If you aren't already reading the The New Standard regularly, then you should be. They are producing some excellent progressive news and opinion unfettered by big-media pandering to corporate agendas. Plus, if you become a member by helping support this non-profit publication you get some extra heads-ups. Like the following story, which will appear on the TNS site later this week as background to a series of reports.
TNS reporter Gabriel Thompson just spent a week incognito as an effectively imbedded reporter with the Minuteman Project, the group of uber-nationalists who have been hunting undocumented immigrants along the Arizona border.
What he found was a situation where most reporters were happy to talk to one of the two officail leaders, Jim Gilchrist or Chris Simcox, who stayed very much on message and then leave with one of the standard soundbites we have seen parroted time and time again in the press and on Rightwing blogs: either "We’re Americans doing the job the government won’t do" or "we’re the largest neighborhood watch group in the country".
Thompson took an unorthodox route by moving in to one of the groups flophouses, a dorm room on a bible college not far from the border, and there getting to know the individual group members, many of whom were resentful of the media-hogging their leaders were doing. What he found was that the group's members were mostly not simple racists but rather uber-nationalists of the Michelle Malkin, my-country-right-or-wrong, persuasion. Group members felt "a deep sense of patriotism and loyalty to one country, the United States, and a pretty strong lack of concern for citizens of others".
Thompson also managed to get a good hard look at member's underlying motivation - a strong, almost pathalogical need to feel secure.
I was initially amazed at how much time people spent talking about the "security" of the bible college. On the first night there was an alleged "security breach" by two people that didn’t have Minutemen identification. Though they never found the people - who probably never existed - many volunteers armed themselves, strapped on bullet-proof vests, and conducted a door-to-door inventory of the facility. Some were downright hysterical that the breach had allegedly occurred.
And even though there were always people with the task of "securing" the perimeter of the bible college, I often heard people complain about how vulnerable they felt. One man explained in a frantic voice that even on day 3, with regular shifts of security detail, things were still a mess. He told me that a group of "illegals" could easily come in from one of the areas that was still unprotected and attack our group. While taking a shower one morning I overheard another man speak about wanting to set up lights that could illuminate the whole area 24-hours a day.
Thompson felt that for most Minutemen, their actions were driven by an inability to outgrow a childish fear of the dark and that this fear seemed to drive most of their waking actions even when not with the group.
He also called into question the Minuteman Project's figures on the number of people they had available - the Project claims 1,000 members on patrol but Thompson never could get what he saw to add up to more than 150. And those 150 were mostly bored - for the bulk of the Project members the sense of boredom from endlessly watching border shubbery without catching a glimpse of any "infiltrators" soon replaced the hype of the Project's recruitment email which had promised militaristic excitement.
Fascinating. Keep an eye on TNS for more in the near future.
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