Robert Erickson: Speech to Anti-Immigrant Teabaggers
Posted by Mike E on November 16, 2009
Talk at the November 14 Minnesota teabagger event (Minnesota Tea Party Against Amnesty). Watch to the end.
Background >>
Background from Twin Cities Indymedia (suggested by Brad Sigal.)
Anti-Racists Steal the Show at White Supremacist “Tea Party Against Amnesty”
11/15/2009 — Forty-five anti-immigration activists held a small rally outside the state capitol on Saturday. Counter-protest from members of Anti-Racist Action, Bash Back, the Minnesota Immigrants’ Rights Action Coalition and others was frequent, vigorous and hilarious. (“America is not for Russians! America is not for Germans! Europeans go home!”)
The cheerful crowd of immigrants’ rights activists held a banner reading “Stop the raids and deportations”. In conversation with members of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform, the activists repeatedly pointed out that all non-native people in Minnesota are illegal immigrants–Minnesota was taken by force by whites from the native people who lived here for centuries before white arrival. One activist, under the name “Robert Erickson,” managed to get on the list of speakers and riled the crowd into a frenzy about the theft, murder and disease inflicted by illegal immigrants… from Europe, upon indigenous populations. In a “Yes Men” moment, the anti-immigrant crowd sat in silence, trying to figure out what just happened. (See video from Bluestem Prairie; transcript below; photos to come) | More video from I Don’t Hate America (1, 2)
Immigrants’ rights activists were also unimpressed with MINN-SIR’s conservative libertarian take on government programs–although members of MINN-SIR have no problem working for the government, they are opposed to government assistance, whether to support homeowners, to provide health care, schools, or any other form of citizen benefit. “No money for children!” said one immigrants’ rights activist. “No money for schools! No money for veterans! That’s just great!”
Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform and the Minnesota Coalition for Immigration Reduction attempt to present themselves as the respectable face of anti-immigrant sentiment, distinguishing themselves from the neo-nazis who frequently rally in southern Minnesota. But how big is the distinction? Some scenes from yesterday’s rally:
Domestic violence is caused by women and exploited by immigrants! A white man who looked to be in his late fifties gave an extended speech describing how, because of the National Organization for Women, hundreds of undocumented women make false claims of domestic abuse in US courts to get US residency. He added that seventy percent of domestic violence cases are caused by women, that some abusers “have good reasons” for what they do, and that courts never investigate domestic violence cases. This was a particularly creative speech given that undocumented women who are victims of abuse often can’t get legal help or protection out of fear that they’ll be deported.
No education for special needs children! You know what’s wrong with education in Minnesota? Schools have to educate everyone. Federal legislation, said local politician Noran Dylan, “forces states to educate children with higher barriers to learning”, including students learning English. This raises costs!
Chain gangs, prison deaths and refusing to investigate rape cases are things to boast about! This crowd loves Arizona sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who is a personal friend of the rally’s keynote speaker, former Sheriff Richard Mack–a fondness they share with Aryan Nation and the Ku Klux Klan. (Mack’s claim to fame is his distaste for background checks on gun owners.) Arpaio is accused of racially profiling Latin@ drivers; he charges undocumented immigrants with felony conspiracy and holds them without bail; his heavily militarized anti-immigrant sweeps are often conducted against the wishes of local government (so much for local government!)–and he’s under investigation by the federal government.
Arpaio’s jails have money to hire guards to beat blind and disabled prisoners to death (as noted on a conservative website!), but they don’t have enough money to investigate rape cases, as per the conservative Goldwater Institute. And serious felonies have skyrocketed during Arpaio’s tenure–he’s not just racist and violent, he’s ineffective! Arpaio thinks it’s an honor to be compared to the KKK, too. You may remember Arpaio for his “tent cities” for immigrants, intentionally located near polluted sites. Or his chain gangs–Arpaio-lovers see nothing wrong with lines of poor men, many men of color, laboring in chains. And then there’s the homophobia–Arpaio thinks it’s hilarious to dress his male prisoners in pink and parade them around, since he thinks men should be humiliated to wear a “feminine” color and he thinks it’s awesome to sexually humiliate prisoners.
This is the man whose name was cheered–cheered with passion–by the crowd.
White people brought everything good to this country! Plus confusion. “Can you imagine what it would be like if Mexico still ran this place?” said one rally attendee after explaining to a counter-demonstrator that white Europeans had brought ambition and bravery to a lax and cowardly land.
Pushing journalists is A-ok! After you get done knocking someone off a bike, that is. I was frankly shocked to see one of the older men at the rally push a protester off his bike. While I was taking pictures, the man turned toward me. “I saw you,” I said. “I saw you push him off his bike.” The guy responded by heading over and giving me a couple of good shoves, because if you’re going to knock someone smaller and younger than you down, you sure don’t want anyone seeing you do it.
Minutemen hats! “America’s Neighborhood Watch” has interpersonal ties to the Klan. Just this summer, former Minutemen star Shawna Forde was arrested for the robbery and murder of Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter Brisenia.
That one guy from the Nazi rally! He’s always there, and he’ll tell you that he’s carrying weapons. At the raucous Austin rally last month, local police identified him as Joseph Benjamin Thomas, 38, of Mendota Heights. After trying to join the Nazi rally but being detained when a Mower County Deputy noticed he was wearing body armor and carrying a knife, he was questioned and stated he also had an expandable baton and a stun gun, according to the police report. He was disarmed but allowed to pick up the weapons later. At Saturday’s rally at the Capitol, he appeared to pull some kind of weapon in the scuffle after another rally attendee knocked a protester off his bike.
Kyle 486-T said
This is funny.
Reminds me of when a group of white comrades organizing against Prop 187 in southern California went into an anti-immigrant/white supremacist rally and passed out “Free boat tickets for all European Pilgrims” to be shipped out on Thanksgiving Day.
I heard that not that many folks showed up for the free boat ride back to Europe.
Radical-Eyes said
I really don’t think that the folks in the crowd understood what he was saying.
All they seemed to be hearing was “send ‘em home”….that and their own screams.
Stanley W. Rogouski said
I agree with Radical-Eyes. That video was more disturbing than amusing. Erickson’s irony comes across via Youtube but in person he wasn’t a strong enough speaker and he kept getting drowned out by the counterprotesters. Most people would have heard that speech as an anti-immigrant speech, let alone Teabagger types, who pretty much hear whatever they want to hear anyway.
What DID come across was the way the Teabaggers just let the mask drop. There was no “well I like immigrants just not illegal immigrants” hedging. All you got were shreiks of approval every time Erickson said “send them back”.
That’s what a lynch mob looks like. l
Kyle 486-T said
I hear what Radical-Eyes and Stanley W. Rogouski are saying.
However, I think you are missing the bigger picture. Those folks at the rally will not be convinced by any speech (either by Erickson or anyone else). The point is to fuck with these reactionaries, so why don’t we ease up a bit, shit.
As someone who came to this country “illegally” and is now a citizen, I found Erickson’s actions as a big “fuck you” to those at the rally and a show of solidarity with undocumented immigrants and indigenous peoples. I doubt it that a person of color would have even been able to get close to the mic at that rally.
Btw, as immigrants and folks of color, we deal with that kind of white-supremacist lynch-mob mentality all the time, if we thought about this all day, we would go fucking crazy. A laughter here and there is needed.
palante, Kyle
Gary said
I suspect Erickson, who like any Minnestotan with that surname is VERY aware of his Scandinavian roots, is enganging in some weird dry humor here.
chegitz guevara said
At the rally in Fort Lauderdale, one sign read, “Mexicans should be spayed and neutered.”
Stanley W. Rogouski said
The point is to fuck with these reactionaries, so why don’t we ease up a bit, shit.
Agreed. I think Erickson’s routine would have been devestatingly effective inside where there was less noise and he could have set the pace better. But, even as it was, it was still pretty good.
I was just struck by how open they all were. There was none of the “I like immigrants who come here legally” bullshit. It was just pure balls out hate.
Btw, as immigrants and folks of color, we deal with that kind of white-supremacist lynch-mob mentality all the time
In a way you may even be lucky. As a white guy with a pretty authentic sounding Jersey accent, a lot of bigots don’t even both to put up the mask around me. They consider me one of them. Whenever I object, they’re almost incredulous. But after they get over their initial unbelief, expressing their bigotry is almost a macho thing for them. Their attitude is more like “damn if I’m going to let some politically correct liberal tell me what I can’t say.” Then they double down even more.
Kyle 486-T said
Stanley:
In a violent white-supremacist world, I don’t know if I could consider myself being “lucky” to be a person of color (because I won’t have to deal with racist macho assholes talking shit to me?) vs. actual white supremacist structural violence. There is a difference. My point here is not to rate “who is more oppressed than who” kind of thing, but stress an awareness in terms of how we come to understand “violence”.
The over 800 young women in Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, TX) who have been “disappeared” are not not exploited within capitalist social relations; there is an act of feminicide taking place: the killing of women by men simply because they are women.
As the scholar/activist Rosa Linda Fregoso reminds us in an essay on feminicide on the U.S.-Mexico border: “Although, there is no doubt that the process of economic globalization may indeed be ‘out of control,’ globalism is a monolithic, top-down analysis that neither captures nor explains the complexity feminicide. Nor does conflating the exploitation of gendered bodies with their extermination (!!!, my emphasis) offer us the nuanced account of violence that the murders of women demand”. Fregoso argues that we need an analysis that seeks to “recognize the multiple structures of oppression in the lives of women”.
You write above: “As a white guy with a pretty authentic sounding Jersey accent…” Think about the meaning of this and then telling a person of color that “in a way you may even be lucky”.
Hope to continue building and struggling with you comrade, Kyle.
Kyle 486-T said
typo:
above sentence should read: “The over 800 young women in Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, TX) who have been “disappeared” are not not exploited within capitalist social relations…”
not only exploited…
Stanley W. Rogouski said
In a violent white-supremacist world, I don’t know if I could consider myself being “lucky” to be a person of color (because I won’t have to deal with racist macho assholes talking shit to me?) vs. actual white supremacist structural violence. There is a difference. My point here is not to rate “who is more oppressed than who” kind of thing, but stress an awareness in terms of how we come to understand “violence”.
True. There is a difference. But I don’t know if the difference is as big as a lot of people think. In both cases, the aim of racist shit talking is “I have power over you. You can’t stop me from displaying this kind of hate in front of you. You are powerless.”
For example, one of my coworkers quit his job to join the border patrol. When my employer found out, she said “good. We need to shoot some of those people coming across the border.” Now what message is she sending to me when she expresses that kind of openly racist sentiment in my face. It’s “don’t think you have any power here. I’m in charge.” Needless to say, had I been a person whom she needed to impress, she might have held off on the racist trash talk until she found out more about what I thought. But in this case, with me as the subordinate, she had no hesitation at all.
It’s a bit like the wife beater scratching his balls or wagging his dick in his wife’s face. The message is “this is my territory.”
Now contrast some of my coworkers/peers to my employer. One women (Cuban American ironically) and one man (Irish American) are both Glenn Beck fans. They were both Steve Lonegan supporters in the Jersey Governer’s race (Lonegan’s the guy who tried to get Spanish language billboards banned in a town in New Jersey and subsequently became a hero to the local wingnut base).
When they found out that I WASN’T a Glenn Beck fan, when they found out that I voted for Obama (not popular here I know) and when they found out that I was willing to debate them, they just refused to discuss the issue at all. Why? Because they knew they had no power over me, that we were on equal footing, and they’d have to defend their racist bullshit against an equal.
In short, it’s about POWER. In the Jim Crow south, the Klan was about keeping white people in line also, not to the extent that it was about terrorizing black people of course. But it was still about power, as much as race.
Stanley W. Rogouski said
The over 800 young women in Ciudad Juarez (across from El Paso, TX) who have been “disappeared” are not not exploited within capitalist social relations; there is an act of feminicide taking place: the killing of women by men simply because they are women.
I’ve always thought that Ciudad Juarez and the seriously dangerous parts of Mexico along the border were at least partially about NAFTA’s free trade zones and that the killings of women in Juarez were at least partly to send a message to troublemakers who might organize unions or agitate for womens’ rights.
Question. And I don’t really have any answers to this. Why are so many leaders of the extreme racist right in America women? Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Liz Cheney, the list goes on and on and on.
Is there something about the nexis between racism and gender in America that’s laid the groundwork for someone like Palin? Is there some message here to racist, right wing men that “hey. If your women are stirring things up here, why don’t you have your guns out by now?”
d said
74% of Americans think the government is not doing enough to keep illegal immigrants from coming into this country, [Washington Post-ABC News poll, April 2009] Those aren’t all white people, people. Wake up and smell the coffee. “Bob” lied, cheated and stole, not funny and nothing to be proud of. I stopped such pranks in junior high because oh right I had to grow up.
Stanley W. Rogouski said
More on this. It seems some of the Teabaggers didn’t like being punked and got violent.
http://www.bluestemprairie.com/bluestemprairie/2009/11/ruthiehendrycksfail.html
Most of the MINN-SIR supporters were slow to catch the satire, and so the cheering from that side of the crowd took a while to subside. As they realized they’d been punked, they stood in a cold, stunned silence, while the 30 or so counter-protesters urged Columbus to go home.
Unfortunately, some of the pro-MINN-SIR audience made up for what they lacked in humor through the use of violence. Both Danielson and I saw middle-aged men attack young protesters, knocking one off a bike before he started throwing punches at the young man.
Just as shocking was the reaction of the state police working the rally, who pushed back those being attacked, rather than those attacking the counter protesters.
Stanley W. Rogouski said
Another blog entry on the Erickson incident.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/columbus_go_home/
What was caught on video doesn’t seem too severe, just a little pushing and doing dudely poses. The report is that someone attacked a counter-protester on a bicycle, probably because that was the only physical advantage they had. As usual with this teabagger shit, the teabagger group was primarily composed of older white people, and the counter-protesters were all young. This adds a note of near-melancholy to the speaker’s triumphant claims that the racists are winning, since the visuals you get is a group of aging racists that are simply going to lose the demographic war to younger people who have more open minds about living in a multi-cultural society.
There’s not much I can add to the content of the protests themselves. But what’s interesting about this is that a lot of anti-immigration fanatics justify their racism by hiding behind conspiracy theories about “La Reconquista”—a lurid wingnut conspiracy theory about how Mexico plans to “retake” land won in the Mexican-American war through immigration. What’s interesting is that the theory is built on the idea that white Americans dominate that land unfairly. Built into their hysteria is a note of guilt, a sense that what they own is stolen, and the people they fear are coming to take it back. Of course, the people “reconquering” it in their overwrought imaginations are also post-Columbus people, but we’re not talking about logic here. This protest managed to strike at the heart of what creates these frantic reactions, this uneasiness that wingnuts feel about their unearned privilege, their sense that it could be snatched away once the universe realizes that they didn’t earn it.
Robert said
Check out another NEW video – the full story of Robert Erickson!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rry_SlPW7oU
http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/nov/tcimc-video-robert-erickson-punks-tea-party-full-story
The crowd reaction is priceless and check out the weird interactions w/ the teabaggers – including one pushing a kid off his bike and more weirdness. Columbus go home!
LS said
Here’s an article on a followup action that happened on Monday at the ICE building in Bloomington, MN:
Tea Party Prankster Robert Erickson Strikes Again! Protest at Immigration Office Exposes Racism and Hypocrisy of Deporting Latino Immigrants
Twin Cities Indymedia also made another great video of this action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmtcqFYY1XY
Robert said
TEA PARTY PRANKSTER RELEASES BANNED SUPERBOWL AD