Guest Column
Minutemen Internal Fighting, Jim Gilchrist Ousted, Tanton and FAIR take over the Anti – Immigrant movement
- Minutemen Internal Fighting, Jim Gilchrist Ousted, Tanton and FAIR take over the Anti – Immigrant movement
- By Nazi Hunter –
- Los Angeles Independent Media Center
- Mar. 06, 2007
- http://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/03/194699.php
Recent events have set the heads of Minutemen everywhere spinning on
their shoulders.
Jim Gilchrist, head honcho of the Minuteman Project has been fired by
the group’s board, which claims the former CPA embezzled some $70,000.00
in Minuteman funds, appropriating the money to finance his campaign for
Congress, and to promote his recent autobiography.
The Minuteman Project has been taken over by Marvin Stewart, a Black
minister who is one of a number of Black anti- migrant activists being
groomed for national leadership in the Minutemen and related movements.
Stewart is being pushed by Minuteman Project board member Barbara Coe,
who, along with more powerful and talented allies behind the scenes, has
orchestrated the ouster of Gilchrist and his replacement with Stewart.
While the Minutemen are caught up in the Gilchrist drama, a more
sweeping takeover of their movement is underway on a national scale. The
Minuteman Project upheaval is only a single part of a bigger picture.
While Gilchrist allies complain about “internal terrorists” taking over
his project, the fact is that groups like the Minutemen Project and Save
Our State are being taken over from within and neutralized – by outside
agencies.
And despite the most recent Minutemen fantasies, Karl Rove and the White
House didn’t meet with the “internal terrorists” behind Gilchrist’s
ouster. He didn’t need to. Other, more obvious forces were at work.
Across the US, arch racist and money man John Tanton’s FAIR and U.S.
Inc., understanding the need for a buffer against the charges of racism
that have crippled the movement’s potential, have been grooming Black
leaders for the anti-migrant movement, even as Tanton’s allies have
sought to undermine the movement’s current power base.
Tanton ally Barbara Coe, Gilchrist’s key enemy, heads CCIR, a group
that’ received substantial monies from Tanton and FAIR.
Tanton has funded and created “Choose Black America”, an effort to shine
a national spotlight on Black anti-migrants, funding trips for Blacks
like Coe allies Ted Hayes and James Spencer to media hotspots like
Chicago, where the Arellano case has received international media
attention. Last May, Tanton funded the expenses of ten Black Minutemen
supporters to Washington D.C. for the founding of “Choose Black
America,” and a press conference he’d arranged for them at the National
Press Club.
In August, FAIR footed the bill for three “Choose Black America” members
to travel to New Orleans for a Hurricane Katrina anniversary press
conference – another shot at gaining international press for the new
leadership corps that Tanton is grooming.
In the meantime, Save Our State – once the meanest anti- migrant group
in the country under the leadership of Joe Turner, has been adrift and
rudderless for months, carrying out none of the brash actions that
characterized the early Turner and that made the group’s reputation.
Now, second and third string players organize tiny, insignificant
actions, harassing day laborers. Even the group’s best efforts are now
“organized” by the second string, and it shows. SOS can’t seem to Pay
for the media attention that used to come so freely, unless it’s from
the National Review- not even with a protest in front of the home of
L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Turner has gone into a damp hard shell, spending all his activist
energies, not on Save Our State, but on his new job, working for John
Tanton, the “Puppeteer” of the movement, as Tom Tancredo and others have
called him, at FAIR.
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