Other KKK groups set up similar patrols in south Texas, placing leaflets with a printed skull and crossbones on the doorsteps of Latino residents, warning “aliens” and the federal government to fear the klan. Led by a 27-year-old David Duke, the KKK set up a “border watch” in 1977 at California’s San Ysidro point of entry, finding much support among border patrol agents. Snipers took aim at Mexicans coming over the border. Anti-migrant violence was fuelled by angry veterans returning from Vietnam, who carried out what they called “beaner raids” to break up migrant camps. Vigilantes drove around the back roads of the greater San Diego area, shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds of their pickups dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves. As San Diego’s sprawl began to push against agricultural fields, racist attacks on migrants increased. Conflict grew especially acute in California in the early 1970s. The poetry stopped on 16 June 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign by standing Turner on his head. There was no thought,” Wilson said, “of drawing back.”
As Woodrow Wilson, who before he was president was a colleague of Turner, said: “A frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or another, for centuries. There were lulls, doubts, dissents and counter-movements. No writer is more associated with the idea of the frontier than Frederick Jackson Turner, who, in the late 1800s, argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism. N o myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across the frontier – a word that in the United States came to mean less a place than a state of mind, an imagined gateway into the future.