Neo-Nazis whose self-impor­tance and egos far out­strip their com­pe­tence patrolling the Ari­zona bor­der?

What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

(Intense sar­casm.)

So how much of the vote might a neo-Nazi gar­ner in Ari­zona if he sud­den­ly switched par­ties from GOP and Demo­c­rat and ran for Sher­iff while prais­ing George Wal­lace and Jim Crow laws? We’ll find out!

Neo-Nazi Who Advo­cat­ed Bor­der Land­mines Launch­es Run For Sher­iff in Ari­zona
Nick R. Mar­tin Jan­u­ary 24, 2012, 7:13 AM

Two years ago, he was call­ing for land­mines to be used to stop immi­grants from ille­gal­ly cross­ing into the US from Mex­i­co. Now, a well known Ari­zona neo-Nazi wants to be in charge of law enforce­ment in a vast swath of desert south of Phoenix.

...

Ready is a long­time Repub­li­can and one­time precinct leader in the Ari­zona GOP. But elec­tions records show he switched par­ties Jan. 13 and plans to run as a Demo­c­rat.

He told TPM on Mon­day that he respects the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s his­to­ry, say­ing it was the par­ty that brought about Jim Crow laws and Alabama’s seg­re­ga­tion­ist Gov. George Wal­lace. He said he also has a prob­lem with tough-talk­ing Repub­li­can sher­iffs like Joe Arpaio and Babeu.

“All these, quote, bor­der hero sher­iffs — they sit there blam­ing the pres­i­dent while they’re not doing every­thing they can do,” Ready said.

Oba­ma is “def­i­nite­ly not per­fect in my book,” he added, but the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent has sent more troops to the bor­der and deport­ed more immi­grants than the sher­iffs could ever hope to.

Ready said he’s no longer a mem­ber of the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment, the nation­wide neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion he belonged to for years, but he could not remem­ber exact­ly when he resigned his mem­ber­ship. He also said he can’t stand the term neo-Nazi, call­ing it “the oth­er N‑word,” and insist­ed he is seek­ing diverse sup­port for his cam­paign.

How­ev­er, Ready’s racist views remain on full dis­play on his cam­paign Face­book page, show­ing his ide­ol­o­gy hasn’t changed even if his mem­ber­ship sta­tus in the NSM has.

The page is sprin­kled with quotes from Wal­lace. He also post­ed a pho­to of him­self stand­ing under a street sign that dis­played the name of Mal­colm X. Below the pho­to, he wrote that one of his pri­or­i­ties in office would be to get a street named after George Lin­coln Rock­well, the founder of the the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty.

As the Phoenix New Times not­ed when it first report­ed on his can­di­da­cy last week, Ready also lists his cam­paign chair­man as Har­ry Hugh­es, a long­time friend and doc­u­ment­ed mem­ber of the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment. Ready told TPM he is now liv­ing with Hugh­es in the Pinal Coun­ty town of Mari­co­pa.

“What Har­ry has is a big piece of prop­er­ty that we have turned into a com­pound,” Ready said, not­ing that they’ve sur­round­ed it with sand bags and barbed wire. How­ev­er, he added: “It’s not a mili­tia or any­thing like that.”

Ready has been on the fringe of Ari­zona pol­i­tics since at least 2006, when he came in sec­ond place in an elec­tion for city coun­cil in the Phoenix sub­urb of Mesa. And before he made his racist beliefs pub­lic, he was also a men­tor of for­mer state Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Rus­sell Pearce, the pri­ma­ry spon­sor of Arizona’s harsh immi­gra­tion law in 2010. Pearce has since dis­tanced him­self from Ready.

In ear­ly 2010, Ready attend­ed a Tea Par­ty ral­ly that Pearce and Arpaio both spoke at. He min­gled in the crowd and passed out fliers for the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment that called for land­mines to be placed along the US-Mex­i­co bor­der.

“We all should be active­ly advo­cat­ing dai­ly to main­stream Amer­i­ca the most humane, non-racist, fair bor­der secu­ri­ty plan avail­able,” the fliers said. “Name­ly, A MINEFIELD!”

...

TPM has a nice review of the ongo­ing JT Ready-affil­i­at­ed neo-nazi dri­ve to build a small army along the US-Mex­i­can bor­der. It’s worth a read.

@Pterrafractyl: They’re at it again? Hmm.....thanks.

(BTW, Dave, thanks for intro­duc­ing me to the Phoenix New Times back in 2010. It’s been one of my favorite sources, par­tic­u­lar­ly on this sub­ject. =) )

Because noth­ing pre­vents a race-riot like rov­ing gangs of heav­i­ly armed neo-nazis...

Well, this was trag­i­cal­ly unex­pect­ed:

TPM
Bor­der Vig­i­lante Iden­ti­fied As Gun­man In Ari­zona Mas­sacre

Nick R. Mar­tin May 2, 2012, 8:25 PM 6889

Updat­ed: May 2, 2012, 9:23 PM

Long­time white suprema­cist and bor­der vig­i­lante JT Ready saw him­self as part of a war that few oth­ers would fight. He amassed weapons. He donned a uni­form. He formed his own brigade of vol­un­teers to walk along­side him as he hunt­ed what he described as “nar­co ter­ror­ists” flow­ing across the Ari­zona-Mex­i­co bor­der.

On Wednes­day, reports out of Ari­zona said Ready died, not at the hands of drug run­ners, but with his own gun dur­ing a mad ram­page inside a sub­ur­ban home just east of Phoenix. Along the way, the reports said, he took the lives of four oth­er peo­ple, includ­ing a tod­dler.

It was unclear imme­di­ate­ly who the vic­tims were, but Ready still some­how man­aged to use the event to blame immi­grants even after his death. A post­ing on his Face­book page appeared hours after the mas­sacre took place.

“Reports are uncon­firmed that a car­tel assas­si­na­tion squad mur­dered JT Ready and sev­er­al of his friends and fam­i­ly this after­noon in Gilbert Ari­zona,” the post­ing said. “This page’s admin will keep you updat­ed of the sit­u­a­tion as soon as pos­si­ble.”

TPM called Ready’s cell phone late Wednes­day, but a mes­sage on the oth­er end said the line had been dis­con­nect­ed or was no longer in ser­vice.

...

Before that, Ready was a mem­ber of the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment, the largest neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion in the nation. He joined in at NSM ral­lies in Ari­zona and Cal­i­for­nia and was often spot­ted along­side swasti­ka flags.

Ready told TPM he had quit the move­ment, how­ev­er he could not remem­ber exact­ly when. He also fre­quent­ly brought Har­ry Hugh­es, anoth­er mem­ber of the NSM and long­time friend of Ready’s, along on the desert patrols.

Ready said in the inter­view that he had recent­ly moved into Hughes’s house near the town of Mari­co­pa, inside Pinal Coun­ty.

“What Har­ry has is a big piece of prop­er­ty that we have turned into a com­pound,” Ready said. He men­tioned they had recent­ly sur­round­ed the prop­er­ty with sand bags and barbed wire. How­ev­er, he added, “It’s not a mili­tia or any­thing like that.”

The Cal­i­for­nia GOP looks like it’s about to dou­ble down on ‘divid­ing and con­quer­ing’ the elec­torate

Pan­do­Dai­ly
Tim Don­nel­ly, Weimar Repub­li­can.. and next Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia?

By Yasha Levine
On May 19, 2014

California’s pri­ma­ry elec­tion just a few weeks away, and it looks like like its going to be an inter­est­ing one. One of the weird­est races is the fight for the gov­er­nor­ship, where an ultra-rightwing can­di­date is expect­ed to grab the GOP nom­i­na­tion and square off against incum­bent gov­er­nor Jer­ry Brown in the gen­er­al elec­tion.

His name is Tim Don­nel­ly, and he’s been freak­ing out California’s mod­er­ate Repub­li­can Par­ty estab­lish­ment.

“This is a bat­tle for the soul of the Repub­li­can Par­ty,” Lar­ry Ger­ston, a polit­i­cal-sci­ence pro­fes­sor at San Jose State, told LA Dai­ly News. “If Don­nel­ly pre­vails, it indi­cates that the fis­cal con­ser­v­a­tives, the evan­gel­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives and the Tea Par­ty con­ser­v­a­tives con­trol the par­ty and leave Repub­li­cans with lit­tle oppor­tu­ni­ty to suc­ceed in the long run.”

The rea­son why the GOP is freak­ing out? Don­nel­ly is one of the weird­est and most extreme elect­ed offi­cials in Cal­i­for­nia today.

Don­nel­ly rep­re­sents South­ern California’s High Desert region, locat­ed about 100 miles east of Los Ange­les — in the Cal­i­for­nia State Assem­bly. Don­nel­ly not only open­ly iden­ti­fies him­self as a Min­ute­man — part of a larg­er, loose­ly affil­i­at­ed net­work of nativist and anti-immi­grant mili­tias, accord­ing to the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter — but has pro­claimed that his man­date as an elect­ed offi­cial is to make sure “Amer­i­cans are back in pow­er” in the Gold­en State.

Tim Don­nel­ly ran a small busi­ness that man­u­fac­tured screws for the plas­tic injec­tion-mold­ing indus­try before he caught the Tea Par­ty wave to elec­toral vic­to­ry back in 2010. He doesn’t have much polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence, but he has a loy­al white, ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive fol­low­ing in the High Desert that has brought him two con­sec­u­tive vic­to­ries, with the lat­est com­ing this past Novem­ber.

Both times, Don­nel­ly ran — and won — on an extreme anti-immi­grant plat­form, essen­tial­ly declar­ing open sea­son on immi­grants and Lati­nos. In 2010, he open­ly bragged about his affil­i­a­tion with Arizona’s Lati­no-huntin’ Sher­iff Joe Arpaio. And he pulled all this off in a dis­trict with a huge and boom­ing Lati­no pop­u­la­tion.

His secret? He got a lot of help from the sub­prime bub­ble . . .

I first came across Don­nel­ly while liv­ing in and report­ing on the desert sub­prime city of Vic­torville, Cal­i­for­nia, a bleak sub­ur­ban sprawl out­post locat­ed in the edge of the Mojave Desert halfway between Los Ange­les and Las Vegas. I went there to report on the after­math of California’s real estate col­lapse. And Don­nel­ly was cer­tain­ly a man of his time — a man whose polit­i­cal career was launched and defined by the real estate col­lapse and eco­nom­ic depres­sion that hit California’s sub­prime boom towns par­tic­u­lar­ly hard.

* * * *

Tim Donnelly’s polit­i­cal awak­en­ing began in the mid-2000s, at the height of the real estate boom, when he sud­den­ly real­ized that the Lati­no pop­u­la­tion boomed all around him, seem­ing­ly for no rea­son. Even his ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive small town of Twin Peaks, locat­ed high up in the San Bernardi­no Moun­tains over­look­ing the Mojave Desert, wasn’t immune from the demo­graph­ic shift.

Accord­ing to a 2010 LA Week­ly pro­file, one inci­dent in par­tic­u­lar pushed him over the edge: In 2005, a 10-year-old Lati­no boy was accused of sex­u­al­ly harass­ing a white girl at a local ele­men­tary school. The kid’s crime? He alleged­ly said to the girl: “I want to lick you where you pee. I want to hump you all day and night.”

Don­nel­ly, who also hap­pens to be a hard­core Chris­t­ian, saw this as a grave offense, and thought that school admin­is­tra­tors should have deport­ed the the boy along and his par­ents right off the bat. Don­nel­ly had no proof that the fam­i­ly was indeed in the coun­ty ille­gal­ly, but he became out­raged when school admin­is­tra­tors told him to lay off. Clear­ly, he could not trust the gov­ern­ment to pro­tect his chil­dren and fam­i­ly from the immi­grant threat.

“That com­ment by that admin­is­tra­tor turned me from an aver­age cit­i­zen to an acti­vat­ed cit­i­zen,” he said, accord­ing to LA Week­ly. Don­nel­ly dis­missed accu­sa­tions that he was racist, point­ing out that his wife is of “Fil­ipino her­itage.” “I’m the only white guy in my entire extend­ed fam­i­ly, and I nev­er noticed it until peo­ple start­ed call­ing me a racist because I believe in the rule of law,” he said. And any­way, he didn’t care what peo­ple called him. “I am proud to be a ‘racist’ if the def­i­n­i­tion of racist means that you can tol­er­ate being called names in order to pro­tect chil­dren from sex­u­al preda­tors.”

Start­ing in 2005, Don­nel­ly began forg­ing ties to the Min­ute­man move­ment in Ari­zona, and took mul­ti­ple trips to train and take part in Min­ute­man cit­i­zen patrols of the Ari­zona-Mex­i­co bor­der.

Here’s how Don­nel­ly described his first expe­ri­ence keep­ing vig­il at the Ari­zona-Mex­i­co bor­der to the Moonie-owned Wash­ing­ton Times:

“I thought the wail­ings we heard at night were the coy­otes bark­ing at the moon,” said Tim Don­nel­ly, who head­ed the Min­ute­man Civ­il Defense Corps bor­der vig­il here. “I didn’t know until lat­er that those sounds were the cries of women being raped in the Mex­i­can desert, some less than a hun­dred yards away from the bor­der.

“There was absolute­ly noth­ing any­one could do about it,” said Mr. Don­nel­ly, gri­mac­ing as he turned away to hide his emo­tions. “It’s some­thing you nev­er for­get.”

Back in his tiny home­town of Twin Peaks, he start­ed up a Cal­i­for­nia chap­ter of the Min­ute­man Civ­il Defense Corps, one of the orig­i­nal bor­der vig­i­lante groups. Don­nel­ly was extreme­ly suc­cess­ful in orga­niz­ing fel­low nativists. Ulti­mate­ly his group grew to become “the largest anti-immi­grant Min­ute­man chap­ter in Cal­i­for­nia,” report­ed the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter.

...

In his 2010 cam­paign, Tim Don­nel­ly made demo­niza­tion of Lati­nos a huge part of his pol­i­tics. His big promise was to bring Arizona’s racial pro­fil­ing anti-immi­grant law to Cal­i­for­nia. It would require police to detain and deter­mine the immi­gra­tion sta­tus of any­one sus­pect­ed of being an ille­gal immigrant—which basi­cal­ly meant the cops could legal­ly detain any­one who looked Lati­no. One of his cam­paign slo­gans was: “Send a Min­ute­man to Sacra­men­to.”

Don­nel­ly toned down his rhetoric for the main­stream media, but ratch­eted it up for his base at Tea Par­ty cam­paign events. For instance: at a Tea Par­ty Express ral­ly in High Desert town of Barstow, Don­nel­ly framed his mis­sion in terms of an eth­nic war, of cleans­ing Amer­i­ca:

“I am going there to reach across the aisle to the ene­mies of free­dom and anni­hi­late them and pound them into the ground and take back our pow­er. . . . We don’t stop until Amer­i­cans are back in pow­er.“

His white vot­er base ate it up. In 2010, he beat out a bet­ter-fund­ed, more-mod­er­ate Repub­li­can in the pri­ma­ry, and won the gen­er­al elec­tion by a fair­ly wide mar­gin.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Donnelly’s first term didn’t go so well. He didn’t achieve much of any­thing, and spent most of his time in Sacra­men­to cast­ing “Nay” protest votes for every sin­gle bill that came across his desk and annoy­ing Democ­rats with his teabag­ger rants on the floor of the assem­bly.

Here’s him him on the floor defin­ing “lib­er­ty” as the right of car-dri­vers to dri­ve as dan­ger­ous­ly close to bicy­clists as they felt like:

SACRAMENTO — Repub­li­can Assem­bly­man Tim Don­nel­ly was thun­der­ing on the cham­ber floor against a pro­pos­al to make dri­vers stay 3 feet from cyclists, a reg­u­la­tion he said would chip away at Cal­i­for­ni­ans’ lib­er­ty. As his voice rose, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic col­league stepped in.

“I’m tired of you hol­ler­ing on the floor!” shout­ed Assem­bly­man War­ren Furu­tani of Gar­de­na, who urged Don­nel­ly to “use his inside voice.” The inter­rup­tion was met with scat­tered applause.

. . .With lit­tle chance of affect­ing pol­i­cy in a Leg­is­la­ture run by Democ­rats, Don­nel­ly has made his Assem­bly desk a soap­box, test­ing fel­low law­mak­ers’ patience with scorched-earth rhetoric on his favorite sub­jects.

Leg­is­la­tors want to “kneel and wor­ship the envi­ron­ment,” he says. A Sacra­men­to news­pa­per is “one of the most Com­mu­nist papers on the face of the earth.” Cap-and-trade pro­grams intend­ed to reduce pol­lu­tion will allow lib­er­al financier George Soros to “play pok­er with our jobs” by gam­ing the mar­ket.

One day, anoth­er Repub­li­can assem­bly­man swiped Donnelly’s micro­phone as a joke (he gave it back).

The one thing Don­nel­ly man­aged to do was to join the State Leg­is­la­tors for Legal Immi­gra­tion, which the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter describes as anation­al anti-immi­grant group fund­ed by big rightwing mon­ey:

Gay peo­ple are the “death knell” of Amer­i­ca. The Con­fed­er­a­cy fought for “indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties.” One-world gov­ern­ment, as pre­dict­ed in the Book of Rev­e­la­tion, is around the cor­ner. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment knew about the Okla­homa City bomb­ing before it hap­pened. Pres­i­dent Oba­ma is a secret Mus­lim and not an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. The babies of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants are a “poi­son.” State troop­ers should con­fine immi­grants to spe­cial ghet­toes. A fed­er­al agency has secret­ly built a series of con­cen­tra­tion camps for patri­ot­ic Amer­i­cans

These are just some of the rad­i­cal-right beliefs of a dozen lead­ing mem­bers of State Leg­is­la­tors for Legal Immi­gra­tion (SLLI), a four-year-old orga­ni­za­tion that spe­cial­izes in mount­ing leg­isla­tive attacks on immi­grants in states around the coun­try.

When Don­nel­ly joined the group, SLLI was agi­tat­ing against the right to birthright cit­i­zen­ship guar­an­teed by 14th Amend­ment. Yep, to ‘bag­gers like Don­nel­ly, not all Con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ments are made equal…

Don­nel­ly might have been use­less as a mem­ber of state assem­bly, but he knew how to please his desert hick con­stituen­cy.

In Jan­u­ary 2012, he pulled a stunt to remind his sup­port­ers of just why they elect­ed him as their assem­bly­man: He attempt­ed to board a plane with a loaded Colt .45 in his car­ry-on lug­gage, and then blamed it on ille­gal immi­grants, who he claimed had been threat­en­ing his life and thus forced him to pack heat.

Here’s the Sacra­men­to Bee:

Don­nel­ly was cit­ed on a mis­de­meanor charge of pos­sess­ing a loaded firearm – a Colt Mark IV with four rounds in its mag­a­zine, plus a spare mag­a­zine with five rounds, said Nico Melen­dez of the fed­er­al Trans­porta­tion Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion.

Screen­ers at the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia air­port detect­ed the firearm as Don­nel­ly pre­pared to board a South­west Air­lines flight to the cap­i­tal for the Assembly’s first 2012 ses­sion.

“It was an unfor­tu­nate mis­take,” Don­nel­ly told reporters lat­er. He said he “tends to always be armed” because of death threats he has received since launch­ing a ref­er­en­dum to over­turn the Dream Act, a new law to per­mit some undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants to qual­i­fy for state-fund­ed col­lege aid.

That was enough for vot­ers back home. They elect­ed him by a large mar­gin in 2012, despite the fact that his new assem­bly dis­trict had been redrawn to include a much high­er per­cent­age of Lati­no vot­ers.

But the demo­graph­ics might gonna start to work against Don­nel­ly very soon. By 2015, his district’s adult Lati­nos pop­u­la­tion is pro­ject­ed to out­num­ber whites by near­ly 15% mar­gin. Maybe that’s why Don­nel­ly is run­ning for gov­er­nor.

And the GOP’s alleged ‘civ­il war’ con­tin­ues (to make no dif­fer­ence what­so­ev­er)...