Minuteman Founder Said to Tolerate Neo-Nazis in Campaign

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http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=610

Neo-Nazis volunteered for Jim Gilchrist's recent congressional campaign and distributed racist propaganda at Gilchrist rallies with the full knowledge of the Minuteman Project co-founder and his campaign managers, according to a former Gilchrist campaign volunteer whose account is supported by photographs, video footage and postings on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront.

"They were basically allowing Skinheads and white nationalists to work the phone banks and do IT and distribute National Alliance fliers targeting non-whites," Cliff May, a dance instructor in Orange County, Calif., told the Intelligence Report. "When I told Mary and Eldon that I didn't want to work for a campaign that was tainted by white supremacy in any way, they told me not to cause a stir.

"When I kept bringing it up, they kicked me out."

Photographs taken at an Oct. 29 Gilchrist rally in Sacramento show a man outfitted like a Nazi Skinhead distributing propaganda from the neo-Nazi National Alliance. "I talked with Gilchrist about it and he said they'd decided to, in his words, 'let it go,'" May said. Three weeks later, May says he spotted two neo-Nazis among a crowd of Gilchrist campaign volunteers at a City Council meeting in Lake Forest, Calif. May recognized the young man and woman from photographs of neo-Nazis giving seig-heil salutes in front of swastika banners at an anti-immigration protest in Laguna Beach four months earlier, in July. May said he videotaped the neo-Nazis at the November meeting in Lake Forest and immediately afterward played the footage on a big screen television at Gilchrist's campaign headquarters.