A good friend of mine wrote an article recently for the Southern Poverty Law Center about the resurgence of the Far-Right movement and the tendency for some of its leaders to defraud their own followers. I was not all too shocked by the shenanigans involved: 1) Crazy dominant personality gets group to speak out against the government’s encroachments on their liberty. 2) Crazy guy then encourages crazy followers to get fully armed. Crazy guy and followers do crazy militant things like taking over a bank and strip mall by force. 3) Crazy guy also defrauds his own flock 4) Crazy guy and followers get either killed by snipers or arrested.
What shocked me was that the perpetrators had names like Angel Cruz and Cirino Gonzales. I contacted my friend to verify that that there hadn’t been a misprint–were these armed militia nutjobs really Latinos? Yes, he said, though their identities were more tied to the militia-type groups than to any Latino cause.
Then, today’s Sun-Times posted an article online about sky-rocketing gun sales since the Obama election. The guy in this picture is Mark Cruz, a gun dealer in Waukegan, IL (of all places). I wonder if he went into business after the city implemented a series of anti-immigrant policies (which incidently led to so much backlash that la gente organized and kicked out the Mayor)?
So there goes my stereotype of right-wing militia crazies as being poor white people or Nazi-wannabes. Gosh, I hate enlightenment.
Photograph by Tom Cruze for the Sun-Times
Cockroach People 