THe Takeover of the Minuteman Project

Tanton and FAIR take over the Anti – Immigrant movement

Recent events have set the heads of Minutemen everywhere spinning on their shoulders.

Jim Gilchrist, head honcho of the Minuteman Project has been fired by the group’s board, which claims the former CPA embezzled some $70,000.00 in Minuteman funds, appropriating the money to finance his campaign for Congress, and to promote his recent autobiography.

The Minuteman Project has been taken over by Marvin Stewart, a Black minister who is one of a number of Black anti- migrant activists being groomed for national leadership in the Minutemen and related movements. Stewart is being pushed by Minuteman Project board member Barbara Coe, who, along with more powerful and talented allies behind the scenes, has orchestrated the ouster of Gilchrist and his replacement with Stewart.

While the Minutemen are caught up in the Gilchrist drama, a more sweeping takeover of their movement is underway on a national scale. The Minuteman Project upheaval is only a single part of a bigger picture. While Gilchrist allies complain about “internal terrorists” taking over his project, the fact is that groups like the Minutemen Project and Save Our State are being taken over from within and neutralized – by outside agencies.

And despite the most recent Minutemen fantasies, Karl Rove and the White House didn’t meet with the “internal terrorists” behind Gilchrist’s ouster. He didn’t need to. Other, more obvious forces were at work.

Across the US, arch racist and money man John Tanton’s FAIR and U.S. Inc., understanding the need for a buffer against the charges of racism that have crippled the movement’s potential, have been grooming Black leaders for the anti- migrant movement, even as Tanton’s allies have sought to undermine the movement’s current power base.

Tanton ally Barbara Coe, Gilchrist’s key enemy, heads CCIR, a group that’ received substantial monies from Tanton and FAIR.

Tanton has funded and created “Choose Black America”, an effort to shine a national spotlight on Black anti-migrants, funding trips for Blacks like Coe allies Ted Hayes and James Spencer to media hotspots like Chicago, where the Arellano case has received international media attention. Last May, Tanton funded the expenses of ten Black Minutemen supporters to Washington D.C. for the founding of “Choose Black America,” and a press conference he’d arranged for them at the National Press Club.

In August, FAIR footed the bill for three “Choose Black America” members to travel to New Orleans for a Hurricane Katrina anniversary press conference – another shot at gaining international press for the new leadership corps that Tanton is grooming.

In the meantime, Save Our State – once the meanest anti- migrant group in the country under the leadership of Joe Turner, has been adrift and rudderless for months, carrying out none of the brash actions that characterized the early Turner and that made the group’s reputation. Now, second and third string players organize tiny, insignificant actions, harassing day laborers. Even the group’s best efforts are now “organized” by the second string, and it shows. SOS can’t seem to Pay for the media attention that used to come so freely, unless it’s from the National Review- not even with a protest in front of the home of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Turner has gone into a damp hard shell, spending all his activist energies, not on Save Our State, but on his new job, working for John Tanton, the “Puppeteer” of the movement, as Tom Tancredo and others have called him, at FAIR.