However, when arguments flared between a handful of Hispanics and the handful of counterprotesters she was leading, she took great pleasure from the confrontation, asking, "Isn't this exciting?" at one point. Later, as both sides were dispersing, she noted a crushed Dr Pepper can on the ground, lamenting, "See how they throw trash on the ground? It's just like this on the border." Still, this ain't exactly the same as prancing around in a Klan hood screaming, "White power!"
Lawless' views on race can be opportunistic, though. Last year, KPHO Channel 5 had reporter Morgan Loew pretend to join the Border Guardians, filming Lawless with a hidden camera. In the footage, which can still be viewed at KPHO.com, Lawless confesses matter-of-factly that she would accept racists into her group.
Giulio Sciorio
Giulio Sciorio
Make her day: Lawless channels Dirty Harry while using a Mexican flag as a doormat during the Freedom Riders event.
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"What we need right now is bodies," she tells Loew, unaware that he's an undercover reporter. "At this point, I don't even really care if they're racist as long as they're not obnoxious to people of color who are also in the group."
Lawless claims she was just testing Loew to make sure he wasn't a bigot, and he failed because he showed no reaction when she made her remark. Good try on Lawless' part, but her cover story strains credulousness. It's more likely that the KPHO broadcast was a glimpse of the Laine Lawless that's rarely on public display, one that on occasion takes a realpolitik view of her less-savory colleagues.
One of those less-savory colleagues was Roy Warden, whom Lawless broke with after Warden pushed a teenager at a June 2006 protest in Tucson outside the Mexican consulate there. Sixteen-year-old Arturo Rodriguez had the temerity to step inside the boundary Warden had set up for his protest, part of the wild-eyed activist’s standard operating procedure. As Rodriguez filmed Warden with his video camera for a short film he would later post online at Panleft.org (http://panleft.org/screen.php?videoSrc=warden_assault.mov), Warden shoved and threatened him. “You stay the fuck out of our area, you got that?” Warden yelled at Rodriguez in the video. “You step in there again and I’ll put a bullet in your fuckin’ head!”
Lawless was present during the confrontation and actually videotaped it, but after Warden was cited for assault and making intimidating threats, Lawless refused to help with his defense. Warden shared their resulting e-mail exchange in a much-forwarded Internet message declaring that Lawless had put a hex on him. Lawless’ October 4, 2006, e-mail to Warden is a real eye-popper:
You are a fucking prick, a misogynist, a homophobe, an animal abuser who throws his poor female cat in heat against a wall to silence her, and an evil man. You deserve the support or help of NO ONE. Any testimony I might give in an open court would not be to your advantage. What do you want me to do, show my video of you assaulting a minor child, and then say, yep, he did it? You fool! You think just because ppl are around you, it gives you the right to push them around like they are pieces on a chess board? Go join the pushy Mexicans in the Open Borders Lobby — your tactics are more morally compromised than theirs, and at least they can put on a peaceful face, which you don’t bother with. I’m not in your game, you son of a bitch, and I will not be dominated by you. No man has ever succeeded in that, and you won’t be the first.
Though Warden has since been found guilty of assault involving the June fracas and Lawless has sworn off dealing with him, Don Pauly, who has espoused violence in the past, remains in her good graces. As for Chris Simcox, whom she worked for in 2003 or 2004 at Simcox's Tombstone Tumbleweednewspaper, he's her bête noire. She regards him as a traitor to her movement.
But roles are reversed this time. Simcox kicked Lawless to the curb and will have nothing to do with her now.
Simcox admits Lawless helped out in Tombstone for about three months, but it was eventually decided that Lawless, true to her name, perhaps, was too radical for the minutemen. According to Simcox, Lawless didn't pass his movement's "vetting process," which supposedly includes a background check and "keeping an eye on the individual" for a while.
"After a couple of months, her rhetoric got to the point where it was not meshing with our procedures," says Simcox. "It was a little too aggressive. The rhetoric was negative. And we severed ties with her."
Lawless is an "embarrassment" to his movement, and her tactics are self-aggrandizing, he states. He also cops to sending a 2005 e-mail to Don Pauly (another person with whom Simcox says he's cut ties), wherein he suggests Lawless is an agent of the feds or of the very "Open Borders Lobby" that she routinely decries.
"Please stop referring to Laine Lawless as a member of the Tombstone Militia, Civil Homeland Defense," writes Simcox, using a former name for his organization. "Laine was vetted and outed long ago as a person who was intent on encouraging citizen groups to step outside the law. We are suspicious that she is a plant working for the government or working for the open borders crowd to get people to make racist comments so they prove we are racists."
