of the white power movement or not but he seems to share their obsessions.

 http://www.columbia.edu/~rhf2108/GILCHRIST.pdf

RonL, you're right not all minute men/women are racist. However, you perpetrate the same uninformed statement by generalizing when accusing La Raza and Mecha of Racism. Such generalizations are damaging to the possibility for discourse and an exchange of ideas. If you did your unbiased research you would find that Mecha is not an entity with a single mentality. Mecha is made up of diverse schools and diverse peoples coming from diverse ethnic/economic/cultural/ideological/ …backgrounds. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and beliefs, even when they are one-dimensional.

Ron Lewenberg

Ron Lewenberg is a founding member of New Yorkers for Immigration Control and Enforcement (NYICE), a local group with direct ties to the Minutemen. He can be reached at  r_lewenberg@yahoo.com.

Please ask him why he hasn't been a true patriot and gone to Iraq or Afganistan to fight terrorists? Me thinks he's a coward.
Kyles Bruser's step Grandmother
Lynn Bruser

Iwrote
"The Minutemen are not Nazis in any way shape or form. They are not even racist, unlike La Raza and MEChA."

Not a Native American responded:

The only people in the United States who talk about groups like "La Raza" and "Mecha" are white supremacists.

Anyone who isn't a third worldist or wishes to see the US swallowed up is a white supremacist.
That isn't an arguement but slander dressed up as a sylogism.

"True there are occasional self-hating white supremacists of color like Michelle Malkin but for the most part if you hear someone pushing wild conspiracy theories about Mexican nationalists wanting to turn the Southwest into part of Mexico, chances are good that person's had some contact with the white power movement.

....
I don't know if "Ron" comes out of the white power movement or not but he seems to share their obsessions. "

What's with the scare quote around my name? I give my name at my website, which I listed.

As for the "white power" movement, most of them are a bunch of neo-Nazis. As a nationalist supporter of the west, as well as of diversity, I am not welcome. When I do engage them, just as I am engaging you, they call be unAmerican for not despising Israel.
The really nutty ones will call me a plant screaming about marxist Zionist Khazars. (Although I am a Zionist Jew with Khazar and Karaite ancestors, that is not really the point.)

Nancy wrote
"If you did your unbiased research you would find that Mecha is not an entity with a single mentality. Mecha is made up of diverse schools and diverse peoples coming from diverse ethnic/economic/cultural/ideological/ …backgrounds. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and beliefs, even when they are one-dimensional. "
From the MEChA website, they seem to all be Chicano/Mexican-Americans who wish to politically or literally conquer the Southwest, and , to some degree, expell whites and blacks.

gotcha, I did not hide my background, although I think I have a better picture up there.

Lynn Bruser "Please ask him why he hasn't been a true patriot and gone to Iraq or Afganistan to fight terrorists? Me thinks he's a coward. "
1. Me thinks that Mrs. Bruser is either intellectually shallow or believes that only those who have served in the military should have a say on foreign affairs. Sounds like Rober Heinlien to me istead of a liberal.
2. Sorry, but I would not be accepted by the military. However, since wars are lost on the homefront I am serving my country.

"2. Sorry, but I would not be accepted by the military. However, since wars are lost on the homefront I am serving my country."

You probably tried a few years ago when standards were higher but they're accepting everybody now. Why not go to a recruiting station and give it a try.

What's more, there are literally thousands of illegal immigrants in the military right now serving their country. Who do you think is more deserving of American citizen? Stay at home neocon cowards? Or them?

 http://www.madison.com/wsj/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12363

"In the midst of the justifiable outrage we all feel about the torture and death of two American soldiers in Iraq and in the compassion and sympathy we feel for their families, one little fact seems to have gone almost unnoticed.

When Maria Vasquez, the mother of one of the fallen soldiers, Kristian Menchaca, issued a brief statement to the press saying "I am against the war and I feel very hurt by what happened to my son," she did so in Spanish.

Vasquez is a Mexican immigrant to this country. I have no idea what her legal status is and I don't know how well she speaks English. The only thing I know - after searching quite a number of sources - is that her public statements have been in Spanish.

That, in itself, would make her unwelcome in a number of places in this country. If you're on any e-mail circuit, you know what I mean. A great many of our fellow citizens are outraged by immigrants who don't know English, by Spanish-language billboards, by bilingual education.

Geno's Steak restaurant in Philadelphia made news recently when its owner posted a sign reading "This is America - when ordering, speak English!"

I hope if Vasquez ever travels to Philadelphia, someone reads that sign to her."

"From the MEChA website, they seem to all be Chicano/Mexican-Americans who wish to politically or literally conquer the Southwest, and , to some degree, expell whites and blacks."

David Niewert discusses this in detail, the mainstreaming of this particular canard of the white power movement through the Minutemen.

A must read on the Minutemen.

 http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/08/minutemen-home-for-extremists_08.html

"What's going on, of course, is that the Minutemen provide an ideal opportunity for white racists to "mainstream" their agenda, using the relatively benign "average citizens" that Lou Dobbs exclusively observes in their ranks as just so much cover."

 http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=916

Enemy Territory

While Gilchrist is newly prominent on the anti-immigration front — he recently joined the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, a hate group whose leader routinely describes Mexicans as "savages" — Simcox has been active since 2002, when he founded Civil Homeland Defense, a Tombstone-based vigilante militia that he brags has captured more than 5,000 Mexicans and Central Americans who entered the country without visas.

"These people don't come here to work. They come here to rob and deal drugs," Simcox told the Intelligence Report in a 2003 interview. "We need the National Guard to clean up our cities and round them up."

But that was the old Chris Simcox talking, not the new, spiffed-up, buttoned-down, ready-for-primetime Chris Simcox.

The old Simcox described Citizens Homeland Defense as "a committee of vigilantes," and "a border patrol militia." The new Simcox — the one interviewed for dozens of national TV news programs and major newspaper articles about the Minuteman Project — characterized his new and larger outfit of citizen border patrollers as "more of a neighborhood watch program."

The old Simcox said of Mexicans and Central American immigrants, "They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughter and they are evil people." The new Simcox said he sympathizes with their plight, and sees them as victims of their own government's failed policies.

Gilchrist gave his sound bites an even more extreme makeover by frequently comparing himself and most of his volunteers to "white Martin Luther Kings," and the Minuteman Project to the civil rights movement. He and Simcox both also preposterously declared in interview after interview that they had designed the Minuteman Project to "protect America from drug dealers and terrorists" as much as to catch undocumented immigrants and turn them over to the U.S. Border Patrol.

The mainstream American media largely failed to challenge these flagrant reinventions, even though Gilchrist's militant rhetoric about immigrants "devouring and plundering our nation" was still up on the Minuteman Project's Web site; even though Simcox's statements are public record (many were published in his own newspaper, the Tombstone Tumbleweed), and even though the Minuteman Project's leaders already had a record of lying to the media.

Early this year, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Web sites began openly recruiting for the Minuteman Project. In response, Gilchrist and Simcox proclaimed that neo-Nazi Skinheads and race warriors from organizations such as the National Alliance and Aryan Nations were specifically banned from participating. Pressured by journalists to explain exactly how they planned to keep these undesirables out, the two organizers said they were working with the FBI to carefully check the backgrounds of all potential Minuteman volunteers, only to have the FBI completely deny this was the case.

Gilchrist and Simcox then claimed they were personally checking out each and every potential volunteer using on-line databases. Even if this were true, one of Gilchrist's computers crashed the morning of April 1, wiping out the records of at least 75 pre-registered volunteers. As a result, the registration protocol in Tombstone rapidly degenerated into a free-for-all, and virtually anyone who showed up and gave a name was issued a Minuteman Project badge and told where to go the next day to be assigned to a watch post.

Gilchrist and Simcox further claimed to the media prior to April 1 that the only volunteers who would be allowed to carry firearms would be those who had a concealed-carry handgun permit from their home states, an indication that they had passed at least a cursory background investigation. In fact, virtually no one was checked for permits.

While most of the Minuteman volunteers were not organized racists, at least one member of Aryan Nations infiltrated the effort, and Johnny and Michael said they were two of six members of the Phoenix chapter of the National Alliance who signed up as Minuteman Volunteers. They said the other four had arrived separately in two-man teams in order to cover more ground and be less conspicuous. They said the Alliance members came out to support the Minuteman Project, but also to recruit new members, and to learn the remote hot zones for border crossers in Cochise County. They said they intended to return and conduct small, roaming, National Alliance-only vigilante patrols in the fall, "when we can have a little more privacy," as Johnny put it.

The day after the registration meltdown, the Minuteman Project sponsored a protest across the street from the Border Patrol's headquarters in Naco. It drew about 75 demonstrators, including Johnny and Michael, who sat quietly in camp chairs, wearing sunglasses and holding placards.

Michael's sign was decorated with a war-room graphic of arrows that represented armies marching north from Mexico and spreading throughout the United States.

"Invasion?" it asked. "What Invasion?"

The graphic on Michael's sign was almost identical to the imagery on a billboard the Alliance paid to put up earlier this year in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Las Vegas and on Alliance fliers that were tossed onto driveways and lawns in Douglas and Tombstone in late March during a dead-of-night distribution drive.

"Immigration or invasion?" those fliers read. "Non-whites are turning America into a Third World slum. They come for welfare or to take our jobs. They bring crime. Let's send them home now!"

Johnny and Michael offered their last names to no one, and never spoke of their jobs, though Michael said he had fought in the first Gulf War with the 82nd Airborne Division. At the protest, he wore a desert camouflage vest over a black shirt emblazoned with a white fist and combat boots. There were other small clues to the pair's ideology. Driving to the protest, they blasted the white-power rock band Youngblood. Johnny made several references to the "14 Words," a white supremacist adage ("We must secure the existence of our race and a future for White children"). Johnny also had a National Alliance symbol tattooed to the back of his neck and "Born in the C.S.A." (referring to the Confederate States of America) inked below his left jawbone.

"We both grew up in El Paso, and we've been racially aware since we were kids," Michael said. "In the sixth grade, El Paso put in a forced busing program, and I got sent to a middle school that was 95% Mexican. I got my ass kicked about every day. Johnny and I started backing each other up and we've been fighting Mexicans ever since."

Though both have lived in Arizona since the late '90s, the Minuteman Project marked the first time either has dared come near the border.

"The only way I'd be down here is with a bunch of other white guys with guns," Michael said. "Whites are the minority in these border towns, man. They've already been taken over. This is enemy territory."

I'm all for protesting, but I say let the racists do the talking, and they will be revealed for who they are. I am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and have been all my life. I say protest, but to deny someone else their right to free speech is totalitarian. Those who deny others their rights are bad, left or right. Instead, protest before and after the speech, but not during. To deny someone else their rights means you are no better than those who seek to deny or inhibit the rights of others through racism, hate, ignorance, and the myriad of other reasons humans hurt other humans. There has to be a conversation. If not, we are all doomed.

Transnational corporations are attempting to set up regional economies throughout the world (the European Union being the most well known). President Bush is helping them to create a North American Union with Mexico and Canada under the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. The corporate elite have done numerous studies over a couple of decades where they determined that they can make a lot more money if they dissolve borders and eventually countries.

Those who are volunteering to spend their time advocating open borders or taking a pro-illegal stand are doing the bidding of corporate America! While the former head of the U.S. National Security Council in Latin America, Robert Pastor gets paid to be a corporate cheerleader for a North American parliament, N.A. currency, N.A. passports, N.A. borders, N.A. immigration, etc., a lot of mislead people are freely fighting to help corporations make even more money.

By design, a North American Union is to compete with populations the size of China and India and therefore the goal is to increase immigration as much as possible in order to decrease the wages of workers! Hence the reason the U.S. Senate tried to pass a bill that would double the amount of immigration allowed into the U.S. each year from 1 million to 2 million. If you are rallying for open borders and illegal aliens, you are unwittingly seeking a race to the bottom for wage depreciation just as members of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on a North American Commnunity hopes for. Members that include board members from Time Warner, banks, etc. The radical left has been hijacked by corporate America!

First off, Jim Gilchrist is a member of the CONSTITUTION PARTY. Not Republican. Republican=Democrat Lite (or is it the other way around).

Secondly, wanting people to immigrate legally instead of ILLEGALLY is in NO WAY racist. It just so happens that we share a border with Mexico. If Canadians came here illegally, I still say deport them...and I had Canadian ancestors (U.E. loyalists).

Anyone who doesn't mind foreigners coming here and sucking us dry is a TRAITOR. (That includes Dubya and his gang BTW.)

Also, the ancestors who came to New England and Virginia in the 1630s were not immigrating illegally. America was not a sovereign nation yet. There's a bit of a difference between immigration and colonization! You can't immigrate to a place that isn't a sovereign nation; therefore my ancestors were NOT illegal immigrants!

Might I also add that I had Cherokee ancestors....