Profile of Shawna Forde

The Seattle Weekly has online their cover story on the anti-Latino female terrorist Shawna Forte, Lethally Blonde by Rick Anderson 07/14/09. A former teen prostitute, thief and grifter, Forte became involved in the far-right gutter version of the anti-immigrant movement. Not that any version of it is that far from the gutter.

Forte is currently in legal trouble:

Forde today is being held at Pima County Adult Detention Center in Tucson. Along with two others, including 34-year-old white supremacist Jason "Gunny" Bush of Wenatchee, she's charged with first-degree murder in a plot to steal drugs and money and kill any witnesses. Prosecutors say Forde's motive was to finance her self-anointed border-patrol group, Minutemen American Defense, an anti-immigration posse known as MAD.

Prosecutors and family say the woman who just eight years ago was leading a beauty-school protest in Everett had morphed into the leader of a small outlaw band, prowling the Mexican border for illegals and drug dealers to rob. In debt after a recent divorce from a man who was the target of an Everett murder attempt, she embarked on an armed crime spree to finance a grandiose scheme: She would buy those back-40 desert acres she often talked about and grow her tiny team into a Blackwater-style international force that would battle border jumpers and drug cartels and rescue kidnapped Americans in other countries.

Violent rightwing terrorism is becoming an increasing problem here in the United States. Rick Anderson's article gives more background than we usually see reported of one now-notorious person who wound up involved in the paranoid politics of the violent right.

Tags: radical right