Thursday’s campaign round-up

Public disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s tax returns is apparently still on the way.

I wouldn’t hold your breath.

“But then I stopped watching cable news.”

Zing. That burn alone is reason enough to vote for him.

The Clintons seem to major in minors.

The Tweety put down was great, but still not as humorous as a couple weeks ago when a reporter was on his show to discuss an article she had written.

She was apparently getting frustrated at his lack of understanding, when she asked him “Have you read the article?” With his usual lack of thinking before speaking, he answered “No”!

Just a shame someone can’t put Tweety ‘down’ the way you would a crippled animal…

Mother Jones has an interesting story today on Clinton’s position on Israel, suggesting that she is pandering to big money Jewish donors who tend to lean to the far right on Israel.

Clinton’s unequivocal support for Israel is one of the reasons I don’t support her. As a constituent of hers, I felt put out that she spent so much time in Israel and that she seemed to care more about the opinion of Israelis than mine.

Dean reversed course, saying, “We are committed to do everything in our power to seat the Florida delegation,”

Translation: We’ll let them come to the party. But they won’t affect the nomination.

Bill won by 43% against a read-my-lips liar… -toowearyforoutrage

That’s what we call the ‘Perot Effect.’ He garnered 19% of the popular vote, even finishing second in some states.

He was so crazy though, talking about some sort of ‘giant sucking sound’ due to outsourcing and NAFTA. I think history has soundly proven him incorrect on that one.

Right?

Hey doubtful, I read that Perot would have won if the people who wanted him to win had voted for him

I think that in a 3-way race like that one, that might be right. All he would need would be another 13%, and I’d say that at least that percentage of people were so sick of Washington politics that they were ready to pull the pin on the “hand grenade in a bad haircut”. But since they didn’t think he could win, they voted for their second choices.

“I pretty much stopped paying attention to the feud between the Clinton campaign and Bill Richardson, but apparently, it’s still ongoing. Let it go, guys.”

I hate to see CB being even-handed on this one. This public feud is entirely the fault of both Clintons and their friend, James Carville. I certainly understand and expect Richardson to defend himself, and he has done so with reason and class.

This feud only servers to make Hillary look worse, and via Bill Richardson, Obama look better.

Hey, without me, Obama’s new donor number would have been 217,999. Woohoo, I’m famous!

Obama and Wright Racism and Bush bashing

In a recent press release Obama claimed, “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity [United Church of Christ] or heard him utter in private conversation.”
Appearing on cable news shows this past weekend, Obama claimed when he saw recent videos that have Wright making such comments as “God damn America,” he was “shocked.” Obama implied that the reverend had not used such derogatory language in any of the church services Obama attended over the past two decades.
If Obama’s claims are true that he was completely unaware that Wright’s trademark preaching style at the Trinity United Church of Christ has targeted “white” America and Israel, he would have been one of the few people in Chicago to be so uninformed. Wright’s reputation for spewing hate is well known.
In fact, Obama was present in the South Side Chicago church on July 22 last year when Jim Davis, a freelance correspondent for Newsmax, attended services along with Obama. [See: ”Obama’s Church: Cauldron of Division.”]
In his sermon that day, Wright tore into America, referring to the “United States of White America” and lacing his sermon with expletives as Obama listened. Hearing Wright’s attacks on his own country, Obama had the opportunity to walk out, but Davis said the senator sat in his pew and nodded in agreement.
Addressing the Iraq war, Wright thundered, “Young African-American men” were “dying for nothing.” The “illegal war,” he shouted, was “based on Bush’s lies” and is being “fought for oil money.”

The Reverend Wright’s anti-white theology that Senator Obama expressed surprise over is evident on the church’s website. The site says the congregation subscribes to what it calls the Black Value System, which is described as a disavowal of “our racist competitive society” and the pursuit of “middle-classness.” That is defined as a way for American society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps,” just as the country structures “an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.”
“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in the church-affiliated magazine Trumpet four years after the attacks. “White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Anti-Semitism:

Obama went on to claim that he first learned about Wright’s controversial statements when he began his presidential campaign. But this assertion conflicts with the fact that just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally on Feb. 10, 2007, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation.
At the time, Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

Black Racism: In failing to condemn Wright himself and claiming that he was unaware of the preacher’s hate-filled speech, Obama is continuing a longstanding pattern.
Obama often refers to Wright as being “like an old uncle, who sometimes says things I don’t agree with.” Wright is not Obama’s “uncle” — a person born into a blood relationship — but a man he has cultivated for decades as a close friend, mentor and adviser.
After Newsmax broke the story on Jan. 14 that Wright’s church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan in December for lifetime achievement, Obama again sought to denounce his minister’s action without criticizing Wright himself.
Like Wright, Farrakhan has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews (calling Judaism a “gutter religion”), whites, and America. He has called whites “blue-eyed devils” and the “anti-Christ.” He has described Jews as “bloodsuckers” who control the government, the media, and some black organizations.
After the Newsmax story, Obama issued a statement purportedly addressing the issue.
“I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan,” Obama said.
Again, Obama was careful not to condemn Farrakhan himself or Wright who had spoken adoringly of Farrakhan and put their church behind the award to the controversial Nation of Islam leader.
“When Minister Farrakhan speaks, black America listens,” Trumpet quoted Wright as saying. “His depth on analysis [sic] when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest.”
In fact, Trumpet is published by Wright’s church using the church’s offices. Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor.
***Having gotten away with sidestepping Wright’s adoring comments about Farrakhan, Obama told Jewish leaders flatly in Cleveland on Jan. 24 that the award was because of Farrakhan’s work with ex-offenders. To date, no news outlet has pointed out that Obama’s claim is false.

Obama went on to explain away Wright’s anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state’s support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with his claim that the award to Farrakhan was made because of his work with ex-offenders, Obama made that up. Wright’s statements denouncing Israel have not been qualified in any way.
Covert Racist Supporter Obama:
Wright suggested to the New York Times last year that he and Obama might have to do something of a distancing act in the run up to the election.
“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Wright was quoted by The New York Times. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said, ‘Yeah, that might have to happen.'”

Obama embraced more than Christ when he answered the altar call two decades ago at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Southside Chicago. The 8,000-member church describes itself as “unashamedly black” and holds classes in “African-centered Bible study.”
He also pledged to honor something called the “Black Value System,” a cultlike code of nonbiblical ethics written by blacks for blacks. It preaches a radically exclusive theology that contradicts the tenets of Christianity.
Since we first drew attention to the Afrocentric system more than a year ago (“Obama’s Real Faith,” Jan. 22, 2007), the church has removed it from the “About Us” page of its Web site, replacing the entire section with a glowing video testimonial from a white official with its parent United Church of Christ.
But according to the original Web page, Trinity puts the “black community” first.

Black members are encouraged to pursue education and skills exclusively to advance their community, and allocate their money exclusively to support “black institutions” and black leaders who “embrace the Black Value System.”
In short, it preaches from the gospel of blackness and black power. There’s little room for white Christians at Obama’s church. It attacks the pursuit of “middleclassness” (code for whiteness), arguing that middleclassness is a conspiracy by white leaders to keep talented African-Americans “captives.”
Trinity warns them not to be seduced by it, even though millions of blacks have benefited from homeownership and crime-free suburban living
Obama: “I believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change,” he recently asserted. He said his faith has also led him to question the idolatry of the free market. This reflects Trinity church doctrine that no African-American can really rise to the top echelons of a “racist, competitive” white society on merit.

Their (Wright and Obama) specially disturbing. By any objective measure, Wright is an America-hating race-monger. He blames practically every ill on “white America,” including 9/11. Just this past November, he honored bigoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan with a “lifetime achievement” award presented in Wright’s name.
Wright gushed in a cover profile of Farrakhan in his church’s magazine that his old pal Farrakhan — who has bashed whites as “blue-eyed devils” and Jews as “bloodsuckers” — should be a model for blacks because he “truly epitomized greatness.”
In the ’80s, the two traveled to Libya together to pay homage to terrorist Muammar Qaddafi.
Obama says he respects his preacher and is “proud” of their friendship, as well as his church, which proclaims: “We are an African people, and remain true to our native land, the mother continent.” In a 2006 interview with BeliefNet.com, Obama called Wright “one of the greatest preachers in the country.”

Obama recently promised a black newspaper in Michigan that Africa will be “my priority” as president. “I think that the U.S. has to see its long-term interest wrapped up in the success of Africa,” he said.
Hillary Clinton calculates that Obama’s childhood brushes with Islam will make Americans nervous. But it’s his adult conversion to black nationalism and socialism that makes this otherwise attractive minority candidate unfortunately so unattractive.

Obama on Faith and Growing Up

For much of his childhood, Obama lived with his maternal grandparents. He describes them as having no religious faith. He says of his mother’s mother, she was “always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn’t see, feel, touch or count.” [vi] His maternal grandfather, who he describes as a “dreamer,” [vii] had an innate rebelliousness and a “complete inability to discipline his appetites.” [viii] Perhaps this influenced Obama’s own youthful experimentation with marijuana and cocaine. [ix]

Barack Hussein Obama was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan Muslim father of the same name and an American secular humanist mother named Ann Dunham. While Obama’s father was raised in Islamic culture, he had become a functional atheist by the time he reached college. Despite his parents’ lack of religion, young Obama received his early education in both Catholic and Muslim schools.
Obama’s parents divorced when he was only two years old. Henceforth, the senior Obama was “almost entirely absent” [i] from his son’s life
While Obama’s mother was a quintessential secular humanist, he told Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Daren Briscoe, “[S]he was a deeply spiritual person. In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama wrote of his mother, “She was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position paper liberalism.” [ii]

During his early years in Chicago, Obama says he was a religious “skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.” [xi]
Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. while attempting to recruit Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for a community organizing drive. The very liberal United Church of Christ denomination notes, “In a sea of conservative black churches, Trinity stands out in that it has welcomed gay members, done outreach to people living with AIDS and advocated progressive positions on many social issues.” [xii] Wright is the man to whom Obama has turned to “help him explain how his liberal positions jibe with his faith.” [xiii] Today, after 20 years, Obama still calls Wright his pastor, friend and mentor. [xiv
It was under Wright’s tutelage that Obama made his public profession of Christian faith. This, in response to a sermon preached by Wright and entitled (like Obama’s recent book), The Audacity of Hope. For Wright and his church, the gospel is fused with the black experience in America. The church’s mission statement reads, “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.” [xv]

Trinity also has “adopted the Black Value System,” [xvi] 12 “precepts and covenantal statements” [xvii] that form a sort of Ten Commandments-like code. The System’s preamble charges, “These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered.” [xviii] The second value, after “Commitment to God,” is “Commitment to the Black Community.” The eighth is “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” And the eleventh is “Pledge Allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.”
This exclusive commitment to a cultural and national identity played a major role in Obama’s decision to identify himself with Christianity. He explains that he probably would have remained apart from any faith, “had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.” [xix]

OBAMA’S FAITH NOT A CONFIDENT FAITH

commitment to the plenary authority and centrality of the Bible does not describe Barack Obama’s Christianity. In fact, Obama picks and chooses what parts of the Bible he will accept or reject. For example, on the subject of same-sex relationships, Obama writes,

“I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.”[vi][xxv]

**Obama doesn’t seem to have this assurance of his salvation and, sadly, he risks passing that doubt along to his own four year old daughter:

“I thought of Sasha, asking me once what happened when we die— ‘I don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I hugged her and said, ‘You’ve got a long way to go before you have to worry about that,’ which seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang.”[ix][xxviii]

***He (Obama) approves of same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, as do his church, his pastor and his denomination. He supports abortion for any reason, by any method, at any stage of pregnancy including during the birth process. In an E-mail under his wife Michelle’s signature, his campaign for US Senate championed Roe v. Wade and partial-birth abortion.[xii][xxxi] In 2002 as an Illinois legislator, Obama even voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that survived late-term abortion.

Obama defines himself as a “progressive.”[x][xxix] He admonishes those of us who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible that we have an added burden of translating our religious principles into what he calls “universal values.” According to him, failure to do so in a “pluralistic democracy” means forfeiting even our highest moral standards because “we have no other choice.”[xi][xxx]

Obama’s progressivism, however, leads him to conclusions that are morally untenable, if not reprehensible, to Evangelicals and other traditionalist Christians.

Obama must acknowledge that he may be wrong about such essentials as the Bible, doctrine, the means of salvation and morality. (He will probably have to stop smoking too, as that would be one the simplest ways of avoiding offense with the large number of Evangelicals who hold to holiness codes.)

****Obama is a member in a church that places devotion to race and nationality on par with devotion to Christ.

Obama will also likely need to explain why his mentor, Pastor Wright, unapologetically uses language that insults millions of Americans, many of whom are Evangelicals. In one interview, Wright called those of us who voted for George Bush “stupid.”

The Minuteman Reconsidered
Monday, January 28, 2008 – Orange Coast Magazine – February 2008

The Minuteman Reconsidered

It’s easy to call Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist of Aliso Viejo a froth-mouthed racist agitator, especially if you ignore a few inconvenient truths

By Steven M. Thomas • Photography by Challenge Roddie

It would have been so much easier to write a profile of Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist if he had turned out to be the unrepentant son of a bitch that he often is portrayed to be. I could have interviewed a few of his many opponents, gleefully transcribing their charges of racism and hatemongering, discounted as partisan his own statements and the support of his friends, and tossed my indictment on the pile. But, no. Gilchrist was about to complicate my life.

We had agreed to meet at 10 a.m. at a Starbucks at the broad suburban intersection of Alicia Parkway and Pacific Park Drive near Gilchrist’s home in Aliso Viejo. He is late and comes in looking harried, like someone with a hectic schedule who always runs 10 minutes behind. Standing at 5 feet 8 inches, probably 165 pounds, he isn’t an intimidating physical presence, but there is something very solid about him.

When I stand to greet him, he gives me a firm handshake and a smile that makes him look like a grandfather of three, which he is. “Let me grab some coffee, and I’ll be right with you,” he says, tossing a notebook and some papers on the small round table and hurrying toward the counter.

I don’t know a great deal about Gilchrist, just what I’ve picked up from a handful of newspaper articles over the past few years and skimmed from his Web site before driving down. As a progressive Democrat, though, I am hard-wired to be suspicious of him and his cause. I’m rubbed the wrong way by the idea of a bunch of middle-class white people banding together to stop poor Mexicans from participating in the great tradition of building new lives in America. I plan to be journalistically objective, of course, but I am fully prepared to buy into the negative assumptions about Gilchrist that people like me often make. The trouble starts when he settles into the chair opposite me and begins to speak.

Assumption No. 1
Jim Gilchrist is nothing but a shameless self-promoter.

Gilchrist is a Rhode Island native who has been married to his wife, Sandy, for 14 years. They have two grown stepdaughters. He says his rise to the forefront of the immigration issue began in the 1990s, when he and Sandy wrote to Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and their congressman, Christopher Cox, on a regular basis, demanding action on the problem of illegal immigration. They were concerned about the use of taxpayer dollars to provide services for non-citizens and the government’s failure to enforce the laws of the land.

“All we ever got back were boilerplate replies from the politicians that [didn’t] address the issue,” he says.

The issue took on new urgency for Gilchrist after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Outraged that most of the Saudi attackers were in the country illegally, having overstayed their visas, Gilchrist blamed the federal government for allowing the tragedy to happen. Deciding to get more involved, he says he “started reading everything I could find on the subject and doing a lot of research.”

The Minuteman Project, which Gilchrist describes as a multiethnic immigration law enforcement advocacy group, was born Oct. 1, 2004, when he stayed up all night composing an e-mail recruitment poster inviting people to join him on the Mexican border. “Within two weeks, that e-mail ended up in 400,000 mailboxes,” he says.

Gilchrist crossed the border of American consciousness six months later, on April 1, 2005, when he and his followers set up camp in the desert south of Tombstone, Ariz., to draw attention to the problem of uncontrolled illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States. “I knew if I could create the largest gathering of Minutemen since the Revolutionary War that it would have an impact on the issue,” he says.

During the next 35 days, more than 1,000 people from around the country participated in the controversial event, fanning out along a 24-mile stretch of the international border to look for and report undocumented immigrants slipping into the country. The gathering sparked a media frenzy, drew a charge of vigilantism from President Bush, and probably did more than any other single event to push immigration reform to the center of the American political stage.

In the three years since then, Gilchrist has stayed relevant by advocating strict border control and immigration-law enforcement in city council meetings, on college campuses, at border events, and on more than 2,500 television and radio shows. His energetic agitation has helped make immigration one of the top issues in the 2008 presidential election season.

Gilchrist also jumped into politics directly, running for Congress as an American Independent and campaigning for candidates who support his views. The run for Congress made him look good. After a whirlwind three-month campaign in fall 2005, he attracted a respectable 25.8 percent of the vote in a special election to fill the 48th District congressional seat vacated when Cox was appointed chairman of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Republican John Campbell won the election, but Gilchrist says, “I had a big smile on my face … the day after the election. There were four bills dealing with immigration chaos introduced in Congress that day. Ten weeks before, none of them were in the works. I have to give myself some credit for that.”

Others give him credit as well. “Gilchrist was very effective in exploiting talk radio to make illegal immigration a hot issue in the congressional campaign,” says Michael Capaldi, chairman emeritus of Orange County’s iconic Lincoln Club, a nationally influential group of Republican moneymen and power brokers. Adds Mark Petracca, chairman of the political science department at the University of California, Irvine, “Gilchrist’s run for Congress in the open primary election probably compelled the other candidates in this and other local and county elections to focus more on immigration than would have been the case absent his candidacy.”

Local political blogs lit up recently with speculation that Gilchrist aims to unseat Democratic U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez in the 47th district in November, a rumor he doesn’t deny.

“There’s a 50-50 chance I’ll get in,” he says.

If he does, it’s a safe bet that furious protesters will show up at every campaign stop accusing him of being a hateful nativist marching arm-in-arm with the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation to trample the rights of Mexican immigrants.

Assumption No. 2
Jim Gilchrist is a froth-mouthed racist agitator masquerading as a reasonable man.

As Gilchrist sips coffee and explains what he stands for, the flaws in my assumptions jump out at me.

A decorated Marine veteran who volunteered to fight in Vietnam when he was 18, arriving in Quang Tri province near Khe Sanh in February 1968 at the tail end of the Tet offensive, Gilchrist is passionately anti-war, viewing the Iraq conflict as a terrible mistake. He is a registered Republican, but considers George W. Bush the worst president in American history. He expresses strong and seemingly sincere support for multiculturalism, noting that one of his stepdaughters is married to a Mexican-American man and two of his grandchildren are half-Mexican. He points out that the Minuteman Project itself is a multiracial and multiethnic group with African-Americans and Hispanics in positions of leadership.

“We have individuals who have immigrated here legally from countries like Cuba, Mexico, and Peru who help Jim,” says Robin Hvidston, a college-educated mother and housewife who is Gilchrist’s national rally organizer. “It is not a matter of race. It is a matter of upholding laws.”

Another surprise comes when he tells me that his border patrols were never intended to actually stop illegal immigration. “That first border event was a dog-and-pony show,” he says. “It was political activism. I organized it to draw attention to the failure of the government to secure our borders, and it did that in spades. Patrolling the border is only about 5 or 10 percent of what the Minuteman Project is about. The other 90 to 95 percent is driving this issue up through city councils, mayors, state legislatures, and governors into the halls of Congress to force change.”

As he talks, I’m struck by the reasonableness of many of his views on immigration. He is passionate about “the rule of law” in American life and history, and believes that free flowing illegal immigration and a failure to deal with illegal immigrants tend to undermine the nation’s civic foundations. A retired certified public accountant with three college degrees, he has a good grasp of numbers and makes effective points about the extent of illegal immigration, as well as its economic and social consequences. Some of his harshest scorn is reserved for big corporations and other businesses that employ undocumented workers.

“Enforcement against employers is key,” he says. “These big companies are engaged in a 21st-century slave trade, luring poor people north to work for dirt cheap wages and no benefits to increase their profits. They are laughing all the way to the bank while hard-working citizens are crying all the way to the poorhouse. If you come here impoverished and work for $8 an hour as a carpenter, low wages keep you in poverty while you put a $40-an-hour union carpenter out of work, and [then] we have twice as much poverty as before.”

Other of Gilchrist’s positions are arguable. He says he supports legal immigration but only for people “who have integrity and character that will preserve us as a civilized nation governed under the rule of law.” It’s not clear who, exactly, would gaze into the eyes of each potential immigrant and divine whether they have a good heart or a bad one.

Gilchrist also advocates deporting undocumented people already in the country. The federal government says there are 12 million of them in the United States, while Gilchrist puts the number at 30 million. Either way, the idea of mustering the political will and practical ability to find all those people, pluck them out of the social fabric, and expel them from the country seems like a fantasy.

When I ask Gilchrist if he really believes it is possible, he talks about arresting employers to make examples of them, cutting off welfare services, building a $6 billion wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and hiring more border guards, immigration investigators, prosecutors, and judges to handle deportations.

“It’ll take time,” he says. “You have to educate the public, which is what I am trying to do. We don’t live in a perfect, ideal society, and we never will, but somewhere between that ideal and the way it is, there is a practical reality we can reach.”

Morning blends into afternoon as we talk. Workers and high school students on lunch break crowd into the coffee shop. Several people stop to greet Gilchrist—an Afghan immigrant, a sheriff’s deputy, and an elderly white woman, among others.

“I saw your picture in the paper,” the woman says, patting his shoulder. “I am for you. I support what you are trying to do.”

Assumption No. 3
But seriously, he really is a froth-mouthed, hatemongering racist agitator underneath it all, right?

The last thing I wanted to do was defend this guy and then have someone send me a video clip of him uncorking his inner Lester Maddox. So I got to work conducting numerous interviews and doing extensive research to see if I could find the Maddox clip myself.

The first thing I discovered was that Jim Gilchrist is a hard subject to get a handle on. There are an infinite number of bloggy accusations against him, and an equal number of hateful anti-Mexican rants in defense of him and his positions. Most, on both sides, are devoid of good grammar and supporting evidence.

In the realm of verifiable reality, I interviewed serious people—academics, activists, and political observers—and listened to those who say Gilchrist is a monster, as well as those who say he is a great American. I also met with Gilchrist on the patio of the same Starbucks for another long conversation, spoke to him frequently on the phone, and exchanged numerous e-mails with him. He was always accessible and forthcoming with any information I requested.

In the end, I decided Gilchrist is partly responsible for many of his problems. He has an unfortunate penchant for militarist metaphor. To him, the illegal immigration problem is “a Trojan Horse invasion” and “the number of illegals crossing the border each week is equivalent to four reinforced army divisions.” That kind of talk inflames his opponents and makes it easy for them to think him inclined to violence. Though Gilchrist often shows remarkable forbearance when under personal attack, he reacts in the long run with considerable hostility toward those who denigrate him, hurling back in print and on air the charges of racism and rotten behavior his critics aim at him, vowing to defeat and dismantle their organizations. Understandable, but not a great public relations strategy. It doesn’t help that he sometimes sounds apocalyptic, talking about illegal immigration leading to the breakup of the country along racial and ethnic lines “like the old Soviet Union.”

Probably the biggest source of the animosity and confusion surrounding him stems from the cause itself. While Gilchrist seems sincere about his desire for non-violence and racial tolerance, the anti-immigration debate attracts many lowlifes whose words and behavior get charged to him although he has never met them and doesn’t sanction their acts. He says there are more than 200 independent groups that use the word “minuteman” in their title that have nothing to do with his Minuteman Project. He is regularly called to account for the actions of others.

On the other side, talking with Gilchrist’s opponents, reading what they write, and watching their tactics on video, has been no less disturbing—and at times has made me ashamed to consider myself a liberal. Remarkably uninformed, they pour bile on him like pitch from the ramparts. They accuse him of murder, mental illness, cowardice, criminality, scapegoating, and nativism—the politically correct term du jour for racism—but offer scant proof of their charges.

Assumption No. 4
Jim Gilchrist is an insignificant pipsqueak who has done little more than throw gasoline on the fire.

Gilchrist is never more controversial than when he takes his message onto college and university campuses. In October 2006, he was invited to speak about immigration reform at Columbia University. When he stepped to the lectern, students organized by Hispanic campus groups stormed the stage, knocked over the lectern and drove Gilchrist into the wings.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, not exactly an apologist for the right wing, condemned Columbia students for silencing Gilchrist, calling the preplanned disruption “one of the most serious breaches of academic faith that can occur in a university such as ours.”

David Eisenbach, who teaches media and politics at Columbia, remembers the repercussions that followed. “Columbia was bashed in just about every publication in New York City, from the New York Post to the New York Times, for not being able to carry out its duty to ensure free speech,” he says. “It was shameful the way the event erupted into fisticuffs.”

Eisenbach adds that when he tried to bring Gilchrist back to the campus for the one-year anniversary of the disrupted speech, socialist and Hispanic student groups blocked the event.

A year later, in November 2007, students invited Gilchrist to debate the immigration issue at California State University, Long Beach. Other students and professors banded together to form the Campus Coalition Against Hate in response, condemning Gilchrist by the very title of their organization. They organized a counter-rally and refused to debate him, citing the Columbia incident as evidence that he was “looking to provoke” conflict and violence.

Enrique Morones, a San Diego immigrant-rights activist, eventually agreed to debate Gilchrist at Cal State Long Beach, but then, after insisting that he be allowed to speak first, launched into a 10-minute series of personal attacks, accusing several people not present who he said were connected with Gilchrist of being child molesters and criminals, and then saying that Gilchrist himself is mentally ill, has a criminal record, and was the laughingstock of the Marine Corps when he was fighting in Vietnam. Morones then led a planned walkout of students opposed to Gilchrist who had packed the auditorium.

Gilchrist stayed calm, saying only that Morones was lying. Someone shouted that those leaving the auditorium were liberal scum, but Gilchrist hushed his supporter. “They are not liberal scum,” he said. “They are just uninformed.” He then gave a two-hour talk mostly about the importance of the First Amendment to the 50 or 60 students who remained.

When I asked Morones afterward for evidence to back up his charges, he seemed outraged that I questioned his truthfulness—but did not provide a scrap of proof.

Norma Chinchilla, chairwoman of the Chicano and Latino Studies Department and one of the leaders of the Campus Coalition Against Hate at Long Beach, offers another reason why she declined to debate Gilchrist. “I don’t consider him a major voice in the immigration debate,” she says, concurring with Victor M. Rodriquez, a professor in her department. “Who is James Gilchrist?” Rodriquez asks. “He is not an expert on immigration.”

Convenient if true, but plenty of others see Gilchrist as a leading player. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, consulted with Gilchrist on his immigration policy and solicited his endorsement last fall, trumpeting it on the front page of his campaign Web site and on “Larry King Live” when Gilchrist endorsed him in December. “No one can question Jim’s commitment to this country and the immigration problem,” Huckabee says.

A number of polls conducted by network and cable news organizations in 2005 and 2006 show that a solid majority of Republicans support Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project. A 2005 Rasmussen Survey of 1,000 adults found that 54 percent of all Americans had a favorable opinion of the Minutemen. Adds Michael Capaldi of the Lincoln Club: “No one else on the anti-illegal immigration side has had the impact that he has. Gilchrist knows how to light the bonfires and keep them burning. He’s a voice that you can’t ignore.”

Still, Chinchilla calls Gilchrist an extremist who is operating outside the political mainstream and who needlessly showed up for the Long Beach debate wearing a bullet-proof vest outside his suit coat. Gilchrist, who has a penchant for political theater, says he wore the vest to help engage students in a discussion about the dangers of speaking out on controversial subjects and the importance of the First Amendment. Professors Chinchilla and Rodriquez say the vest was a melodramatic provocation, proof that Gilchrist is a troublemaker.

Their reaction, of course, ignores the fact that members of the anti-Gilchrist group showed up with tape over their mouths and bandanas hiding their faces.

A few weeks after the uproar at Cal State Long Beach, a Gilchrist appearance at Long Beach City College was canceled for security reasons. Byron D. Breland, that college’s dean of student affairs, insists the decision was not driven by a political agenda. The cumulative result, arguably, was that the students who disrupted and protested Gilchrist at Columbia and Cal State Long Beach helped silence him at City College.

In one sense, the attitude of people such as Chinchilla and Rodriquez toward Gilchrist is wholly understandable. There is a long, ugly history of anti-Latino racism in California and the United States, and racism persists today. But that protective attitude can easily go too far. History is full of oppressed people who later become repressive themselves.

“People around here try to suppress everything like we are a communist school or something,” says Cal State Long Beach junior Jason Aula, the student leader who invited Gilchrist to campus. “It is like you are not free to have an opposing viewpoint. But we are not going to be intimidated by people. Illegal immigration is not a Democrat or Republican issue. It is an American issue, and we have a right to express and maintain our side of that issue in a respectful, non-racist way. That is what America is about.”

Assumption No. 5
Jim Gilchrist must somehow be getting rich, as well as famous, from all this.

Gilchrist serves as president of the Minuteman Project without pay, takes no reimbursement for car or phone expenses, and has borrowed against his home to tide the organization over when expenses outpaced donations, loaning as much as $70,000 of his own money to the cause. He receives a steady stream of death threats, some of which are posted on his Web site under the heading “Hate Mail.” He says his windshield has been smashed and his car keyed.

So why does he do it?

Chinchilla believes he likes the limelight: “I think he has just latched onto an issue that he can get some response on,” she says. Ted Hayes, a Los Angeles homeless advocate, disagrees, insisting that Gilchrist is “motivated by love for country.”

Gilchrist, a self-professed “Navy brat” who attended nine schools before graduating from high school, says he joined the Marine Corps right out of high school because he wanted to defend his country. He knows now that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was bogus and believes the Vietnam War was a mistake, but the urge to serve is still there. He knows how difficult it is to force change in the face of entrenched interests, but believes he is making a difference.

“Jim Gilchrist came along at a time in my life when I felt very alone and believed that nobody knew what was going on and nobody cared,” says Barbara March, mother of David March, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who was killed by an illegal immigrant gang member who fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution. “He is a hero who is trying to help his country.”

Gilchrist named his first camp at the border Camp David March to honor the slain deputy.

“That touched us so deeply,” says John March, David’s father. “Our goal has always been to make Dave’s life and death count. As a result of the awareness the Minuteman Project brought to the border, and of what my wife, and I, and others have done, all of a sudden Mexico has had to change its extradition policy. Dozens of killers of U.S. citizens have already been extradited back to the United States. Politicians are now starting to talk seriously about securing our border. Jim Gilchrist was instrumental in that monumental change.”

Gilchrist says he doesn’t enjoy the constant conflict in his life, but isn’t surprised at the hostility directed at him. Despite the trials and turmoil, he says he will continue until he gets the results he wants— or someone comes along to take his place.

Talking about Vietnam, as he often does, Gilchrist says, “I think about that place every day, more than once a day. I mostly remember it as a very tragic place. I have some good memories of my experience there, too, and I wouldn’t trade my tour of duty for a million dollars. But I wouldn’t do it again for a billion.”

In the end, he may look back on his immigration activism in the same way.

And the Easiest Assumption Of All?
Jim Gilchrist is a crook.

Jim Gilchrist’s image took a hard hit when several of his close associates tried to take over the Minuteman Project early in 2007. The group accused him of stealing donated money and announced that they had fired him as head of the organization.

Guy Mailly, Gilchrist’s attorney, calls the takeover attempt “so silly on its face that it is incredible. Jim is the founder of the Minuteman Project. He has never relinquished control of the organization. He was the sole member of the board of directors and is still the sole member of the board of directors.” In addition, Gilchrist controls the Web site http://www.minutemanproject.com and continues to function as the group’s leader and spokesman in high-profile appearances on national television and with national political candidates.

Still, the charges were widely and uncritically reported around the county and country. A civil trial in Orange County Superior Court in May should settle outstanding issues, but so far the process has seemed to vindicate Gilchrist and raise questions about the validity of the charges against him. Among those questions:

1. The Minuteman Project was incorporated by Gilchrist in Delaware with Gilchrist as the sole member of the board of directors. How did his associates have the authority to fire him as president of the organization?

2. Why did Orange County Superior Court Judge Randell Wilkinson issue an injunction in March 2007, barring the takeover group from using the Minuteman Project name, spending the organization’s money, or doing fundraising under its guise?

3. If Gilchrist was embezzling, why was he never arrested or charged with a crime, and why is he so willing to make available a certified audit of the Minuteman Project’s finances during the period in question?

4. Why has the takeover group been cut loose by several attorneys in succession—most recently by the law firm of Gilbert & Marlowe, which sent a letter Nov. 1, 2007, describing a communications breakdown, asking the takeover group to sign a substitution of attorney form, and threatening legal action against the group?—S.M.T.

—Steven M. Thomas is a writer based in Orange. Ballantine will release his Orange County crime novel, “Criminal Paradise,” on Feb. 28.

One other thing– does your mom know you’re still up? Isn’t it waaaay past your bedtime?