Interviewing Minutemen President

While blogging for Colorlines Magazine and Racewire.org at the Democratic Convention in Denver, Julianne Hing had a chance to interview Chris Simcox, the president of the Minutemen:

I imagined the folks at Minutemen gathering crowd asking themselves, “What’s a young, minority lady doing here?” I joined them in Congress Park in Denver. It was billed as an all-day rally—their 8-hour agenda featured speakers like Tom Tancredo, Bob Barr and Alan Keyes, but it was more like a subdued suburban picnic with lots of coded hate speech tossed around in alternating lofty and heated tones. Chris Simcox, president of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, called the event a “third party convention for the conservatives—the real conservatives.” The folks in the audience were nearly all white and middle aged, a relaxed crowd leaning back in their USA lawn chairs as if they were watching Independence Day fireworks. . . .

I could see the attraction of this backwards, political thinking for the racist xenophobes who still wanted to believe in the “good immigrant” narrative and larger American myths. But while equating foreign nationals with “gangers” who “rape, murder and rob,” who also raise “pot plantations in our national parks, and they sweep it, and it’s ALL foreign nationals,” Simcox revealed his wildly racist, deeply held fears. He couldn’t hide it behind his occasionally generous depictions of immigrants in the U.S. Click here for the rest of the piece.

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