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.”
A Black President and a Birth Certificate
Jim David Adkisson really hated liberals. He hated them so much he wanted to start killing them en masse. So one day he did.
On July 27, 2008, Adkisson—a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville, Tennessee, suburb of Powell—drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, which had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Adkisson walked inside the church carrying a guitar case packed with a shotgun and seventy-six rounds of ammunition.
The congregants were enjoying the opening scene from the church’s production of the musical Annie Jr. when Adkisson, in a hallway outside the sanctuary, abruptly opened the guitar case, pulled out the shotgun, fired off a round that alerted everyone to his presence, then walked into the sanctuary and began firing randomly, while saying “hateful things.” Linda Kraeger, sixty-one, a grandmother and retired schoolteacher, was hit in the face with a shotgun blast. Greg McKendry, sixty, got up to shield others from the attack and was hit in the chest.
A group of men began to surround Adkisson. When he stopped to reload, three men tackled him and wrestled away his gun. Pinned to the ground, Adkisson complained that the men were hurting him.
Greg McKendry was dead at the scene. Linda Kraeger died the next day. Seven other congregants were wounded.
In his Ford Escape, Adkisson had left a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”
A detective who interviewed Adkisson and examined the manifesto reported to his superiors that Adkisson targeted the church “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
Adkisson explained to the detective that he’d decided that since “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them into office.”
At Adkisson’s home in Powell, scattered among the ammunition, guns, and brass knuckles, investigators found a library straight from the right-wing canon: Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, by Michael Savage; Let Freedom Ring, by Sean Hannity; and The O’Reilly Factor, by Bill O’Reilly, among others.
Adkisson’s manifesto read like an angry and twisted regurgitation of the rhetoric ladled out by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, boiled down to its logical conclusion.
Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them …
This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence …
I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me … Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
Adkisson’s rampage shattered the congregation. “People were killed in the sanctuary of my church, which should be the holy place, the safe place. People were injured,” Rev. Chris Buice told PBS’s Rick Karr a couple of weeks later. “A man came in here, totally dehumanized us—members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?”
Eliminationism had become an established component of right-wing rhetoric, both in the mainstream and among extremists, during most of the preceding decade and longer. One of its most powerful effects is to create an atmosphere of permission for acts of violence and intimidation; over time, enough such rhetoric will cause some people to commit hate crimes and worse.
The year 2008 was when eliminationism ceased being mere rhetoric and started bubbling up into the real world. Incidents of right-wing domestic terrorism, such as Jim Adkisson’s murderous spree,
