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A couple of weeks ago, when Harvard University withdrew its invitation to Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist to speak at a forum on immigration, Gilchrist could be heard whining that he was being unfairly smeared for his incendiary rhetoric.

Neil Cavuto, for instance, hosted Gilchrist on his Fox News show Oct. 16, and mostly blew sunshine up Gilchrist's butt, talking about how he was a war hero, and didn't those mean students know he had fought for their free-speech rights, blah blah blah. Then he added:

Cavuto: What the kids were saying in those pre-law classes was that you were going around, rounding up at the border illegal immigrants, was tantamount to, uh, physical abuse, some of them were saying. And that you were advocating violence. Now, I know that's not your schtick, or what you're saying, and it's a gross exaggeration of what you do -- that was the kids' position. What do you make of that?

Gilchrist: Ah, the kid is, obviously he's stupid. And if anyone should be banned and barred from Harvard University, it should be a student that stupid.

Somehow, that level of discourse is about the kind of reply we've come to expect from Jim Gilchrist. Because the problem isn't, as Cavuto put it, that Gilchrist is "advocating violence". Rather, as we've explained, the problem is that his rhetoric creates permission for violence, and his real-life activities help produce real-life violence -- including the murders of a 9-year-old girl and her father. That, as we reported, was the key reason for Harvard declining its invitation.

What may have been the deciding factor, it turns out, may have been Jim Gilchrist's history of bad judgment catching up to him -- namely, his long association with Shawna Forde, the leader of a gang of "tacital" Minutemen who, in a failed effort to finance their activities through robbery, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl and her father late at night in their home in cold blood.

Of course, we're already noted Fox's extreme allergy to reporting this story. So it's not surprising that Cavuto was utterly unaware of this dimension of the story. And it's a far more substantial matter than Gilchrist has been willing to admit.

My friend Scott North at the Everett Herald recently published a riveting account of just how deeply Gilchrist and Forde were intertwined. Indeed, he was working to help promote her "work" on the border intensely during the two weeks between the murders and Forde's arrest -- and may have tipped her off that she was being sought by federal SWAT teams:

Jim Gilchrist counts himself among those fooled by Forde.

He stuck with her when some questioned her methods. He stood by her through the blood and tumult in Everett that started last December. He remained her ally right up until the day she was arrested in connection with the two murders in Arivaca, Ariz.

"If she hadn't been able to use me she would have used somebody else," Gilchrist said. "It is so unfortunate because I really thought this person, in spite of her checkered past had, in lieu of a better term, 'found Jesus' and really wanted to be a do-gooder."

Gilchrist said he was oblivious to the behind-the-scenes drama at his 2007 speech in Everett. He'd never met Forde before she e-mailed to arrange his travel. He was impressed by her and her fledgling Minutemen operation and donated the money he was paid to cover his travel expenses to Everett -- cash that actually came from Parris.

Gilchrist gave that money to Forde.

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[Video via deedynamo at YouTube.]

The strange case of Shawna Forde, the Everett-based anti-immigration activist whose gang of Minutemen murdered a 9-year-old girl and her father in cold blood, took another interesting turn this week.

Scott North of the Everett Herald -- a classically dogged news reporter who has been on this case since the start -- reported this week that one of the people who helped Forde and her gang after the murders was none other than Arizona anti-immigrant activist Laine Lawless [real name: Roberta Dill], perhaps most noted for burning the Mexican flag in public and ranting about communists in the government (as in the video above):

A minuteman who says he helped bind a bullet wound May 30 for a co-defendant of border activist Shawna Forde now says he wasn’t alone when he went to provide medical assistance to the man in Arivaca, Ariz.

Chuck Stonex of Alamagordo, N.M., said Tuesday he was accompanied on the first-aid mission by Laine Lawless of Phoenix.

Lawless, who is known in Arizona for burning Mexican flags, recently made headlines for starting up a Web site claiming that Forde, formerly of Everett, is being railroaded on charges that she was involved in a double murder in Arivaca. Arizona prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

Stonex said it’s time for Lawless to publicly acknowledge that she met with Forde, 41, and co-defendant Jason Eugene Bush, 35, within hours of the killings. The meeting occurred at an Arivaca house that Stonex said he now believes was the home of Albert Gaxiola, the third defendant in the murder case.

“She was there, too. She saw everything that I saw,” Stonex said of Lawless. He had earlier decided to leave it up to Lawless to come forward as a witness — something Stonex said he did as soon as he learned that Forde and Bush were suspects in a double murder.

He changed his mind in part because of Lawless’ involvement with the Web site Justiceforshawnaforde.com.

“She’s making too many troubles and I think it is time for the rest of the story,” Stonex said.

Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times has more about Lawless, including the fact that she recently attended a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving in the Phoenix area.

Lawless, in fact, has been a significant figure on the Minuteman front for some time now, not least because she formed one of the first spinoff groups. She played a key role in helping Chris Simcox organize one of his earlier versions of the Minutemen, the Civil Homeland Defense, and was one of the characters who showed up on video when the Minutemen first organized their border watch.

However, she got the boot shortly afterward, no doubt because she's such a lunatic that not even Simcox wanted to be associated with her. So she started up her own Minuteman offshoot, and it was shortly in the business of forming alliances with real neo-Nazis and even offering them advice on how to harass Latinos:

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The New York Times yesterday carried a report on the case of Shawna Forde's gang of killer Minutemen -- probably the first such report from any of the major mainstream media.

Mind you, it added little to what has already been reported on the matter, but it does give us a look at their impact on the community:

Sheriff Dupnik has said there is ample drug activity between here and the border. The suggestion has angered the residents of Arivaca, a town of retirees, artists and working people about 50 miles south of Tucson. “This is a good town,” said Fern Loveall, 76. “It’s a good place to live, and it’s a good place to raise kids. What they’re saying about it isn’t true.”

Members of Mr. Flores’s family also denied that he had had any connection to the drug trade.

“He was a good guy,” said Gilbert Mungaray, his 80-year-old grandfather. “I know what happened, but I can’t imagine why.”

The family’s house was silent this week. An American flag hung on the porch, and three pink roses adorned the front door. Down a dirt road, at the local community center, a picture of Brisenia, the slain daughter of Mr. Flores and Ms. Gonzalez, had been placed in a frame with a small black ribbon affixed to it.

For the regulars at La Gitana Cantina, a friendly establishment with a mixed clientele of Anglos and Mexican-Americans, emotions have ranged from abject sorrow to rage.

“I’ve had people come into the bar and just put their heads in their hands, and all the sudden they’ve got tears pouring down their face,” said Karen Lippert, a bartender. She added that while Mr. Gaxiola was a local, the two other suspects were not.

“This is not us guys,” she said. “It’s the not the way us guys operate.”

Meanwhile, Scott North at the Everett Herald reports that authorities had been given a heads up about Forde and her gang, but it went ignored.

The Green Valley News, meanwhile, reports that there may have been at least two more people involved in the home invasion, and more arrests may be forthcoming.

Of course, Fox News continues to completely and utterly ignore the story. It's not hard to imagine why, since Fox's pundits were among the most prominent cheerleaders for the Minutemen back in the day.

Back in that same day, and even before, there were some of us who were pointing out that this kind of bloodshed and violence was going to be inevitable whenever you start forming border-militia cells to do vigilante patrols. For some reason, though, we didn't get any airtime.

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Last year a Norwegian news crew interviewed Shawna Forde while she was out on "patrol" for illegal border crossers in the vicinity of Arivaca, Arizona -- the same area where, less than a year later, she would be arrested for the cold-blooded murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father.

It's pretty chilling, particularly when she describes their activities in the desert:

And then there's the shot where you see her stick her gun down her pants. (For someone raised around guns in a shooting family, that only confirms her complete and utter dumbassery. What is it about Minuteman types who stick their guns down their pants? This is always the sign of someone too stupid to care whether they shoot off their dick or ass.)

In any event, this is all part of why, as Patrick Young at Long Island Wins notes, the Minutemen and their supporters are scrambling hard to get away their many long associations with Forde:

Shawna Forde, who allegedly cooked up the deadly plot to raise money for political action had close ties to Jim Gilchrist, one of the two founders of the Minutemen. His website had defended her against criticism from other anti-immigrant activists as recently as January of this year. Yet, if you go to his site today, pages that Google says listed her have been scrubbed.

Same thing with VDARE, the homepage of educated racism. The site had an article criticizing a newspaper that had called Forde's claims of having been abducted by aliens (Latino immigrants, not space monkeys) far-fetched. The page was scrubbed. It only exists as a Google cache and will soon disappear. Cowards. If you want to back up a woman her brother describes as a sociopathic liar you should at least leave your endorsement up when she is also shown to be a psychopathic murderer.

Young also adroitly observes:

Jeff Schwilk, the leader of the San Diego Minutemen, in his denial of involvement with Shawna Forde gave the most damning statement about her and his own armed militia: "I've been concerned about her and her impact on our movement... Irrational people with assault rifles at the border is a recipe for disaster."

Exactly what I've been saying since I first heard of the Minutemen.

Indeed. And the above video is ample testament to that fact.

Meanwhile, Chad Shue at the Examiner describes how Forde's extremism helped drive the formation of an organized civil-rights campaign to counter it in the Everett area in the form of the Snohomish County Citizens Committee for Human Rights.

The Colorado Independent points out that Tom Tancredo also had his representatives in attendance at Forde's 2007 "Immigration Summit" in Everett, where a letter was read from Tancredo sending his regrets for not being in attendance.

And Marc Cooper chimes in as well.

Of course, at this point, we're still wondering where the rest of the media are. The national reporting on this has been nearly nonexistent -- particularly at Fox.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, the media reaction under the reversed scenario: If this had been a Mexican drug gang that had murdered a white family in the desert, can you imagine how Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly would have handled it?

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Remember how, a week or so ago, Bill O'Reilly was preoccupied with the idea that the news media had comparatively obsessed over the domestic-terrorism killing of Dr. George Tiller, while "ignoring" the killing of Private Long, a similar act of terrorism? He had numerous segments complaining that the matter proved there was a liberal media bias.

At one point, he complained that CNN had "ignored" the story -- a completely meritless charge. At another, he even claimed that the only place you could find any coverage of the case was on Fox.

Now, compare that to how Fox has handled yet another horrifying case of murderous extremism: the arrest of Shawna Forde and her Minuteman cohorts for the cold-blooded murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father.

Fox simply has ignored the story. There is a single Associated Press story on the Fox website. This AP piece, notably, contains not a single reference to Forde's long history with the Minuteman movement, her close ties to Jim Gilchrist, or the fact that she intended this Minutemen squad to use its ill-gotten gains to "start a revolution against the United States government."

Meanwhile, I've reviewed my Fox News recordings, meanwhile, and cannot find a single instance of the story being reported anywhere on the news channel. (I could be mistaken about this; the recordings are only partially complete, and it's possible something ran in the occasional gaps in my record. But not likely.)

Meanwhile, have O'Reilly, or Glenn Beck, or Sean Hannity -- all of them big fans of the Minutemen -- even mentioned the story a single time?

No. That's a big fat No.

Of course, you have to wonder if it's not because this case demolishes O'Reilly's take on the Minutemen:

"Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups."

Now, it's worth noting that the entire mainstream media have largely been missing in action on this story, perhaps for similar reasons. Nonetheless, Anderson Cooper has reported on it, as has Rick Sanchez. (However, Lou Dobbs has similarly been completely mum about it.)

Meanwhile, MSNBC has reported dutifully on the matter, though I have yet to have found any news-channel coverage.

But those stations didn't accuse anyone of under-covering any stories recently. And there's no question that this is a significant story because it exposes so deeply the twisted nature of the Minuteman movement beneath its "neighborhood watch" facade -- a facade erected with Bill O'Reilly's help.

Yet O'Reilly, it seems, can't even live up to the standards he demands his cable competitors meet.

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Matthew Balan at Newsbusters is unhappy because a CNN chryon identified Shawna Forde's killer-Minuteman gang "extremists", while Rick Sanchez talked a bit about how Forde had been a player in the movement:

A chyron which accompanied a report on CNN’s Newsroom program on Wednesday about the arrest of a leader of an organization inspired by the Minuteman Project, referred to her and her accused accomplices as “extremists.” Despite qualifying how the largest Minuteman organization had distanced itself from the suspects, anchor Rick Sanchez questioned how she became a “player in the anti-immigration movement.”

OK, so if Balan doesn't want to call Forde's gang of thugs "extremists," what would he call this?

Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.

"She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government," he said.

... "She sat right here on my couch and told me that she was going to start an underground militia. This militia was going to start robbing drug-cartel dealers — rob them and steal their money or drugs," Metzger said.

... Investigators think the May 30 robbery was intended to be the first in a series of such attacks intended to fund the border-watch group and a new venture, O'Connor said. Forde planned on starting a business of helping free kidnap victims in other countries, he said.

Oh, and then they shot a 9-year-old girl and her father to death in cold blood.

And yes, Forde indeed was a player in the Minuteman movement, appearing on TV as a Minuteman spokesperson and onstage with Jim Gilchrist here in the Northwest.

What, exactly, does Balan think Sanchez should have reported?

Now, Sanchez never suggests that the larger Minuteman movement might be riddled with extremists, but that seems to be what Balan is accusing him of doing. Or at least sidling up too close to that proposition.

Well, tell ya what, Matthew: We'll gladly say it here. The Minuteman movement is and always has been an extremist movement, and so it is no surprise to see it devolve in its decaying phase into a radical and violent one.

Oh yes, and you know what else? It's a big moneymaking scam, too.

But I guess you're unhappy unless they're described as a big "neighborhood watch." Yeah, that fits 'em to a T, eh?

Here's what's actually noteworthy about all this: Unlike CNN, you'll never see this story reported on Fox. In fact, I haven't seen a single mention of this story on Fox TV. Gee, I wonder why that is. Well, no I don't.

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We've been pointing out for a long time the powerful connection between right-wing hate talk directed at illegal immigrants -- generated by the whole spectrum of media pundits and nativist anti-immigration organizations -- and the predictable and powerful explosion of hate crimes directed toward Latinos in recent years.

Indeed, the now-infamous case of Luis Ramirez in upstate Pennsylvania is not just a classic illustration of the problem, but equally a demonstration of the real need for a federal bias-crime statute.

More pointedly, perhaps, the case of Shawna Forde and her gang of Aryan Minutemen -- who killed a 9-year-old girl in cold blood in a botched home-invasion robbery in Arizona -- makes abundantly clear how the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric being stirred up on the Right by "respectable" nativists like the Federation for Immigration reform is whipping extremists into their usually violent courses of action.

The Washington Post yesterday reported on the connection between the nativist immigrant-bashing that has been endemic to the immigration debate and these kinds of hate crimes:

U.S. civil rights leaders said yesterday that an increase in hate crimes committed in recent years against Hispanics and people perceived to be immigrants "correlates closely" to the nation's increasingly contentious debate over immigration.

Hate crimes targeting Hispanic Americans rose 40 percent from 2003 to 2007, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available, from 426 to 595 incidents, marking the fourth consecutive year of increases.

As the report explains, the crimes are being whipped up by a combination of grotesquely irresponsible media figures like Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, and "respectable" nativist organizations such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies.

All of these folks have adamantly denied they have anything to do with these crimes. Dobbs and O'Reilly have been patently disingenuous in running away from their culpability. Meanwhile, FAIR, CIS, and the rest of the John Tanton Network have done likewise.

And as Eric Ward observes, they're doing likewise in trying to flee their connection to Shawna Forde. Their press release responding to reports of the connection mostly continued to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of their most persistent critics.

Well, as we reported, it's not entirely clear how Forde came to be identified as a "spokesperson for FAIR" at a 2006 immigration forum in Yakima. But what's more than abundantly clear is that the Minuteman Project organization which originally empowered Forde and with which she has extensive connections was heavily promoted by FAIR.

Forde has a particularly extensive background of connections to Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project. She appeared onstage with Gilchrist in 2007 in Everett, Wash., at an "Immigration Summit" organized by local right-wingers.

Michael Hood wrote up a riveting account of this affair for The Stranger:

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We already pointed out this audio recording of the 911 call placed by the lone survivor of that botched home-invasion robbery carried out by Shawna Forde and her gang of Minutemen. But further listening reveals a number of details about the crime.

It begins simply:

"Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband."

The dispatcher begins asking questions and obviously dispatches deputies to respond. As she's asking about the killers, the victim cries out:

"They're coming back in! They're coming back in!"

An exchange of gunfire ensues. When the woman comes back on the line, she explains:

"They told us that somebody had, um, escaped jail or something and they wanted to come in and look at my house or something. And they just shot my husband. And they shot my daughter and they shot me."

"... Oh my God, I can't believe they killed my family."

She explains that the killers walked up cold-bloodedly to her daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, as she cowered and cried, and shot her two or three times anyway.

Later in the call she tells the dispatcher that the shooting began when her husband became suspicious of the invaders and asked them about their guns.

We also learn that the shooters were two men -- both tall, one white with a painted face, the other Latino -- and a "shorter fat woman."

That very much describes the gang that was arrested this week.

Scott North and Jackson Holz have more details on the tape.

Vivir Latino points out that there's been a disturbing theme in some of the coverage -- suggesting that perhaps the family somehow had it coming:

Something that tends to happen when the media covers these types of horrors, is double victimization. In an effort to answer the question why, subtleties, like how immigration has been racialized and how Latinos, painted as immigrants, are criminalized and dehumanized, get swept under the rug.

It certainly does raise the question: Why are the media paying so little attention to this story? Are they still wedded to their favorite narrative, that the Minutemen are just some big "neighborhood watch"?

As we said, that's some neighborhood watch.

I guess they're too busy covering that all-important David Letterman protest.

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Remember how all those right-wing pundits proclaimed the Minutemen as being just like a neighborhood watch? Michelle Malkin called it "the mother of all neighborhood watches." Lou Dobbs labeled it "this country's biggest neighborhood watch program". Bill O'Reilly declared: "Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups."

Boy, that sure is some neighborhood watch:

Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.

"She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government," he said.

Here is a recording of the 911 call made by the victim who survived -- the mother of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, who was shot "two or three times" while her mother lay nearby. As she's on the phone, you can hear the killers return and open fire on her again, and hear her return fire:

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[Courtesy Arizona Star]

The accused shooter, Jason Eugene Bush, was charged Friday in the 1997 murder of a sleeping, homeless Hispanic man in Wenatchee, Wash.
"Bush has had long-standing ties to the Aryan Nations," Sgt. John Kruse of the Wenatchee police wrote in a statement filed in Chelan County Superior Court.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department arrested Forde, Bush and Arivaca resident Albert Robert Gaxiola on Friday and accused them of killing Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia, 9, during a home invasion. Flores' wife was injured during the attack and returned fire, wounding Bush, investigators said.

Forde, 41, who has lived primarily in Everett, Wash., was the executive director of Minutemen American Defense, and she had named Bush the "operations director" for the group's border-watch activities along the Arizona-Mexico border.

... Forde's brother, Metzger, worked for the organization at its inception years ago, but he quit, he said, "when it started to get too deep."

He and other family members grew suspicious of Forde and started talking to police about her after her husband was shot in their Everett home in December.

That's why, Metzger said, he had an audio recorder running when she visited his Northern California home in early May.

"She sat right here on my couch and told me that she was going to start an underground militia. This militia was going to start robbing drug-cartel dealers — rob them and steal their money or drugs," Metzger said.

... Investigators think the May 30 robbery was intended to be the first in a series of such attacks intended to fund the border-watch group and a new venture, O'Connor said. Forde planned on starting a business of helping free kidnap victims in other countries, he said.

She also spoke of the venture to her brother, he said.

"She was telling me that they were going to start some sort of militia that was going to go overseas and aid and abet those who are kidnapped. She said she was going to go to Syria," he said.

I warned some time back that this was precisely the arc of flight that the Minuteman movement was taking:

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Those upstanding nativists and xenophobes employed by the John Tanton Network -- and particularly the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was designated a hate group by the SPLC awhile back -- have been complaining vigorously about how unfairly they are being treated. Why, they have nothing to do with the manifest racism swirling around the immigration debate -- so they claim.

But the recent arrest of Minuteman offshoot leader Shawna Forde for the murder of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter -- part of a broader plan to rob drug dealers and use the money to finance their Minuteman operations -- has ripped the veneer off the fake walls these nativists use to pretend that they have nothing to do with the racists who seem to swell their ranks as though they belonged there naturally. (Funny thing, that.)

Back in 2006, you see, Forde appeared at a public "town hall" forum on immigration in Yakima, Wash., a central-Washington city whose main economy is agricultural, particularly apple orchards. As Jackie Mahendra at America's Voice notes, she was presented as a "spokesperson for FAIR" as well as the Minutemen.

As you can see from the video above, Forde was outrageously incendiary, accusing immigrants of bringing crime and disease to the state and costing taxpayers in health-care costs, particularly for their "anchor babies."

At one point, host Enrique Cerna asked Forde:

Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?

Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.

She later wrapped up with this:

Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?

And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.

However, it was unclear to me if Forde really was a FAIR representative or whether she had just lied about that, as seems to be her pattern in many instances.

But in untangling the puzzle, what emerged was a clear portrait of FAIR officials commingling freely with Minutemen and the many seedy characters who occupy their ranks -- so much so that what they become is a "respectable" front organization for a ragtag bunch of thuggish nativists.

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Logan already gathered most of the relevant early details about the remarkable case of Shawna Forde, arrested yesterday for ordering the murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father in Arizona.

My old friend Scott North, who has been around the block with reporting on the activities of the far right in Snohomish County -- where Forde is from -- reports this morning that Forde may have been involved in another violent home invasion in California already:

On Saturday, Arizona detectives were pursuing tips that members of Forde's group may have staged a home invasion robbery in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Monday.

The victims, friends of Forde's mother, reported being robbed at gunpoint of nearly $12,000 by two men who showed up at the door and presented badges claiming they were U.S. Marshals.

Truck driver Peter Myers, 48, said he recognized one of men who robbed him after he saw news reports about Forde's arrest and photographs of her co-defendants.

He said the man who directed the robbery in his home was Jason Eugene Bush, 34. The ex-convict from Eastern Washington is a Forde associate now accused of being the gunman in the Arivaca killings.

"That is the guy. He pointed a gun right at us," Myers said.

***

Arizona officials have said Bush is recovering from a gunshot wound received during the home invasion there. Myers said that description fits the tall man who bound him with zip ties and then took cash from the family's lock box.

"He was moving real slow," Meyers said.

Forde's mother, Rena Caudle, said her daughter recently visited the area. After Friday's arrest, Caudle said she made certain that Arizona officials knew about the suspected link to the California robbery.

This may just be the tip of the iceberg with this gang. Already Jim Gilchrist, the Minuteman leader with whom Forde has had a long association, is making the signs of the cross in her general direction and declaring he had nothing to do with her:

Jim Gilchrist, president of the California-based Minuteman Project and a longtime Forde ally, made it clear Saturday that his earlier support of Forde should in no way be construed as approving the actions now attributed to her.

"Am I going to come to her support at this time? Of course not. How can I?" Gilchrist said.

Forde ran her own organization, Gilchrist said.

"Unfortunately, some people in this Minutemen movement have used this movement to carry out sinister agendas," he said.

We'll see. Investigators may not be done making arrests yet.

Indeed, it's starting to look as though Forde may have been organizing basically a low-rent version of The Order: an ideological army turned into criminal moneymaking operation. Only this time, anti-immigrant nativism instead of white supremacy is the ideological driver. And when The Order crumbled in flames, it exposed all kinds of criminal dealings on the far right.

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The nationwide surge in violence by right wing extremists has been making a lot of headlines lately, both in the blogosphere and the corporate media -- with Fox News doing its best to downplay the violence as isolated and perpetrated by lefties.

Now it appears that Shawna Forde, a rising star in the xenophobic, anti-immigrant militia movement has been arrested for her role in a home invasion that left two dead, including a 9 year old girl.

TUCSON, AZ (KOLD) - Pima County Sheriff's investigators have charged three people with a May 30 home invasion that left a father and 9-year-old girl dead.

Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush and Albert Robert Gaxiola face murder, burglary and aggravated assault charges.

Investigators say the suspects broke into a home in Arivaca, shooting and killing 29-year old Raul Flores and his daughter Brisenia.

Investigators say Forde was the mastermind of the operation. She and Gaxiola are in the Pima county jail. Answering media questions while led out in handcuffs, both suspects denied responsibility for the deadly home invasion.

"This is a very unusual woman," said Clarence Dupnik, Pima County Sheriff. "I don't really know what goes on in her mind, but she is obviously a very evil person. If you look at her history closely, and you know what we know, she is, at best, a psychopath." Read on...

Forde, who is surrounded by numerous controversies, has been on the radars of both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League for some time now. Shawna is also supported by Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project -- who is also embroiled in controversies of his own.