Shawna Forde trial starting (gacked from unfunny_business)

[ithiliana]

But it's worth considering how some stories of nine year old children being killed get media attention and which don't. (I have this ongoing hatred of the fact that Fox News always seems to have some ongoing story about adolescent thin pretty cis blonde woman horribly murdered by evil barbarians that huge amounts is spent on at least while I'm visiting my mother.)

Crooks and Liars: The Shawna Forde Trial: Will the mainstream media bother to notice?

The little girl's name was Brisenia Flores. She lived near the border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca, Arizona. On May 30 of 2009, a woman named Shawna Forde, who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic "fun". Forde's gang had decided to go "operational," which meant they concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and "start a revolution against the government". They targeted the Flores home, which had neither money nor drugs, based on dubious information. They convinced Flores to let them in by claiming to be law-enforcement officers seeking fugitives, then shot him point-blank in the head when he questioned them and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez. And then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot Brisenia in cold blood in the head. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend's.)

Fox News did not cover the story except in one brief online article without any reference to Forde's associations with Minutemen movement

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."

Comments

[acari]

Do you have any links with info about the Minutemen? I assume they are some kind of batshit militia, right? Wikipedia only talks about them in a historical context.

[ithiliana]

*smacks head* US centrism strikes again--I'll give a quick look!

[acari]

Hee. Thanks.

[ithiliana]

Here's one of their web sites:

http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/

If you search for "Minutemen" with other terms like ARizona, Texas, Border, Illegal immigrants, you'll get more, plus a wide range of interpretations of their actions.

They claim to be patriots doing what the government does not do. Their white nativist (USA=white) rhetoric demonizes "immigrants" (which are all brown and illegal!), and they have taken a number of actions that have been covered in the media.

I consider them a vigilante group who like other self-proclaimed "militas" often veer into terrorist activities (which as the Shawna Forde case shows rarely gets the mainstream media attention that any story involving a non-white person does).

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking them (the SPLC tracks hate groups and extreme nativist groups--and have brought successful lawsuits against racial hate groups like the KKK and the ARyan Nation).

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2007/spring/shoot-shovel-shut-up/the-groups-a-lis

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/summer/lock-and-unload

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/summer/arizona-showdown

[acari]

Jesus. Their website is so damn creepy.

[ein_myria]

Minutemen are those "militias" in Machete, yes?