JT READY IS DEAD: FASCISM AND THE ANARCHIST RESPONSE IN ARIZONA, 2005-2012 ~ Fires never extinguished: A blog of the Phoenix Class War Council
JT Ready is dead. And by his own hand. It took a while, but in the end JT took the
free advice of his many anarchist adversaries and followed his leader into oblivion. Though in the end he opted for the
Goebbels style
over that of his boy Hitler. That's the thing with JT: despite being a
consistent white supremacist, he could sometimes surprise you. Not
with something entirely new. No. But with variations on a theme. Most
of us figured he would blow up somewhere, at some point, and given
the history of white supremacists with regard to child and spousal abuse, we are not surprised that his end
mimicked his political practice perfectly: violence mostly aimed down the social hierarchy. Consider the death of National Socialist Movement leader
Jeff Hall as another case in point.
According to the cops, on Wednesday, May 2, JT, a former
president of the Mesa Community College Republican Club and Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman, stormed the house of his
much-abused and terrified girlfriend
in Gilbert wearing full combat gear and then proceeded to open fire on
everyone in the place. The dead included Lisa Mederos, her daughter
Amber (
JT's former treasurer for his run for Pinal County Sheriff), as well as her fiance, Jim Hiott, who was
a fellow militia member.
In a truly cowardly act, JT also killed Amber's 15 month-old baby.
Only Lisa's younger daughter survived, hiding under the bed in her
upstairs room.
We in PCWC first began running into
JT during the early parts of the immigration movement,
around 2005, before there was a formal PCWC, really. As many probably
know, JT had a rather chaotic political career, but in those days he was
allied with State Senator Russell Pearce and
local car dealer Rusty Childress.
Even then political violence had already begun to rear its ugly head in
the anti-immigrant scene. It might be valuable to review some of what
had happened in Arizona in the several years preceding JT's final bloody
rampage, and it certainly would be worthwhile to consider the ways that
anarchists in Phoenix and Arizona organized against him, his politics
and his political allies (and enemies) over the last half decade or
more. While liberals advocated for his free speech, anarchists opposed
him every step of the way.
Read more:
http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot.com/2012/06/jt-ready-is-dead-fascism-and-anarchist.html