This last week, Youth for Western Civilization dropped by the left-wing “Campus Progress” conference here in Washington D.C.  It was held in the Omni Shoreham hotel, with the main portion of the conference taking place in an ornate ballroom filled with a massive stereo system and two giant projection screens.  The conference was headlined by big name speakers like Samantha Powers, John Podesta, Van Jones, and dozens of other presenters and panelists flown in with all expenses paid for the weekend.  At least George Soros isn’t lacking for money in the Obama Recession.

All our favorite leftist archetypes were in attendance:

The advocates for the re-distribution of wealth – You know the type. The angry scowlers of the Al Sharpton strain who demand affirmative action and blame white people for black and Hispanic economic disparities, directing a constant barrage of eye-daggers at anyone who appeared to represent ‘the man’.

Illegal aliens and their apologists — They were there in force.  Their main objective is the so called DREAM Act which would give illegal alien minors the ability to become permanent residents if they go to college.  According to these law breakers, borders and sovereignty are a thing of the past… for Western countries. It’s of course essential that Mexico, Honduras, Vietnam and all the other places these illegals hail from maintain their sovereignty, culture, and identity, while the United States is transformed from a “melting pot” into a “salad bowl” in the never ending pursuit for diversity and inclusion.

The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender advocate) legions – This was the most prominent group there.  We were unable to guess the gender of many of them.  A number of them were wearing shirts advocating a ‘marriage boycott’ until all states begin issuing ‘gay marriages’.  Good luck with that.

Even the restrooms were not safe from social engineering.  Each men’s restroom was designated as a “multigender restroom.”  However, for the women’s restrooms, there was no transgender symbol. Only females were allowed in female restrooms.  The irony of this ‘discrimination’ seemed to escape them entirely.

David Cho, the winner of one of the organization’s awards, took to the stage to proclaim that he was an illegal alien.  His speech consisted of complaints that even though he had gone through the California educational system (no doubt at significant taxpayer expense) he had difficulties finding jobs due to his “status,” which he felt was “discriminatory.”

“We now have SB 1070 brewing in Arizona, a state that’s sweltering under the heat of oppression, and we now live in a society which restricts young children and students solely on the basis of their status,” he proclaimed.  This is the Arizona that recently decided to dismantle the speed cameras in the state, hardly a move consistent with “a state that’s sweltering under the heat of oppression.”  Left unmentioned was the nefarious discrimination against convicted felons, drunk drivers, and sex offenders “solely on the basis of their status.”

Although he was proud to announce that he was “undocumented”, and list the jobs he and his family illegally work (many of which are the type in which one is commonly paid “under the table”), no federal agents showed up to arrest him, nor is there any sign that any legal or law enforcement action will be taken in the future to restrain him from continuing to break the law.  One can easily imagine this would not be the case had an American citizen proclaimed “I don’t pay my taxes”, “I drive without a license”, “I sell marijuana for a living,” or any other proud announcement of ongoing and purposeful law violation.  Rather than living “in the shadows,” criminals like Cho can flaunt their illegal status confidently because they know they have the American Establishment on their side.

David Cho has high ambitions for someone who isn’t even an American citizen: “I ultimately want to become a U.S. Senator, because I want to make changes in this country,” he announced.  Of course, we want to make changes too, though probably something far removed from the kind of “Change” we’ve been suffering through the last two years.  Cho concluded, “let us rededicate ourselves to the commitment and the involvement in the common effort to create a new society, and a new nation.”  One wonders who this “us” is (not Americans, which he is not), what “new nation” he wants to create, and why he has to do it here.  As Americans, we like the nation we have now and don’t want it to be replaced.

The various sessions on specific issues were predictable.  Granting amnesty to illegal aliens was the subject of one of the morning sessions, entitled “Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets”.  The main argument put forth by this panel was that with millions of illegal aliens leeching off the institutions and taxpayers of our republic, “it only makes sense” to give them citizenship. As stated above, the main goal is the ludicrously named DREAM Act, which would give young adults illegally residing in the United States the opportunity for permanent residency.  Americans who do not have access to a college education or law abiding immigrants who are trying to obtain permanent residency would be ignored.  One of the requirements for the law would be “good moral character.”  Voluntary deportation and legal entry into the immigration process would be a good test of that, but we are pretty sure that’s not what the panel meant.

The mantra of ‘multiculturalism’ was everywhere throughout the event, even in areas seemingly entirely unrelated.  For example, another morning panel YWC attended on “The Force of Food” was ostensibly organized to discuss organic and sustainable food movements.  A number of YWC members and supporters have recently become intrigued with ideas about backyard gardens and getting away from corporate produced processed food (which often relies on huge numbers of illegal workers to produce).  Therefore, we actually expected some practical help from this panel.  Instead, rather than advice on how to build and organize such movements, the focus was on “getting minorities involved.”

The panel centered on complaining that there was a “lack of access” to organic and healthy foods in “minority areas,” without addressing the underlying culture of this demographic that creates the market forces that generate this pattern.  A self-described “native American tribal activist,” Terrol Dew Johnson, complained that there was only one grocery store on his Tohono O’odham reservation, and that “the largest aisle is soda pop and junk food”.  Another panelist lamented that the supermarkets have departed Los Angeles, and the new tenants in these buildings are liquor stores.

The federal ‘Superfund’ law which mandates clean-ups of polluted “brownfields” even came in for some part of the blame, as one of the panelists said that McDonalds was the only company able to pay for such cleanups before building on certain urban sites.  However, one would think that large organic and health food chains such as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s would just as easily be able to afford such cleanups, were there any demand for such stores from the people who live in these areas.  Of course, since the CEO of Whole Foods publicly opposed the Obamacare bill, he might be persona non grata in the eyes of the extreme Left.

One questioner, who appeared to be a middle-to-upper class white girl, asked the panel what could be done to bring organic and healthy foods to her area in Philadelphia, which she described as predominantly black.  She talked about how she saw no interest whatsoever from the black community in organic or healthy foods.  The panel was unable to come up with any answers, saying that the process would be ‘slow’ and could ‘take a decade or more’ to come up with any noticeable shift.  One panelist said that he would be speaking at Swarthmore within a few months, but the questioner replied that “unfortunately” she would be on a month-long vacation in France during that time.  It’s doubtful that the Europtripping activist Left will actually be making changes in inner city dieting anytime soon.

One of the afternoon panels YWC attended was called “Race and the Recession.”  The general theme of this panel was that regardless of the ebb and flow of our global economy, white people are responsible for black and Latino disparities in wealth and income. The most recent evidence was President Obama’s stimulus bill which was supposedly intended for minorities.  However, some of the money ended up going to whites.  This, of course, is “stealing the money from people of color,” and “as a country of color, we need more programs to elevate the rainbow coalition.”

(We should note that because this was a left wing event and we are quoting them, the following paragraphs contain vairous expletives and racial slurs.)

Ironically, the other afternoon session which YWC attended, on the topic of “Promoting Progress Through Comedy,” was mechanical and boring.  The one exception was a “joke” by Baratunde Thurston of ‘The Onion’ that Mel Gibson’s black friends must be a “pack of raping niggers,” which Thurston said he could “only say… because I’m black.”

Van Jones seems to have learned his lesson from last year, and like most of the major speakers took care to sound as mundane as possible.  One who didn’t get the memo was an individual of indeterminate gender named Andrea Gibson.  She went on a few long rants, saying such things as “Our sky is so perfectly blue, it’s repulsive-somebody tell me where God lives, because if God is truth, God doesn’t live here.”  Her view on supporting the troops was “fuck your yellow ribbon.”

Although her time was expired, she decided to stay for one more rant, since, as she put it, “I can’t get off the stage without being gay.”  She ranted about “the patriarchy”, recounted a fit of rage from her lesbian girlfriend when she commented that she’d “like to eat that checkout clerk”, and expressed her anger at people who do not want to redefine marriage to enable her to marry her girlfriend “but the fuckers say we can’t-because you’re a girl and I’m a girl!”  One of the best moments of her life was “the time we saw two boys kissing on the street in Kansas, and we both broke down crying, because it was Kansas…we were born again that day!”

Another interesting speaker was Beau Sia, who opened up with “I don’t need a gong to make my entrance, I’m Asian American!” and recounted a series of racial achievements and his pride in them, statements which would have been described as ‘racist’ and  ‘supremacist’ if they had come from a white person.  He then proceeded into another tirade in which he described himself as “a developed nation jerk-off”, and rambled wildly about “saving the world” from some sort of apocalypse.

What do we take away from this?  Campus Progress seemingly has little to do with generating solutions, even in theory, for issues like the economy, job creation, national security, health care, trade, or education.  Instead, it is a collection of tribes united only by their hostility to Middle America and everything that it stands for.  It’s simply George Soros backing the next generation of Jesse Jackson style shakedown artists and weird exhibitionists.  They have no solutions for America’s future — more than that, they’re not even trying.

The next event being hosted by ‘Campus Progress’ here in D.C. is “Drag Bingo,” featuring “the biting commentary of DC’s best drag queen, Shi-Quita-Lee.”  I think we’ll pass.

A new poll shows that 61% of Coloradans want a copy of Arizona’s 1070 law allowing law enforcement to investigate those they encounter who exhibit “reasonable suspicion” of being an illegal alien.

A recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform discovered that illegal aliens cost Colorado taxpayers more than $1.1 billion per year, or about $612 per household.  Additionally, between $730 million and $1 billion per year of wages paid to illegal aliens is sent out of the country instead of being reinvested in local communities.

Since 2000, the population of illegal aliens in Colorado has nearly doubled, rising to over 270,000 illegal aliens.  Including children born to illegal aliens, this number is even higher, and has accounted for 35% of the state’s population growth over this time period.

More than 10% of the students in Colorado public schools are the children of illegal aliens, costing the taxpayers $11,000 each per year, for an annual total of $925 million.  Another $68 million per year is spent on programs for ‘limited English students’, who are mostly the children of illegal aliens.  These costs do not include the costs to the federal government incurred by illegal aliens in the Colorado public education system.

Illegal aliens cost Colorado taxpayers $82 million per year.  This does not include the health care costs which are charged to the federal government or the higher premiums paid by Coloradans to help cover costs incurred by illegal aliens in Colorado.

Colorado taxpayers pay $38 million per year to incarcerate illegal aliens in Colorado.  This estimate only covers a small portion of the cost of criminal aliens to Colorado.  Not included in the estimate are the costs to the federal government, law enforcement costs, costs to the judicial system, and the impact of the crimes themselves.

The minimum cost of $1.1 billion per year to the Colorado budget due to illegal aliens is double the current Colorado budget deficit of $560.7 million.  If illegal aliens left the state of Colorado, this $560.7 budget deficit would turn into a surplus of about the same amount.  One suspects that the percentage of Coloradans in favor of enacting an Arizona-style law would be even higher, if these figures were widely known.

Rand Paul has been the subject of liberal assaults recently for his comments on Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act.’  The liberal TV pundits accuse Rand Paul of ‘being ignorant of the law and history,’ but it is actually they who are ignorant-or even worse, purposely misleading.  The real issue has nothing to do with race, but with unlimited power granted to the federal government.

When Title II of the Civil Rights Act was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Katzenbach v McClung, it was ruled to be ‘Constitutional’ based on the ‘Commerce Clause’ which grants Congress the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States.”  Although some parts of the ‘Civil Rights Act’ are based on the post-civil war Amendments, these were ruled by the District Court inapplicable to private businesses absent any action by the government.  The same Supreme Court which ordered desegregation and bussing recognized that there is no ‘civil right’ to access the private business premises of another without giving the owner any choice in the matter.  In actuality, the entire Constitutional justification of the law is that it makes it easier for “interstate commerce for one can hardly travel without eating.”

Simply put, the justification Congress had to pass Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act’ was that mandating such regulations on restaurants increased the likelihood that blacks would engage in interstate travel.  With this reasoning, there is nothing to prevent Congress from passing other such laws, for example mandating that all restaurants offer a full vegan menu in order to ‘promote interstate travel’ for vegans.  Congress could pass laws demanding that all restaurants offer a full Halal meal in order to promote interstate travel by Muslims.  Congress could pass laws demanding that all restaurants offer a full range of diet drinks and low calorie meals in order to facilitate interstate travel by overweight people.

The prior court case on which the Katzenbach v McClung was based has been called into question in recent years.  In Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could prevent a farmer from growing wheat on his own land to feed his chickens because it affected the ‘interstate market’ in chicken feed.  This was the culmination of a series of cases which ruled that the federal government could basically do anything it wanted, with justification under the ‘Commerce Clause,’ while ignoring all other parts of the Constitution.

Prior to the 1930s, the Supreme Court had regarded the ‘Commerce Clause’ to read what it’s authors intended: that only Congress should have the power to set regulations on trade between the various states, a clause inserted into the Constitution to prevent trade wars from erupting between states.  For example, North Carolina can not place import tariffs on goods manufactured in Virginia.  California may not forbid its citizens from traveling to or conducting business with Arizona.

All this changed under the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.  As is happening in the present day, FDR and a Democrat controlled Congress used an economic crisis as justification to pass legislation granting massive new powers to the federal government.  Most of these were struck down by the Supreme Court, since they had no justification under the Constitution, which reserves all powers not specifically granted to the government to the states or the people.

In response, FDR threatened to increase the size of the Supreme Court from nine to fifteen Justices, meaning he would immediately be able to appoint the six new Justices himself, who would then approve his ‘New Deal’ programs.  In response to this threat, Justice Owen Roberts had a sudden change of mind, and from then on the Supreme Court approved FDR’s proposals, eventually culminating in essentially granting the federal government unlimited power in Wickard v. Filburn.

This state of affairs existed until almost the turn of the century: for six decades after the Supreme Court began use the ‘Commerce Clause’ to excuse FDR’s power grab on behalf of the federal government, the Supreme Court found absolutely nothing that was not ‘justified by the Commerce Clause.’  No limits whatsoever.  Katzenbach v McClung, which ruled that the federal government could dictate admissions policy to an out-of-the-way restaurant in Alabama, is but one of many extensions of nearly unlimited power to the federal government.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has finally returned some limits to the ‘Commerce Clause’ power.  In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Lopez that the ‘Commerce Clause’ did not provide justification for the federal ‘Gun-Free School Zones Act’ since the law was meant to regulate social behavior, which was outside the scope of the ‘Commerce Clause.’

Following this came a number of other decisions in which the Supreme Court ruled that neither the ‘Commerce Clause’ nor the 14^th Amendment granted the federal government  unlimited power, for example when finding that the federal ‘Violence Against Women Act’ had no justification under the Constitution.  Many legal experts expect the battle over the Constitutionality of Obamacare to focus on whether the Supreme Court follows the trend of the past 15 years, or the trend followed from the New Deal until 1995.

Which brings us to the real reason Rachel Maddow and the other liberal attack dogs are making such an immense fuss over Rand Paul’s comments on the Constitutionality of Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act.’  Of all the cases from 1936-1995 period which found that the federal government had virtually unlimited power under the ‘Commerce Clause,’ the one upholding Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act’ is the most emotionally charged.  Liberal attack dogs would not be able to get their audience worked up into a frenzy and throw Rand Paul off balance by arguing over wheat growing regulations.

Like calling the ‘Tea Parties’ racist, by focusing on a 50 year old federal law and ensuing court case in which race was involved, liberal attack dogs like Rachel Maddow can redirect the argument over Constitutional restraints on federal power into racial hyperbole.  This prevents them from having to debate Rand Paul over the Constitutionality of Obamacare or other large federal programs.

Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act,’ and the Supreme Court decision that approved it, stands as a bulwark of the ‘federal government can do anything it wants’ concept.  The admissions policy of an out-of-the-way restaurant in Alabama does not have much to do with maintaining the smooth flow of ‘interstate commerce.’

Most people don’t think it does, and instead have the incorrect opinion that Title II of the ‘1964 Civil Rights Act’ is based on the post-civil war Amendments, the statement that “all men are created equal” (which actually comes from the Declaration of Independence), or some other sort of Constitutional right to enter any business premises they please, without regard to the wishes of the owners.  Its actual basis is in the ‘federal government can do anything based on the commerce clause’ rationale, which has recently been limited and is in danger of unraveling completely.  The race issue, much hyped upon by pundits, does not provide any legal justification, only rhetorical hyperbole to distort the discussion away from the Constitutional limits of the power of the federal government.

Walter Rodgers has a really good article in the Christian Science Monitor about illegal immigration from Latin America. There is nothing much I can add to this. I recommend you click the link and read this one yourself. He starts the piece with an arresting anecdote:

Walking the sandy beachfront in this ultra-affluent city, 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!” Given the tsunami of illegal immigration and the prolific Hispanic birthrate, I responded, “I believe you will.”

Rodgers again draws upon his own experience to illustrate the contempt many illegal aliens have for America:

I witnessed this grudge up close a few years ago at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. Hispanic students challenged me, claiming any restriction of illegal immigration across the US southern border with Mexico is a violation of Latinos’ human rights.

Me: “Would you try to reenter Spain without a passport?

Students: “Of course not.”

Me: “What about France, or Britain?”

Students: “No.”

Yet many of these illegal Latino immigrants suffer the illusion they are divinely entitled to colonize the US – and not just the states bordering Mexico, but Chicago and the East Coast as well.

We all know the social problems of the growing illegal alien underclass: extraordinary high school drop out rates, authoritarian values, deassimilation, ghettoization in ethnic enclaves, drug trafficking, joining violent gangs like MS-13. We also know that big business uses the “nativism” canard to justify importing a servant class of groundskeepers, nannies, and pool boys from the Third World.

What we don’t hear much about is this divine sense of entitlement shared by so many illegals. The Left doesn’t seem to have a problem with “Manifest Destiny” so long as the American majority gets to play the role of the Indians. Under multiculturalism, aggressive Hispanic ethnic chauvinism flies under the innocent banners of “human rights” and “social justice.”

America seems determined to commit national suicide … and the rest of the West eager to follow us off the cliff.