Tonight we’re posting one of Randall Burn’s Progressive Indictiments, this time of American Prospect magazine’s recent “special report” on immigration. So I suppose I should comment on one of the articles, an attempt to smear the immigration reform movement as white nationalist and nativist by somebody called Leonard Zeskind.

They all merge after a while, these supposed exposes with their endlessly-recycled “paranoid scholarship“, these excitable and exciteable Zeskinds. (There’s an interesting article about this particular Zeskind’s Stalinist past here). An accuracy guage: Zeskind says Proposition 187 was “found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court”. It wasn’t.

I have to say, though, that Zeskind’s article does achieve a new high in guilt by association. He concludes an account of an immigration reform meeting by noting darkly that outside the hall - across a highway - was a public billboard advertising the National Alliance.

Wow! And no doubt somewhere in the city a library had a copy of Mein Kampf. Case closed!

Zeskind attacks me by quoting my Alien Nation:

“Suppose I had proposed more immigrants who look like me,” Brimelow wrote in his book Alien Nation. “So what? As late as 1950, somewhere up to nine out of ten Americans looked like me. That is, they were of European stock … . In those days, they had another name for this thing dismissed so contemptuously as ‘the racial hegemony of white Americans.’ They called it ‘America.’” These two writers [Zeskind kindly links me with Pat Buchanan] provide an intellectualized rationale for the raw, crudely white-supremacist view that America is — or once was and should now be — a white and Christian nation.

What fascinates me about this attack is its trusting faith in pure hysteria. Zeskind just assumes that it is obvious to everyone that saying America was a “white and Christian nation” is scandalous.

Apparently, he has never looked at who exactly signed the Declaration of Independence or attended the Constitution convention. Why would he?

A Certain Slant of Light, amongst the most indefatigable immigration-skeptic blogs currently active, has a useful report on attending a Town Hall Meeting on Thursday in Conroe TX.

Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO)… spoke today to a standing-room-only audience of approximately 150 people…interrupted any number of times by strong applause (including a standing ovation at its conclusion) and loud vocal support…I find it interesting that a town hall meeting lacking MSM publicity drew such a solid crowd today — more people, really, than the room could comfortably accomodate. Many people stood along the walls of the meeting room; and more people were actually outside of the room in the hallway

Good point. One might also ask, how many Congressmen can get standing ovations - except from their own election workers?

A refreshing thing about Tancredo is that he seems to have grasped some of the economics of the immigration disaster, as ACSL’s summary of his talk notes:

“Cheap labor” is only cheap for employers who hire illegals, as taxpayers subsidize those wages by subsidizing the social safety net of services that illegals avail themselves of…

(This was also apparent in the brief but devastating remark the Los Angeles Times allowed him in their account last August of the new Amnesty-Lobbying effort.)

ACSL has a follow-up, noting the total lack of coverage of the meeting - after all by an out-of area national political figure to a metropolitan area with maybe half a million illegals - either before or after, by the Houston area media:

I did, however, find a story this morning that the Wendy’s hamburger chain is no longer putting tomato slices on its burgers unless the customer specifically requests them. That, of course, is need-to-know information.

This kind of repression is not going to work, now that the Internet has emerged as the Kentucky Long Rifle of America’s 21st century patriots