But, in the great struggle now unfolding before us for our nation’s future, it seems to me these two quintessential Americans are worth thinking about in light of each other.

One is Steve Jobs.

The other is Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jobs, of course, is in the headlines because of his decision to step down and retire from Apple Computer, the company he co-founded, from which he later got fired, and to which he subsequently returned and resurrected.

Dr. King is in the news because of the opening of the King monument in Washington, D.C.

Other than being in the news at the same time, why might we think of these two very different Americans together?

I think they are icons of two essential but different and opposing aspects of American life. One is the individual and the other is our social reality.

It’s these two aspects of American life, the dignity and potential of individuals living free, and the social reality, the rules by which we all agree to live and to which we all submit, that has always caused tension in American life. And this tension is becoming particularly acute today.

Jobs is, of course, the essence of what so many see what America is about. The rugged, free and creative individual. The intrepid entrepreneur.

His success story is a story of bucking the establishment and being his own man. As a college dropout, he and his colleague Steve Wozniak, with whom he started Apple, brought new technology to the American people that not only revolutionized our lives, but also caused the corporate giant that supposedly controlled the computer business, IBM, to change itself.

King, on the other hand, is about America’s social reality. What are the rules we live by and what are the contours of the field of life on which rugged American individualists share and live their lives?

The American focus on the individual sometimes causes us to lose focus that man is a social creature as well as an individual. No man, in those famous words, is an island.

When 20-year-old Jobs labored in his garage, building the personal computer, he was building a product to serve others. And those whose lives he made so much better as result of his labor and creativity compensated him and made him a wealthy man.

As critical as it is for the individual human spirit to be free to create, that individual agrees to live with others by rules in a society that hopefully permits this to happen.

American history has been about the ongoing challenge of refining our understanding and acceptance of the eternal truths that enable men and women to live together freely and creatively.

Dr. King played a critical role in moving this nation along in this process. He helped the nation understand that these truths remained blurred if some, for bigoted reasons, could not participate and contribute. All suffer for the omission of even a few.

King pushed the nation to turn its eyes to the heavens so that truth might be perceived more clearly and, as result, our freedom enhanced.

This is our struggle in 2011. How do we understand the truths, the rules, by which we live better so that our social reality — our laws and our government — enhances rather than stifles our freedom and creativity?

And so we should also note that Jobs was born to a college student, an unwed mother, who put him up for adoption. It was 1955, some 18 years before Roe v Wade.

Let us be thankful this young woman brought her child into the world. Where would we be today if not?

We still have many rules to fix.

“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years.  Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned.  My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”  Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?”  Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.

As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.”  In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves.  This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.  Why is it fatal?

First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education.  Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum.  A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically.  Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.

Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades.  And what is this ethic?  The elite must decide for the sheep.

Progressivism argues that man should play G-d, organizing society as he sees fit, “nudging” people as Cass Sunstein advocates towards making the right decision of a governmentally-defined set of choices and socially engineering swaths of society.

Never mind that central planning fails given that the planners can never make the decisions that self-reliant and self-interested individuals acting freely would make, and that central planners lack the specialized information of the millions of actors that make up the economy.  Never mind that even if you don’t buy this argument on theoretical grounds, every nation guided by central planning has ended in mass poverty, mass genocide or both.

The manifest defects of central planning are not nearly as bad as its dehumanizing nature.  For the progressive central planner is a regressive tyrant.  What he seeks to do by regulation is only different than what the master does by the whip in his coyness.  The progressive enslaves as he believes that there is no value in the individual — there are only masses of malleable animals that must be shaped and coddled by paternalistic wise men in government.  Egalitarianism must reign.  Natural differences, desires and ambitions must be discarded for the greater good.  Social welfare is but a small price to pay for the fat cat, selfish innovators, entrepreneurs, job creators and investors who subsidize it.  Forget about the fact that practically every good and service around us was provided by the very system the progressives seek to destroy, to the disproportionate detriment of the lower classes.

Yet the question is never posed, is such a system moral?  Should you by virtue of living in America be forced by law to live to support your fellow man through government?  Should you be an indentured servant for months each year in effect working for the government middle man so that he can bribe and satisfy his constituents?  Should the politician be able to compel you by law to plan your retirement by paying into an insolvent Ponzi scheme like social security; to at the point of the gun make you cut a check each year for failing public schools that teach the very principles to the nation’s youth that most disgust you?  And is it moral that these progressives who would be the first to attack religious advocates impose their own leftist religion through the involuntary mechanism of brute government force?

The progressive philosophy, an economic failure, is also a massive blight on our souls.  For it enchains man to his fellow man and impoverishes all of society by taking away man’s individualism, his sense of responsibility and his self-worth.  The progressive state dehumanizes and demoralizes man, leaving him an apathetic and impotent slave.  There is no compassion in such a system.  There is no morality in such a system.  All that there is is man ruling over his fellow man, throwing bread crumb benefits at various faceless voting blocs unable to see through such a scheme after so many years of socialist ideological subversion.  Shame on the progressives for their disdain for their fellow man, their hubris in thinking that they are right to rule over him and their disgusting glee in molding society for their own political gain.  And shame on us for sanctioning such a system.

With these words I began the fifth chapter of my recently released book, Liberty Rising, A Treatise on the Restoration of Our Constitutional Republic.  I repeat them to begin this article to remind all Americans that there has always been a third party among us, and that party is we the people.  The United States of America, more than ever before in our history since the founding, needs its people to rally in the defense of liberty, self-reliance, individualism and the real concept of American Exceptionalism.  Our great nation stands at a dangerous divide.  On one side stands the America that in 234 years has become the greatest nation in the history of man.  On the other side stands a downward spiral toward tyranny and a failed republic.

Since the Democrats took control of the Congress on January 1, 2007 and then with Barack Obama becoming President on January 20, 2009, single party rule in America became a self-appointed ruling class and began to dictate to the American people, against the will of the people.  I have no excuses for the establishment Republicans who, in the years immediately prior, lost their way and set the stage for the assumption of this elitist group of power-mad progressives who believe that their ends justify their means.  The stimulus legislation, the health care debate and resultant law, the House version of cap and trade legislation and countless un-elected special advisors and czars who were appointed to positions of power without even the consent of the Senate, are all examples of how in just 20 months the state has placed itself above the people in an arrogantly un-America fashion.

The response, however, has been typically American.

People across the country grouped together and began to speak among their family members, friends and neighbors.  They then began to speak to others outside their inner circles, and then to the public at large.  They found out that they were not alone and that their numbers were legion.  They formed study groups, activist groups and staged rallies.  They phoned, e-mailed and wrote letters to their House Members and to their Senators.  They visited the offices of these elected officials and they demanded to be heard.  They marched on Washington and in the streets and on the squares of thousands of towns and cities across the United States.

Many became part of the TEA Party Movement, many acted independently.  All were mocked and smeared as being “fringe” and in some cases branded without any evidence as “racist.”  The people were no longer silent; were no longer going to be talked down to; and were no longer going to accept having their will subordinated to the political agenda of those holding elected office.

We witnessed the power of a people united in the 2009 elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey with the victories of Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie respectively.  We admired the incredible resolve of a people of liberty in the January 2010 special Senatorial election in Massachusetts with Scott Brown’s victory.  Recent primary-elections revealed a shift in the people’s focus from the Democrats to the establishment Republicans.  The message is clear, if an elected official has acted against the will of the people then that official will be removed from office by the people.

The November 2^nd Congressional election is only weeks away and those in power are fearful.  They are fearful because they have demonstrated that in this time of financial difficulty and joblessness for the American people, the only job they care about is theirs.  The actions of this Congress and this administration resulted in unsustainable growth of the central government, run-away entitlement commitments, intrusion of government deep into every aspect of the lives of citizens, deciding on politics over victory relative to our brave men and women at war and a shameful display of incompetence in foreign affairs.  In less than two years their actions have humankind visualizing a world without America.

Our third party, which is not the TEA Party (though the Movement has helped to make many Americans active and has helped to educate many more), is the people!  The people are in motion and there is hope for our nation.  The Republican Party reacted with their Pledge for America and they have the basics correct: reduce the size and reach of government; reduce spending; repeal the horrible health care law and replace it with common sense health insurance reform, support private sector oriented economic policies of reduced taxes and un-obstructive regulations and promote individualism and self-reliance.

American Exeptionalism will return, not from the hand of government but from the will and actions of the people.  We will once again see to it that the people will take their rightful place as the highest element of society in the United States of America.

Robert Allen Bonelli is the author of “Liberty Rising,” an accomplished business executive, public speaker and involved citizen.

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

D’Souza’s thesis certainly goes a long way toward defining a thread of consistency in the policies and priorities of this president. But “anticolonialism” is a heterogeneous package of economic, political, and—above all—moral ideas that deserves closer inspection.

It is clear that Barack Obama abhors the core founding principles of individual self-responsibility, personal self-realization, and constitutionally protected individual rights, upon which our historically exceptional nation was built. He shares with America’s adversaries the view that our individualist ethos and worldview is selfishly immoral.

Thus, the consistent thrust of his agenda, foreign and domestic, has been to humiliate America as an exceptional nation and to punish its exceptional achievers, by imposing the principle of coercive, egalitarian leveling on the American culture and economy.

Evidence for this objective can be found throughout his life, statements, and career. It is championed in the works of his intellectual mentors: his father, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Saul Alinsky; in his personal associations—including the endless procession of anti-American leftists (Wright, Ayers, Jarrett, Jones, et al.) who have pockmarked his life, career, and administration; in his soak-the-rich economic policies; in repeated, blunt declarations from his hand-picked officials, advisers, and spokesmen.

Obama seeks to tax and regulate into leveled oblivion the exceptional achievers in our midst (“spread the wealth around”); to transform formerly competitive, entrepreneurial industries—banks, financial services, medicine, insurance, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, sciences, etc.—into docile, tightly regulated, corporatist public utilities; to accelerate everyone’s dependency on government (e.g., ObamaCare); to undermine, through environmental laws, economic restrictions, and ubiquitous behavioral regulations, the means of individual private travel (the automobile), of individual self-defense (guns), and of individual financial self-sufficiency (independent wealth); to gut America’s ability to defend herself (unilateral military cutbacks, unguarded borders, enabling Islamic radicalism, affording legal rights to terrorists, etc.); to betray vital Western alliances (Britain, Israel); to stop America from operating unilaterally in its own interests (treaties to erode national sovereignty); and to bow—both symbolically and literally—before foreign tyrants.

Connecting these dots and others, we find that they form a vector that points toward an overarching, unifying objective: to humble, even humiliate, exceptional individuals and our exceptional nation, so that arrogant Americans no longer think of themselves and their nation as better than anyone or anyplace else. As Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru put it:

The president has signaled again and again his unease with traditional American patriotism. As a senator he notoriously made a virtue of not wearing a flag pin. As president he has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time. And while acknowledging that America has been a force for good, he has all but denied the idea that America is an exceptional nation. Asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism during a European trip last spring, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exception­alism.” (Is it just a coincidence that he reached for examples of former hegemons?) . . . .

Obama has frankly and correctly described [his] project as to change the country fundamentally. On those occasions when Obama places himself in the con­text of American history, he identifies himself with the post-Wil­sonian tradition—with, that is, the gradual replacement of the Founders’ design. He seeks to accelerate it.

Indeed. With the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama is the only American president to truly despise, at the deepest philosophical level, what America uniquely stands for—which is why he stresses that he aims to be a “transformational president.” He has complained that the Framers of the Constitution failed to allow for “redistributive change.” Andrew C. McCarthy summarized Obama’s frustration with constitutional limits on government power:

As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties”—one that says only what government “can’t do to you.” For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government “must do on your behalf” (emphasis added).

Fortunately, battered remnants of the United States Constitution still stand in the path of the anti-American president’s agenda of radical “change.” A clear majority in the polls fundamentally oppose the vision he would impose upon them. The president now faces a rising rebellion of millions of Americans, led by the Tea Party movement—a grassroots revolt that he and his media lapdogs have struggled, desperately but unsuccessfully, to defeat.

Barack Obama’s inherited dreams of transforming America from history’s individualist exception into a humbled, ordinary, unexceptional socialist state still remain unrealized. His campaign to vandalize the American legacy can yet be reversed—but only if we retain the will and acquire the intellectual clarity to make our voices heard and our votes counted.

Democrats and Republicans shake their heads and wonder, how could our President pursue such divisive and unpopular policies?  What is the rationale for his decisions?  Is he incompetent?  Is he naive?

The answer is none of the above.

I have said before and I will say again, Barack Obama does not share the values of Americans.  His vision is completely anathema to an America based on individualism, private property rights and Judeo-Christian morality.

When one argues that Barack Obama is merely mistaken in his economic program, they completely discount the notion that he knows exactly what he is doing and that he has been 100% successful in achieving his policies and their intended ends, means and ends that any objective viewer would realize were insane.  After all, an economy is nothing more than the collection of mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges of labor and the fruits of labor.  Anything that impedes one’s labor, or the trading of its fruits is necessarily bad for the economy.  Hence, almost everything a government does to try to stimulate an economy, impeding the natural spontaneous harmony of such a system necessarily postpones any recovery.

We were in major trouble with unsustainable public and private debt prior to this President, coupled with a completely insolvent financial system, a destined to fail monetary system and numerous stagnant businesses sucking up economic resources.  A real financial restructuring would have taken significant time, and even the most “fiscally conservative” President and Congress would not have been able to move enough roadblocks out of the way to make this recovery painless or quick.  I question whether or not anything could change the direction of the economy in the long run, save for a collapse that would force us to let the free market work and liquidate the welfare state.  But this President ensures that there will not even be a chance for recovery for many many years, regardless of who the next President is.

And it is all by design.

If you are Barack Obama, your plans are working perfectly.  You are driving the economy into the ground, fueling turmoil in the Middle East, weakening our nuclear defenses and supporting the enemies of civilization, while lining the pockets of your constituency and pushing us towards such great crises that a society already addicted to government may be forced to its knees wrongfully begging for an even greater paternal one.  If you doubt my argument that the American people are still not awake enough to cause any meaningful change, consider that for all the talk of a backlash against this government, if you look at the Republicans that will take over Congress, almost none of them them would truly be willing to do the things necessary to make our government solvent, break the chains off of our private sector and defend us against our enemies and their abettors, starting with calling them by name, not a tactic like terrorism.

This brings us to Barack Obama’s stance on the Ground Zero mosque.  Months ago I argued that Islam is not a religion in the traditional sense.  I argued that as Islam is a theo-political system, it should not deserve the same Constitutional protections as other religions with a strictly spiritual component.  In effect, to support Islam in this country would be to support a political system incompatible with ours, and intolerant of our pluralistic Judeo-Christian society.  To promote Islamic institutions would be to weaken America’s freedom, not strengthen it.  For Islam and America cannot coexist because America is a threat to the Ummah; us infidels would have to be converted by the sword or forced to live as second-class citizens under Islamic law, like Spaniards once did in Cordoba.  Hence the Cordoba Initiative.

Yet Barack Obama consistently sides with Muslims; makes it a point to bow down to Muslims at every turn and has since the start of his Presidency and throughout his public life.  He also studied in the madras as a child, has had the backing of major players in the Muslim community during his academic and political career and attended Reverend Wright’s church which parrots the same narrative as Imams worldwide.  His true colors showed when he made the Ground Zero mosque a national issue by supporting it.  Even Howard Dean has gone on record as questioning what Barack Obama could have been thinking politically.  Of course he found it to be a political disaster, lest he should care about its destructiveness on principle.

But though Barack Obama knew the firestorm he would create, he did not care.  He could not help himself when it came to something he truly believed in, jumping to say something unpopular to the American people but instinctive for him.  Just like he did not care about creating fertile soil for economic growth, just like he does not care in my opinion about defending American lives as reflected by his policies.  And when he says inflammatory things about white cops and business executives and mosques that make political pundits shake their heads in wonder, it is because he is showing who he is, and where his passions lie.

This President is a principled politician, but he supports principles that are crushing the American people.  This is the most destructive President since FDR, and that it is intentionally so makes it all the more demoralizing.  Until more people realize this, we won’t even have a fighting chance.  We are going to be poorer, weaker and less likely to ever rekindle the flame of freedom in this nation, and I fear that our differences with our political opposition will prove irreconcilable.

Instead of letting individuals determine how best to allocate land, labor and capital based upon their own subjective values and aspirations, the government in its self-attributed divine wisdom believes it is morally right for it to squander other people’s money.  Apparently, we are not ourselves capable of deciding how to dispense with our property, and deal with the consequences of such actions good or bad.

Then again, in our “social”ist democracy we feel it proper that government take care of our health and our retirement under the auspice of the “public good.”  So what of a little more state paternalism?  To that I say, the so-called public good is a public bad because when the collective supplants the individual, society fails.  If people would rather have the government take care of such things then take care of them themselves, then the best we can hope for is that the government not monopolize such goods and services but allow for unobstructed private competition.

In any event, to ascribe the word “sector” to the limitless Unconstitutional and unnecessary public “businesses” is pure subterfuge.  The plunder sector is the only accurate title for what the government does outside its strict Constitutional scope.

Any and all government “stimulus” retards growth because it removes current and future wealth from its producers and gives it to central planners who are not subject to the market but to voters, a significant part of which do not pay for the bread and circuses they demand, sadly trading their liberty for a false economic security that ends in the collapse of the welfare state while stripping real job creators of their property and the incentive to create.  In case the moral argument and this brief economic one do not suit you, I suggest reading and sending to as many people you can Henry Hazlitt’s simple classic “Economics in One Lesson,” and specifically this chapter on public works, which explains the myriad economic fallacies pervading the nation with regard to public works.

Indeed, the only jobs that Barack Obama will “create,” will not be jobs in the traditional sense but make-work undertakings that the private sector, i.e. sovereign, voluntarily acting individuals would never put their money behind.  And you can bet they will be union jobs, paying above market wages certainly making inefficient use of the land, labor and capital that real businesses would best make use of were not our whole economy being either hyper-regulated or socialized.

A politician cannot create jobs but only remove impediments to their creation, allowing for innovation, entrepreneurship and investments through creating a stable legal framework, applied equally and to all and steeped in maximal individual liberty, the sanctity of contracts and the protection of property rights.

The above addresses the “cannot” and “will not” parts of my title.   But what of the last part?  Would an American President intentionally sabotage an economic recovery?

If one is to objectively look at the actions of this administration, one can come to no other conclusion.  Nauseating as it is, to review, this administration has abrogated private contracts, shifted private losses onto the public, socialized or de facto socialized major swaths of the economy, hyper-regulated the other parts of the economy, vilified private enterprises and individuals, in so doing added crushing taxes both direct and indirect in looting the Treasury and printing money, designated certain groups as being “protected” over others (liberty and justice for some apparently), attacked our judiciary and overall created an environment averse to all of the things that a politician interested in allowing for a prosperous and thriving economy would attempt to ensure.

Barack Obama is the anti-fertilizer to our rich economic soil.  And unlike FDR, terrible and tyrannical as he was with regard to the economy during his tenure, this President sees the evil in the world as good and the good as evil.  His only saving grace may be that his unparalleled hubris may like so many before him be his undoing.

But I digress.  If you were Barack Obama, why would you want to ensure that the economy remain crippled?  For one thing, this creates crisis.  Obama can blame the private sector for not creating jobs and argue that the public sector must lend an even bigger hand.  This will mean for him more hungry people to demand welfare or government jobs so anyone who wishes can be gainfully employed by the state and receive government union benefits.

Private industry failing also means lower tax revenues which this administration will argue means that taxes must be increased on the rich, further attacking wealth producers and creating larger and larger deficits.

All of this is essentially a Cloward-Piven type strategy.  What is unclear however is what Barack Obama’s end is, given the horrendous ends of all socialist states.

An objective observer knows that even if we had the most staunchly free market administration in office today, with a congenial Congress and Judiciary, the fiscal mess that is our welfare state would be difficult to clean up, and our private economic restructuring would be disruptive.  People generally simply do not seem to have the stomach for having all of their “benefits,” another misnomer if I have ever seen one, cut; they cannot make the connection that it is the “welfare” that itself is poison, as I have previously argued.  They also do not seem to realize the lesson from history that the private sector would return to prosperity relatively quickly as we did during the Recession of 1920 and all of our preceding ones were the government to get out of the way.

But if Barack Obama is trying to implode the system, and he is to succeed in doing so, how does he know that the people of this nation will not revolt?  Does he assume that people will simply demand a government that makes all of their decisions for them?  Perhaps he knows that this is a failing battle, but he realizes that if we manage to teeter for years on the edge, at least he will have accelerated the decline for fundamental transformation, swelling the public payroll and finances, sufficiently hobbling the private sector, weakening our morale and making people exponentially more reliant on government.  Even if he cannot push all the way to totalitarian collectivism, he can still get us close enough that is almost impossible to repeal massive statism.

Until I see any evidence to the contrary, after the nightmarish first year and a half of this administration, I will confidently argue that Obama and his cohorts are intentionally crushing our economy.  I will confidently argue that this administration cannot, will not and has no desire to create the conditions necessary for job creation.  All we can do in such times is be the biggest, baddest loyal opposition this nation has ever seen.

More importantly, the premise that the the Arizona immigration law is unjust, and that thus the Suns should wear these jerseys to stand in solidarity with Hispanics against it is a flawed one.

As Byron York has been adeptly arguing in recent days, the Arizona law is a carefully crafted one.  According to Mr. York it is only

the criticism of the law that is over the top, not the law itself.

The law requires police to check with federal authorities on a person’s immigration status, if officers have stopped that person for some legitimate reason and come to suspect that he or she might be in the U.S. illegally. The heart of the law is this provision: “For any lawful  contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…”

Critics have focused on the term “reasonable suspicion” to suggest that the law would give police the power to pick anyone out of a crowd for any reason and force them to prove they are in the U.S. legally. Some foresee mass civil rights violations targeting Hispanics.

What fewer people have noticed is the phrase “lawful contact,” which defines what must be going on before police even think about checking immigration status. “That means the officer is already engaged in some detention of an individual because he’s violated some other law,” says Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri Kansas City Law School professor who helped draft the measure. “The most likely context where this law would come into play is a traffic stop.”

As far as “reasonable suspicion” is concerned, there is a great deal of case law dealing with the idea, but in immigration matters, it means a combination of circumstances that, taken together, cause the officer to suspect lawbreaking. It’s not race — Arizona’s new law specifically says race and ethnicity cannot be the sole factors in determining a reasonable suspicion.

Mr. Kobach quickly dispels these and other misconceptions about the law in a recent New York Times Editorial.  His arguments are as follows:

On the notion that it is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them:

…since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime.

On the charge of racial profiling:

Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

On the issue that states should not get involved with immigration:

…the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted.

So when Suns owner Robert Sarver says (and I take him at is word and assume he is not just trying to curry favor with his Hispanic fan base, perhaps naively) that “However intended, the result of passing the law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question…and Arizona’s already struggling economy will suffer even further setbacks at a time when the state can ill-afford them,” one has to wonder if he understands the law.

First, what equal rights and protections under the law exactly are being violated?  Second, are we to grant equal rights and protections under the law that serves lawful citizens to those who by virtue of being in the United States illegally are anathema to the law?  Third, has Robert Sarver considered the seen and unseen effects of removing illegal immigrants from Arizona? Guess what, the great thing about markets is that they are flexible – people will fill the jobs left open by illegal immigrants at the right price and legally, and Arizona’s prisons will be less full, law enforcement less burdened, properties and persons less threatened and people able to spend less time and money worrying about security, and more on the business of Arizona.

And when Steve Nash says, “I think the law is very misguided. I think it’s, unfortunately, to the detriment of our society and our civil liberties. I think it’s very important for us to stand up for things we believe in. As a team and as an organization, we have a lot of love and support for all of our fans. The league is very multicultural. We have players from all over the world, and our Latino community here is very strong and important to us,” does he consider the detriment to Arizonan society of the violence and economic destruction created by some of its illegal immigrants?  Does he consider all of the immigrants waiting their turn to lawfully enter our country who are left in the dark and cut in line given our current federal policy and practice?

When Suns executive and former player Steve Kerr says, “…what we’re focusing on is we want to celebrate the diversity that exists in our state and the diversity that exists in the NBA, make sure that people understand that we know what’s going on and we don’t agree with the law itself,” one wonders how deluded he must be.  How does wearing a ‘Los Suns’ jersey in protest of a just law that protects American citizens show that you understand what’s going on, and on what basis do you disagree with such a law?  Perhaps if Mr. Kerr were to speak with Arizonans living on the border he might feel differently.

Regarding the multiculturalism and diversity that Kerr and Nash speak to, if they believe a basketball game the right arena for promoting these ideals, is it proper to do so in support of those breaking our laws?  Why must there always be a race or ethnicity delineation?  Are sports about diversity for the sake of diversity, or winning with a roster which may incidentally consist of  people of different backgrounds?  Aren’t we a post-racial society?  Why not just celebrate athletic excellence, the amazing acts of the most important minority of the individual and Americanism at sporting events.

Frankly, the bottom line is that people in the “mainstream” are resorting to straw man, ad hominem attacks against those who support this law, vilifying them largely on the basis of the color of their skin, not the content of their character.  After all, what white middle-aged Tea Partier isn’t a racist.  The folks attacking this law are not looking at its substance because it does not fit their narrative, and because it would require rational thought as opposed to emotional reaction.  And so while normally it would not be necessary to pay heed to the remarks and actions of NBA players and executives on political issues, because they made such a public misguided statement in the face of deeply concerned Americans, I believe they deserve a reasoned response.

To be sure, there are illegal immigrants who contribute positively to society, and US citizens who do not, and Americans should want the best and brightest from abroad to come to our country.  But the interests of American citizens must come first, and our citizens should not have to cower; they should boldly assert that this is so.

We can have a debate on immigration – about what kind of people we want coming into our country, about the welfare state itself that leads to the economic burden on and of our native and immigrant population and about our drug laws which make trafficking lucrative and create crime, but it is a travesty that so many are attacking this immigration law without realizing its equity and efficacy in helping protect the life, liberty and property of Arizonans and more broadly, Americans.