Rand Paul’s Gotta Get Beyond Pandering to Minorities

05/31/2014

Senator Rand Paul has teamed up with Obama advisor David Axelrod and agreed on the open borders, multiculti amnesty consensus. Paul and Axelrod want the eleven million illegal aliens to stay and enrich your community:

David Axelrod: So you would grant them a legalized status in the form of a work visa and allow them to await citizenship?
Rand Paul: Right

[Rand Paul discusses Immigration Reform with David Axelrod, Youtube.com, May 23, 2014]

Like most libertarians, but certainly not all, Rand Paul is a gullible, well-meaning white male who refuses to face racial realities.

First, Paul proved how gullible he is on immigration by saying, “We gotta get beyond deportation to get to the rest of the issues.” [Katie Glueck, Rand Paul: GOP must get ‘beyond deportation’, Politico, April 14, 2014]

Paul’s comment is on par with the ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ line of reasoning. Republicans were never at deportation, so how can they get beyond deportation? The GOP floats amnesty proposals each generation, when it’s not allowing high levels of legal immigration and turning its back on illegal immigration.

And what’s this about how, “[Hispanics are] not going to care whether we go to the same church, or have the same values, or believe in the same kind of future of our country until we get beyond [deportation].”

Nancy Pelosi goes to the “same church” as Hispanics. She’ll even wash immigrants’ feet during Catholic Holy Week. [Cheryl Chumley, Nancy Pelosi washes immigrants’ feet in humble Holy Week act- then promotes on Twitter, Washington Times, April 18, 2014] Try topping that with speeches about Ludwig Von Mises!

[Pelosi assists in holy week foot-washing ritual, SF Gate, April 18, 2014]

Many have written about Hispanics refuting the pathetic “same values” meme. [, Hispanic Family Values? By Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Autumn 2006; The Hispanic Challenge, by Samuel Huntington, Foreign Policy, March-April, 2004]

As for the “same kind of future,” just tell that to Walter Rodgers, who relates this vignette about life in California:

Walking the sandy beachfront… I chanced upon two Hispanic men rummaging through the trash. Startled at the sight, I stared momentarily. One of them yelled at me, “You look now, but in 50 years we will own all this!”
[Walter Rodgers, Illegal Hispanic immigration is undermining American values, The Christian Science Monitor, March 30, 2010]

Same kind of future indeed! If a conflict over ownership of the land, resources, and culture is your idea of the “same kind of future,” then have at it Senator Paul. But the rest of the nation isn’t so keen on job displacement, falling wages, and American flag bans.

For his next stunt, Paul proved how politically correct he is by pandering to black ministers and saying that Republicans are “offending people” with voter ID laws. As it happens, majorities of Democrats and blacks support voter ID laws. [Poll: 70 percent support voter ID laws, By Mario Trujillo, The Hill, May 16, 2014] So Rand Paul is comfortable bashing the law-abiding majority as racially insensitive for “offending people.” What would happen if this panderer hit the presidential campaign trail?

After criticism, Paul back-peddled into an extremely unprincipled position in response to a simple question from Sean Hannity:

HANNITY: …[T]he idea that they have to present an identification to show that they are who they say they are… Why is that so offensive to people?
PAUL: Like I say, I think both sides have made mistakes in…this issue. But it’s mainly in presentation and perception, not in reality. In the sense that, if Republicans are going to go around the country and this becomes a central theme and issue, you have to realize, rightly or wrongly, it is being perceived by some — and this is the point I was making and I think it’s still a valid point, that I’m trying to go out and say to African Americans ‘I want your vote and the Republican Party wants your vote’. If they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that showing their ID is an attempt to get them not to vote because they perceive it in the lineage of a time when it truly did happen through poll taxes and questioning to try and prevent people, if they perceive it that way, we have to be aware that the perception is out there and be careful about not so overdoing something that we further alienate a block of people we need to attract.

[Rand Paul to Hannity: There is nothing wrong with Voter ID, let’s just not emphasize it as much, The Right Scoop, May 13, 2014]

If this is Rand Paul’s approach to politics, then he is a disgraceful weakling. The “perception is out there” that voter fraud undermines democracy and robs law-abiding people of their vote. Why doesn’t Paul stand for the people with that perception? The “perception is out there” that illegal immigration will turn America into a modern-day Camp of the Saints. Where is Paul’s loyalty to the people who have that perception?

Right now we’re cursed by GOP leadership that prefers to cater to minority whims and ethnic phobias, instead of standing up for the law-abiding majority. In Paul’s case, it runs in the family.

Paul’s family lineage didn’t include a good role model on immigration. Ron Paul’s spineless pro-illegal immigration maneuvering is well known to VDARE.com readers. But the younger Paul could have simply turned to Milton Friedman’s seminal libertarian statement on immigration: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” In fact, Paul actually quoted Friedman’s line in 2013. But he somehow now believes that we can pass Amnesty without enlarging the welfare magnet.

“Freedom, growth, assimilation, more freedom, more growth, more assimilation: that’s our heritage.” This is the libertarian immigration fantasy, summed up by ideologues like Jerry Bowyer. [Earth To Conservatives: Immigrant Amnesty Is A Conservative Policy, Townhall.com, Sept. 11, 2012]

Like most minorities, Hispanics support the Nanny State, which is supposed to be inconsistent with freedom — especially from the libertarian standpoint. At this point, anyone who thinks that assimilation is occurring must be assumed to be a liar or fool. Hispanics are rejecting the traditional American faith in limited government and free markets, making them less-than-ideal libertarians.

Occasionally, libertarians like Professor Hans-Herman Hoppe break with the “freedom of migration” orthodoxy:

In a natural order, there is no such thing as “freedom of migration.” People cannot move about as they please. Wherever a person moves, he moves on private property; and private ownership implies the owner’s right to include as well as to exclude others from his property. [Secession, the State And The Immigration Problem (PDF)]

Sovereignty is still a valuable interest, worth preserving, whether or not it fits into the schema of any given school of thought. This is especially true if great dangers arise where sovereignty is violated.

South of the border, they cling to fantasies about “stolen” land. If amnesty passes, we’re signaling to the Third World that America is theirs for the taking. The ideas of Austrian economists are completely extraneous; Rand Paul is too enamored of politically correct libertarianism to understand what we’re up against.

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.