Despite White Supremacist Ties, Nativist Minutemen Project's Gilchrist Stumped For GOP Candidates

[pampango]

Jim Gilchrist is sought by GOP candidates to burnish their tough-on-immigrant credentials, and treated by the media as a legitimate authority on immigration issues.

(CNN host Larry) King identified Gilchrist as the founder and president of the Minuteman Project. That's half-true. Gilchrist is co-founder of the Minuteman Project, the nativist group that popularized the concept of placing armed but untrained civilian volunteers on the U.S.-Mexico border to discourage immigrants from entering the country illegally. But he's not been the group's president since February 2007 when the Minuteman Project board of directors fired Gilchrist for allegedly stealing donations.

Last campaign season, Gilchrist further raised his profile by endorsing and stumping for at least ten Republican state and national candidates who sought his help in burnishing their tough-on-immigration credentials. Through all this, Gilchrist has continued to deny that he misappropriated funds. On the issue of white supremacists involving themselves in the movement he played a major role in creating, however, Gilchrist expresses regret.

It was one year after the launch of the Minuteman Project. Gilchrist was nearing the pinnacle of his power as ringmaster of the Minuteman circus. His group had garnered international media hype, spawned more than 40 imitators and ladled gas on the fire of the already resurgent American nativist movement. Later that year the Minutemen and their allies would play a key role in derailing immigration reform legislation proposed by a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and influential Republicans... .

(Arizona neo-Nazi J.T.) Ready is one of the last high-profile Minuteman holdouts. The movement has largely disintegrated over the last two years as many of its leaders and untold rank-and-file volunteers transferred their allegiance and financial support to various Tea Party groups. The death knell for the movement as a mainstream political force occurred in the summer of 2009, when members of Minuteman American Defense, a Minuteman Project splinter faction, shot to death a nine-year-old girl point blank as she begged for her life in Arivaca, Arizona. They also killed her father.

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/152218/despite_white_supremacist_ties,_nativist_minutemen_project_founder_gilchrist_stumped_for_gop_candidates/

Minuteman to Tea Party: A Grassroots Rebranding

Over the past two years, more than a dozen former border vigilante leaders have taken on key roles in the Tea Party movement. Some, like Spencer, continue to maintain their hard-core nativist personas. Others have sought to separate themselves from their Minuteman identities in pursuit of mainstream political legitmacy.

"The Forde killings really made the whole movement sordid and these guys needed to find somewhere else for their ambitions," said Heidi Beirich, co-director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks extremist groups. "Rebranding themselves as Tea Party figures is their effort to stay relevant. They saw the rising populism as a good thing to latch onto, so they just toned down their anti-immigrant messaging a bit and synced themselves with the larger Tea Party agenda."

The Tea Party offered a broader political agenda that appealed to rank-and-file Minutemen. Their concerns over border security and non-white immigration had been equaled if not displaced by distress over the financial meltdown and the election of President Obama.

The IREHR report documented several examples of Minuteman leaders morphing into Tea Party figures. Among them:

*Eight state chapter leaders of the Patriot Action Network (The IREHR report refers to Resistnet, which has morphed into Patriot Action Network), the second largest Tea Party group in the country, are former state chapter leaders of either the Minuteman Project or the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

(Several other examples of the Minuteman-to-Tea Party connection are listed.)

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105240028