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The smoke and dust from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were still in the air when Alex Jones went on his radio show in Austin that same day and declared the disaster to be a false flag operation perpetrated by the New World Order.

Prior to the events of 9/11, Jones had mostly been following in the footsteps of the Patriot movement’s leading conspiracy-meisters, mimicking and amplifying what had become, for a small but growing national audience, the many theories that made up their alternative universe in the 1990s. That changed the day of the attacks.

Jones gave his audience what they later came to see as a prediction of the 9/11 attacks in his broadcast of July 25, 2001, while ranting about the Oklahoma City bombing and other false flag operations he claimed were perpetrated by the New World Order. He thought recent talk about Middle Eastern terrorists was a prelude to more of the same. “Call the White House and tell them we know the government is planning terrorism,” he said. “Bin Laden is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system.”

So in a sense Jones was thoroughly prepared six weeks later on the morning of September 11, when New York City’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington were hit by jet airliners flown by Al Qaeda terrorists. He opened his show by declaring that what Americans were seeing on their televisions was a staged terror attack. “I’ll tell you the bottom line,” Jones said. “Ninety-eight percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing.”

Years later, Jones told Rolling Stone’s Alexander Zaitchik, “I went on the air and said, ‘Those were controlled demolitions. You just watched the government blow up the World Trade Center.’ I lost 70 percent of my affiliates that day. Station managers asked me, ‘Do you want to be on this crusade going nowhere, or do you want to be a star?’ I’m proud I never compromised.” It wasn’t in Jones’s nature to change his tune—he had been building toward this for years, and he finally had a national event around which he could spin a conspiracy-theory empire all his own.

That’s what he set about doing in the subsequent weeks and years, gradually building a nationwide audience for his now-independent Infowars website, one conspiracy theory at a time: The Towers were felled not by the airliners but by powerful explosives already in place when the attacks began. Military jets had been intentionally grounded to prevent them from intercepting the airliners. The Pentagon was hit not by a jet airliner crashing into it, but by a series of explosives designed to resemble a jet crash. Soon branches off the central theories began sprouting like kudzu.

The believers insisted that what they were seeking was the truth about the attacks, so it became known as the 9/11 Truth movement, or Truthers for short. And not all of them were right-wing Patriots like Jones. The conspiracist Patriot universe had always attracted an element of the fringe left, such as people who promoted theories about health cures and the claim that the FDA was hiding cancer cures, or claims about jet contrails secretly poisoning the public.

This element, and other conspiracists from across the political bandwidth, formed a major part of the early audience for the theories. After all, a major element of the 9/11 Truther theories was their inherent critique of the Republican Bush administration, and most of them were already inclined to distrust the conservative government’s policies. The 9/11 theories gave them further ammunition. Other prominent 9/11 theorists included the French analyst Thierry Meyssan, who wrote a book, 9/11: The Big Lie, in which he hypothesized that the attacks had been staged by a faction of the US military intelligence complex in order to impose a military regime, and a former theology professor, David Ray Griffin, who published a series of books supposedly exposing the conspiracy. These commentators distanced themselves from Jones and his conspiracy mill, whose videos and website rants spread everywhere on social media and Internet chat forums.

In addition to his daily radio show, Jones began churning out what he called documentary films that explored the various conspiracies around 9/11, and selling the videotapes and DVD versions on his Infowars website. They bore titles such as 9/11: The Road to Tyranny; The Masters of Terror: Exposed; Matrix of Evil; Martial Law 9/11: Rise of the Police State; and Terrorstorm: The History of Government-Sponsored Terrorism. Jones later claimed that this last film provided some of the key footage for the conspiracist documentary series Zeitgeist, which similarly explored 9/11 conspiracies with a somewhat artier tone. There were all kind of similar spin-offs and independent 9/11 ventures, including Loose Change, for which Jones served as executive producer.

Conspiracy theories had always been something of a dividing line between Patriot extremists and mainstream conservatives, and that line became sharper now. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly became more pointed in distancing themselves from Jones and the 9/11 conspiracy theories, especially because so many of them were staunch defenders of the Bush administration. The notion that Bush might have been part of a New World Order plot to bring down the Towers was not just risible to them but bordered on treason.

Limbaugh in particular was scathing in his dismissal of the 9/11 theorists, labeling them “loons” and similar epithets. He once pulled the plug on a call-in listener for suggesting that Limbaugh look at the evidence that the attacks were an “inside job” by the government. Limbaugh went into a rant about “kookery”:

We don’t allow kooks. Kookery is never allowed here. And if you’re gonna talk about 9/11 being an inside job, and Khalid Sheik Mohamed, and you’re going to start agreeing with Rosie O’Donnell, I would suggest rehab and treatment, counseling and so forth. You know, like Rosie, … you’ve probably got really deep issues from your childhood that needs to be resolved, because you, sir, are a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance, and I am simply intolerant of it.

At Fox News, the right-leaning cable news network that had grown to become the dominant voice and propaganda organ of the conservative movement during the Bush years, there was, similarly, little tolerance for 9/11 conspiracism, although one correspondent, Geraldo Rivera, and an on-air contributor, Andrew Napolitano, both had brief flirtations with “being open” to some of the theories. But most of its talking heads, particularly talk-show hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, treated any hint of 9/11 conspiracism as evidence of the speaker’s vile character.

The radio pundit Michael Reagan, the son of Ronald Reagan, made the mainstream-conservative loathing for the Truthers explicit in one of his broadcasts:

There is a group that’s sending letters to our troops in Iraq … claiming 9/11 was an inside job—oh, yeah, yeah—and that they should rethink why they’re fighting … Excuse me, folks, I’m going to say this: … Just find the people who are sending those letters to our troops to demoralize our troops and … you take them out, they are traitors to our country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that, deal with it. But anyone who would do that doesn’t deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors … and you shoot them dead. I’ll pay for the bullet.

This became something of a recurring theme—though for the most part, it was not directed at right-wing “kooks,” but mainstream liberals.

Eliminationist rhetoric had become popular with right-wing talk-show hosts in the 1990s, during the heyday of the militia movement from which so much of it originated, brewed up amid the virulent hatred of the government that both had reveled in. Even back then Rush Limbaugh liked to make little “jokes”: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

So even though the events of 9/11 had created a wedge between the conspiracist Patriot universe and the extreme pro-Bush war patriotism of mainstream conservatives, the anger and viciousness remained intact on both sides. It expressed itself in the crude demonization of a targeted Other as vermin and excrement and disease fit only for elimination, ultimately creating tacit permission for people to excise them, violently or by any other means, in the name of “protecting society.”

Mainstream conservatives became especially hyperpatriotic in their defense of the Bush administration and its decisions to invade, first Afghanistan in October 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and then, more controversially, Iraq in March 2003, to overthrow the regime of the dictator Saddam Hussein. Critics of the war were early on dismissed as traitors who, in Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s favorite phrase of the time, “hated this country.”

In one of his nightly Fox broadcasts on The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly, a former mainstream reporter who had gained prominence as the host of a syndicated “tabloid” news show called Inside Edition in the early 1990s, laid down his edict for the bounds of acceptable discourse:

Everybody got it? Dissent, fine. Undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.

Throughout right-wing media the defense of the Bush administration remained consistently eliminationist in tone. When critics questioned the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq based on dubious information about weapons of mass destruction—which indeed were never found—they were accused of “hating America” and committing treason. At one point, O’Reilly hosted a discussion on whether Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado and a critic of the Iraq War, should be charged with treason and sedition. Others received similar treatment if they critiqued the execution of the war: the botched occupation of Fallujah, or the scandal that arose when torture and inhumane conditions at a US-run prison in Abu Ghraib were revealed in a series of horrifying photos. For most right-wing commenters, the sin was never the incompetent or illegal behavior revealed, it was daring to reveal it at all. For example, the popular Fox Network talk-show host Sean Hannity accused the Democratic National Committee of conspiring to have the Abu Ghraib photos released to the public.

The eliminationist rhetoric became commonplace in movement conservatives’ attacks on liberals, embodied in the book titles that flooded the marketplace. Sean Hannity’s bestselling screed, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (2004), summed up in its title the general conservative view that liberals were not just wrong, but evil. Other iterations of this meme were Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (2007); Michael Savage’s The Enemy Within (2003), which claimed that the nation’s real enemy was liberalism; Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003), in which she argued that Senator Joe McCarthy was right about Communists infiltrating the government in the 1950s, and charged that today’s liberals were actively undermining antiterrorism efforts.

Conservatives during the Bush years did not reserve their eliminationist rhetoric for antiwar liberals alone. During those same years their most popular and durable target became Latino immigrants.

By 2006, Americans were seeing many, many more Latino faces in their midst. Millions, in fact.

Between 1990 and 2000, the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the United States more than doubled, from 3.5 million to 8.6 million people. The vast majority of them were from Mexico: the number of documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States doubled in that same time span from 4.5 million to 9.7 million.

Most of the deluge was a result of circumstances arising from twofold conditions: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had resulted in significant loss of employment in Mexico; meanwhile, the American economy was booming.

NAFTA, approved under the Clinton administration in 1993 and intended to spur business between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, had had a disastrous side effect: its requirement to lift protections for corn prices forced millions of Mexican corn farmers out of business, because they could not compete with cheap American prices. Moreover, the promised job gains in Mexico to compensate for any losses, mainly in the form of American auto and other manufacturers moving their factory operations there, turned out to be ephemeral: many of the corporations that opened plants in Mexico soon abandoned those expansions and shifted their manufacturing operations to plants in China and elsewhere in Asia.

Further, the booming American economy was creating a massive job market—not only in such skilled labor markets as the new tech economy, but also in the unskilled labor markets such as agricultural production (that is, managing and harvesting crops). There was a huge demand for labor to harvest crops and process meat that was largely going unfilled by American workers. The legal immigration system was not set up to accommodate this need: the US economy generally produces 500,000 unskilled labor jobs per year, but the US Immigration Service issues only about 5,000 green cards to foreign workers.

So the vast majority of the immigrants found themselves without legal status, having either crossed the border legally and overstayed their visas, or crossed the border illegally. These immigrants generally figured they could at least come and work for a few years and send their earnings to their starving families back home; some came intending to leave, others came intending to stay, and fate was often known to play jokes that undermined those intentions. Virtually all, however, came intending to work, and that was primarily what they did, laboring in the shadows with fake Social Security numbers that allowed their employers to pay taxes in their names—even though they, as undocumented immigrants, would never receive any direct benefits from the system they were paying into. Thus, anti-immigration forces who charged that immigrants were a burden on taxpayers because they were able to collect benefits while paying nothing into the system were turning reality on its head. Working immigrants were actually subsidizing those legally in the system.

Before the passage of NAFTA, most illegal border crossings had occurred near one of a handful of major border cities—Nogales on the Arizona border, Ciudad Juarez in Texas, and Tijuana in California being the primary crossing points—where crossing illegally had been a relatively simple matter of skirting barriers. But after NAFTA was passed and its effects began creating a wave of Mexican immigrants, the Clinton administration, under pressure from Congress, moved to crack down on illegal crossings in those towns, beginning in 1996.

The crackdown stanched the flow for a few months. Soon, however, the wave of attempted border crossings began spreading out into the surrounding deserts. Longtime “mules” who helped people cross illegally reported having to move their operations farther and farther away from the border towns. Eventually this meant that human smuggling was rising like a bad flood tide out in the remote reaches where it previously had been only a rare thing. Ranchers along these borderlands began reporting having more and more problems with border crossers, from thefts to vandalism to threatening encounters to deaths of migrants in the desert. Many people living along the border who had in previous years gone out of their way to help stray border crossers now avoided them out of fear, especially as Mexican drug cartels became involved in the human smuggling. At the same time, thousands of border crossers began dying out in the lethal deserts where they now crossed, mostly of exposure and water and food deprivation. Some met violent deaths at the hands of human smuggling vultures.

These changes at the border were creating waves inland. In rural America, economic changes had transformed the landscape as small family-run pig and dairy farms were replaced by large industrial food-production operations. Like the agricultural operations in California’s Central Valley, these food-production plants also ran on cheap, low-skilled workers willing to do harsh and unpleasant work. Cheap and often illegal labor brought in from Mexico and Central America filled the bill. Soon small Midwestern towns in Nebraska and Ohio were filling up around the edges with more and more Latinos who spoke little English and for a number of reasons tended to keep to themselves. Now there were brown faces in places where for generations just about the only faces to be seen had been white.

Even in the suburbs, there suddenly were many more brown faces—people working in landscaping and construction, in housekeeping and child care. Most American suburbs were predominantly white, often according to their original designs in the 1940s and ’50s when race-based exclusionary covenants were still perfectly legal, and so the arrival of a tide of brown faces came as something of a cultural shock for many whites living there.

By 2000, anti-immigration organizations were marshaling their forces to make the fresh tide of Latino faces in America into a political issue. Many of these groups, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies, had their roots in various think tanks funded by John Tanton, a prominent white supremacist based in Michigan. Others, such as Numbers USA and Americans for Legal Immigration, were openly nativist; one of them, run by a California white supremacist, Glenn Spencer, claimed that the wave of Latinos was part of a sinister Reconquista conspiracy by globalist forces to return the American Southwest to Mexico. Spencer advocated forming citizen militias under the banner of his outfit, American Border Patrol. Simultaneously, white-supremacist organizations around the country began talking about immigration as the next big issue around which they could recruit and expand their movement.

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman and neo-Nazi, wrote a screed that year that he distributed to his fellow white supremacists:

We are fighting for the preservation of our heritage, freedom and way of life in the United States and much of the Western World. Ultimately, we are working to secure the most important civil right of all, the right to preserve our kind of life. Massive immigration and low European American birthrates coupled with integration and racial intermarriage threatens the continued existence of our very genotype. We assert that we, as do all expressions of life on this planet, have the right to live and to have our children and our children’s children reflect both genetically and culturally our heritage.

The numbers of immigrants continued to rise, reaching a peak in 2007, when the population of undocumented workers hit 12.2 million, an increase of 3.6 million over the previous year. But by then, the backlash was well under way.

Much of this nativist backlash, which could be found on right-wing radio, on cable talk shows, on websites and blogs and YouTube videos, was predicated on a set of myths about immigrants that were largely created and promoted by nativist anti-immigrant organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), myths that were stark inversions of factual reality. These myths nonetheless came to be widely embraced by conservative pundits and their audiences. Four of the most prevalent were the following:

•Immigrants bring crime to their communities. In reality, numerous studies of the crime rates among various ethnic and immigrant communities clearly demonstrate that immigrants generally, and Latinos especially, commit crime at a significantly lower rate than occurs in the white and general populations.

•Immigrants take jobs away from Americans. The vast majority of undocumented Latino immigrants are employed in low-paying, low-skilled jobs that require hard labor and that employers have extreme difficulty filling without an immigrant labor pool. So in reality immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won’t take. Numerous economic studies have demonstrated that having a substantial immigrant labor pool is an essential ingredient to creating more higher- and middle-wage jobs in the larger economy.

•Immigrants bring disease with them. This is a bald-faced lie unsupported by credible data. But it does serve as a rationale for eliminationist thinking. Disease rates in immigrant communities are roughly the same as in other communities, and the Centers for Disease Control has no data indicating that immigrants are prone to bringing exotic diseases with them.

•They don’t want to become Americans by learning to speak English. Most immigrant communities in US history have been faced with this canard, dating back to when Germans and Japanese immigrants faced similar accusations that they didn’t want to assimilate. Similarly they were told they would never be “real Americans,” but history has shown this to be untrue. Immigrant communities are frequently made up of people with lower education levels who have not had the opportunity to study English. Moreover, because of the hostility they often generate, immigrant communities have also long tended to form insular neighborhoods where they speak their native languages freely. History has demonstrated time and again that this insularity always breaks down over time. And many non-immigrant communities, ethnic and otherwise, are also quite insular by choice.

The larger narrative arc created by these myths was that “white culture” was under attack in the form of this “invasion” of brown faces speaking foreign tongues. This narrative not only became the core of the nativist and white-supremacist assault on immigration but also was the essential story told to the public on right-wing media such as Fox News, as well as on such ostensibly mainstream networks as CNN, where Lou Dobbs for many years held forth on the dangers of immigration.

On one of his nightly Fox broadcasts, Bill O’Reilly angrily explained the problem:

Now in 1986, President Reagan thought he could solve the [immigration] problem by granting about three million illegal aliens amnesty. The New York Times was in heaven, editorializing back then, quote, “The new law won’t work miracles but it will induce most employers to pay attention, to turn off the magnets, to slow the tide.” Of course, just the opposite happened. But the Times hasn’t learned a thing. That’s because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

The first attempt to start a border militia was made by David Duke and some pals of his from the Ku Klux Klan. “We believe very strongly white people are becoming second-class citizens. When I think of America, I think of a white country.” Duke uttered those words in October 1977 while speaking to assembled newspaper and TV reporters at the US-Mexico border crossing in San Ysidro, California.

Duke had announced that he and a couple of carfuls of robed Klansmen would hold a press conference at the border crossing to tell the public about his latest project: a “Klan Border Watch” that he claimed would enlist KKK members from around the nation to show up armed and ready to catch illegal border crossers. But Duke’s project quickly fell apart amid internecine bickering with his fellow neo-Nazis.

The concept, however, lingered on among white supremacists, played a role in some of the movement that took off in the 1990s, and eventually led to the idea of having ordinary patriots form citizen militias. One of the people who picked up the idea in that era was Glenn Spencer, a retired California businessman who began agitating against immigration in 1993 and formed his militiaoriented organization, American Patrol, in 1995. Its website spread Reconquista conspiracy theories, white-supremacist eugenics, and anti-Latino hatred. “The Mexican culture is based on deceit,” he once wrote. “Chicanos and Mexicanos lie as a matter of survival.”

Most of all, Spencer promoted the idea of having citizen militias to act as eyes and ears on the border so that more illegal crossers could be caught, and perhaps to arrest them themselves. In 2001, Spencer packed his bags and moved his operation to a ranch outside rural Sierra Vista, Arizona. At about the same time, the militia idea caught on with a couple of Arizona ranchers named Jack Foote and Casey Nethercott, who organized a militiaesque armed outfit called Ranch Rescue that prowled the Arizona borderlands from 2002 to 2003, harassing border crossers when they found them. They finally ran afoul of the law when they assaulted and sicced a dog on a couple of Salvadoran immigrants who were caught crossing ranchland that the militiamen were guarding. The two vigilantes eventually were put out of business by a lawsuit filed on behalf of the terrorized couple.

The border-militias story attracted some media attention, but Foote and Nethercott were sketchy characters whom reporters shied away from interviewing, and Spencer was not very mediagenic. It took a former schoolteacher from California to get the media’s attention—a fellow who made his living in part by playing one of the doomed gunmen in the daily re-creation for tourists of the Gun-fight at the OK Corral in Tombstone.

Chris Simcox was a youthful, slightly scruffy man who had moved to Arizona from California in the early 2000s and become an ardent desert rat. With a ready grin and a pleasant voice, he had an all-American demeanor that TV reporters who started coming in 2003 soon found appealing, as he described his adventures with his newly organized Tombstone Border Militia and the urgent need to have better border security because of the “invasion” from Mexico.

The attitudes that were roaming the desert with Simcox’s patrols were voiced by one participant caught by a documentary filmmaker who filmed an exercise by Simcox’s militia group, now renamed Tombstone Civil Defense Corps. As cattle roamed in the background, the militiaman turned to the cameraman and said, “No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. After two or three are shot, they’ll stop crossing the border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”

Simcox was flamboyant—he had a penchant for posing with a pistol down the front of his pants—and in him the border-militia movement now had a figurehead who made for a good story. Pretty soon Simcox was getting broader media attention, appearing on CNN with Lou Dobbs in November 2002 and on Fox News shortly thereafter with Sean Hannity, both of whom described him and his endeavors to organize vigilante border watchers in admiring tones. He also began popping up on right-wing talk radio all over the country.

One of the people listening in was Jim Gilchrist, a retired real estate salesman from California who had decided to devote himself to immigration activism and was attracted to right-wing theories about the “invasion.” Inflamed in part by a Simcox interview, he conceived the notion of creating a nationwide “citizen border watch” event that would draw people from all over the country to Arizona for a month in an attempt to stop the flow of border crossers.

Gilchrist called it the Minuteman Project, and got ahold of Simcox to ask if he’d be interested in playing a central role in the project, since it would all take place down south of Tombstone, in Simcox’s stomping grounds. Simcox was all in, and in short order stories about the project naming Simcox and Gilchrist as its cofounders started appearing in the right-wing media.

Within a few weeks, the two men were back on national TV, telling Dobbs, Hannity, and a number of visiting reporters about their plan to bring “thousands” of Americans down to the desert for a month-long “border watch” that they hoped, if nothing else, would send a message to politicians that people were tired of seeing immigrants flooding over the Mexico border.

The media reportage about the Minutemen’s planned month-long event drew concern from officials in Mexico, who feared that their citizens might be mistreated and targeted by armed militiamen in Arizona. President George W. Bush—never a favorite of the Patriot crowd—stepped in and, in a joint presser with Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, denounced the Minutemen, calling them vigilantes.

The whole thing came together in a big circus near the border in April 2005 that drew a media horde of TV crews, newspaper reporters and photographers, radio reporters, and Internet journalists who outnumbered the 900 Minutemen who showed up. The media gamely recorded the photo-op site established near the Mexico border of motor homes and campers. Many of the Minutemen were photographed scanning the desert wastes with their binoculars from the comfort of their lawn chairs.

Over the course of the first week of April, the Minutemen proved far more successful at attracting media coverage than they were at catching border crossers, none of whom came within their sights that week (although a couple of men were caught late one night in the second week). Sean Hannity even flew out to Tombstone and held a live broadcast from the Minutemen’s gathering site in which he interviewed both Simcox and Gilchrist. Less noticed but silently lurking in the encampment were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

The most exciting thing to happen was a late-night alarm, spread through the Minutemen’s operations center, that Salvadoran drug gang members were about to descend upon them with machine guns. The pickups scrambled, roaring through the dust with their floodlights glaring and their passengers’ long guns at the ready. Then they gradually realized that it had been a false alarm, and everyone returned to their campers and motor homes and went to bed.

By the second week of April, most of the participants began clearing out, and so did the reporters. By the third week of April, the border watch had pretty much petered out, the Minutemen had gone home in their campers, and their leaders, Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist, had flown out to Washington, DC.

Actually, the two men had a deeply acrimonious relationship that had manifested itself only a few days into the April media circus, caused mostly by Simcox’s intense jealousy of Gilchrist’s genial way with reporters. By December the rift had grown so intense that the two men announced they were officially splitting into two separate organizations: Gilchrist’s operation would still be called the Minuteman Project, while Simcox’s outfit was now named the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

Within a few months, the two organizations had descended into open and intense rivalry and had begun competing for members. Initially, Simcox held something of an upper hand, because he was already putting together the events for which the Minutemen were now known: civilian border watches, as they liked to call them. And in addition to organizing several such watches along the California border, in the summer of 2006 his MCDC began organizing a Minuteman watch in Washington State, along the Canadian border near Blaine. Of course, Canadians or other undocumented immigrants coming over the border aren’t really a problem in Washington State, but Simcox mainly wanted to be able to point to the Canadian watches as proof to reporters that the Mexico border watches weren’t racist in nature.

One of the people drawn to these Washington border watches was Shawna Forde, a hairdresser and former Boeing worker from Everett. One day after returning from a long road trip to California and back during which she had gorged on right-wing talk radio most of the way, she told her husband she had decided what she wanted to do with her life: “save America from illegal immigrants.”

Forde was a diminutive but brassy and busty blonde who liked to play the tough gal in the testosterone-laden world of the mostly male Minutemen border watches. Indeed, Forde had a rap sheet dating back to when she was eleven years old that included sex work, shoplifting, credit-card fraud, and car theft, though none of her colleagues were aware of that. She was ambitious, and soon began climbing the hierarchy of the state Minuteman organization by putting together immigration-related meetings around the state. When Chris Simcox came to Bellingham for a public hearing about the Minutemen, Forde attached herself to him and introduced herself around as the state MCDC’s press secretary.

Her raw ambition, combined with her propensity for thievery, put her sideways with the state’s MCDC leadership, even though she had formed a close relationship with Simcox. After a prolonged internal fight, they fired her; she walked away vowing that she would form her own anti-immigrant border watch organization.

Forde promptly jumped ship to Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project, and sponsored a couple of Gilchrist speaking appearances in Washington state. In return he helped publicize her new group, Minuteman American Defense (MAD), and its plans to organize border watches in Arizona. Forde subsequently oversaw a number of these watches in various Arizona locales, including in the Altar Valley of the Sonoran Desert, and often hung out at Glenn Spencer’s ranch in south-central Arizona, near Hereford.

A little after midnight the morning of May 30, 2009, Forde and three men dressed up to look like Border Patrol officers approached the home of Raul Flores Jr. in Arivaca, with the intention of robbing him. One of the vigilantes, Jason Eugene Bush, fatally shot Flores in the chest and head and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez, hitting her twice, though both shots were nonfatal. Gonzalez collapsed to the floor in a fetal position and pretended to be dead, then listened to them interrogate her nine-year-old daughter, Brisenia, as to the whereabouts of her older sister before they shot her twice in the face and left. Gonzalez called 911, but as she was doing so the gang reentered the home to retrieve a forgotten AK-47. The chief gunman, Bush, was lightly wounded by Gonzalez, who had retreated to the kitchen with a handgun. The gang fled, and authorities arrived about fifteen minutes later. Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, and a third cohort named Albert Gaxiola were arrested two weeks later.

Two years later, in January 2011, Shawna Forde went on trial for the murders and was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. Jason Bush’s trial the next month was shorter, the verdict and the sentence the same. The third gang member, Albert Gaxiola, was convicted of murder but got a life sentence without parole. All are still in the Arizona penitentiary system.

Forde maintains to this day that she is innocent. She claims the whole crime was a setup created by the New World Order and the Obama administration to defame and embarrass the Minuteman border watch movement. A website run by an admirer and onetime associate promotes these claims as a conspiracy theory.

The Minuteman name more or less died with the Forde gang’s crimes. As one former Minuteman leader told a reporter, “A lot of people felt, well, you’re a Minuteman, you’re a killer.” However, he didn’t seem to blame Forde for this, saying, “The name Minuteman has been tainted by a lot of organizations that didn’t want us at the border, that say we’re killers, that we’ve done harm.”

The final nail in the Minutemen’s coffin came in 2013, when Chris Simcox was arrested on multiple counts for molesting his daughter, six, and her five-year-old playmate. Simcox was eventually convicted in 2016 and was sentenced to twenty years.

Border militias enjoyed a brief resurgence in 2015, when fears about border crossers began rising amid intensifying hysteria about a sudden surge in children crossing into the United States to escape political and gang persecution in Honduras and elsewhere in Central America. You might find a few groups dotting the Arizona landscape on weekends, with names like Arizona Border Reconnaissance and Three Percent United Patriots.

A reporter for Mother Jones, Shane Bauer, spent a year undercover with one of these militias and found that their paranoias and hatreds were similar to those of the Minutemen ten years before and, for that matter, of David Duke’s Klansmen in 1977. What this was all about for them, really, beyond the camping and outdoor time and “hunting beaners,” as they called it, was doing something to stop the tide of brown faces they were seeing everywhere.

One militiaman, code-named Captain Pain, explained his motives in a roundabout way by describing his hometown in Colorado for Bauer: “Saudi fucking Aurora is what it is,” he said. “We need to kill more of those motherfuckers. I never seen so many fucking towel-heads stateside.”

Another militiaman, code-named Jaeger, chimed in: “I remember when the part of Aurora I lived in was just white people.”