Just how messed up is the City of Mesa?

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Just how messed up is the City of Mesa? Isn't it bad enough that it is home to nativist anti-immigrant demagogue Russell Pearce and his buddy, Neo-Nazi J.T. Ready? (that's them together in the photo, h/t Phoenix New Times). Ready was booted from a low-level leadership role in the Republican Party in 2008, only after the Neo-Nazi revelation. Now I read this headline in the East Valley Tribune today: White nationalist party pushing candidate for Mesa council – East Valley Tribune. Seriously?

Ralph Brandt is seeking a City Council post in Mesa, the same community where J.T. Ready sought the same office five years ago only to later be pictured at a Neo-Nazi rally.

Brandt is the Arizona leader of the American Third Position, a political party that is making a push to run candidates in all 50 states.

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The party formed in 2009 and has quickly grown in strength and its activity, said Heidi Beirich, the Southern Poverty Law Center's director of research. The nonprofit civil rights organization said the white nationalist party was founded by skinheads but now is headed by professors and a corporate lawyer.

"The leadership is more highbrow today but the basic principle of the party is to make this a white country. As a result, we list them as a hate group," Beirich said.

Wait for it…

The party's website says it represents the political interests of whites and that the nation needs to be restored to its "rightful owners."

Well I am certain the Native American tribes, at least the remnants of those tribes that were not entirely wiped out by genocide at the hands of white European settlers, will be glad to hear that this group wants to "give America back to the Americans." Does this also mean these white supremacists will be packing up and returning to their ancestral lands in Europe? (Not that any European country would want them).

Brandt says he is organizing a statewide effort to get the American Third Position Party on Arizona ballots. That requires more than 23,000 signatures. Those petitions should make it easy to identify the white supremacists, skinheads and Neo-Nazis in Arizona — it is a public record, after all. I am sure the Department of Homeland Security's domestic terrorism office will appreciate your assistance.

You know that fence Russell Pearce wants to build? Maybe we should be building that fence around Mesa.