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Forget Paula Deen. There are far more dangerous bigots and poisonous haters spoiling the American landscape. They cook up violent rhetoric and murderous plots against our troops, our citizens and our allies 24/7. And they have direct access to the White House.

Is the Second Reconstruction over?

The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876.

The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states seeking to make even minor changes in voting laws had to come to Washington to plead their case before the Justice Department and such lions of the law as Eric Holder.

Southern states were required to get this pre-clearance for any alterations in voting laws because of systematic violations of the 14th and 15th amendment constitutional rights of black Americans to equal access to polling places and voting booths.

The South had discriminated by using poll taxes, gerrymandering and literacy tests, among other tactics. Dixie was in the penalty box because it had earned a place there.

What the Supreme Court did Tuesday, in letting the South out of the box, is to declare that, as this is not 1965, you cannot use abuses that date to 1965, but have long since disappeared, to justify indefinite federal discrimination against the American South.

You cannot impose burdens on Southern states, five of which recorded higher voting percentages among their black populations in 2012 than among their white populations, based on practices of 50 years ago that were repudiated and abandoned in another era.

You cannot punish Southern leaders in 2013 for the sins of their grandfathers. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, black turnout in 2012 was higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts.

Does this mean the South is now free to discriminate again?

By no means. State action that discriminates against minority voters can still be brought before the Department of Justice.

Even the "pre-clearance" provision of the VRA remains. All the court has said is that if Congress wishes to impose a pre-clearance provision on a state or group of states, Congress must have more evidence to justify unequal treatment than what "Bull" Connor did in Birmingham back in 1965.

Congress could pass a bill today authorizing Justice Department intervention in any state where the registration of blacks, Hispanics or Asians fell below 60 percent of that electorate.

What Congress can no longer do is impose conditions on Southern states from which Northern states are exempt. Washington can no longer treat the states unequally—for that, too, is a violation of the Constitution.

The Roberts court just took a giant stride to restoring the Union.

Yet the hysterical reaction to the decision reveals

[This is my fourth WND column this year, originally published on WND, June 24, 2013, updated here with more links. WND likes comments so I'd be grateful if VDARE.com readers could weigh in]

Great news! Another bursting debt bubble is about to take down the U.S. economy. And the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill, now being debated in the Senate, is perfectly designed to make the situation worse!

This time, the culprit is not reckless mortgage lending, which led to massive defaults and a real-estate crash that nearly wrecked the world economy in 2008. Instead, now the culprit is student loans—amazingly, they’re now getting to be about as large in total as the subprime mortgage market at its peak in 2007 ($1.3 trillion); they already exceed total credit card debt ($798 billion). And student default rates are creeping up into the same range as the default rate on mortgages in 2007.

In both cases, the ultimate villain is the federal government.

For more than 20 years, under both Democrats and Republicans, Washington pushed the mortgage banks to extend home loans to people who would not normally qualify, because it wanted to expand home ownership among minorities, who are disproportionately bad credit risks.

It was always obvious that this would result in more defaults—I wrote about it in Forbes magazine back in 1993! [The Hidden Clue]  But Washington didn’t care. It drove the mortgage industry, and the economy, right over the cliff anyway.

Moral: You simply can’t trust Washington not to drive the country off the cliff for short-term political reasons—as it is now trying to do with the Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill.

In some ways, the more interesting question is: Why did the mortgage banks let themselves be driven off the cliff?

To understand this, you have to know something about the peculiar psychology of commercial bureaucracies. To the individuals running the mortgage banks, more lending meant more immediate commissions and bonuses for them personally. And for that they were quite ready to sacrifice the future of the institutions they managed (but usually didn’t own). Plus they may have reasoned that the federal government would ultimately bail the banks out anyway—which, in fact, is just what happened.

Again, this short-term greed is exactly what is driving the current extraordinary spending on the Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill by plutocrats like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Standard econometric analysis suggests that legalization, and the planned huge simultaneous increase in legal immigration, could result in the transfer of as much as a trillion dollars a year from labor to the owners of capital, because

I used to be a Democrat. I still am an environmentalist. It doesn’t surprise me when my former fellow-Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer salivates about two million-strong Mexican mobs assembling on the Washington mall to intimidate Americans: the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill is designed literally to crowd out the historic American nation. The politics of this—the drive to Elect a New People—have been extensively discussed on VDARE.com. But the population aspect—the tsunami of people that would be allowed in by this bill—deserves attention too.

Obviously any serious environmentalists would worry about the danger inherent in importing enormous numbers of people, especially from the Third World to the First where their use of resources normally increases greatly. After all, greater material consumption is why most immigrants come, though we call it “searching for a better life.”

But these days, “global warming” has become almost the sole issue in Establishment environmentalism. Population issues have been purged, because it is not PC to say America is full up.

I was part of a movement among grassroots Sierra Club members that worked for years to return the organization to being a voice for domestic overpopulation concerns. Unfortunately, the normal democratic process for reform had been undermined by a secret bribe of $100 million to suppress mention of the connection between excessive immigration and environmental harm.

When business special interests and non-white racial nationalists wrote this Open Borders plus Amnesty bill of their dreams, all the conspirators got what they wanted. Any "compromise" simply meant more handouts, from La Raza to the Chamber of Commerce.

As a result, the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill is a monstrous Leviathan of more cheap workers, more Democrats, more union members, more taxes, more shoppers, more pavement—and, above all, more people. The base-line estimate, taken from a recent CBO report that immigration enthusiasts actually touted as favorable to their cause: a stunning 46 million persons in the next two decades [Senate bill allows 46 million immigrants by 2033, says CBO, by Neil Munro, Daily Caller, June 19, 2013]

During the mark-up of the legislation in May, Schumer deflected Senator Jeff Sessions’ question about the numbers allowed in the “new legal flow” by announcing: “They’re coming. They’re either coming under law or not under law. And what we do is try to rationalize that system.”

In other words, this bad-faith bill explicitly eliminates borders and enforcement—it just calls the result “legal immigration.” A massively increased future flow from the Third World is the goal of the Gang of Eight bill. The 10 (20?) million illegal aliens to be legalized are just the beginning.

We already know what the future will look like if America becomes a boarding house: my home state of California—or as we now call it “Crowdifornia.”

Many of the immigrants unleashed by S.744 will certainly end up in Golden State. Would a quarter of the 46 million settle in the scenic former paradise? That guesstimate would not be unreasonable, since over one in four residents is foreign born now, according to the Census. Twenty-five percent of 46 million would be over 11 million in 20 years who need schools, jobs and housing.

California (population now 38 million) has a little-known but long-established history of drought and the population is well beyond a normal carrying capacity. Tree-ring research has indicated water shortages of disturbing length in relatively recent history:

Beginning about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.

Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California, By William K. Stevens, New York Times, July 19, 1994

Already, overuse of natural resources has led to expensive and taxpayer-funded

Rubiot Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO-SC) has just claimed: "It's impossible winning the presidency getting 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, 30 percent of the Asian vote and 7 percent of the African-American vote." GOP Strategy for 2016 Looks Deeply Unsettled, By Charles Babington, RealClearPolitics, June 23, 2013:

This is telling . A couple months ago, renowned New York Times political statistician Nate Silver put together a vote modeling system to measure the electoral effects of the current Senate Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill. In a widely-noted column, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out that the model showed the GOP could do better in the short term with slight improvements in the white vote than with shifts of near-impossible magnitude in the Hispanic vote.[Byron York: Winning Hispanic vote would not be enough for GOP, May 2, 2013] Of course, Steve Sailer has been making this point on VDARE.com ever since the 2000 election,

But Graham’s unreconstructed view is obviously still the consensus in Conservatism Inc.—and in the Main Stream Media, which all too often amounts to the same thing.

In fact, Nate Silver’s model shows that, even if non-whites do continue to vote as Lindsey Graham describes,

 Whatever the outcome of the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” a.k.a. Amnesty/ Immigration Surge battle in Congress, Conservatism Inc. has already lost. The only way the Beltway Right could get the immigration issue “behind” it is if there were no debate within the conservative movement in the country. But the conservative grassroots have decisively turned against Rubio, McCain, Graham, and their collaborators.

And so Conservatism Inc. has turned against the grassroots.

The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis [Email him] epitomized Conservatism Inc.’s hatred of its own voters in his most recent diatribe “Exposing anti-immigration reform motives and canards” [July 20, 2013 ] Lewis, who earlier distinguished himself by his eagerness to purge the “indefensible” John Derbyshire, follows the usual Beltway Right pattern of deciding his opinion on an issue by whether or not it will lead to Leftists calling him names.

Attacking some of the grassroots videos made in response to Mickey Kaus’ mischievous suggestion, Lewis claims that immigration patriotism is discredited because Amnesty opponents believe that the historic American nation should be preserved. He thinks that highlighting this lying promise by Teddy Kennedy at the time of the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act must be a case of gross nativism (if not neo-Nazism):

Lewis sneers that he “doesn't care what Ted Kennedy said in 1965” and preens that he “couldn't care less about preserving the 'ethnic mix' of America. “

Instead, he triumphantly offers the tired bromide that America isn't about a culture or people but about “ideas.”

Lewis writes: “As long as America is free and virtuous, honors the rule of law, and advances the values of Western Civilization, why does ethnicity matter?”

But of course, America currently does none of those things—and mass immigration is a major reason why.

• We are not free, because you can't have freedom and multiculturalism.
• We are not virtuous—America is a moral cesspool, and the increasing Hispanic population is only worsening the problems of illegitimacy, abortion, and crime.
• The rule of law is a joke—as shown by how we are even having this debate over Amnesty.
• “Third World America” does not advance the values of Western Civilization—by opposing patriotic movements in Europe, subsidizing moral degeneracy internationally, facilitating mass immigration into both Europe and America,
  

I write from Mexico, where my family and I are visiting for about a month. Of course, I try to keep up with the latest on the Amnesty debate in the US. And, of course, that's being covered here in Mexico. Guess what, Mexicans support amnesty, so it must be good for the United States, right?

Being here in Mexico while this is going on brings back memories. As longtime readers of VDARE.COM know, it was my experience living in Mexico for many years that helped transform me into an American immigration patriot. (See my article THE EDUCATION OF A GRINGO IN MEXICO, Or How Living in Mexico Helped Transform Me Into A VDARE.COM Contributor. )

The Mexican media and political class keep close tabs on U.S. immigration legislation—closer tabs than most Americans do. And of course Eduardo Medina-Mora, Mexico's ambassador in Washington, is particularly on top of things:

"The Ambassador of Mexico in the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora, praised the migratory reform Project being discussed in the U.S. Senate.” Embajador de México en EU alaba avance en reforma migratoria, [By Angel Villarino,  Terra.com, June 12th, 2013 ]

The ambassador prefaced his remark with a typical disclaimer - "The government of Mexico admits that the migratory reform in the United States is a domestic issue..." (Mexican diplomats say that when they're about to meddle) - but we cannot fail to recognize its deep impact."

The ambassador continued "The possibility that this reform is passed is a reminder of the best traditions that have made this country great." Actually, this reform is in the tradition of things that are destroying our nation.

Medina Mora's comments were made at an American Enterprise Institute symposium on June 12^th—the same day the Senate voted to begin deliberations on S. 744. He was the keynote speaker at the symposium ludicrously entitled "Where is Mexico Headed?"

Where is Mexico headed? To the United States, obviously—in droves.

And the Villarino article included this equally ludicrous comment:

While other governments such as South Korea or China have lobbied to support migratory reform, Mexico (the country with the most migrants in the United States) has preferred to maintain itself at the margin.

Mexico at the margin of the immigration debate? Baloney! Mexico is already well-established in the United States with its 50 consulates and its flagrant meddling in our internal affairs apparently isn't an issue. (When was the last time you heard a GOP politician complain about it?)

Meanwhile, back in Mexico the Mexican Congress is also working on S. 744. Recently, Mexican congressman Miguel Alonso Raya [Twitter] presented a statement to the Comisión Permanente [Permanent Commission] of the Mexican Congress. (The Comisión Permanente is a sort of mini-Congress with 37 members, which is in session during congressional recesses.)

Raya’s memo was actually an exhortation telling the Mexican executive branch to "prepare to respond...to an unprecedented demand for documents on the part of Mexican migrants resulting from the approval of a migratory reform in the United States” and to "coordinate with the state governments, the chief of the Federal District and the municipal governments to respond to such a demand of documentation over nationality, identity and civil state." (This would include Mexican citizenship, birth and civil state documents).

In other words, this congressman wants the Mexican government to get ready to help Mexican illegal aliens to be legalized under S. 744.

Ayala pointed out, in fact, that there already is a demand for such documents,