The Arizona Desert has been used as a testing ground for all sorts of measures that are spreading around the country. Most of us, however, sit on the sidelines silent. I feel as though I’m now living the future of the United States. Where legalized criminality and attendant impunity have become the accepted and acceptable norm.
DR. LINDA GREEN, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, FEBRUARY 2011
“We face a state fiscal crisis of unparalleled dimensions,” Governor Jan Brewer declared in the spring of 2010, “one that is going to sweep over every single person in this state as well as every business and every family.”
Now holding the governor’s reins she had inherited from former Governor Janet Napolitano in 2009, whose departure to head up the Department of Homeland Security allowed for the Republican secretary of state to gain office regardless of party affiliation, the sixty-five-year-old self-professed fiscal conservative stood at the crossroads of her political future. As a state legislator and county supervisor, she had watched Arizona swell with real estate speculation and reckless development—an acre an hour, the construction industry claimed—during the housing boom of the 1980s and ’90s.
Those were the golden years of Arizona unbound; now the state housing market and house-of-cards economy had collapsed to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and Brewer found her state ranked aside Mississippi as the poorest in the nation. With one of the most entrenched debt problems in the country, the fiscally tight conservative legislature—which typically ranked at the bottom for per capita expenditures in education, health care, and social services—had whittled its budget to the bone.
“Opposition to big government and the Obama administration plays well at the State Capitol,” longtime Southwestern observer Tom Barry wrote in the Boston Review. “Conveniently missing from this narrative is the back-story of federal subsidies and contracts. At last count, Arizona received $1.19 in federal spending for every dollar sent to Washington, which makes it a beneficiary state.”
In essence, Arizona received more federal money per tax dollar ushered off to Washington’s coffers than neighboring California or Nevada. While Arizona touted itself as anti-Washington and opposed to big-government handouts, the open secret was that the state had always been one of the great welfare queens of federal aid—from huge subsides for agriculture, water, and irrigation projects (and now Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement monies), to a $4.3 billion check from President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which had kept the state afloat. While characterized as a rogue state, Barry noted, Arizona may have been better described as a “failed state.”
None of this dismal news was going to help Brewer’s election chances in the fall of 2010. Worse, her ratings were plummeting in the polls, as challengers in the Republican primary surged ahead of her. On March 23, 2010, Brewer received the bad news: State Treasurer Dean Martin was now the front-runner in the latest Rasmussen poll, which also showed Brewer lagging far behind her potential Democratic opponent. More important, the poll noted that 85 percent of Arizona voters were concerned about drug-related violence in Mexico “spilling over into the United States.”
Brewer’s flagging campaign—and her career—had a reckoning with history.
Four days after that disastrous poll, borderlands rancher Robert Krentz was murdered, setting off a frenetic news media crush and legislative maneuver by Tea Party leader Russell Pearce that culminated with Brewer’s newfound support and signing of the SB 1070 bill within a month. Her ratings soared. So did her rhetoric, which had suddenly let loose the hounds of anti-immigrant fervor.
In her impassioned memoir, Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politics to Secure America’s Borders, Brewer frames her conversion to SB 1070 and her political motivations in a different way. “We are under siege,” she writes. “And we have been totally disrespected by the federal government.”
Brewer makes it clear from the first line that it is not really “we,” as in the collective Arizona populace, but she who has been unfairly treated by the “liberal” media and President Obama, in particular, in the aftermath of Arizona’s defiant legislative act. She so identities herself with the state that she writes at one point, “Kind of like me. Kind of like Arizona.” The substantial portion of the state that is not like Brewer is what torments her.
In the witching hours before she signed the controversial bill in the spring of 2010, with protesters outside her office and a nation divided over immigration policy, Brewer set the scene as a drama of her own victimization: “The best comparison I could think of was: This must be what it’s like to be waterboarded.”
In Scorpions for Breakfast, reportedly written with the help of ghostwriter Jessica Gavora (who also penned Sarah Palin’s memoir), Brewer wants readers to know she lives on the Arizona front lines: “I was involved in a war with a deeper and more entrenched set of political interests than I had realized.” In an attempt to make her own “war” more real, Brewer dedicates a chapter to the unsolved murder of Krentz and mentions his name more than thirty times throughout the book, while referring only once to SB 1070 architect Pearce.
Brewer argues that the Obama administration has intentionally allowed an immigration crisis to spiral out of control on the US-Mexico border, and even spill over into international controversy. When Mexican President Felipe Calderón addressed a joint session of Congress and criticized Arizona for SB 1070, Brewer could not believe that a foreign leader was actually allowed to criticize the United States.
“I had to wonder where our country was going under Obama,” she writes. “It started to dawn on me that this president and his liberal allies in Congress don’t really understand what America is all about and what our fundamental principles are.” Depicting her state as a victim in a campaign of recrimination and blame, she writes again, “It was then that I knew that we were in a war.”
Throughout the book, in fact, the Arizona governor constantly reminds readers that her state “didn’t cause this crisis,” but acted only when the federal government refused to do its job. “And what did we get for our effort?” she asks. “We were demonized and called racists. We were sued and treated like subjects instead of citizens. . . . We were slapped down like wayward children.”
Brewer’s war is not limited to the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where an “invasion” of “drug dealers, human smugglers, generic criminals, and the sheer volume of people pouring over our unsecured border” has given her state no other option but to “lead when their representatives in Washington failed to do so.” Her “war” is with President Obama. And for the governor of Arizona, it gets personal.
Attempting to speak with the president during his commencement address at Arizona State University in Tempe, only weeks after signing SB 1070, Brewer claims Obama “blew me off.” Finally, at a long-awaited meeting in the Oval Office, Brewer writes, “He proceeded to lecture me about everything he was doing to promote ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’ which was code for encouraging more illegal immigration by letting those already in the country illegally jump the line.”
Brewer’s account of Obama’s remark ignored the fact that the Obama administration had deported a record number of immigrants—more than his Republican predecessor—and ramped up Border Patrol and border security funds to unprecedented levels. Instead, Brewer had an epiphany: “He’s treating me like the cop he had over for a beer after he had badmouthed the Cambridge police, I thought.”
This level of self-obsession and victimization overrides the discussion of virtually every policy decision and event in Brewer’s eyes, and frames much of her leadership in Arizona’s rebellion. Take her rendition of the legislative process leading up to the signing of SB 1070, one of the biggest media events in recent memory for the state. A Tucson station even broke into the soap opera One Life to Live to cover the press conference, she crows.
“I steeled myself and whispered, ‘Jesus, hold my hand. I’m going to do this for the people of Arizona,’” the governor recounts, as if the closely watched election polls had no bearing on her decision. “If it affects my reelection and political reputation, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about Jan Brewer’s political future. It’s about Arizona’s future.”
Brewer’s version of Arizona’s future covered the front pages of newspapers around the world in a bizarre incident in the spring of 2012, when the governor made sure President Obama got his comeuppance for mistreating her. Pointing her index finger at the president’s nose as he crossed the tarmac at the Phoenix airport, Brewer lectured Obama about their disagreements. The photo of the finger-wielding governor nudged aside the saguaros and sunsets as the iconic image of the state’s defiance; it was immortalized on a hot-selling T-shirt. And Scorpions for Breakfast shot to the bestseller list on Amazon.
“As I write, I have almost 500,000 friends on Facebook,” Brewer concludes in her memoir, “and every day I take time to read the comments people leave on my wall.”
“This only happens when there’s a Democrat in the White House,” Peter Goudinoff said, reaching under the control panel of his Lancair Legacy airplane. “We spent half our time fighting off these crazy ideas when Bruce Babbitt was governor, and he spent half his time vetoing the craziest of ideas.”
Goudinoff looked back, his crown of bushy white hair framed by large glasses. After two decades as one of the lonely liberal voices in the Arizona state legislature, the University of Arizona political science professor retired to pursue his passion for airplanes. He had built his experimental aircraft from a kit. He haunted the hangar with other “old white guys.” He spent his days reflecting on his public service from above, taking off from Ryan Airfield, outside Tucson, and roaming across the corridors of commerce between the US and Mexico, the massive open-pit copper mines, and the sprawling cluster subdivisions that now define the region.
Retirement didn’t keep him out of trouble. When the so-called “illegal alien” fires roared across southern Arizona in the summer of 2011, Goudinoff and a friend piled into his single-engine plane and headed toward the “monument fire,” near the border in Cochise County. After losing contact with the Libby Army Airfield outside Sierra Vista, Goudinoff soon found himself being escorted by two F-16 fighter jets, whose pilots forced his plane to land at an airstrip in Tucson. Officials from the North American Aerospace Defense Command grilled Goudinoff; their jobs had increasingly shifted to monitoring the traffic of drug smugglers.
“I didn’t know I had penetrated Mexican airspace,” he said. “But I guess I had.”
Even at ten thousand feet, the border had its virtual wall. Although Goudinoff never got near the fire, he recalled the media sensation that hovered over the question of immigration and state versus federal jurisdiction.
“It wasn’t like that back in the 1970s,” he said, picking up a screwdriver that sat on one of his wings.
Another rebellion over states’ rights in Goudinoff’s era, though, underlined an antifederal streak among Arizona hard-liners who finally found an ally in the state capitol with the ascension of Brewer. And indeed it took place, as Goudinoff noted, during the liberal Democratic administration of President Jimmy Carter.
“Just boilerplate, just like today,” Goudinoff said, “making noise to generate political turmoil. There’s always been a wing of the Republican Party that pushes this rhetoric.”
In the late 1970s, the right-wing Republicans in Arizona took that rhetoric to the next stage, joining a Western movement they called the Sagebrush Rebellion. Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah referred to it as “the Second American Revolution.” Goudinoff called it “theft.”
Manufacturing a constitutional crisis in a similar fashion as today, conservative legislators from several Western states sought to take “sovereign control” over the public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under the guise of constitutional rights and federal mismanagement. “This was land that no one originally wanted,” Goudinoff scoffed. “That’s why it ended up in the hands of the feds.”
In 1912, Arizona’s state constitution legally relinquished “forever . . . all right and title to the unappropriated and ungranted public lands lying within the boundaries thereof.” “Thereof” notwithstanding, states’ rights had been the mantra of a cadre of pioneering lawmakers long before Tea Partiers like Russell Pearce. The Tucson Citizen noted that the rebellion’s main sponsor in 1979, Representative Joe Lane, a rancher from Cochise County, was a “state’s-righter from Day One.”
But what did states’ rights really mean for the majority of residents who did not dwell or work or roam across those precious and remote public hinterlands in the clutches of the federal government?
Within a few months, the Sagebrush Rebellion’s adherence to such sacred sovereignty would quickly dissipate to a thinly veiled front for private landowners. An amendment sought to obtain the land from the federal government and put it up for sale in a state lottery within five years. As one Sagebrush senator declared, the “land is best left to private ownership.” Calling the action a “landmark” for the West, one Arizona lawmaker reminded his colleagues that the land grab could result in “more than $1 billion in land value because of the energy and land resources.”
In a region where oil and mining interests and real estate companies encircled counties for cheap deals, and huge ranching operations sought to expand unfettered grazing on public lands, the states’ rights parade was a bandwagon to support.
“If the state was going to get the land,” one critic surmised, “they’d [the developers] spring out of the desert like wildflowers.”
The rebellion spread across the West for a reason: most of the BLM land, such as the estimated 11.6–12.5 million acres in Arizona, sat to the west of the 100th meridian. In its attempt to seize on this “abuse” by the “dictates” of the federal government and “eastern environmentalists,” the Western movement ramped up its rhetoric to Civil War terms. “The Mason-Dixon line has shifted,” declared one Alaskan legislator, “and runs north-south now, separating the Eastern states from an increasingly isolated, angry West.”
Such outrageous statements tended to undercut the seriousness of the rebellion. Like the Tea Party today, the movement showcased a distant and deep-seated anti-Washington distrust, pitting itself against a liberal Democratic administration in an ideological battle to provoke a judicial showdown over constitutional issues. The movement coincided, as well, with the revival of conservative rebels in the Republican Party that had emerged during Barry Goldwater’s brief reign in 1964 and would spike again with the insurgent presidential campaign of California Governor Ronald Reagan in 1980.
As Lane told his fellow Arizona supporters, the rebellion was really about bringing this constitutional crisis to the courts. In other words, can a state claim sovereignty over federal land and jurisdiction if it passes a law that gives it the right to do so?
Despite the interpretations peddled by the League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights, which fronted as the lobby for the Sagebrush Rebellion, court decisions over the past 150 years had clearly sided on behalf of federal domain. The Wall Street Journal reminded its readers: “Most experts believe the federal government will prevail in any court challenge to its land ownership.” In Arizona, as scholar John Keane noted, virtually all of the state’s lands were originally “acquired by national force of arms in the War with Mexico and by a payment to Mexico of millions of dollars from the Federal treasury in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and in the Gadsden Purchase. When Sagebrush supporters call for the land to be ‘returned’ to the states or individuals, Sagebrush opponents are quick to point out that the land never did belong to the states or to anyone but the nation as a whole.”
Much like the Tea Party rebellion in Arizona, the Sagebrush Rebellion refused to allow a bit of historical reality to block its path.
The rebellion even halted Governor Bruce Babbitt’s record of twenty-eight vetoes. Voting 46–8 to override his veto, the Sagebrush renegades passed the measure and donated $60,000 toward the legal battle with fellow legislators in Nevada and Utah. One of the dissenting Democrats referred to the bill as the “Stagecoach Rebellion, because we’re all being taken for a ride.”
That ride didn’t go too far, and not because of a federal crackdown or judicial decision. Conservative Republican hero and self-proclaimed Sagebrush rebel Ronald Reagan was elected president in the fall of 1980, and as the cowboy rode into town and quickly sought to gut federal oversight and legislation for wilderness and environmental management, the Sagebrush Rebellion dissipated for the next decade.
Back in Arizona, the Cochise County rancher and legislator Lane and other states’ rights advocates knew the party would never end. “It won’t be resolved today,” he declared, “and many of us here won’t live to see it, but our children and grandchildren can be proud that we started the fight.”
Lane was right. That fight over states’ rights never ended. Brewer joined the state legislature two years later as part of a new wave of powerful “Republican wives” in politics. In the spring of 2012, more than three decades after the last “sagebrush rebellion,” the state legislature revived the campaign and passed a bill to reclaim control over an estimated forty-eight thousand square miles of federal land, including national forests, monuments, and wildlife areas. The lawmakers’ intentions were unabashedly clear; the bill included measures to sell off the public lands to private interests.
“The Tea Party’s taken over,” Arizona House minority leader Chad Campbell told the Arizona Republic. “This entire Capitol is run by conspiracy theorists and the Tea Party.”
Brewer’s surprising veto of the “sagebrush” bill fell on deaf ears, however; in an added gesture of bravado, the state legislature had already passed HCR 2004, the “state sovereignty” resolution, which placed a proposition to amend the state’s constitution before the voters in the fall 2012 elections. The bill read in part: “The state of Arizona declares its sovereign and exclusive authority and jurisdiction over the air, land, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within its boundaries.”
For any student of history, Brewer followed a fairly typical path of election-time fear-mongering that had been part of Arizona politics since its inception. But as Brewer and Pearce understood, just like the infamous Sheriff Wheeler in Cochise County knew a century ago, it wasn’t always convenient to report the truth.
Although Brewer may have eaten “scorpions for breakfast,” a series of gaffes and outright lies often made her eat crow for lunch. “Jan Brewer has serious issues with the truth,” Three Sonorans wrote in the summer of 2010, just as she was ramping up her nativist credentials. “Everyone lies at one point or another,” the blog admitted, “but she has a special knack for choosing lies that are extra-sensational, using Nazis, terrorism and immigration as her subjects.”
In what she described as her “lightbulb moment” in politics, Brewer traced her career back to her stint as a “young wife and mother” so detached from the community that she had to ask her husband about the strange huddle of people sitting at the front of the room at a school board meeting in Glendale, Arizona, in the early 1980s. (The Brewers, contrary to the Scorpion book jacket, were California transplants in 1970, not “lifelong Arizona residents.”)
“And he said, ‘Well, they’re the school board.’ So I said, ‘How did they get there?’ He answered, ‘They were elected by the people in the school district.’ And I said, ‘Well, I could do at least as good a job as they are, if not better.’”
Skipping any school board race, Brewer decided to make the leap straight to the state legislature. She recalled that she hand-addressed her campaign announcements from “my beach house in Rocky Point, Mexico.” In the state legislature, she picked up the nickname “Janbo” for her effort to halt a “monument to Vietnam war protests.” Her proudest legislative effort, even though the bill never passed, was an attempt to require labels for “obscene” lyrics on record albums.
Emboldened by the SB 1070 notoriety in her revived gubernatorial race, Brewer uttered some fairly obscene whoppers of her own in the course of a single month in the summer of 2010. In response to criticism that SB 1070 had the overtones of Nazi-era police enforcement, the Arizona governor had attempted to flip the accusations and nearly broke down in tears, claiming she had lost her father at the age of eleven, “knowing my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany.” Brewer had shaken her head. “It hurts,” she went on. “It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”
Not that factual experience had much to do with her claim. When a follow-up investigation found that her father had actually died ten years after the end of the war, and had not served on the European front lines but as a civilian supervisor in a naval munitions factory in Nevada, she quickly admitted that she had taken some liberties with the truth.
That little white lie vanished in the lure of dark mistruth a few days later, when Brewer charged that “the majority of illegal trespassers” from Mexico were “drug mules” and criminally involved in the drug wars. Without much evidence to support her charge, the sneer of racist association even raised the eyebrows of the most convinced Tea Partiers. But Brewer refused to back off her offensive portrayal of the hundreds of thousands in Arizona’s workforce who had kept afloat the state’s building, tourist, and service industries, and toiled in its fields. The stance scored her more national coverage.
The allegation was so ludicrous, of course, that even the conservative Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix ran an editorial rebuking the governor for making “the state look foolish.” Senator John McCain, who had joined the chorus of SB 1070 advocates and made his fair share of unfounded gaffes—telling Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, for example, that “drivers of cars with illegals in it” intentionally caused the lion’s share of car accidents in Arizona—called out Brewer’s fact-challenged comment. The head of the Border Patrol labor union countered that the “majority of the people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs.”
Brewer went for the jugular with her third tall tale in the summer of the brown scare. She made national news again when she claimed on Fox News that the Arizona deserts were littered with “bodies that had been beheaded” as part of the Mexican drug cartels’ reign of terror, which had allegedly spilled over the border. (Earlier that spring, Brewer had told a Fox News interviewer: “Arizona has been under terrorist attacks, if you will, with all of this illegal immigration that has been taking place on our very porous border.”)
Brewer’s tale even took the breath of Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, the conservative border sheriff who had railed against the Obama administration on the TV circuit. “We’re not seeing the multiple killings, beheadings and shootouts that are going on, on the other side,” he told the Arizona Republic. His county’s crime rate had been flat for nearly a decade.
After other law enforcement officials threw up their hands at the absurdity of the comment and immigrants’ rights groups and local and national media demanded to see evidence, Brewer dodged press encounters for nearly two months until she finally uttered a halfhearted clarification. “That was an error, if I said it,” she admitted.
Brewer got the last laugh, of course. The image of beheadings, real or delusional, was now a permanent part of Arizona’s immigration debate. Never one to run away from a fight, Russell Pearce covered Brewer’s back. “I can tell you there’s been 300 to 500 beheadings and dismemberments along that border,” he told the AP. “It is a national security concern, yet we’re worried about this game playing, this word-smithing.”
On election night in the fall of 2010, when the Republicans swept every statewide race and Brewer celebrated her own victory, Pearce basked in his role as a new kingpin in Arizona and national politics. “I think, out of fairness, the governor would have to admit that if it wasn’t for 1070, she wouldn’t be elected,” Pearce boasted to a Phoenix TV news reporter. “I know other folks ran on 1070. Nationally, folks ran on 1070. I had three governor candidates call me to do calls for them and support them, not because I’m Russell Pearce, but I’m the face of 1070.”
Pearce was right, of course. The long road to Brewer’s victory had been foretold in an extraordinary script of a manufactured crisis. And far from Arizona’s volatile borders, it wasn’t only true-believer nativists and opportunist politicians peddling its message.
Or, at least, that was the viewpoint of former Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck on the eve of the signing of SB 1070. He wagered that Brewer didn’t have the courage to sign the bill. Beck mused, “It would be amazing if she did. I just can’t believe I live in a country where we have to pass a law to make it illegal to be illegal.” The guffaws abounded.
Although Brewer trumped Beck on this supposed act of bravery, no one would minimize the broadcaster’s role in shaping and inflaming the right-wing narrative in the country over the past several years. His role was crucial in the fertile and ever-growing debate on Arizona’s immigration and border security policies.
And that role largely served to disseminate incorrect or misconstrued information. On February 13, 2009, Beck attempted to one-up news outlets like ABC News, blasting the urban legend of Phoenix as the “number-two city in the world for kidnapping.” Feigning disbelief, he railed, “That is staggering. I love Phoenix, Arizona. I used to live in Phoenix. I was just in Phoenix. Here’s what you’re not getting. You’re not getting in the news the truth on Mexico. I am—God bless them, man. You’re not going to find this story in the AP. You’re not going to find this story anyplace else.”
In truth, the story was everywhere, especially on Fox News—even though it wasn’t based on fact. Nearly a year before Beck’s revelation, on June 23, 2008, Sean Hannity brought Phoenix Police Sergeant Phil Roberts onto his Hannity’s America program. Hannity told listeners, “Bloodshed south of the border is spiraling out of control and the effect is being felt, right here in America. . . . Mexican drug cartels are waging an increasingly bloody battle for control of smuggling routes into the United States. . . . The violence does not stay south of the border. Two hundred miles north of the Sonora. . . . It’s a scene that plays out over and over again in Phoenix, where the kidnapping problem is exploding.” Roberts filled in the numbers, claiming, “Ninety-nine percent of all the kidnappings we are investigating are in some way related to illegal border activity.”
Despite Beck’s staggering disbelief, in the summer of 2010 the PolitiFact news service ran a check on its “Truth-O-Meter” about the assertion. It came to a resounding thump of falsehood. The fact-checkers noted: “Neither the FBI nor the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that serves as the United States’ representative to Interpol, could confirm that Phoenix has the second-highest frequency of kidnapping cases worldwide.
“Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical intelligence for Stratford, an Austin-based global intelligence company, separately chimed in: ‘According to our analysts, there is no way that Phoenix is the No. 2 city in the world for kidnapping.’”
Phoenix Police spokesperson Sergeant Tommy Thompson told PolitiFact that kidnapping statistics have “no reliable empirical data” and are “inherently under-reported, anyway.” Thompson placed such unreliable data and terms into context. “Unless you’re involved in the dope trade,” he told PolitiFact, “there’s a very very slim chance that you’ll be kidnapped.”
Nonetheless, thanks to Beck’s following, the kidnapping legend continued to swell. It became a staple in the stomp speeches of pundits, talk-show hosts, Republican and Tea Party candidates, and presidential wannabes. Interviewed at a Tea Party meeting in Los Angeles right after the signing of SB 1070, Representative Michele Bachmann justified her support for the draconian bill by claiming “innocent Americans being killed on their ranches and in their homes . . . when you have Phoenix the kidnap capital of the United States, I applaud Arizona, what they have to do to keep their people safe.”
Accepting his Annie Taylor Award on November 18, 2010, at right-wing darling David Horowitz’s “Restoration Weekend” in Palm Springs, Florida, Pearce dramatically reminded the audience that Phoenix was “second in the world in kidnapping,” adding in disgust: “Apparently that’s just collateral damage to some folks, for cheap labor and cheap votes.”
For former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, it wasn’t enough for Phoenix to be ranked as number two in the sphere of kidnapping. Speaking with Fox News On the Record host Greta Van Susteren in the wake of the SB 1070 signing, he amplified the legend with his own version of facts along the “doggone borders.” Huckabee charged: “People in Arizona were just frustrated. They’re the number-one kidnapping capital in the world. They’ve seen people murdered who were simply trying to take care of their farms and families. And in exasperation because of the complete ineptness of this federal government, they took action.”
Beck’s initial barrage didn’t stop with the “ineptness” of the federal response. He held McCain, one of his favorite Republican targets, accountable for an apparent conspiracy of a news blackout. Despite Beck’s blessing, right-wing former Representative J. D. Hayworth failed as a Tea Party insurgency candidate to dethrone McCain in the 2010 Republican primary.
Beck roared: “How did John McCain go an entire two years or not [sic] campaign trail without America showing that the second-most dangerous city to have your kids or somebody in your family kidnapped is Phoenix, Arizona?”
More than a year after Beck repeated the legend, McCain embraced the issue as his own. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on June 27, McCain issued his own outrage: “By the way, on that issue, why is it that Phoenix, Arizona, is the number-two kidnapping capital of the world? Does that mean our border’s safe? Of course not.”
Neither Beck nor McCain seemed to notice that Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon had already appeared before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science in the spring of 2009 and painted a less-than-romantic picture of the American West. “Almost every night, Phoenix police will get one or more calls,” the Phoenix New Times newspaper reported, “about an immigrant smuggled into the country being held for ransom and tortured. And for each one of the calls, Gordon said, the police department has to divert as many as 60 officers to find, rescue, and protect those kidnap victims.”
Ramping up the volume, Beck continued his crusade: “Our republic is at stake.”
In the summer of 2010, fifteen months after Beck’s first kidnap-mania broadcast, he insisted that Phoenix “has become the kidnapping capital of America, with more incidents than any other city in the world outside of Mexico City. . . . Do you think we’ve got a problem in our country?”
Arizona indeed had a kidnapping problem, but it was not the one Beck obsessed over. The truth had been kidnapped.
First, kidnapping rates in Phoenix were actually falling, though they still remained significant. Thompson, from the Phoenix police department, told PolitiFact in the summer of 2010: “There were 358 reported kidnappings in 2008 (10 fewer than reported by the LA Times, due to later reclassification of the crimes), 318 in 2009 and there were 105 from January through May 2010, he said, putting the city on track to sustain less than 300 this year.”
In the spring of 2011, the New Times fact-checked the numbers that the Phoenix police department and politicians were circulating. More important, it checked the origins of the crimes. Analyzing 264 of those 358 reported kidnappings, the New Times found that “only about one of every four incidents labeled as kidnappings in 2008 appeared connected to border-related crimes.”
End result: “Phoenix was dealing with Mexican-style kidnap-for-ransom cases an average of once a week, not daily.” Mark Spencer, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, told the New Times: “One a week still indicates a crisis. Those figures didn’t need to be inflated. Either the police management team was . . . disingenuous or grossly incompetent.”
Disingenuous or grossly incompetent. Or unabashedly dipping in the federal coffers. In her book Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, Phoenix-based journalist Terry Greene Sterling recounted the difficulty in getting any clarity on the situation. “It was clear to me,” she wrote, “that Thompson faced a public relations quandary. On one hand, his job was to spin Phoenix as a safe city. On the other hand, he had to confirm that Phoenix was the Kidnapping Capital of the United States. (At the same time, Police Chief Jack Harris was seeking federal stimulus funds by milking the Kidnapping Capital theme.)”
“Not long after Harris and Gordon’s testimonies,” Monica Alonzo wrote in the New Times, “the Phoenix Police Department applied for and received $2.45 million in federal grants, in part to combat the kidnappings.” In a subsequent “Project Eagle Eye” grant, the city scored another $750,000 by directly linking a majority of the kidnappings “to border issues of drugs and human smuggling.” Another $1.7 million poured in for “Operation Home Defense,” once again to combat “daily” kidnappings.
By the summer of 2011, Alonzo had gone straight to the root of the federal pillorying. Police Sergeant Phil Roberts, the very spokesperson who rang the bell of kidnapping lore on Hannity’s America in 2008, and who subsequently briefed every major news outlet over the next year, suddenly decided to come clean. He accused the Phoenix police of exaggerating kidnapping cases as a “golden ticket” for detectives to “build their résumés.” Alonzo noted that Roberts “started downplaying the figures he’d been touting. In his voluminous memos, Roberts claimed that Phoenix kidnapping statistics were bogus and intentionally inflated by police officials to defraud the federal government of grant money. He claimed that Phoenix had only 20 to 30 border-related kidnap cases a year, instead of the 300-plus logged in 2008.”
A federal investigation of the Phoenix police department was eventually opened and remains in progress. The police chief left. Whistleblower or hero or accomplice, Roberts underscored the gullibility of shock broadcasters like Beck and mainstream news outlets, and their willingness to hype fear over reason and raise the terror alert in our collective minds with little truth and grave consequences.
For all their inaccuracies and panic-inducing accusations, Brewer and Pearce and their media allies successfully reframed the discussion over immigration in Arizona and the United States. They deflected any criticism with ease. When an Immigration Policy Center report chastised Arizona’s new immigration law for setting off “a state of confusion” that would unravel into a patchwork of interpretations by police officers, Pearce invoked his tenure as a former chief deputy sheriff who had been shot in the line of duty.
Yet buried in an informative overview of the political posturing over borderland security and the real line of fire, an Arizona Republic article published a week after SB 1070 passed noted one important detail. For all of the “brown scare” tactics that had been unleashed, and the outcry over the potential for violent spillover from Mexico, the drug cartels, and deviant immigrants without papers, this fact remained: “According to the Border Patrol, Krentz is the only American murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant in at least a decade within the agency’s Tucson sector, the busiest smuggling route among the Border Patrol’s nine coverage regions along the U.S.-Mexican border.”
“This is a media-created event,” Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik noted in the spring media fever over SB 1070 in 2010. Unlike frequent Fox News media commentators and so-called “border” law enforcement experts, including Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, Dupnik’s jurisdiction actually covered the US-Mexico border. “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”
But there had been other murders.
Few Arizonans—few Americans, for that matter—knew that the first post–9/11 hate crime in the United States took place in Pearce’s own town of Mesa, when Frank Silva Roque set out to “shoot some towel-heads” and gunned down Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turban-clad immigrant Sikh from India, at his gas station on September 15, 2001.
The Three Sonorans blog reminded its readers of another murder that should have changed the nation, as well. Thirteen days after Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, a reportedly drunk Phoenix man approached his neighbor Juan Varela to chat about the new immigration rules; he called the man a “wetback” and told him to “hurry up and go back to Mexico, or you’re going to die.” Varela’s family traced their Arizona heritage back several generations—not that it should have mattered. After a brief argument, Varela was gunned down in cold blood.
“You know Arizona has been under terrorist attacks, if you will, with all of this illegal immigration that has been taking place on our very porous border,” Brewer argued on Fox News when asked about the criticism she had received over SB 1070. “The whole issue comes back, that we do not and will not tolerate illegal immigration bringing with it, very much so, the implications of crime and terrorism into our state.”
But would she tolerate terrorism among her own citizens? By the time Varela’s gunman was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for the murder of a US citizen—by comparison, the undocumented Mexican immigrant who shot and injured Russell Pearce’s son in the line of duty in 2004 received a fifty-one-year prison sentence—the hate-crime charges had been dropped by an all-white jury. When New Times reporter Stephen Lemons looked at the latest figures from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, he found that the outlook was dismal: “Hate crimes have been increasing steadily since 2006, when there were 60 hate crimes reported by the PPD [Phoenix Police Department] to the FBI. In 2007, there were 80. This means that from 2006 to 2010, the numbers have more than doubled, a whopping 125 percent increase.”
Lemons didn’t pull any punches: “The Grand Canyon State has a welldeserved reputation for being the ‘state of hate,’ what with its demonizing of the undocumented (who are mostly Latino) and the blanket atmosphere of intolerance that pervades Sand Land, a.k.a., ‘the white man’s last stand.’ We can thank such politicos as state Senator Russell Pearce, Governor Jan Brewer, and Attorney General Tom Horne for helping to encourage this climate of bigotry. But they are not responsible for it. They have merely capitalized on it. And it existed prior to the noxious rise in nativism here.”
Was it fair to blame incendiary rhetoric for the rise in hate crimes? Was it fair to point the finger at political and media figures who had openly incited violence?
Arizona, of course, hadn’t cornered the market on radio rage or political assassinations.
As the fear-mongering in Arizona against Mexican immigrants reached absurd levels (with “terrorist attacks” and “drug mule” accusations), a deranged man in Oakland acted on Glenn Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric against the liberal Tides Foundation and attempted an armed assault on the organization. Thankfully, his attempt was foiled.
Yet the episode, like the Varela murder that same summer, raised the question of complicity, especially when it came to the backlash against immigrants. History reminded us that Arizona was hardly a pioneer in immigration violence or rank discrimination to serve political means.
Beck’s German ancestors could have lectured the TV host on what had happened in a similarly long summer more than a century and a half ago in Louisville, Kentucky, when a nationally prominent newspaper editor repeatedly fomented what became the worst anti-immigrant massacre in US history—the murder of German and Irish Catholics on “Bloody Monday,” August 6, 1855. Beck, ironically, had launched his first political radio rant in Louisville in 1986, when American war planes rocked the compound of Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi; as a morning shock jock, he played patriotic country tunes and banged the drums for more bombardment.
A Connecticut Yankee turned Louisville Journal editor, George Prentice was considered the best-known commentator in the nation, according to the New York Times, which described him as a “bitter, unrelenting political foe [who] several times had street fights.” As the great editorial voice of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, Prentice relished attacking the “foreign hordes” of Germans and Irish that poured into the Midwest. Fearful of an election upset, he penned a series of editorials that unleashed the wrath of hired thugs on Louisville’s darkest and bloodiest day.
On the eve of the riots, Prentice declared, “Let the foreigners keep their elbows to themselves to-day at the polls. Americans are you all ready? We think we hear you shout ‘ready,’ ‘well fire!’ and may heaven have mercy on the foe.”
Fueled by rumors and booze, drunken mobs roamed the German and Irish wards that August day with rifles and muskets and pitchforks and torches, and left behind the smoldering remains of destruction, strewn and burned bodies, and at least twenty-two dead (most historians place the death toll much higher). In the process, hundreds if not thousands of immigrants and sympathizers fled Louisville.
Writing in the Washington Post after the Tides Foundation episode, columnist Dana Milbank called out Beck’s verbal warning that “it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid”:
Most every broadcast has some violent imagery: “The clock is ticking. . . . The war is just beginning. . . . Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government. . . . You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head. . . . The other side is attacking. . . . There is a coup going on. . . . Grab a torch! . . . Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers. . . . They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered. . . . They are putting a gun to America’s head. . . . Hold these people responsible.”
Beck has prophesied darkly to his millions of followers that we are reaching “a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out.”
In Louisville back in 1855, the opposing Courier newspaper similarly called out Prentice’s violence-inciting words for disgracing the great city: “We fully agree with the Journal that there is a terrible responsibility somewhere, and that no language is too strong for its condemnation. And the Journal knows full well where this responsibility belongs. To its incendiary articles continued day after day before the election, and its violent appeals on the morning of the election, articles and appeals calculated to bring into active exercise all bad passions of the human heart.”
Toward the end of his life, the famed Prentice spoke publicly about his regret in stirring anti-immigrant violence. Within a decade of the riot, Louisville had elected a German-American mayor.
Violence had always been part of Russell Pearce’s career on the front lines. His campaign website began, as in all Pearce pronouncements, with the fact that he had been shot in the line of duty. Then it reminded its readers—Dear Patriots—of Pearce’s vision of his vanguard role in the nation’s battle for freedom and secure borders against illegal immigration: “Leadership, practiced at its best, is the art and science of calling to the hearts and minds of others. It is engaging others in an enterprise of sound strategic focus, where they can experience a sense of ownership, of making a difference, of being valued and adding value.”
Beautiful words, of course, but a closer examination revealed that Pearce had plagiarized them from well-known motivational speaker and author Robert Staub’s book The Heart of Leadership.
Earlier that summer, as President Obama and congressional leaders wrangled over the debt ceiling, Pearce had turned to Facebook to express his personal outrage. “Folks,” he wrote, “if there was ever an argument for NO to raising the debt limit and YES to stop the reckless socialist spending in this Gangster Government in DC. Watch this video.”
The video showed an “elaborate welfare housing project” built for “illegal immigrants” and funded through alleged “refugee pay.” Just one problem: the five-month-old viral video—created by a far-right gadfly from Tacoma, Washington—had already been thoroughly debunked by the Tacoma News Tribune. By Sunday morning, Pearce had deleted the post from his Facebook page. In truth, he had lifted the video and comments from anti-immigrant crusader Tom Tancredo, a former US Representative and perennial right-wing candidate.
Even with the election heating up, Pearce didn’t seem concerned about associating himself with the work of fringe characters. In 2006 he had been caught circulating an article from the Holocaust-denying National Alliance, a West Virginia–based white supremacist group. In issuing an apology, Pearce claimed not to have known about the group’s views. Dismissing him as a relic, then Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano had told the Associated Press in 2006 that Pearce’s antics proved that “he’s so far to the right that his contribution to public discourse is limited.”
An examination of Pearce’s website and public statements showed that the self-proclaimed architect of Arizona’s “papers please” immigration law had regularly borrowed and presented as his own significant portions of text from the writings of hard-line white nationalists, fringe anti-immigrant activists, and others whose views fell far outside the mainstream.
Even his authorship of SB 1070 seemed to be in question.
Pearce was particularly fond of the right-wing American Constitution Party, which championed “sovereign” states’ rights and opposed immigration. In an August 31, 2010, press release that chastised the Obama administration for including SB 1070 in a United Nations report on human rights, Pearce borrowed whole paragraphs from an essay that had been written in 2009 by Tim Baldwin, a prominent Constitution Party activist (and the son of radical activist Chuck Baldwin, who previously ran for president under the party’s banner). Pearce lectured Obama with Baldwin’s work, without attribution: “Particular to the United States, the U.S. Constitution was voluntarily formed as a compact by existing sovereign states with existing state constitutions. Despite the deceptive proposition that the States were created by Congress, the States existed prior to and independent of any Congress, as confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1783 (which, by the way, was not overturned by any subsequent legal action of the states). The state’s authority is not delegated; it is inherent authority and has inherent responsibility to its citizens. The State governments, by their original constitutions, are invested with complete sovereignty.”
Those last phrases had been part of Pearce’s stump speech for the past two years.
Pearce did the same thing on his personal website. Under the tab for his three main constitutional issues—“Birth Right,” “14th Amendment,” and “Supreme Court Decisions”—he borrowed wholesale from the website writings of Fred Elbel, an anti-immigrant extremist who had been linked to various fringe nativist organizations.
According to a Southern Poverty Law Center report from 2007, Elbel “is, in effect, the house webmaster for the anti-immigration movement.” The SPLC added, “Elbel displayed his temperament during the debate over the Sierra Club’s future in 2004, when he wrote an E-mail that read: ‘Damned right. I hate ’em all—negroes, wasps, spics, eskimos, jews, honkies, krauts, ruskies, ethopans, pakis, hunkies, pollocks and marxists; there are way too many of them.’”
Called out on a number of other plagiarized texts, Pearce took down all of his borrowed work and revamped his campaign website.
More evidence then emerged that Pearce had possibly plagiarized significant parts of an outrageously inaccurate email on immigration from one of his state’s fringe lawmakers, State Senator Sylvia Allen, for an important article on the origins of SB 1070 he had supposedly written in the Social Contract Press, run by the shadowy Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) founder and board member John Tanton. The Social Contact Press, the Center for American Progress noted in a report, “publishes the views of white nationalists such as John Vinson, including a gem about how God prefers racial separation.”
Despite being called the “mastermind behind the organized anti-immigration movement” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Tanton tended to fly under the radar of most mainstream news outlets. While FAIR was “more nuanced in its use of language than other anti-immigrant groups,” the Anti-Defamation League concluded, “a close look reveals a pattern of extremist affiliations and a strategy of founding and empowering smaller groups that promote xenophobia.”
Such as in Arizona. In a special report on the “racist roots of Arizona’s immigration law” in the spring of 2010, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow examined the state’s link with FAIR, as well as Tanton’s infamous “WITAN Memo” from 1986, in which he declared, “‘To govern is to populate’ . . . In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?” Seven years later, Tanton wrote to a colleague, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority and a clear one at that.”
In the 2010 summer issue of the Social Contract Press, Pearce’s name appeared as the author of the article “Arizona Takes the Lead on Illegal Immigration Enforcement.” In the article, Pearce opines on “why we need SB 1070” and on the need to follow the rule of law. He rails against “leftists here and in DC” and asks, “How long will it be before we will be just like Mexico? We have already lost our language; everything must be printed in Spanish. We have already lost our history since it is no longer taught in our schools. And we have lost our borders.”
To support his argument, Pearce reports unsubstantiated evidence from a recent State Senate hearing he had sponsored, including testimony from one rancher who had found “17 dead bodies and two Qur’an bibles” on his property and the unverified claim that “in the last few years, 80 percent of our law enforcement personnel who have been killed or wounded were done by an illegal alien.”
However, earlier that summer, on May 3, Sylvia Allen—who made national news in 2009 for her comment that uranium mining was safe because “the earth was 6,000 years old”—had sent out a very public email explaining her views on SB 1070. The email was so ridden with factual errors that one Democratic state senator published a response in an attempt to clarify Allen’s wild claims.
In her email, Allen also reported that “17 dead bodies and two Koran bibles” had been found on a rancher’s property, and also stated without any factual evidence that “in the last few years 80% of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal.” In the spring of 2012, Allen would introduce a state Senate bill to fund an armed volunteer militia on the US-Mexico border, in order to stem the tide of Hezbollah insurgents pressing at Arizona’s gates.
In fact, Allen’s email and Pearce’s most important article on the backstory of his support for SB 1070 were nearly identical. Did she plagiarize from Pearce, or did he borrow again from her work? Or perhaps neither Tea Party legislator actually had a hand in drafting the document? That question also applied to Pearce’s self-professed “authorship” of SB 1070.
The day after Governor Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by Kris Kobach, a former adviser to Bush-era Attorney General John Ashcroft and a well-known anti-immigrant advocate who would eventually be elected secretary of state in Kansas. Kobach was no stranger to Arizona. In 2006, he had served as legal counsel for the state law that made immigrant smuggling a crime. Five years later, Kobach signed on to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign as the top immigration adviser.
As Stephen Lemons noted in the Phoenix New Times, Kobach was also “the proponent of a near-mystical legal concept; that local cops have the inherent authority to enforce all federal statutes.” Lemons mused, “Most legal scholars find this idea laughable, but folks like [Maricopa County Sheriff Joe] Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce cling to it like a life preserver in choppy waters.” Kobach, in fact, had trained Arpaio’s officers in immigration law.
At a rally later that summer for Kobach’s successful campaign for secretary of state in Kansas, Arpaio made a special appearance and hailed Kobach’s role as one of the authors of SB 1070.
In keeping with Pearce’s other favorite authors to plagiarize, Kobach had also represented FAIR and its Immigration Reform Law Institute in various court challenges.
“Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration,” Kobach wrote in the New York Times. “Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America.” In a final jab at the president, he added, “President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with ‘comprehensive immigration reform’—meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical alien is guilty of breaking many of them. . . . Is it any wonder the Arizona legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?”
“As a senator in a state on the front lines of the illegal invasion, I see first-hand the damage being done to our state and our country,” Pearce had concluded in the Social Contract essay. “It is clear we cannot wait for the feds to secure the border or to enforce the laws that are already on the books even as the violence and cost continue to soar for our citizens.”
The time had come, as Kobach wrote, for Arizona to draw the line. The nation—and Arizona voters—didn’t know, however, that another lobbyist had already made the first draft.
National Public Radio broke the story in the fall of 2010. Combing hundreds of pages of “campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records,” NPR reporters discovered the paper trail of a private prison lobby effort to draft and pass SB 1070.
“The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before,” NPR reported. “And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.”
Within days, noting that Brewer’s campaign chair and former deputy chief of staff were former or present lobbyists for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a report from Phoenix CBS News questioned whether the Arizona governor had signed the bill with “ulterior motives.” With the exclusive hold on the federal contracts for prison detainment in Arizona, CCA had raked in $11 million a month from the state of Arizona, according to the report, “and that, if SB-1070 is successfully implemented, its profits would be significantly padded as it would take responsibility for imprisoning immigrants arrested by Arizona police.” According to other reports, “a significant portion” of CCA revenues came from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.
The NPR investigation found that it had been Pearce, not Brewer, who shepherded the idea to a hotel room in Washington, DC, during a special meeting with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy lobby front of various multinational corporations and conservative legislators. CCA lobbyists took the hotel elevator ride to SB 1070 glory, as well.
“I did a presentation,” Pearce said on NPR. “I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, ‘Yeah.’”
With the assistance of the ALEC lobbyists, including the prison representatives, Pearce watched as the language for SB 1070 took shape.
“Four months later,” NPR reported, “that model legislation became, almost word for word, Arizona’s immigration law. They even named it. They called it the ‘Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.’”
“Maybe it is too late to save America,” Pearce had concluded in his essay on SB 1070 for the Social Contract Press. “Maybe we are not worthy of freedom anymore. But as an elected official I must try to do what I can to protect our Constitutional Republic. Living in America is not a right just because you can walk across the border. Being an American is a responsibility, and it comes through respecting and upholding the Constitution, the law of our land which says what you must do to be a citizen of this country. Freedom is not free.”
With the border fence in the background, Russell Pearce stood in his blue jeans and tucked-in red shirt, microphone in hand, giving his stump speech at a Tea Party rally. American flags dangled from the rust-color fence. The makeshift stage sat on the ranch property of Glenn Spencer, a California transplant who had created the shadowy American Border Patrol, a conspiratorial vigilante front. It was a hot day in August, but something else had set Pearce ablaze in the summer of 2010.
“Enough is enough is enough,” he told the crowd, perhaps as many as a thousand Tea Partiers, border watchers, and an assortment of gun-toting militiamen and -women from around the region. “We’ll take back our country, and it’s one state at a time, and it starts here in Arizona.”
It also started with President Obama. With former Representative J. D. Hayworth, a Tea Party challenger of Senator John McCain, lurking on the stage, Pearce delivered his verdict on the White House: “This is the first time in the history of the United States that a president of the United States has sided with a foreign government to sue the citizens of the United States for enforcing our laws. Never has it happened before. I believe it’s impeachable.”
Pearce sucked in his barrel chest with the cheers. He delivered his jokes. He choked on the emotional parts—he had a finger shot off, he reminded the crowd, and he had been shot through the chest. He had been in the immigration battle for twenty-five years, and he couldn’t rest yet. The country was on its last legs because illegal immigrants were “going to destroy the republic.” Arizona needed to protect itself against an “invasion coming across the border.”
With a nod to his Tenth Amendment revisionists, Pearce repeated his states’ rights mantra: “Again, it’s not we the people of the United States. It’s we the people of the sovereign states. These rights that belong to the states are inherent in the Constitution. We have an inherent right to enforce these laws. . . . That’s exactly what 1070 is about.”
In fact, he told the crowd, SB 1070 was Arizona’s and America’s success, and thanks to their efforts it was being talked about from coast to coast. Then Pearce quieted and dropped his voice into that crusty baritone of a prophet readying to deliver the message. He set the stage of those dark moments in the American Revolution when only a “ragtag army, mostly made of up congregations, led by ministers,” had any faith in America. His words made the crowd look around and embrace their prophetic role as border guardians.
“Nobody could have expected them to prevail and win that war,” Pearce continued, dramatically. “Nobody. But they did. And I’m here to tell you I believe because we had divine intervention. God had a hand in the making of this republic, the making of this America.”
The crowd roared. “What’s it gonna take to wake people up?” Pearce asked.
Much to Pearce’s surprise, the answer to that question would take a decidedly different twist.