Extremists Go to ‘War’ in the Arizona Desert
Do read it all. It’s right here.
Early last year, a young neo-Nazi called his girlfriend from a jail cell in Phoenix. She was upset. She was confused. She wanted to know why FBI agents were in her living room saying they caught him making pipe bombs and stockpiling other explosives.
“Why were you guys making that stuff?” she asked. “Why did you have it in your truck?”
“Because,” he told her, “we wanted to make those things for the border.”
By all accounts, Jeffery Harbin was a minor player in the white supremacist movement, a man living deep in the fringes of American extremism. But in the broader context of the immigration debate, he was hardly alone.
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Meanwhile, at least two of Harbin’s associates from the National Socialist Movement have founded a new group that intends to go well beyond anything the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps ever did.
Led by longtime white supremacists JT Ready and Harry Hughes, the US Border Guard routinely treks out in the desert south of Phoenix, heavily armed for what it describes as ‘operations’ to stop ‘narco terrorists.’ Its members often boast of confronting immigrants and detaining them until authorities can arrive.
But Ready, the same man whose name adorned the landmine fliers in 2010, hopes the group will someday do even more.
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Ready, who is also now running for sheriff of Pinal County, Ariz., describes himself these days as a humanitarian. As he takes a leading role in the new group, he has publicly disavowed the National Socialist Movement. However, he is still a frequent writer on the message boards of the white nationalist website Stormfront.org, where he is recognized as a ‘friend’ of the website and a ‘sustaining member’ — or donor. A search of the site shows he has posted there as recently as February.
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