Minutemen Join White Supremacists In ‘Co-Hosted’ Strategy Session

Posted in Anti-Immigrant, Hate Groups, Nativist Extremist, White Supremacist
by Brentin Mock on June 25, 2008

The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist hate group, publicly announced earlier this week that it was co-hosting an anti-immigration strategy session with Americans4America, the official Las Vegas chapter of Jim Gilchrist’s Minuteman Project.

Despite the Minuteman Project’s oft-touted anti-racist policies, the meeting took place June 24, offering some of the strongest evidence yet of direct ties between the Minuteman movement and overtly racist organizations.

“There’s a lot of overlapping between our two groups,” Nevada CCC leader Don Wassall told the Intelligence Report. “I met a couple of people from their group who are interested in trying to recruit more and get more people active in both of our groups.”

While a June 23 community calendar item placed by the CCC in the Las Vegas Review-Journal listed Americans4America and the CCC as “co-hosts” of the meeting, Wassall told the Report that, in fact, the Minutemen were more like special invited guests.

The relationship between the two organizations is “hard to explain,” said Wassall, but “we are working with them [the Minutemen].”

Wassall said the handful of Minuteman Project members who attended the meeting did not include Americans4America founder Kricket Telfer, who could not be reached for comment. Wassall called Telfer “an acquaintance.”

Like all Minuteman Project chapters, Americans4America declares on its website that it has, “no affiliation with, nor will we accept any assistance by or interference from, separatists, racists, or supremacy groups.”

Commingling with the CCC nullifies that assurance, as does joining forces with Wassall, whose long history of right-wing extremism is beyond dispute. Wassall, who booked the conference room where the joint CCC-Minuteman Project session was held, was the head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the CCC before moving to Las Vegas last December.

Wassall is a longtime member and current executive director of the American Nationalist Union (formerly known as the Populist Party), a radical-right organization started in 1983 by veteran anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Since 1996 Wassall has been the editor of the group’s publication The Nationalist Times. The periodical’s online version contains blatantly racist articles and links to hate group websites including New Nation News and the Political Cesspool, as well as the International Conspiratological Association.

Wassall was also a prominent supporter of the American Friends of the British National Party, a group formed to raise funds for a neofascist political party in England. The group collapsed after its leader, Mark Cotterill, was deported back to England in the wake of an Intelligence Report exposé.

And now, apparently, he’s backing the Minutemen. Wassall said the next CCC meeting in Las Vegas is planned for the last Tuesday in July, and that it “may or may not” be co-hosted by Americans4America.

Source: SPLCenter