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At the recent left-libertarian Students for Liberty Conference, Ann Coulter called a room full of libertarian students “P*ssies” for constantly talking about drug legalization.

In response, the famously verbose young libertarian movement took to its home base on the internet to bash her. But, true to form, it cowardly dodged her main question.

Coulter asked:

We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’ You know, if you’re a little more manly you would tell them what your position on employment discrimination is. How about that? But it’s always ‘We want to legalize pot.’

Coulter’s jibe hits especially hard because she is clearly referring to one person in particular—Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky.

During his campaign for the Senate, Rand Paul plainly stated the axiomatic libertarian position on employment discrimination–namely, that businesses should have the right to exercise freedom of association in defiance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But within hours, Paul reversed himself and performed a ritualized grovel. And during his maiden speech on the Senate floor, Paul took care to bash Kentucky statesman Henry Clay for not backing abolitionism.

Since entering the Senate, Paul has made sure to appeal to powerful constituencies within the conservative movement. He's taken a strong stand in defense of traditional marriage. He was even rebuked by the head of the Family Research Council for joking that he didn't think President Obama's position on marriage “could get any gayer.”

Unlike his father, he has made his peace with the neoconservatives, declaring “An attack on Israel will be treated as an attack on the United States.”

Paul also aggressively pressed Hillary Clinton during the Senate hearings on Benghazi. The scion of an “isolationist” Congressman emerged as an almost Jacksonian nationalist.

Even Senator Paul's advocacy of defense cuts fit  in with the Beltway Right's new focus on limiting spending.

Many libertarians were becoming uneasy with Senator Paul’s regression into seemingly standard Republicanism.

However, Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster on Wednesday has brought home his libertarian base and established him as a national leader. Paul held the Senate floor, and America’s attention, by demanding the Obama Administration answer whether the President has the right to use drones to kill Americans on American soil. He was initially joined by Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, but over the course of the day also won support from Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Reince Priebus.

Even libertarian critics disgusted with Rand's respectability have expressed their support. Paul finds himself the head of a bipartisan coalition in defense of civil liberties. [#StandwithRand | The libertarian moment has arrived – thanks to Rand Paul, by Justin Raimondo, AntiWar.com, March 8, 2013]

The Treason Lobby's favored Republican sons, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, neatly fell into the trap. They attacked Rand Paul and his “impressionable libertarian kids.”

The Amnesty duo, of course, were literally dining with President Obama during Rand's filibuster.

Conservatives hungry for confrontation reacted with fury against McCain and his Mini-Me. Rush Limbaugh slammed them as the “old guard playing footsie with Obama” while Paul was making a stand.

Rand Paul's political masterstroke nailed down conservatives, brought home libertarians, and embarrassed (and intrigued) liberals.

In response, Paul is being refreshingly frank (for a politician) about his plans to exploit his position to run for President in 2016.

Only one obstacle remains on the horizon—the battle over amnesty. How Rand Paul handles this determines whether he will be the Republican favorite for the nomination…or just another false start. There is both cause for hope—and cause for despair.

Rand Paul took strong implicit stances on the immigration issue during his campaign. According to spokesperson Jesse Benton in 2010:

Rand Paul will secure our border by any means needed as our current open border is a threat to national security and economic well-being.

Paul made the common sense observation that Mexican immigrants

As you read through a book, as the pages clock by, hints of the author’s underlying attitudes accumulate until, by halfway through the thing, you have a clear picture of those attitudes.  In the case of a certain type of author—a person with not much power of imagination or self-examination—you may have a clearer picture of his attitudes than he has himself.

So with  Immigration Wars, the new book by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick.  I just got through reading the book on Kindle: the square brackets in what follows refer to locations in the Kindle text.

Yes, there are two authors there, and you can speculate for yourself about who did how much of the writing. But, given that Jeb Bush is an ambitious politician, and that now is about the right time for ambitious politicians to lay down markers for the 2016 election, I doubt there is a single sentence here that Jeb Bush didn’t sign off on—whether he actually wrote the book or not. So I am blaming him for it.

So what insights into this possible 2016 presidential candidate do we get from  Immigration Wars? 

The main one I got: Jeb Bush just doesn’t like Americans very much.

Immigration boosterism always has a whiff of this about it.  “Jobs Americans won’t do”—because they are too spoiled and lazy!  “Skill shortages”—resulting from Americans being too dumb! 

Bush packs both of those into a single sentence:

It is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want and for highly skilled jobs for which there are inadequate numbers of Americans with the skills to fit them. [1207]

Business-wise we’re not up to much, either: “Like most immigrants, Hispanics are tremendously entrepreneurial.” [2206] As opposed to those dull, risk-averse non-Hispanic and non-immigrant Americans!

 As VDARE.com readers know, this last assertion is demonstrably untrue.  Indeed, Bush’s book abounds in long-debunked falsehoods—so much so that, by fifty or so pages in, the well-informed commentator can’t resist doing a search on “44 percent.”  Yep, there it is!—“Whereas Republicans had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote …” [2067] 

When not telling outright porkies, Jeb Bush offers assertions superficially friendly to his case, while omitting taboo-related explanatory factors: 

El Paso, Texas, is one of the nation’s three largest safe cities. [990] 

Yes, because the black population is unusually low: 2.8 percent, only a tad higher than Salt Lake City’s 2.5 percent.

The deficiencies of us actual citizens of the U.S.A. are even spiritual.

Immigrants are unlikely to be complacent about the freedom and opportunity that for them previously was only a dream and was gained only through great effort and sacrifice.  Our nation constantly needs the replenishment of our spirit that immigrants bring. [834]

The accumulating impression left by Jeb Bush: Americans are not much good for anything.  Only immigrants, with “their energy, vitality, talent, and enterprise” [992] can overcome the lassitude, torpor, mediocrity, and complacency of the native-born.

We get a revealing metaphor here, one that

American college campuses are the most fertile grounds for fake hate. They're marinated in identity politics and packed with self-indulgent, tenured radicals suspended in the 1960s. In the name of enlightenment and tolerance, these institutions of higher learning breed a corrosive culture of left-wing self-victimization. Take my alma mater, Oberlin College. Please.

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student getting interested in conservative politics, the Right was going through a “crack-up” [™R. Emmett Tyrrell] after the demise of Communism and the then-recent defeat of George H.W. Bush. This was disrupting the conservative coalition that had existed for roughly two decades.

Books such as David Frum’s Dead Right and Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement examined the various factions of the right and laid out what they stood for. Personally, I wasn’t drawn to conservatism because of the flat tax or missile defense systems. Instead, I was living in an extremely anti-white PC environment at my liberal college and was looking to join a resistance movement.

Needless to say, I identified with the paleoconservative wing of conservatism as exemplified by Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, Jared Taylor, Paul Gottfried and the writers gathered around Chronicles magazine. These hard men spoke truth to power on issues of race and had no desire to make peace with those who supported Affirmative Action, multiculturalism and other anti-white trends.

Of course, the paleos lost—but not before giving the GOP and the Conservative Establishment a scare with the presidential campaigns of Buchanan and the intellectual firepower of the Chronicles crowd and sympathetic journalists such as Joe Sobran and Peter Brimelow (then still with National Review).

Republicans and Establishment Conservatives have long since given up any pretense of opposition to Affirmative Action and multiculturalism—let alone immigration. Indeed, they are often now on the wrong side of these issues. Thus all their current presidential contenders for 2016—Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush—support Amnesty.

Needless to say, folding like origami on these issues has not helped the GOP win elections. Nor has it prevented a further rift within the dwindling number of those who still call themselves conservative.

The 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held March 14-16 in the Washington D.C. area. Those who cannot attend will miss out on seeing a Who’s Who of Amnesty supporters like Rubio, Paul and Bush along with conservative heavyweights such as Francesca Chambers, Chelsi Henry and T.W. Shannon.

Who? I’ve never heard of the last three either. But they are black—so, of course, they are featured speakers at CPAC. Presumably, they are there to hector white College Republican types during the panels on how to attract minority voters and “A Roundtable Discussion on The Future of the Movement: Winning with Generation X/Y.”

But the main buzz around this year’s CPAC is the exclusion of GOProud, a gay Republican group that had exhibited at past CPACs (and, according to one person I know who attended, was harassing gay marriage opponents).

This caused MSNBC’s token Republican, S.E. Cupp [Twitter] to publicly boycott the event. Another house conservative, Jennifer Rubin [email her]of the Washington Post, cheered her on, citing Cupp’s “political courage.” CPAC damages itself and the GOP, February 27, 2013

Yet real courage would be challenging the opinions and views of their leftist employers. Attacking supposedly fellow conservatives will only enhance the job security of these two specimens of what Sam Francis called “the harmless persuasion.”

Not to be outdone, National Review Online posted several columns attacking CPAC’s decision to exclude GOProud, and also a perhaps-related move to not invite New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. In a conclusive demonstration that NR is no longer in any sense a Catholic magazine, an editorial titled “CPAC’s Empty Chairs” proclaimed:

Conservative opinion on the intersection of homosexuality and politics is not monolithic, especially among the college-aged set that makes up the better part of CPAC attendees. And a gathering that hopes to speak for the conservative movement will be better equipped to do so if it represents the overlapping gamut of views included in it.

Jonah Goldberg chimed in, criticizing CPAC for acting as a “border guard”

A number of “Hispanic Republicans” a.k.a. professional ethnics/ Treason Lobby shills recently launched what is obviously an orchestrated guilt-by-association smear of CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA and immigration patriots in general on the grounds that that they are all secretly eugenicists, pro-abortion, “nativists” etc. etc.

• Mario H. Lopez, (email him) president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, invoked the ghosts of Thomas Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Sir Francis Galton, and Margaret Sanger to smear FAIR’s Dan Stein, VDARE.com columnist Donald A. Collins, and Dr. John Tanton—a real-life immigration patriot hero whom VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow described in Alien Nation ., echoing Robert E. Lee, as “a citizen who has taken up arms for his country.” [Hijacking Immigration?, Human Life Review, Fall 2012]
• Linda Chavez [Email her] echo-chambered Lopez in in her Creators Syndicate column, saying that immigration patriots, because of these fantasized associations with “pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide” ideas, constitute Strange Bedfellows For Conservatives. In the New York Post this became the Anti-immigration lobby’s ugly roots. [February 8, 2013].

Ms. Chavez, a former member of the Young People's Socialist League, is at best a neoconservative but she gets to lay down the law.

• Bob Quasius [Twitter] the white guy at “Café Con Leche Republicans” is attacking Ann Coulter with many references to dead nativists, and makes a drive-by attack on Charles Murray, who is allegedly “hardly a credible source on demographics” because of the familiar accusations of racism which are (a) unfounded, and (b) irrelevant to credibility since Murray doesn’t just assert demographic facts, but always provides data.

Of course, this is an old, tired argument for Conservatism Inc. immigration enthusiasts—for our Washington Watcher’s documentation and debunking, see here. Even National Review’s immigration beards have been induced to whimper—see Krikorian and O’Sullivan here and here.

All the current smearers are Hispanic, even Quasius. (Well, actually he’s married to a Hispanic woman, and makes a living, GOP-campaign consultant style, by running Café Con Leche Republicans and whining about “Hate.”)

They apparently are Republicans. And they say they’re conservatives. But they’re favoring radically transformative levels of legal and illegal immigration, a program supported by the worst elements of the hard Left—including the current President of the United States.

So, if we’re looking at motives, here are the “ugly roots” of immigration enthusiasm:

• Communists

The 1965 Immigration Act replaced the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which was an anti-Communist bill. The breakdown of the McCarran-Walter Act was a major objective of the Communists, as Congress heard in testimony in 1965, and pro-Communist writers are still gloating over its defeat. See, more recently, Communist Party Resolves: Immigrant rights is a struggle for democracy, CPUSA website, May 27, 2010.

• Socialists

Mexico is a much more socialist country than the United States, and more immigration will tend to make the US more socialist. American socialists know this [ Socialism and Immigrants’ Rights, By Teddy Shibabaw, SocialistAlternative, June 22, 2010] and perhaps, once again, we should include the current President of the United States in their number. Elected with the votes of many Hispanic legal

  “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in several speeches she gave in 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2004, according to CNN.[ Sotomayor's 'wise Latina' comment a staple of her speeches, June 8, 2009]

Since Monday, the MSM has been celebrating Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—searching Google News on her name brings up one valentine after another:

• "Discrimination is discrimination, and what Congress said is it continues,"5 hours ago CBS News
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor Explains Class in the US Better Than Anyone, Huffington Post, February 26, 2013
• Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: A Proud 'Product of ... Civilrights.org-9 hours ago
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor slams Texas prosecutor for racial remark5. Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2013
• Sotomayor chides prosecutor for 'racially charged' question7. In-Depth, Washington Post, February 25, 2013
• Sotomayor slams prosecutor's racial remarks, Blog -Politico (blog), February 25, 2013
• Sonia Sotomayor Condemns Prosecutor's Racially Charged Question, Huffington Post, February 25, 2013
• Sonia Sotomayor slams prosecutor's moronic strategy, racist remarks, msnNOW, February 25, 2013

What’s this all about?

In a Texas federal drug trial in 2011, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Ponder had asked black defendant Bongani Charles Calhoun on the stand of a situation in which he had found himself,

“You've got African-Americans, you've got Hispanics, you've got a bag full of money. Does that tell you - a light bulb doesn't go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?”

The blacks in the hotel room had been Calhoun’s accomplices. They thought the Hispanics were going to sell them drugs. But the Hispanics were DEA agents. The bag of money came from Calhoun and his black accomplices.

Calhoun claimed to have no knowledge of any drug deal. Of course, he was lying and was duly convicted.

No one saw anything wrong with Ponder’s conduct at the time. And nothing was wrong.

You could say the DEA engaged in “racial profiling”—by having exclusively Hispanic agents play drug dealers. But no one has attacked the agency (yet). Had a racially mixed group of white and Hispanic agents posed as dealers, the buy-and-bust operation would have been a failure because… life is not like that. It would have been a giveaway that the deal was a law enforcement sting.

Indeed, Bongani Charles Calhoun and his crime partners were themselves guilty of racial profiling—that’s why they accepted the Hispanic agents

A VDARE.com reader sent a comment from The Hill

“random minorities with a supposed bag full of money and the guy can't make a reasonable inference? they most likely were not going to buy real estate or deposit it with their stockbroker.” Sotomayor reprimands federal prosecutor for racial remark, By Sam Baker, February 25, 2013.

Eventually, Calhoun and/ or his lawyers sought to convert Ponder’s reality-based question into a racist affront. But by then it was too late to appeal on that basis, and the Supreme Court rejected the argument.

Although Sotomayor acknowledged, the appeal was dead, she attached a statement to the decision, saying the question “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation,” and was “pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence.” [BONGANI CHARLES CALHOUN v. UNITED STATES (PDF) , U.S. Supreme Court, February 25, 2013.]

Ponder had done no such thing. He had asked a perfectly reasonable question of the defendant, regarding the latter’s state of mind, which would have been formed by valid empirical generalizations which are called, among other things, “stereotypes.”

Some of the earliest valentines were reportorials that seemed to follow the lead of Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday condemned racially charged

Among the many leaders of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform a.k.a. Amnesty movement are evangelical Christians attempting to guilt-trip their congregations. See my article The "Evangelical Immigration Table"—A Treason Lobby Front, which discusses an evangelical group (linked to George Soros) that spearheads the campaign.

Evangelicals don’t form a monolithic entity. There is no hierarchy or central organization that can claim to speak for them. It’s always risky saying “evangelicals” support anything—let alone Amnesty. But that hasn’t stopped various Main Stream Media outlets from proclaiming it in headlines.

In a recent article on the Christian Post website, Napp Nazworth asks On Immigration Reform, Will Evangelicals Follow Their Leaders? February 25, 2013. Nazworth is, of course, referring to pro-Amnesty leaders. He reports research conducted by Dr. Ruth Melkonian-Hoover, [Email her] which she presented at a meeting of the American Enterprise Institute.

Dr. Melkonian-Hoover is not a disinterested observer. She explains her research in a blog entry on G92.org, an evangelical pro-Amnesty website.

If the evangelical community is to be a leading voice in the call for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) [i.e. Amnesty], what steps need to be taken to ignite its voice? In recent years, key leaders within the evangelical community have been instrumental in the support of versions of CIR that attempt to balance moral imperatives of justice and mercy. …Enthusiasm, however, appears to be greater among national leaders than among people “in the pews.”

Evangelical Perspectives on Comprehensive Immigration Reform  (Ruth Melkonian-Hoover, G92, December 5, 2012)

So that’s an admission, right off the bat, that the pro-Amnesty drive in evangelical churches is being driven by leaders—not the grassroots.

Dr. Melkonian-Hoover’s research is based on data collected in 2010, before the current Amnesty drive. Recall that data from 2009 shows that evangelicals are more anti-Amnesty than any other major religious grouping. She reports:

• “…white evangelicals see immigrants as more of a threat to both society and the economy than the overall sample of the American population (50.7% versus 35.2%).
• “…only 21.0% of white evangelicals—compared to 40.3% of the overall national sample—believe that immigrants strengthen both the economy and the society.”

But her research also indicates that “…experiences within congregations affect these perceptions.” This is not surprising, given the vast differences among evangelical denominations and congregations.

Dr. Melkonian-Hoover concluded that the key factor was not “frequent church attendance” but “positive messages”. Among regular white evangelical churchgoers whose clergy had discussed immigration, 30.0% reported a positive message and 31.0% a negative one. Among those who were exposed