I like smoking weed, and these guys didn’t want to throw me in jail for it. That sold me. I figured if they were cool with what I was into, like getting high, then I was cool with their guns and getting government off their backs. So were my buddies.
They didn’t have to like how I live my life, and I didn’t have to like theirs. Live and let live, man. I could get into that. Want a bong hit? This stuff is killer—I sold the rest out at the store, but I have an eighth left if you want to fire up.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
We have left the relatively bug-free confines of Gator’s porch and are walking through the woods, beers in hand. Gator ignores the buzzing insects—and, apparently, the effects of several brews, even as I slap and scratch at the swarm. Gator notices my predicament. “I could use DDT out here, but I’m too damn lazy to bother. You know, by lifting the stupid DDT ban, we saved probably a few hundred thousand lives in Africa using it on malaria mosquitos. Liberals love third worlders, but not enough to let them kill the bugs that are killing them.” I push him on one of the least successful aspects of the insurgency, the immigration issue. He frowns.
Bar none, repealing the citizenship process for those already underway was the dumbest decision we made during the Marlowe presidency. We stopped millions of illegals from turning into freshly minted Democrat voters. But we also managed to turn immigrants and their families from kind of disliking us into wanting to string us up by our balls.
We still haven’t fixed it. Yeah, it was a shitty law. Yeah, “immigration reform” was a scam and they passed it through fraud, but the damn illegals did what we told them to do and on the verge of citizenship we pulled out the rug. That’s going to kick us in the ass for decades.
We fought against the amnesty law—we fought hard. They called it the “HOPE Act,” but I’ll be damned if I can remember what the letters H-O-P-E stood for. I think the “H” was for “Helping” or some damn thing.
Of course the liberals were all for it—they expected that it meant a ton of new voters for the Dems, and they were right. Our polls were all crystal clear. Most of the illegals turned citizens would be voting Democrat pretty much forever. See, right there you would think that Republicans might oppose it, but you probably don’t remember the old establishment Republicans we were stuck with back in the 2010s when Obama and Hillary were around.
What pissed us off was the people in our own party who just wouldn’t look the facts in the face. Amnesty was a bill to create new Dem voters, straight up. But there were Republicans who supported it—a lot of them. I still don’t get it.
Some were big business types who just wanted more cheap workers and more customers. Wal-Mart was a huge behind-the-scenes backer. Others were these smug jerks who kept telling us how thought it was the “right thing to do.” When some politician tells me something is the “right thing to do,” it pegs my bullshit meter. You want to do the right thing? That all starts with beating the lib you’re running against. Period.
Amnesty was political suicide for the GOP, but that didn’t stop the establishment types. See, the old Republican establishment had this kind of suicide pact mentality where they felt honor bound to jump on a sword. Damn, the libs loved those mavericks—until, of course, the mavericks actually did something remotely conservative. Then they stopped being adorable mavericks and went back to being racist sexist homophobes who wanted to murder the homeless.
What really steamed us was how these squishes would try and act like we were some kind of racist haters whenever we brought up how having a few million people wander north into our country without permission and start taking government handouts bothered us. The American people like the rule of law, and illegals were, well, illegal. We were supposed to ignore that and act like we were in the wrong for caring?
Remember that one-term Cuban guy from Florida who everyone thought was going to be president? I actually helped out on his first campaign against this ex-Republican weirdo who became a Dem. Oh man, do I have stories about that guy. Anyway, that senator jumped on the amnesty bandwagon and just lied left and right to us. He told us it wasn’t amnesty and of course it was. He lost reelection mostly because we conservatives abandoned him, but when Hillary signed the amnesty bill he came back to DC. There are photos of him smiling behind her as she signed the bill. What a tool.
We hated that law, but the fact was that by the time we got into office a lot of people were using it to move towards citizenship. So, we had a choice about the facts on the ground. We could live with it and try and fix some of the problems, like how it didn’t build a fence, or we could repeal it. The problem with that was a lot of people were in the pipeline already. The law was terrible, but they were obeying it.
We decided to tank it. Without a filibuster—thanks Harry Reid!—repealing it was easy, and that’s what we did. But that left all these folks hanging—they’d started the process to become citizens and then we went and told them we’d changed our minds. Not surprising, they and their families were pretty pissed off at us.
Looking back, I think that after amnesty passed and they got invested in it, we should have switched strategies and fought for their votes. Instead, we now have this angry bunch of immigrant relatives who are citizens here that libs can use as a base to try and make a comeback down the road. They didn’t move as far right as the rest of the country over the years, partly because we had trouble reaching them through Spanish media. Of course, we’ve deported a fair number and with the border wall up there’s no more tidal wave coming north. Still, we kind of stepped in it with repealing amnesty. There were no good choices, and we chose the worst of them.
Rob Patel (President-Elect)
At the mention of immigration, the president-elect seems annoyed for the first time as he paces across the floor of his suite.
The whole “conservatives hate immigrants” thing always ticked me off. I mean, I’m part Indian, but not like Cherokee Indian! I’d have to hate my own family. And most of my family is Republican.
We have to understand some hard truths. First, America is the most conservative, which elsewhere would be liberal democratic, nation on Earth. We’ve gotten even more so over the last 20 years. Even the other English-speaking countries are to America’s left on almost every issue. So, just about anyone coming here is to the left of the American mainstream. The immigrants from developed countries are shocked by what they see as the lack of basic welfare state institutions, and the ones from the third world are used to various degrees of socialism. Sure, a few of the countries are trying out American-style reforms and hope to copy our success, but it’s a culture shock. So that immigrants usually start out on the left shouldn’t surprise anyone.
This is particularly true about Mexico, where another part of my family is from. Mexico should be a rich nation—it’s full of hard-working people and has great natural resources, but the fact is that the culture embraces a kind of socialist caudillo model where the government rules the people and not the other way around. A lot of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants get here and they bring the values of their homelands with them.
And when it comes to the role of government in people’s lives, those immigrants have a very different view than Americans. They think government should have a big role in people’s lives, and we constitutional conservatives don’t. It’s a tough challenge for us.