Opinion: Jim Gilchrist regrets...
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Is there a July Fools Day I’m not aware of? First, there’s a too-good-to-be-true Tunguska anniversary fireball over Southern California. Now the O.C. Register’s A section has a look back in sorrow from Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, who laments the ‘Saddam Hussein mentalities’ of his cohorts and pronounces himself ‘very, very sad, very disappointed’ about the project’s results:
‘There’s all kinds of organizations that have spawned from the Minuteman Project and I have to say, some of the people who have gotten into this movement have sinister intentions,’ he said.... ‘It’s an ‘invasion’,’ Gilchrist said of illegal immigration across the border between the United States and Mexico, ‘but it’s not a war. It is a covert ‘Trojan Horse invasion’’.... Sometimes, Gilchrist said he thinks about leaving the debate over illegal immigration and taking on a new issue like urban blight or tax reform. For now, he said he will continue to lobby for more border patrol agents but not from a perch on the border, watching for people trying to cross. ‘I have found, after four years in this movement (…) I very well may have been fighting for people with less character and less integrity than the ‘open border fanatics’ I have been fighting against,’ he said. ‘And that is a phenomenal indictment of something I have created.’
(On closer inspection, I see the story came out a few days ago, but just made it into the paper today. Interestingly, the single-scare-quotes around the word invasion above have disappeared in the print version.)
Last time Opinion L.A. caught up with Gilchrist, he was opining for our ‘Forty on 40’ feature (and whatever you may think of his attitudes, he was the very soul of graciousness on the phone):
The most expedient way to dismantle domestic terrorism in the United States is to repeal all the Special Order 40s around the country. If you repeal Special Order 40 you’ll allow law enforcement to protect the citizens of those communities. This rule smacks of special treatment for people who don’t deserve any special treatment other than being arrested and deported. I don’t blame the police department; I blame the City Council which does nothing but aid and abet the criminal mentality.