Salon.com > David Neiwert

Remember the Minutemen

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 15:30:00 +0000

When people hear House Republicans ranting ad nauseam about “border security” – as will everyone for the next several weeks as a comprehensive immigration-reform measure works its way through Congress – they should remember the Minutemen.

You remember the Minutemen, right? Those noble citizen border watchers, out there braving the desert heat to try to stop brown people from crossing the desert illegally, who were the media darlings of 2005 but who seemed to drop off the radar afterward. The Minutemen changed the national conversation about immigration away from a debate about the state of immigration laws and trade policies and into a laser focus on those lawbreakers coming over our borders in large numbers.

They made “border security” the top priority for every politician in the country (including, it should be noted, President Obama, who has deported more immigrants found to be here illegally than any president in history). When you hear them debate immigration, inevitably you will hear some version of the following: “We need to secure the border first before we can pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

Secrets of the right-wing conspiracy playbook

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000

The extremist right in America has always fed on real grievances that go either unaddressed or are mishandled by the mainstream system—by government, and in particular the federal government. In the 1980s and ’90s, they channeled discontent with badly malfunctioning federal farming and land-use policies in rural America into uprisings like the Posse Comitatus and Patriot/militia movements and their various offshoots, such as the Montana Freemen. This led to armed standoffs with federal agents and varying waves of domestic terrorism, all of it emanating from the American heartland.

What these extremists always tell their audiences is that there are simple reasons for their current miseries—inevitably, it is a combination of a secret cabal of elite conspirators running society like a puppet show at the top, crushing the middle-class working man from above, while a parasitic underclass saps his strength from below. This usually plays out, in the worldview of right-wing extremists, as being part of a secret conspiracy to enslave ordinary working people and destroy America.

Meet Sarah Palin’s radical right-wing pals

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:18:00 +0000

On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from the United States.

So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. "This here is my attack dog," he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. "Her name is Suzy." Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol -- once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops -- out of his glove compartment. "I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you."

Homegrown terror

Fri, 26 Oct 2001 23:58:00 +0000

For weeks, government officials have publicly speculated that the source for anthrax attacks against the United States is almost certainly foreign -- either Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, or a rogue state, most likely Iraq.

But suddenly that's changed, and some officials, privately, are speculating to reporters that the "evildoers" behind this scourge may really be closer to home.

Tuesday, the Washington Post cited a "government official with direct knowledge of the investigation" into the origin of the anthrax spores found in Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office as stating that it is "unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq." There's only one other country considered able to produce the kind of high-grade, chemically treated bioweapon discovered in Daschle's mail: the United States.

Of course, even a homegrown weapon could be stolen by a foe, and it's quite possible these government experts, like others in recent weeks, are speaking prematurely and inaccurately. Still, their comments raise the specter of involvement by the United States' own internal agitators -- a bona fide fifth column pursuing its own agenda of destruction. And there are already those on the far right who have gone out of their way to become suspects -- thanks to their history of anthrax threats and their words since Sept. 11.

A Saddam connection?

Fri, 21 Sep 2001 23:45:00 +0000

Even as the Bush administration and the national media focus almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden as the seemingly preordained "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, evidence is beginning to emerge that a more familiar enemy may also have been involved in the devastation: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The central trail of evidence appears to show bin Laden's unquestionable complicity, but a second, subtler set of footprints may lead to Saddam's door. That trail originates with the first World Trade Center bombing, with evidence that some analysts believe links the 1993 operation to Iraq. That theory has gained currency over the past few years among some intelligence experts, including former CIA director R. James Woolsey. In recent days, the administration has contended that the Sept. 11 attacks likely had some state-supported assistance, and others (including Israeli intelligence) have pegged Iraq as the likely co-conspirator. Moreover, there are reports of possible ties between at least one of the hijackers and Iraqi intelligence.

The mystery of John Doe No. 2

Sat, 09 Jun 2001 22:46:00 +0000

The main thing Joann Van Buren says she remembers about Timothy McVeigh is the $50 bill he wanted her to break. That, and the two men who accompanied him.

One day before he tore a hole in the nation's psyche with the bomb that destroyed Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building, McVeigh, Van Buren says, pulled up to the little Subway sandwich shop where she worked in Junction City, Kansas, driving the yellow Ryder truck that would contain the bomb.

Van Buren didn't pay any particular attention to them at first. Another clerk waited on the men, but when they tried to pay for their meal with a large bill, she took notice.

"As soon as the $50 bill came up, I had to go to the safe to get the change," says Van Buren today. "And when I gave them the change and they got their sandwiches, I remember them going back over to the corner, sitting down. And when they left, I remember three people getting into the truck. There were three people at the table."

The first Ted Olson scandal

Mon, 14 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Theodore Olson's nomination to be the nation's next solicitor general suddenly appears to be in deep trouble, because of concerns by members of Congress that he was less than forthcoming in his testimony before them.

It's not the first time Olson has faced congressional questions about his candor. In the mid-1980s, he became the focus of an independent counsel's investigation for much the same thing: giving misleading testimony to Congress -- some charged it was perjury -- that was intended to cover up his own misbehavior.

Olson's current problems stem from his failure to be forthcoming before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is deciding whether to forward his nomination to the larger Senate, when he testified before the committee in early April. As Salon has reported, Olson gave evasive answers about his participation in dirt-digging expeditions into the Arkansas pasts of former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary.

But Olson's troubles with Congress shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed his career, because they bear remarkable similarity to the behavior that got him into hot water more than a decade ago, and almost led to perjury charges.

The whaling that wasn't

Mon, 16 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

The gray whale that was feeding off the outlet of Snow Creek last week, along the northern coast of Washington, probably had no idea it was in peril as it occasionally raised its barnacle-encrusted back to the surface and blew a plume of mist into the morning air. No more than two miles away, the gray whales' ancient hunters, the Makah Indians, were preparing once again to take to boats with harpoons in hand, for the first time in 76 years, to pursue the creatures that had provided them sustenance, both physical and cultural, for centuries prior to the arrival of white men.

Meanwhile, a crowd of mostly white people, clustered on a nob overlooking the sea pillars near where the gray whale fed, gathered to loudly protest the planned hunt. "Stop the slaughter of gray whales," shouted a big sign draped on a truck, blood dripping from the words. Just offshore, a couple of large boats manned by even more white people patrolled the harbors, vowing to intervene if the Makahs dared venture out.

“What kind of life do I have without my bride?”

Mon, 28 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

For an expert military marksman -- indeed, a man who trained Special Forces for years -- you'd think James "Bo" Gritz would be able to shoot straight when it counted. Fortunately for Gritz, though, when he turned his gun on himself last week, his aim wasn't true.

The strangest twist in Gritz's tortuous saga -- from war hero to pop cultural icon to notorious fringe figure -- came last Monday at a bend in the road not far from the Clearwater River in northern Idaho, where an early-morning deer hunter happened upon a bleeding Gritz, lying by the side of a gravel road near his pickup. He had been shot once in the chest, but he was alive and breathing.

An ambulance whisked him to the nearby hospital in Orofino. The local sheriff told reporters the wound had been self-inflicted -- and it was not life-threatening. Family members who lived at Gritz's Patriot settlement (named "Almost Heaven"), 30 miles away, rushed to his side.

Lives of the Republicans, Part Two

Wed, 16 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

PART ONE

She may have committed adultery and lied about it, just like President Clinton. But Helen Chenoweth has one up on the president, so far -- she says she's had a chat with the Lord, and he says it's OK.

"I've asked for God's forgiveness, and I've received it," she reports.

Whether Idaho voters will forgive her is another matter. The two-term Republican representative from the conservative rural state's northern district has always made a big deal about morality -- after all, she was first elected over the back of a Democratic incumbent who stumbled when he admitted (in an increasingly familiar-sounding scenario) to a one-time sexual relationship with a former co-worker after earlier denials.

Chenoweth's own vulnerability in the sexual arena came to light when she decided to go on the attack over Clinton's troubles in the Lewinsky affair. A longtime champion of "family values" (only one of a wide range of right-wing causes she's associated herself with over the years, including support for the militia movement), she ran a series of ads that sought to link her opponent, a Democrat named Dan Williams, to Clinton.