Johnny's gonna go off the reservation today and preach a little

So if that's not your bag you can skip this one...

This is really two stories that Johnny's gonna wrap into one. Or at least try, as you well know he's editorially challenged.

Our first story is that of plotting criminals who through some very bad 'intelligence' broke into a home in the middle of the night looking for a hidden safe/treasure worth a fortune. There never was any such fortune and when this fact finally sunk in the crooks opened fire and shot everyone in the house. The ghouls shot the parents first. Then they murdered a small girl whose last words were "Please don't shoot me" before she was twice shot in the head and killed. The shadowy killers vanished into the night. Now you may say "Hey Johnny, I remember that story, it's famous, it's the 'In Cold Blood' murders made famous by Truman Capote that changed the way literature is written and spawned a cottage industry of books and films on the Clutter family murder in Holcomb Kansas in 1959. But for the fact that Kenyon Clutter a teen male was also murdered in the famed In Cold Blood case you'd be pretty close. But in this story that the media refuses to cover for some reason, the mother survived her gunshot wound and played dead only to have to listen to her daughter murdered. Unlike In Cold Blood, the murderers of the Clutters, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were small time hoods and crooks, often in jail. The murders Johnny is here to discuss were done by real American Patriots. You know, the groups that right wing supporters think are all that and a bag of chips sitting on the Mexican border trying to do their patriotic best to keep illegal immigrants out of America. Their group is called The Minutemen. You've probably seen them extolled for their great patriotism. Mostly it's self-hero worship at least until someone like a leader in the Minutemen movement named Shawna Forde is involved in the murders of Raul Flores and her NINE year old daughter Brisenia Flores. Gina Gonzales, the mother in the case was shot and played dead. Shawna Forde, Minuteman member heard about some secret drug money stashed in the home. You know, the old Clutter safe, just sitting there loaded with illegal drug money. Except like Richard Hickock and Perry Smith found out, there was no money.

Now let's think on this for a minute. Shawna Forde and her militia group thought that upwards of a MILLION dollars in illegal drug money was in the Flores home. Instead of being a real kind of patriot and informing the FBI or local Arizona police (Hey look Arizona with yet another anti-Latino event) they decided the Minutemen could make a big score and KEEP the money and finance the Minutemen, certainly now to what end that money would have been used is extremely suspect.

Let's fast forward to 1965, 6 years after the Clutters were shotgunned. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock came to the end of the court system for them and they certainly got what they had coming, a short drop and a quick stop in the gallows.

Can anyone tell Johnny why Shawna Forde and her two accomplices should get what Hickock and Smith got, seeing as how their crimes were so similar? For the record, Brisenia Flores and Nancy Clutter uttered almost exactly the same final words.

Forde's not now suddenly some ROGUE Minuteman militia operative. Ever notice that? Right wingers will defend these people sometimes to the point of fisticuffs but when one of their members shoots a child in the head twice suddenly they never did have anything to do with them and they sure weren't representative of the movement.

Johnny thinks different. Shawna, Johnny will buy the rope for you and your two accomplices, Albert Robert Gaxiola and Jason Eugene Bush, just as he would have bought the rope for Hickock and Smith in whose hideous footprints you now follow into history.