It’s great to have dopey, clueless opponents. Mark Zuckerberg, charter member of Billionaires for Open Borders who wants to import more cheap Indian programmers, has distributed a memo to House offices intended to boost the GOP brain trust’s amnesty push. (It’s also a riposte of sorts to Senator Jeff Sessions’s memo on the harm that would be done to American workers from proposed increases in immigration.) Most of the Zuckerberg memo is the usual quotes from the usual suspects, such as Grover, Jeb, Rubio, Ryan, et al., about how immigration will cure everything from baldness to bad breath.
Like any lefty document, the report warns of the “shocking extremism behind anti-immigrant groups,” citing their “hateful rhetoric, extreme views, and blatant falsehoods” (including some of my Corner posts). But what really struck my funny bone was this: “While some anti-immigrant voices falsely claiming to speak for conservatives may raise concern over the draft principles, they do not represent the majority of the Republican Party.” Now, it may seem odd that a liberal billionaire would fund a report written by a Democratic staffer citing the Center for American Progress on who’s a real conservative! But Washington in general, and the immigration debate in particular, has a certain BizarroWorld character, so maybe they didn’t find this unusual.
So, who are some of the individuals and groups that have raised concerns about the House leadership’s immigration approach, “falsely claiming to speak for conservatives”? A partial list would include National Review, the Heritage Foundation, Ramesh Ponnuru, Andy McCarthy, Ross Douthat, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sarah Palin, John Cornyn, Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, Ted Cruz, Phil Gramm, Michelle Malkin, Peter Kirsanow, and Erick Erickson.
If they’re false conservatives, who are the real conservatives?