Despite The Star Of David, Palin's In The Mainstream Of Republican Party Thought On Immigrants

Palin's no bumpkin. So what if she thinks it's the "Statute of Liberty?" She eats pizza with a knife and fork (and Trump) and removes the usual Christian iconography and dons a Jewish star necklace when in NYC.

On Ellis Island, gateway to America for so many millions of immigrants from Europe who had to contend with the fear-mongers and Know Nothings (teabaggers of their day) who prophesied the end of America because of them, Palin recited her line: “It’s one of the symbols of course of our country, and it’s a reminder too that immigrants built this country." She then proceeded, predictably, to tear down the DREAM Act.

"The immigrants of the past, they had to literally and figuratively stand in line to become U.S. citizens. I'd like to see that continue," Palin said. "And unfortunately, the DREAM Act kind of usurps that-- the system that is a legal system to make sure that immigrants who want to be here legally, working hard, producing and supplying revenue and resources for their families, that they're able to do that right and legally. Unfortunately, the DREAM Act doesn't accomplish that."

The Palin wing of the Republican Party has always hated immigrants and has hysterically, and often violently, protested the entry of successive waves that have helped build America. Right-wingers were enthusiastic about embracing Nazi war criminals after the war and welcomed them with open arms-- Nixon even hoping they would balance out his "Jewish problem" in key states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where tens of thousands of Eastern European Nazi collaborators were encouraged to settle. But regular immigrants looking for a better life in America? Palin-like Republicans have always objected. Back in the '20s the GOP turned to Washington Congressman Albert Johnson, chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, who was responsible for the Republican anti-immigrant legislation of the 1920s. Johnson, a vehement racist and nativist, was the chief author of the Immigration Act of 1924, which he justified as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." Apparently he was as muddleheaded then as like-thinking Republicans like Palin and Bachmann are today. He was also head of the Eugenics Research Association which campaigned for forced sterilization. Back in those days Republicans didn't see Jews the way they do today-- as necessary for Armageddon-- so Johnson didn't wear Jewish stars but referred to Jews as "filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits." He did his best to refuse Jews entry into this country... Italians too.

In Glen Yeadon's Nazi Hydra In America there was a description of Johnson that sounds like something Steve King, Tom Tancredo and Elton Gallegly modeled themselves after.

A key figure in the success of the eugenicists in changing immigration policy was Albert Johnson. Johnson had been raised at the northern edge of the Mason Dixon line in Illinois during the turbulent Reconstruction period. He later became a big city newspaperman before moving to the small town of Hoquiam, Washington. It was from here that Johnson ran for congress and was elected to the House in 1912. Johnson was a fanatic racist and eugenicist. In 1919, he began a twelve-year tenure as chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization subcommittee in the House.

While there had been restrictions in immigration prior to Johnson’s chairmanship, the restrictions were reactionary in nature and not eugenically motivated. Johnson viewed any immigration as a negative factor. One of his first actions was to appoint [deranged Missouri fascist and racist Harry] Laughlin as his eugenic expert before his committee. Laughlin and other eugenicists had long urged the classification of immigrants along strict biological and racial lines, as well as advocating intelligence testing of immigrants before they left Europe. Their goal was to restrict immigration based on quotas before the mass arrivals started in 1890. ... [Laughlin's] American Breeders and the Eugenic Society were not content with just sterilization and segregation methods as a means to eliminate the defective. By 1910, they were also proposing euthanasia using a lethal chamber... the forerunner of the modern gas chamber.

Much of the money that funded all the eugenics "research" in the U.S. and Germany-- including the Mengele "experiments" in Auschwitz-- came from the Rockefeller family, as well as from other prominent Republican Party fascists. So, Star of David or not, eating pizza with a knife and fork not withstanding, Palin comes from a long line of right-wing Know Nothings and ideologues in the mainstream of deeply ingrained Republican Party traditions.

Plutocrats And Their Republican Party Have Always Wanted To Just Make Things Better

Yesterday we talked a little about how Republican state governments have taken such harmful and extreme positions-- particularly in states like Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Arizona and Michigan-- that voters are expressing, and acting on, very high levels of buyer's remorse. Others haven't woken up yet; even Skeletor (R-FL) still has almost 30% of his state's voters behind him. Perhaps these people recall when conservatives were even worse and think that in retrospect it's not that bad... at least not yet.

The last time the GOP and an overly-entitled plutocracy they serve, a plutocracy, like ours, that hasn't been slapped down in a very, very long time-- thank you Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama-- the conservatives went a lot further towards forcing their dark, dystopian vision on the nation. I was just reading the part in Glen Yeadon's book Nazi Hydra In America where he talks about how Hitler learned all about eugenics from American conservatives, just as he had cribbed so much of his virulent anti-Semitism from Henry Ford.

By the turn of the century, women were still barred from voting. Racial hatred was the norm. Native Americans had been segregated on reservations Blacks and Asians were considered second class citizens and undesirables. Vigilantes often dispensed what passed for justice at the end of a hangman’s rope. From 1889 until 1918, 3,224 people were lynched. More often than not, the victim was black although 702 of the victims were white. Moreover, the hangings were carried out for trivial reasons such as staring at a white girl, offensive language, or other such minor infractions.

Eugenics would soon become a cure all for society’s problems. Criminal analysis would move racial hatred and criminal behavior into the realm of heredity and eugenic cleaning. Disease and physical afflictions, such as tuberculosis and epilepsy, were also considered hereditary disorders.

...In mid July 1911, the special committee met in Manhattan and systematically plotted a campaign to purge the blood of American people of the deteriorating influence of these undesirable anti-social classes. Ten classes of the socially unfit were identified. The classes were as follows in the rank given by the committee: feeble minded, pauper, alcoholics, criminals including petty criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, those predisposed to certain diseases, the deformed, and finally the blind and deaf. Not only did the ABA target the individuals afflicted, but also targeted their extended families as well. The group agreed that sterilization of the extended families was desirable.

The eugenic committee had endorsed a very ambitious plan. The plan prioritized the sterilization of those receiving custodial care, including those in poor houses, insane asylums, prisons, and any others under state care. This group contained approximately one million people. The plan called for the further sterilization of borderline cases of some seven million people deemed by the ABA to be totally unfit to become useful parents or citizens. The estimated eleven million people targeted for the first wave was more than ten percent of the population. After the first wave was completed, the plan called for the sterilization of the extended families of those deemed unfit.

Moreover, the committee sought to bypass the court system in ordering the steril-ization. They attempted to define the steril-ization as a police function. ... About the same time, Dr. Harry Clay Sharp was castrating inmates at the Indiana Reformatory to cure convicts of masturbation. Again, the procedure was conducted outside of the law. In 1899 Sharp read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The article, written by Dr Albert Ochsner advocated the sterilization of all convicts with vasectomies. After reading the article, Sharp performed the procedure on scores of inmates without anesthetics.

By 1906, Sharp claimed to have performed 206 vasectomies, even though the procedure was still not legal. While Sharp was very influential in the passage of Indiana’s sterilization law, he was by no means alone. Reverend Oscar McCulloch, the pastor of the Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was a leading reformer and advocate of public charity while harboring a deep hate for the poor. Indiana law specified a compulsory servitude for its paupers. They could be farmed out to the highest bidder. MuCulloch performed his own genealogical survey of Indiana’s wandering tribe of paupers called the Tribe of Ishmael. MuCulloch’s survey of the Tribe of Ishmael quickly became a centerpiece of eugenics studies. MuCulloch preached to his congregation that the paupers were parasites and preordained to be nothing more. ... Washington State passed a bill mandating sterilization of habitual criminals and rapists. Connecticut passed a law allowing the medical staff to examine patients of two asylums for the feebleminded and their family trees to determine if the patients should be sterilized. California enacted a bill that allowed castration or sterilization of convicts and residents of the state home for the feebleminded.

In the next two years, additional states passed eugenic sterilization laws. Iowa passed perhaps the most inclusive law, allowing the sterilization of criminals, idiots, feebleminded, imbeciles, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, and moral or sexual perverts. Nevada, New Jersey and New York were among the states to pass sterilization laws.

The same parasitic families that are bankrolling the Republican Party today, bankrolled the rise of Hitler and bankrolled the attempted coup d'etat against FDR, bankrolled the takeover of the American media and... the American eugenics movement. They never get punished and they just get more monstrous with each generation. Today they've brought us Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Rick Scott...