Rhetoric of Hate Fans Lynching mobs

There was a time when the national joke about California was that everything loose in the United States rolled into California because of the way the country was tilted. That tilt seems to have swung toward Arizona. Since 1980, Arizona has transmogrified itself from a state identified with rugged individualism, self determination, and tolerance to a xenophobic state of dysphoric panic about Hispanics spilling over its border with Mexico. In the 1980’s, Arizona wrestled with this xenophobia by advocating for English Only legislation; now it’s also wrestling with anything that’s “foreign” in its public school curricula, seeking to end Ethnic Studies courses, especially Chicano Studies courses.

However, what is most unsettling about Arizona’s magnetic attraction of “kooks” is its seemingly unbridled extremist anti-immigrant monomania about Hispanic immigrants, a monomania which has come to a head in the home invasion of Raul Flores in Arivaca, Arizona, some 10 miles from the Mexican border.

On the night of May 30, posing as U.S. Marshals the marauders led by Shawna Forde, head of Minutemen American Defense (MAD), and two of her white-supremacist vigilante cohorts, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola, shot and killed Raul Flores and his 9 year old daughter Brisenia, wounding Flores’ wife after busting into the Flores home. The story is that as a known drug dealer, Flores was fair game for robbery. The Forde gang is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. All are represented by the Pima County public defender’s office. Ignoring the racist motivation of the home invasion, a spokesman for the Pima County Sheriff’s Office attributes the raid to “cash” and drugs.

In a recent report, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) warned precisely about this kind of anti-immigrant extremism, linking the “vitriolic rhetoric to the growing number of hate crimes against Latinos and perceived immigrants” (Shakir, et al, June 19, 2009). From 2004 to 2007 hate crimes against Latinos rose by more than 40 percent. Last year the number of hate crimes against Latinos rose from 426 to 595 incidents. Shawna Forde was reported to have declared “We will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.”

MAD has ties to extremist groups like Aryan Nation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). From 2008-2009 Forde was Border Director for Jim Gilchrists’ Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Gilchrist has appeared regularly on Fox News’ Glenn Beck and Hannity & Colmes shows and CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight (see Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, “CNN and Lou Dobbs: Journalism or Jingoism,” National Hispanic Forum, July 5, 2007).

Shawna Forde also co-hosted “the pinnacle Conservative event of 2007” featuring Gilchrist and GOP presidential hopefuls Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Tom Tancredo who sent his apologies for not attending. Since the killing of Raul Flores and his daughter, all three have distanced themselves from Forde and her MAD group but not from the anti-immigrant hate rhetoric which has now focused on blaming the victim.

Backpedalling on the story, Arivaca residents are touting their “live and let live” philosophy and characterizing themselves as a community that watches out for each other. That being true then the Arivaca murders are indeed a failure of the community. But the failure is not Arivaca’s alone. The Arivaca murders are a failure of the state to curb the rhetoric of hate that permeates much of the public discourse on immigration in Arizona. Actually, the rhetoric of hate permeates much of the public discourse on immigration in the United
States.

an the rhetoric of hate prompt murder? “Of course!” Unequivocally. The murders of Raul Flores and his 9 year-old daughter Brisenia were prompted by the rhetoric of hate. Jason Bush may have pulled the trigger but the rhetoric of hate gave him 007 license to kill Raul and Brisenia Flores. How is that? Because the rhetoric of hate “fatwalizes” the victims, putting them beyond the pale of judicial protection. This was the case in the murder of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant in Long Island, New York, on November 8, 2008, by white teenagers hunting for beaners (Mexicans).

But the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) claims that the demonizing rhetoric of anti-immigration voices is unrelated to anti-Latino violence (Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center, December 5, 2008), adding that there is no evidence to link the rhetoric of hate with hate crimes. FAIR’s rhetoric of hate is based on the paranoid contention that Latinos are secretly planning to hand over the Hispanic Southwest to Mexico. Their defense is the “free speech” protection of the First Amendment.

In Schenck v. United States (1919), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of free speech that no one has the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater knowing there is no fire, just as today no one is free to make bomb jokes aloud in an airborne plane knowing there is no bomb aboard the plane. The First Amendment protects a wide range of expression. In its 1942 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court ruled that certain offensive words — called “fighting words” — can be prohibited.

It is well understood that the right of free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances. There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the

prevention and punishment of which has never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. “Resort to epithets or personal abuse is not in any proper sense communication of information or opinion safeguarded by the Constitution, and its punishment as a criminal act would raise no question under that instrument.”

Surely the rhetoric of hate falls under the banner of fighting words, “words which by their very utterance inflict injury of or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” However, given the tendency of the Supreme Court since 1942 to rule loosely on First Amendment rights, protection from the rhetoric of hate for Latinos seems a long shot. The only hope is that the rhetoric of hate poses a “true threat” of violence. In the murders of Marcelo Lucero, Raul and Brisenia Flores, the rhetoric of hate may have reached a threshold—murder as an emanation of hate rhetoric seems certainly to be a “true threat” of violence.

On June 12, Forde was taken into custody by FBI agents at a roadblock near Sierra Vista, Arizona. Arraigned on murder charges, reports indicate that prosecutors in Tucson are considering the death penalty for Forde, Bush, and Gaxiola. A ver! The most culpable hate mongers deny links between the violent deaths of Latinos by anti-immigrant advocates and their attitudes toward illegal immigration, but the death toll of Latinos at the hands of immigration extremists belie that denial.

This situation is much like the situation confronting Henry II in 1170 about Tomas Beckett, archbishop of Canterbury. In his feud with Beckett, King Henry wails: Will no one rid me of this priest? The King’s knights take this to mean “open season” on Beckett whereupon they murder the archbishop in the cathedral of Canterbury (see T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral). Analogously, the wails of the anti-immigrant hate-mongers in the American public media are taken to mean “open season” on undocumented Hispanic “immigrants” in the United States by the minions of the hate-mongers.

Did the knights who killed Beckett really understand the consequences of their action and its portents for the future of the nation? In like fashion, do the minions of the anti-immigrant hate-mongers really understand the consequences of their actions and their portents for the future of the nation? The outcome of this historical moment will shape the American character for years—if not centuries—to come.

Felipe de Ortego y Gasca is a Scholar in Residence and Chair of the Department of Chicana/Chicano and Hemispheric Studies, Western New Mexico University; Professor Emeritus, Texas State University System—Sul Ross. Contact at: ortegop@wnmu.edu

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