Beck is about policy, and you're going to get no-goodnik supporters of just about any policy. I support the same policies as Beck, except that I think immigration needs to be reduced to less than half a million. I do have to say I don't care what Beirich or anyone in SPLC says. Their mission is to shut up their opponents rather than to wrestle with the ideas.

It's simple economics that too much of any resource devalues that resource, and mass immigration is giving the US far too many low/no-skilled workers, preventing those workers from getting ahead. Many of those workers are Black. I come from a family that has always supported worker movements. My maternal grandmother wrote her PhD thesis on labor relations (1915--six years before she could vote). After graduating from college, my father worked in a textile firm in Manhattan to make ends meet. He knew he wasn't going to stay there but he worked hard to try to organize a union. Alas, there was too much turnover in the firm.

***Too much*** immigration has been swelling this country's GINI quotient for the last 50 years, giving us a hollowed out middle class, and a country where half of our fellow citizens can't afford $400 for a major repair on the car that gets them to work or for a medical emergency. These people lead miserable lives because they have to spend so much energy on keeping access to their jobs, on child care, on making their money go as far as possible, etc. Many of these people are the descendants of slavery. I want the kind of change that can give them decent lives.

We also have a population and consumption level that is around four times what would be sustainable. Ever hear of ecosystem services? These are services we need--fertile soil, pollination, clean water and air, lumber, disease prevention, and many others. As John Holdren, who would later become President Obama's Science Advisor told us in a class at Berkeley in 1975, it would cost far more to replace ecosystem services with artificial services than they cost us.

At the time I took that class, tick borne diseases were a very small problem. That has changed, and the thing that has changed it is the spread of humans on the land, which has interfered with the forces that kept ticks in check.

We are going to have internal climate refugees over the next several decades, people fleeing California and the west as the fires get worse for places like northern Minnesota and New England and New York. California will likely cease being the breadbasket that it's been for most of this century as it dries up. The Colorado river is drying up as the population of its watershed keeps growing. Should we really be adding two million annually--one New York State equivalent per decade under these circumstances? (Those figures from the Census Dept.) Do we want to become like India and China?