RUSH: I’m gonna read some stuff here from Victor Davis Hanson, PJ Media: “How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned off the Public.”

This is nothing you haven’t heard. It’s nothing you don’t know. It’s nothing you haven’t said yourself. It’s nothing you haven’t felt. But I still want to share with you excerpts from this, because it will help to coalesce what you instinctively know. And let me give you a pull quote from the piece: “The truth is that the illegal-immigration lobby was its own worst enemy, its message couched in racism, illegality, untruth — and finally incoherence.

“People tired of being called racists by racial chauvinists, of being dubbed insensitive by unfeeling opportunists, and of being called politically naive by political manipulators. If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented,” because the anti-illegal immigration movement is so large. Here’s how the piece starts: “Why did the illegal-immigration issue launch Donald Trump’s campaign? Why did his recent tense press conference exchange with Univision’s Jorge Ramos please even some of Trump’s liberal critics? What is it about illegal immigration that has finally turned off so many Americans?

“1. Race Over the years immigration activists successfully deconstructed the complex issue of illegal immigration into a race and class morality tale of privileged whites picking on poor brown people. The operative buzzwords were ‘racism,’ ‘nativism,’ and ‘xenophobia.’ That theme is now mostly bankrupt given that every great lie eventually falls from its own weight.

“It was rarely the host, but more often the activists on behalf of the guests, who framed illegal immigration in racial terms. Activists foolishly fabricated the controversy as ‘we noble Latinos’ against ‘you prejudiced non-Latinos.’ They forgot apparently two obvious truths: One, 30% of Americans are not so-called white; and, two, most people resent ethnic chauvinism. Is an unemployed African-American sympathetic to the argument that someone has a birthright to illegally cross into the United States and [illegally] find instant employment?”

What makes that person so damn special? Is what people think, and ask.

“Is a Punjabi-American, waiting patiently for his engineer cousin to get a green card, eager to be told the United States must make special concessions to the Latino lobby? Does a third-generation Mexican-American prefer that his neighborhood school and emergency room be flooded with indigent illegal Mexican nationals?” The question is: Who in the world do these people think is gonna open their arms and welcome all of this?

And when it isn’t welcome, they’re called racists, nativists, xenophobes!

“Sometime in the last five years, the public woke up and grasped that Latino elite activists were not so much interested in illegal immigration per se, but only to the degree that the issue affected other Latinos. Were 3,000 Chinese illegally entering California per day by ship on the Northern California coast, Latino activists and politicians would probably be the first to call for enforcement of federal immigration law.

“It is difficult for the National Council of La Raza to attempt to airbrush away vocabulary like ‘anchor baby’ and ‘illegal immigration,’ while insisting that its own nomenclature ‘La Raza’ has nothing to do with race. The public knows that La Raza means ‘The Race,’ and that those who founded that organization chose that racially charged noun for the precise purpose of ethnic triumphalism — in the way that every infamous 20th-century Latinate racist demagogue from Mussolini to Franco found a use for Raza/Razza, a mostly taboo term in Mediterranean Europe today.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a scholar on the Peloponnesian Wars, Greek culture and so forth.

“2. The Law.” What is it about illegal immigration that’s finally turned off so many Americans? One is race. “2. The Law. The old canard that without law there is nothing did not resonate with voters in connection with illegal immigration until the 21st century. As long as there were only one or two million illegal immigrants apparently the public turned a blind eye. No longer. Extremists took legal noncompliance to an entirely new level of Orwellian arrogance. Suddenly, as if by fiat, the illegal-immigration lobby banned the term ‘illegal alien’ — as if they had never read a word of 1984 or Animal Farm.

“They dreamed up ‘sanctuary city,’ a reactionary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification, whose logical trajectory is the implosion of the entire idea of federal laws…” People aren’t just gonna sit around and put up with this! They’re not gonna be told federal law is worthless and meaningless, the rule of law doesn’t exist, and if you disagree with that, “Shut up, you’re a racist!” They’re just not gonna take it forever.

The third reason why the illegal immigration issue has finally turned off so many Americans is Mexico itself. “Mexico itself has become quite unpopular. Accordingly to recent polls, never have Americans had more negative views of Mexico than during the era of Obama. Americans tired of being told that Mexico did not like the US, when the real truth was increasingly the opposite.

“It is not just the daily news of cartels, beheadings, and corruption that made Mexico unattractive, but the cynicism of the Mexican government itself. Mexico and Central American nations receive $50 billion a year in remittances from their expatriate citizens in the United States,” aid and other kinds of assistance. And these same people are called racists and xenophobes.

“But if illegal aliens were impoverished and exploited as their home countries alleged, how could they transfer such monumental sums back home — and why would not their mother countries worry about the ensuing burdens placed upon their low-wage-earning citizens abroad?” The point here is that if it’s so bad, how come they’re sending so much money back to Mexico of what they earn?

“Hypocrisy became synonymous with the idea of Mexico. Its constitution defines illegal immigration in racialist and chauvinist terms,” and it basically doesn’t permit it. And yet Mexico lobbies, teaches, instructs its own citizens how to illegally emigrate to the United States. People know it; they’re fed up with it. “4. Politics. The Obama-age progressive political narrative was that an old, too-white America was changing largely due to immigration and that this was a much-needed antidote to [all those years of] oppressive white privilege.

“Activists proudly pointed to California and New Mexico’s suddenly solidly blue politics and promised that Texas, Colorado and Nevada were soon to follow. … They even warned that their success would doom Republicans unless the latter emulated their strategies!” I think this was the one that broke the camel’s back.

If you want to know the truth, folks, because I respect, and always have, the intelligence of those of you in this audience. There’s not a moment of condescension here, not real condescension. There may be moments of satire and parody. But I think, despite what Mr. Hansen here has written, I think the straw that broke the camel’s back here, back in 2007 — and there are many, it’s not just one. He’s writing here that there are six reasons for it.

When you began to note that your own party was falling for this insane idea that the only way it could ever win the White House was to emulate the Democrats on illegal immigration, that was it. There was no way you were ever gonna be convinced of that. That was absurd. It was silly. It remains absurd. It remains silly to this day. Mitt Romney, had he gotten 70% of the Hispanic vote, would have still lost the presidency.

But beyond that, everybody who’s even paying halfway attention knows full well that illegal immigration is nothing more than a voter registration drive for the Democrat Party. And people who have been donating to the Republican Party for all these years can’t figure out why the Republicans don’t see that. And then if they conclude that the Republican Party does see that and is still embarking on this effort to support amnesty and illegal immigration, then the obvious conclusion is, what are they worth to us?

How can they possibly be representing us if they think the only way they can succeed is to be like Democrats? Really? Are you telling me the only way you people in the Republican Party can win is if you agree with a massive Democrat Party voter registration drive called illegal immigration? The next thing that people began to realize was that we’re not even talking about immigration. There’s no immigration policy being followed here. There’s no immigration protocols being followed here.

This is an invasion. We’re being overwhelmed at the Southern border. And after so many years of the invasion, people throw their hands up and say there’s nothing we can do here, we’ve gotta grant them amnesty, that’s the only thing we can do. We’ve welcomed ’em, they’ve got jobs, they’re living in the shadows, and people say, “Screw you! The hell with that. You create the problem rather than prevent them from coming here, and then you tell us you’re gonna promise border security but you never do.
Then you tell us there has to be amnesty because of compassion.”

We’re not talking immigration anymore. Immigration is made up of people who’ve been in line for years. They’re filling out the forms. They’re doing everything the law requires. And not nearly enough of those people are getting in. There’s a whole host of reasons here why this is happening, and the idea that the Republican base, the average, ordinary American is too stupid to understand what’s going on here, is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, just one more thing. There’s a bunch of more things. The Trump candidacy, the elements of the Trump support are even more than illegal immigration, but illegal immigration may be — I don’t want to deny this — the foundation for things here. And that scares the bejeezus out of these establishment people.

Remember, now, Trump was supposed to have disqualified himself with his announcement. That was supposed to be the end of Trump, remember, after his announcement, they’re all laughing, “Oh, what a great comedy routine. This guy just said that every Mexican’s a criminal, a rapist and so forth.” He was supposed to be finished, and he blew up, he expanded, he launched like a Saturn 5 rocket, and they have been discombobulated ever since.

The McCain comment was supposed to destroy him. The Megyn Kelly tiff was supposed to end it. He’s supposed to have destroyed himself three or four times. He should have destroyed himself by calling Weiner a perv. You just don’t do that in polite politics. He just keeps growing more popular, and as that happens the resentment for it all deepens. But it’s about much more than illegal immigration. There’s a lot tied up into this. These people are investing a lot in Trump.

And I hope, I really hope he has an idea. I hope he understands just how much hope people are investing in him. And it isn’t ’cause of conservatism, and it isn’t ’cause of this principle or that principle. It’s about something far more than that to the people that are getting jazzed and excited about this. And you can sit there from the ivory towers of the Beltway, and you can impugn, and you can mock people who think they’re losing the country. You can mock them, and you can laugh at them, and you can tell jokes about how they’re a bunch of paranoid kooks.

But just because they’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Being paranoid doesn’t disqualify your fear. And I’m not even calling it paranoia. I’m saying it’s real, and I understand it. I don’t see how the Beltway people can’t after the last seven years. This isn’t politics-as-usual here. We’ve just secured Iran getting a nuclear bomb, for crying out loud. Does anybody really know what that means?