A Meeting of the Minds in Mesa? (Updated, June 24)

Neo-Nazi planetoid J.T. Ready rallies his boyfriends...

 While Jack McManus is in Mesa today (June 22), he really should make a courtesy call to local anti-immigration activist J.T. Ready. The two of them see the world in very similar terms, at least in their choice of enemies.

Like McManus, Ready served in the Marines, albeit briefly and without honor or distinction: He somehow managed to be court-martialed twice. 

More recently, Ready -- a conspicuous representative of the National Socialist Movement -- was briefly a member of the JBS, despite the fact that the Birch Society has an ironclad rule against collateral membership in anti-Semitic and other bigoted groups. That rule apparently didn't survive Jack McManus's decades-long involvement with a schismatic Catholic group founded by unabashed anti-Semite Leonard Feeney. 

...Ready following a post-rally beer or two.

Both the NSM and the Feenyites embrace political models under which severe civic restraints would be imposed on Jews and others, albeit for different reasons. 

Ready and his comrades would insist that only those who belong to the volkish nation -- people of supposedly "pure white" extraction -- would be citizens; the Feenyites insist that the state must be controlled by their proprietary brand of Catholicism. Although they disagree about the particulars of government administration, both groups agree that Jews should be disenfranchised and, if necessary, expelled. 

Where the subject of illegal immigration is concerned, however, I doubt there is any daylight between McManus and Ready. Among other things, they've both endorsed the deployment of the military at the border as a means of turning back the Brown Peril from Mexico.

Neither of them seems to have noticed that, both in Arizona and nationwide, immigration  -- both legal and illegal -- is sharply down since the housing bubble collapsed. The same downward trend is apparent regarding violent crime in Arizona.

Jack's Summer Speaking Tour is entitled "Stealing the American Dream: How Illegal Immigration Affects You." In terms of title and marketing, this is pure, undisguised pandering, coupled with opportunistic scapegoating: In a time of severe and deepening economic hardship, Jack and the bankrupt JBS brain-trust are encouraging people to believe that brown people who speak with funny accents are the cause of their misfortune. Needless to say, where Ready and his goose-mincing boyfriends are concerned, Jack's message is coming in five-by-five.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the JBS went to great lengths to explain how people of Ready's ilk are used to cultivate conflicts that expand government power at the expense of liberty. (In fact, William F. Jasper produced Pulitzer-worthy work on the subject.) Right now, the panderers running the organization are so worried about finding a "wave" to ride they're willing to allow themselves to be co-opted. 

Get a room, guys: Ready and Russell Pearce

The most acute threat to the "American Dream" in Arizona, as elsewhere, is a profligate, incurably corrupt government that has destroyed our economy and is suffocating our liberties. This has nothing at all whatsoever to do with immigration; our enemies are not the people misruling Mexico, or those driven from that country northward; it is the people controlling the regime in Washington, D.C.

The dated, ill-informed presentation Jack will disgorge this evening will have nothing to do with the causes of Arizona's economic afflictions. The current issue of Harper's magazine offers some genuinely terrifying details: 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater"; unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent, or higher; the newly created town of Maricopa, forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix, suffers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash." 

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona -- which, like Nevada, fell prey to a delirious, Fed-financed real estate frenzy earlier this century -- is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie and Freddie. When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. 

A threat to the "American Dream"? Murder victim Brisenia Flores.

In all of this, the chief villain is the Federal Reserve. 

To the extent illegal immigration played a significant role, it was in providing  relatively inexpensive labor during the boom. Now that the bust has descended, the jobs are gone and the laborers go elsewhere. 

What this means is that the immigration problem -- yes, "problem," not "crisis" -- is what the JBS used to call a "tangent" -- a distraction from much more important matters. 

Rather than exercising leadership, Art andJack are content to join in the torchlight parade: They extol the supposed merits of Joe Arpaio, the Mussolini of Maricopa County, and promote the "papers, please"  measure promoted by Ready's political paramour, Russell Pearce.

Meanwhile, Ready and his bunkmates -- who consider themselves a self-appointed law enforcement auxiliary -- are bidding fair to become public face of "immigration reform" in Arizona; an Arizona resident murdered his Mexican-American neighbor following an argument over the "papers, please" law (the alleged killer reportedly told the victim -- who had been born and raised in the U.S. -- to "go back to Mexico");  and shirt-tail associates of JBS Speaker's Bureau attraction Chris Simcox (who is in a bit of trouble himself) are accused of murdering an innocent man and his nine-year-old daughter (both of Mexican ancestry) in a deranged robbery plot intended to fund a breakaway Minuteman faction.

No, Jack isn't responsible for any of this, nor is the JBS. But there was a time, once again, when the JBS would use whatever influence it had to defuse manufactured ethnic conflicts, rather than abetting them, either actively or obliquely. (Witness the role the Society played in de-fusing an orchestrated race riot in Americus, Georgia during the 1960s, or Delmar Dennis's speaking tours exposing the Klan.) Even if Jack were inclined to play the role of peacemaker, I don't think he could do so credibly.

For all of these reasons, and many more, it would be entirely appropriate for Jack to break bread with J.T. Ready while he's in Mesa today, even though the spectacle -- like much of what Jack and Art have done to the JBS -- would make Robert Welch weep through gritted teeth.

                                           Update: Appleton's Inexhaustible Hypocrisy

Apparently, there is no limit to what a contributor to The New American can get away with, assuming he or she isn't named William Norman Grigg.

On the TNA website today (June 24) can be found an essay entitled "In Immigration Debate, Politicians are the Problem," by the immensely gifted Becky Akers. Published near the end of Jack's "Stealing the American Dream" immigrant-bashing tour, Akers' essay deftly and effortlessly demolishes the fraudulent foundation of Jack's presentation -- namely, the idea that immigration is an unrelenting "invasion" of alien usurpers who are (as Alan Scholl once put it) "wrecking our economy."

Those blaming immigrants -- legal or illegal -- for the loss of jobs or other economic problems "are scaping the wrong goats," Akers observes. "If they truly want to `fix' unemployment, they should go after politicians and bureaucrats, not immigrants. Government destroys exponentially more jobs than immigrants could ever `steal'...."

Akers observes that "we play right into our rulers; hands when we beseech government to `protect' jobs, whether from immigrants or from foreign competitors via tariffs." Ah, but what about the federal government's constitutional duty to protect each state from "invasion"? Doesn't Washington have a duty to "secure the borders"?

Not exactly.

The Founders, Akers writes, "didn't include `Control movement into and out of the country' among those [limited federal] powers," Akers observes. "In fact, the nearest the Constitution allows government to approach immigration is `establish[ing] a uniform Rule of Naturalization.' But setting the standards whereby people become citizens is far, far removed from walling off our borders or erecting bureaucracies to harass everyone, American or not, with orders of `Papers, please.'"

"When it came to jobs or borders, the Founders knew better than to trust the State," she concludes. "Why don't we?"

Implicit in that question is the following one: Why the hell is Jack McManus abetting misplaced trust in the State in his "Stealing the American Dream" excursion?

Akers' essay is quite comparable to my now-notorious June 22, 2006 "Birch Blog" installment entitled "Phony Immigration Debate vs. Real Police State Threat." We agree that the immigration issue is cynically exploited as a distraction by opportunistic politicians, and it is being used to manipulate the public into accepting police state measures. But Akers actually assails the claim that there is a constitutional case for immigration restriction -- and she does so in an essay published by the JBS while its President is making exactly the opposite case in a national speaking tour.

Art Thompson treated my re-publication of the immigration-related Birch Blog essay as a firing offense, because I was publicly disagreeing with his, ahem, inspired "leadership" in a matter of nuance. There is nothing nuanced about Akers' disagreement, which was published with the imprimatur of TNA editor Gary Benoit -- you know, one of the four former friends who connived to stab me in the back and throw my family to the wolves. 

Nemo me impune lacessit!