Bosom bigot buddies: J.T. Ready (in suit) and Rep. Russell Pearce (in flag shirt) work the crowd together.
Like you needed more proof that AZ's nativist movement is riddled with racists, rednecks, and raving wing-nuts, the anti-immigrant protest at the state capitol this Saturday (6/16) featured a rabble-rousing speech by none other than the Ernst Roehm of the East Valley, the Martin Bormann of Mesa, everyone's favorite fat-boy fascist, J.T. Ready.
Yep, despite the fact that Ready's been outed by the Anti-Defamation League, and my print cohort The Bird as a white supremacist who's kept a page on the neo-Nazi Web site Newsaxon.com (now Newsaxon.org), a racist MySpace "for whites by whites"; despite the fact that Ready reportedly attended last year's Winterfest event in Phoenix hosted by the neo-Nazi National Vanguard; and though Ready's posted white supremacist messages on my blog and others; he was welcomed, cheered and embraced Saturday by a crowd of 300 or so on the capitol lawn, a crowd angered whenever the term "racist" was raised in regards to their movement.
His massive frame shoved sausage-like into a dark suit, the former Mesa City Council candidate palled around with good friend state Rep. Russell Pearce both before and after Ready spoke during the five-hour prejudice powwow. On the podium, Ready was easily the most popular speaker that day, aside, perhaps, from the Yosemite Sam-like Buffalo Rick, a gimpy, grumpy ol' coot who every day looks more and more like he, in the words of the classic SNL skit, "lives in a van, down by the river." Yeah, Rick may not in actuality be a crazy homeless man, but believe me, he could pass. (More on Rick's antics at the shindig in a moment.)
Goering-esque gasbag J.T. whipped the audience of white trash wackos into a frothing-at-the-mouth furor, denouncing Republican Senator Jon Kyl as a traitor for supporting immigration reform, and giving the audience his four-point program for an all-American authoritarian state, presumably with Ready as its ready-made fuehrer:
"All the politicians wanna say it (immigration) is a complex problem," yelled Ready into the mic. "Well, I got it for you, one, two, three, four. Ya ready? Number one: Put the 1st Marine Division on the southern border. Number two: Put the 2nd Marine Division on the northern border. Number three: Put the 3rd Marine Division at our ports and shores. Number four: Our 4th Marine division needs to be within the interior moppin' up these gangbangers and takin' 'em out of here."
Of course, the military-lovin' Ready never mentioned that he was court-martialed twice and kicked out of the Marines with a bad conduct discharge. Or that in 2006, he was replaced as the master of ceremonies for Mesa's veteran's day parade once vets there discovered the truth of his piss-poor service record. He's also had, and continues to have, run-ins with the police.
Even more disturbing, on his Newsaxon Web page, Ready listed National Alliance founder William Pierce's The Turner Diaries as one of his favorite books. I know it's just a book, but so is Mein Kampf, people. The Turner Diaries is an apocalyptic tale of race war, one that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. So when someone says that's their favorite book, I'm hoping like hell that the police have got that bastard staked out.
Ready also took a moment to briefly denounce his nemesis, Mesa police Detective Matt Browning, who's spent 12 years in law-enforcement infiltrating skinhead and border patrol groups. Exactly why Ready hates Browning so much has yet to be revealed. True, Browning drew the ire of many anti-immigrant groups when he appeared at a forum at the state capitol earlier this year with members of the ADL, and described his work in detail, talking about how skinheads and neo-Nazis were present on the border. But Browning never mentioned Ready directly. This was done instead by the ADL's Mark Pitcavage, who, in descibing the overlap between white supremacist groups and anti-immigrant groups, used J.T. Ready's Newsaxon Web page as an example. Posts on other Web sites have stated that Browning once interrogated Ready, but I have no proof of this as of yet.
After Ready's speech, he worked the crowd, hanging out A LOT with Russell Pearce, which does make one wonder. Pearce got in trouble last year for cutting and pasting an article off the Web site of the neo-Nazi National Alliance and e-mailing it to his supporters. He later claimed an unnamed friend forwarded it to him, so he didn't vet it properly. Hmmm. Wonder if that friend was present Saturday?
I approached J.T. a couple of times and threw some questions at him, each time he walked away, once making a comment to a pal about "Bird shit," a reference to my column. He once ran off to some bicycle patrolmen to complain about me, even though all I was doing was taking photos of him and trying to get a comment. What a wuss! Naturally, the police did nothing. And soon he was jawboning with his fellow fatheads.
Buffalo Rick, always a class act.
After J.T., the fun continued, with scraggly snagglepuss Buffalo Rick taking to the podium and shouting at the top of his lungs like some deranged lunatic. He recognized me standing in the crowd and gave me a shout out:
"There are people among us today, who call themselves journalists, they call themselves reporters, basically people like The Bird down here from the New Times, who seems to think we’re all racist bigots. I got news for ya, if we were racist bigots, you’d be hanging from that tree."
The lynching reference got a cheer from the crowd, and a chuckle from me. But I think Mr. Buffalo Chips was sincere. He followed me around some, trying to provoke a fight, spitting nearby, though not on me. Then he'd get right behind me and shout "Down in front," shit like that. I laughed it off. What am I supposed to do, beat up a cripple in front of a crowd of witnesses? I can just see the headline now: "New Times reporter assaults gimpy geezer."
For the rest of the event, I concentrated on challenging people about Ready's presence. A lot of people claimed not to know who he was, though he'd just been up there leading them in chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A." Others defended him, saying there was no truth to his ties to neo-Nazi types. And still others seemed to think it didn't matter. I missed a chance to buttonhole J.D. Hayworth, as I arrived too late to hear him speak, and he apparently skedaddled post-haste. But I did get to chat with two other pols there, candidate for Mayor Steve Lory and PHX City Council candidate Jack Watson. Both men said they were not aware of Ready's racist activities, and surprisingly both said they would have taken to the stage and spoken even if they'd known.
"I have limited resources to get my name out there," explained Watson. "I guess for the lack of a better term, it’s the lesser of two evils. Because I’ve got to do everything in my power to get my name out there, if I hope to stand a chance to get elected."
Lory, who was there with his sister, had been gathering signatures to get his name on the ballot. His remarks to the crowd almost sounded like something out of the mouth of an ACLU attorney, as he talked about the erosion of our civil liberties. When I asked him about J.T., he claimed it was a freedom of speech issue.
"You’re gonna get that at any event," he told me. "What are you gonna do if you’re organizing this event? You say to someone like him, I don’t like your views, you’re out?"
Um, yeah, that's exactly what you would do if you don't want your name or movement linked to him. Look, I like Steve Lory, and I don't believe the guy's a racist. The nightclub he ran until it was forced to close by the city, Blaze nightclub, catered to a black and Hispanic crowd. And he strikes me as sincere. But if you're appearing at a rally that features a guy like Ready who's an unabashed white supremacist, that begs the question -- at what point do you say it's over the line? What if Ready showed up in a brownshirt and swastika armband? Would you speak at the same event as someone like that? If you think I'm exaggerating, take as an example, this comment J.T. made to one of my blog posts:
New Saxon is accomplishing the one thing that the anti-whites hate. Unity of our racial family. Good. I will keep my page on New Saxon as I planned to anyway. The leftist vitriol spewed forth by malcontent anti-socials is just a further endorsement of a job well done for our just cause. Thank you Buster and all the staff of the New Saxon who are helping make the dream of a safer world for white children possible.
JT Ready- Author of the 18 Words:
"The Purity of the Aryan Race is the most precious resource Nature has to offer All of Humankind."
Interestingly, Ready's e-mail and his phone mail message service reference the "Eagle's Nest," Adolf Hitler's famous Alpine retreat. Sounds like someone's been watching too much of the History Channel.
A lot of people kept coming up to me saying, "I'm not a racist," or "We're not racists," etc. Fine. So why were you cheering J.T. Ready? Indeed, why did you let the guy within 500 yards of your podium if you're concerned at all with the anti-immigrant movement being called racist?Hey, you absolutely have the right to have J.T. Ready there if you want. And I would do nothing to curtail Ready's freedom of speech. On the other hand, I'm going to call it like I see it, and expose the guy for the scumbag he is.
If David Duke had been on the list of speakers, for instance, what would people say about those who remained and continued to participate in the same demonstration as Duke? At the very least Lory is naive. Nor can he say that Ready was the only one there espousing such views. I spotted skinheads in attendance, and there was one Scottish bloke present, wearing Doc Martens, natch, who praised J.T. to the high heavens. They guy even defended the racist shorthand of 14/88 (88 being code for HH, or Heil Hitler, and 14 being the famous supremacist slogan uttered by neo-Nazi David Lane). And he said he believed the Holocaust was a "Hollow-hoax."
And these idiots in the anti-immigrant movement can't figure out why they get tarred with the racist label? Sheesh. Someone please draw 'em a map.
