Barbara Coe, Racist Nativist Leader, Dies in California
Barbara Coe, the vitriolic California racist who regularly called undocumented immigrants “savages” and once claimed that these “barbarians” were busily “cutting off heads and appendages of blind, white, disabled gringos,” has died.
Although she was widely known for statements like those, especially in recent years when she also charged that President Obama was not American and admitted she was a member of a hate group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity,” Coe was once a key player in the nativist movement. In 1994, her California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR) helped push through the state’s Proposition 187, which barred the undocumented from services including non-emergency medical care but was ultimately struck down by the courts.
Coe, who was 79 when she died of lung cancer at her Huntington Beach home on Aug. 31, made a routine of viciously attacking immigrants and anyone who supported them. When an 18-year-old student committed suicide because he could not get legal status in the United States, she described his story as just another “sicko yellow-belly coward illegal alien ‘sob story.’” During the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, held to support legalization of the undocumented, she wondered “how many in this group of foreign invaders have robbed, raped and possibly murdered law-abiding American citizens and legal residents?” When Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, she accused the son of a Mexican immigrant of plotting to return Southern California to Mexico. After newly elected California Gov. Gray Davis refused to pursue the Proposition 187 court case, she accused him of being a Communist and began calling him “Red” Davis.
She despised Obama, who she characterized as a lying Muslim born in another country. Less than an hour after the president announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, she wrote her followers: “OBAMA is a proven, radical pro-Islamic Muslim BUT will do/say ANYTHING to get re-elected. OBAMA has illustrated that he complies with Sharia Law — which demands Misleading or Lying (TAQIYYA) to promote the Koran’s mandate to ‘torture, kill ALL non-Muslim infidels.’ DUMP OBAMA (and his fellow-TRAITORS) or DIE! YOUR CALL!”
Not that she limited herself to hating Democrats. At a 2007 March Against the North American Union — referring to a baseless conspiracy theory about a secret plot to merge Mexico, the United States and Canada — she said that President George W. Bush and undocumented immigrants were working together to impose the “New World Order,” a reference to a much-feared global government. “Illegal aliens,” she said, “are the ground troops needed by Bush Jr. and his globalist buddies for the ultimate death of America.” She went on to charge that Bush and other “globalists” were exploiting the “herd mentality” of immigrants to achieve their aims.
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