← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Mr.Wilson
Thread ID: 8458 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-07-26
2003-07-26 01:17 | User Profile
Joe Guzzardi,of VDare fame,is the only gubernatorial candidate that will raise the immigration issue in the upcoming California election.All other candidates will ignore it. [url=http://www.americanpatrol.com/CALIFORNIA/ELECTION/2004/GUZZARDI/GuzzardiForGovernor030725.html]http://www.americanpatrol.com/CALIFORNIA/E...rnor030725.html[/url]
2003-08-14 17:20 | User Profile
Guzzardi made the cut. Apparently he's running as a Democrat.
2003-08-14 21:59 | User Profile
hell, even Larry Flynt is calling for the military to be put on the border and a stop to illegal immigration.
That's more than the bushy-tailed little Bushman will do. But I forget sometimes, he's a "compassionate....."
-J
2003-08-23 00:07 | User Profile
He has an excellent website that includes many of his articles:
[url=http://www.guzzardi4governor.com/]http://www.guzzardi4governor.com/[/url]
2003-08-23 00:59 | User Profile
I have a fundamental problem with Guzzardi in that he still makes his living as a teacher of English as a second language for adults.
How can this be squared with his anti-immigration political stance?
Either the guy is not smart enough to know he his cutting off his nose to spite his face, or he is a hypocrite.
2003-09-02 18:34 | User Profile
One of the Tribe weighs in on Mr. Guzzardi.
Guess what the "spin" is?
Candidate draws fire on immigration stand
Lodi resident Joe Guzzardi, 60, is a candidate for California governor.
By ERIC STERN
BEE CAPITOL BUREAU August 31, 2003
His own party is not paying much attention to him. A Web posting called him a "white nationalist." The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, is keeping an eye on him.
He is Lodi teacher and writer Joe Guzzardi, 60, vying to replace Gov. Davis in the Oct. 7 recall election. Guzzardi does not expect to win, but he said he would consider it a victory if the other candidates started talking about his pet issue: illegal immigration.
"I think voters would like to know, 'What's the plan?'" Guzzardi said. "California's at such a point where continued mass immigration -- unchecked immigration -- doesn't do anybody any good."
A no-budget, ideological campaign like Guzzardi's normally would gain scant attention. His message gets even more muddled in a race with 135 replacement candidates, including porn stars, comedians, murder suspects and child actors.
But Guzzardi, who has never before run for office, is taking his campaign seriously, and his message resonates with one potential voter base.
Consider a recent e-mail, referring to Guzzardi, posted on a message board of the Christian Identity, which has been described as a white supremacist group: "White nationalist declares for California governor: Will expel all illegal immigrants."
Guzzardi, whose columns about immigration reform in the Lodi News-Sentinel often make the rounds on the Internet, said he is "absolutely not" a racist and is trying to distance himself from the white separatist and close-the-border types who link his tracts to their Web sites.
He said his connection to extremist Web sites and online chat groups is "unsettling," but, he added, "I don't know what kind of control I have over those things."
He said he did not know why the Christian Identity movement would claim him as one of their own. "I don't think that my views about immigration are radical or controversial or anything other than generally mainstream," Guzzardi said.
As proof that he is not anti-immigrant, he points to his day job as a teacher of English as a second language in the Lodi Unified School District.
"I have spent 15 years as an ESL teacher doing anything I can to help these guys with their citizenship tests or translating papers that they get from agencies that they don't understand, or whatever it might be," he said.
Plus, he added, "my girlfriend is Chinese."
Fact 'is really scary'
The Southern Poverty Law Center does not buy Guzzardi's disavowals.
"He's on our radar," said Heidi Beirich, a spokeswoman for the Alabama-based watchdog organization. "The fact that Guzzardi is aligned with the true haters is really scary."
Guzzardi posts his columns on a Web site run by Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation." Publisher's Weekly called the book an "anti-immigration manifesto." A border control group's Web site,
[url=http://www.americanpatrol.org]http://www.americanpatrol.org[/url]
links to Guzzardi campaign updates.
As for closing the borders, Guzzardi said, "I'm not sure I'm totally on that page, [Strike two. Sounds like Marc Moran.] but I would say the further it goes along without doing anything about it, without taking the tiniest little step in any direction, the closer you would have to get to that point."
In the highly unlikely event that he is elected governor, Guzzardi said he would immediately send the National Guard to patrol the border.
Jack Citrin, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said a statewide candidate could "evoke anti-immigrant sentiment that is latent" among voters since they approved Proposition 187 in 1994. Courts struck down the initiative that would have curbed government services to illegal immigrants.
Citrin said he expects top-tier candidates to steer clear of the entire issue "for fear of antagonizing the growing Latino population."
So far, the immigration conversation among the leading candidates has been limited. At a recent news conference, GOP front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to explain his support for Proposition 187: "I am very fond of the Latino community. I have done four of my movies in Mexico."
Guzzardi's views about immigration began taking shape as a teen-ager. At 13, his father, who worked in Los Angeles for a large food-processing firm, was transferred to Puerto Rico and relocated the family.
"It was an early-life wake-up call to the importance of becoming adaptable," Guzzardi said. In the 1950s in Puerto Rico, "nobody spoke English, so I had to learn how to speak Spanish."
Guzzardi finished high school at a New Jersey prep school and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. He said he spent about 20 years in the investment banking and consulting business in New York and Seattle, owned a bar and restaurant, then headed to Lodi in 1988 to follow his girlfriend at the time.
He found work as an ESL teacher and soon was selected as a weekly community columnist for The Record in Stockton, often writing about his experiences in the classroom and how they related to larger issues of immigration. But editors tired of the theme after about 10 years and discontinued the column.
"We were trying to get him to diversify some of his topics, but he kept returning to immigration, and eventually it seemed like we had enough of his point of view and it wasn't going any further," editor-in-chief Jim Gold said. "We weren't trying to censor him, but he just started saying the same note over and over again."
A few years ago, Guzzardi jumped to the Lodi News-Sentinel, where editor Richard Hanner said Guzzardi offers an "eloquent perspective on a variety of topics, including immigration."
The critics write
Guzzardi has a "well-considered perspective on immigration" that is "well-researched and well-stated," Hanner said. "I don't think Joe is an extremist."
But two readers of Guzzardi's column said he is a "racist" who "disguises it very well" by distorting facts. Julio Hernandez and his wife, Rosa Maria Casillas, are Spanish teachers at Tokay High School in Lodi.
They took exception to a critical column that Guzzardi wrote in April about a Hispanic family literacy program that stressed learning how to read and write in English and Spanish. Guzzardi, who often emphasizes assimilation, wrote that the program, "with its thinly disguised sub-rosa agenda of promoting Hispanic culture while minimizing America, is not only unnecessary, it is grating."
After Hernandez and Casillas wrote individual letters to the editor protesting the piece, Guzzardi lashed out in an Internet column, calling them a "couple of slippery Hispanic agitators" because they are both advisers of the high school's MEChA club, a Hispanic advocacy group.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is not spending much time worrying about Guzzardi. A party official said he had never heard of the guy.
"Of the 135 candidates, you're going to see a bunch of kooks, racists and people on their way to a halfway house or who should be on their way to one," said Bob Mulholland, a party spokesman. "We're not paying attention to any of these candidates."
[url=http://www.modbee.com/local/story/7373525p-8294520c.html]http://www.modbee.com/local/story/7373525p...p-8294520c.html[/url]
2003-09-03 14:55 | User Profile
Christ, I'm glad the rain is ending so I can shut the computer down and walk away from this sh*t for a while. If you're living in a neighborhood full of Mexican gangbangers and you're still letting some Stern or other tell you that White racists are your problem you're too damn stupid to survive. Put a bullet in your brain and help us clean up the gene pool, will ya?
2003-09-03 22:12 | User Profile
C'mon Recluse, don't sugarcoat it! :th: