The Truth Seeps Out in a Flag

Check out this post by David Neiwert, who spots a Nazi flag among the "America-first" pinheads at a Minuteman rally in Orange County.

That's what happens when your core issue is keeping 'dem dirty immigrants out of our country.

It's been amusing to watch the Minuteman Project quietly implode over the past few months. Internecine squabbling over, among other things, the rights to the word "Minutemen", has splintered the movement into a disorganized rabble of disparate groups. The latest project in California brought about two dozen people to the border. And now there's this, another example of the ugly racist undercurrent rearing its ugly head while leaders desperately try to tamp it down.

Sensible immigration policy doesn't attract people like members of the Stormfront forum (a neo-Nazi chatroom). It also doesn't involve guns and shootings:

A Tijuana man who last weekend said he was shot shortly after crossing the border illegally into the United States is sticking to his story, despite some reports that he may have been shot in Mexico.

Carlos Alfonso Estrada Martinez, 38, was one of two Mexican citizens shot in separate incidents during the early hours of Saturday in the border region between Tecate and Campo.

In statements he made to officials, Estrada had said he was about 200 yards inside the U.S. when he was hit about 1 a.m. A second man who was shot about an hour later said he was assaulted just south of the border fence in Mexico.

The second man, Jose Humberto Rivera Perez, a 32-year-old native of Guadalajara, was shot just below the left knee. Interviewed earlier this week as he recovered at the Centro de Salud hospital, he said he was shot by a man who had his face covered as Rivera and several others waited to cross the border roughly 20 yards south of the fence.

When they tried to flee, the man shouted at them in Spanish not to run and fired, hitting Rivera.

Jim Chase, the Oceanside resident who organized the three-week border watch, said none of his people have fired any weapons. But he added that while he turns away people he considers extremists, he has been running into people conducting their own patrols who are not with his group.

"It doesn't scare me, but it is scary from the standpoint of these are people who have not gone through me to pledge to be nonracist and nonviolent," Chase said earlier this week.

You may not be taking the blame but it is your fault. Setting up the conditions for violence and hatred is no different than setting up a party for alcohol to be served to minors. It should come as no surprise that the logical outcome of the faltering Minuteman Project is bloodshed.