Immigration is all Satan’s fault

April 29, 2007

To fully appreciate the ideology of large parts of the Republican Party, one needs to look past Capitol Hill and consider what state GOP officials are up to. Take Utah, for example.

Several top Republican officials in Utah — including the lieutenant governor, the state attorney general, and U.S. Rep. Chris Cannon — gathered yesterday for an annual GOP county convention where attendees debated a resolution on immigration. State Sen. Howard Stephenson (R) urged activists to oppose the measure, arguing, “This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party.”

He’s wrong about the ideology of the media, but he’s right about the negative attention.

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan’s minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won’t do.”

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said. […]

Republican officials then allowed speakers to defend and refute the resolution. One speaker, who was identified as “Joe,” said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil. Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald, said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because “they are not going to become Republicans….”

These folks do not appear to be … what’s the word … reasonable.

I’m not just mentioning this to make Republican activists appear foolish, though there’s some entertainment in doing so. In Utah, this appears to be the GOP mainstream. These weren’t fringe activists railing on some obscure radio show; this was an official Republican Party convention with a member of Congress and two statewide officials on hand.

And they seriously debated a resolution on the role of “Satan” in immigration policy. Had the activists been able to keep a quorum, it might have even passed.

But my broader concern is that these activists help run a state Republican Party. They’re helping select candidates and party platforms. They’re running for state and local office, and in turn, shaping public policy.

To be sure, the Utah GOP’s resolution about Satan would probably not receive much of a hearing at most Republican conventions nationwide — at least, I hope not — but it’s a reminder about what we’re up against: a party run by some very odd people.

Several years ago, Kevin Drum, writing about the Texas Republican Party, noted that people need to be aware of what GOP activists believe at the local level.

If this were just a lunatic fringe we could all have a good laugh over their manifesto and then go out for a beer. But you can’t dismiss it so easily. Texas-style conservatism has already put George Bush, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove in charge of the country, and it is very much the future of the Republican party. And for all the conservatives reading this: I know this doesn’t necessarily represent what you believe. But whether you like it or not, this kind of thinking does represent a very strong, very fast growing segment of the leadership of your party, and this is why liberals think the Republican party is just plain scary these days. We know that this is their agenda, we know that they really truly want to do this stuff, and we know that they are steadily gaining influence.

And to liberals: this is what we’re fighting. Republicans may be smart enough to make soothing noises and put friendly faces like George Bush’s in front of their agenda, but behind the facade this is what they want and they won’t rest until they get it. It’s our job to make sure everyone knows this.

Texas wasn’t debating Satan at the time, but Kevin’s sentiment can be applied broadly.

I would like to believe that the more entrenched the true religious wing-nuts become within the Republican party, that it would result in more ‘moderate’ or sensible Republicans to turn their back on the party.

Just keep chipping away at the core 30%-ers. The more they fear loosing grip on power and being prosecuted the more rediculous their beliefs become; the easier it becomes for the masses to realize how wrong they really are.

  • Satan: If the Religious Right gains dominion over society, we will all have to deal with Satan because he plays such a dominant role in their belief system. Anyone who is not born-again is vulnerable to Satan, for they are lacking the protective shield of Christ. The world is clearly divided into “good” and “evil”, “Christ” and “Satan.” R.J. Rushdoony, the man who is considered the father of Reconstructionism called on his followers to “administer justice upon all disobedience in every area of life where we encounter it. To deny the cultural mandate is to deny Christ and to surrender the world to the devil.” (The Institutes of Biblical Law, 1973)” -Theocracy Watch http://www.theocracywatch.org/satan2.htm

  • We of the left have quite a few firebrands as well, but the vast majority of us look at their firey speeches and are not tempted to put them in charge of anything much. We see them as harmless versions of ourselves, with a little more fire and a little less tolerance.

    Likewise, when the majority of the Dems look at the weirdos who make the news on the other side of the aisle, we see a relatively harmless bunch of wackos whose right to speak freely we would still fight to defend. But we of the left fail to realize sometimes that the flaming wackos on the right are generally kept in check by a relatively few people, the powerful elite in the Republican party, and those people are being replaced. The masses of intolerant Christianists, inspired by a fabricated sense of persecution, speak loudly of putting gay people in camps, expelling legal residents, even taking up arms to “put things right”. They sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and they take it literally. These masses are led “into battle for God” by opportunistic charlatans in huge churches, and they work themselves into a lather on a weekly basis.

    The endless supply of Hagees and Robertsons have raised this generation of creeps on apocolyptic fervor, and we should not be too surprised when they act out their visions of the broader picture which they long for in the book of Revelation.

  • Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won’t do.”

    Has this moron ever heard of the American Dream? What universe does he live in? All these people LOVE American people and are determined to be PART of the country – they want the dream!!

    Halfwits like Larsen were debating 150 years ago whether the Irish were human, 100 years ago it was the”Hunkies” from Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe; at the same time it was the “Yellow Peril” coming from China. I notice his name is Swedish/Norwegian in spelling – anyone remember all the “Ole Svendsen” jokes?

    Nice to see further proof that the way to understand Mormons is to remove the second “m”.

  • Oh yeah, the powerless is destroying the powerful. What kind of world do these folks live in where an Army of Illegal Alien Satanist Liberals try to take over the US?

    Batshit Crazy World.

  • Hating liberals still does not give credence to this kind of insanity. Satan has taken over the republican party (see how stupid this rhetoric sounds). Usually it’s accompanied by underlying hatred. How can US Senators and US Representatives even listen to this crap within their own party. More and more it sounds like Republicans don’t believe in America’s Democracy anymore but merely the Republican party and one party rule. Truly, do they want to take over America and force their beliefs on all who disagree. Intolerance is Democracy’s enemy and it seems they are becoming the party of intolerance for education, religious freedom, and civil rights. This article scares the hell out of me that people this bigoted and prejudiced and downright insane are part of government anywhere.

  • I’m dizzy. So these illegal immigrants put everything at risk to sneak into a country they hate because they are controlled by Satan and commanded to destroy it? Is Satan using that pitchfork to dig tunnels for them too? If not, why not? I mean if Satan is serious about this, isn’t this the least he can do?

    It’s not surprising that the hordes of Satanists are in league with Dems and the liberal media – Everyone knows that Dan Rather and Ted Kennedy have horns and pointed tails. The media just keeps airbrushing them out!

    I will give Larsen style points though. Not just for dusting off the old standby ‘New World Order’, but for sprucing it up with a ‘Godless’

    These jackasses aren’t just nuts, they’ve got some kind of advanced mental illness.

  • Well, it’s not exactly about illegal immigrants, but when I was a small boy growing up in Northern Utah, the Union Pacific Railroad would run work trains in the summer to renovate track and facilities. Many of the workers on those crews were Navajo men recruited from the Arizona reservation. In Utah at that time, all of the liquor stores were run by the State, and it was against the law to sell liquor to Indians. On Saturday nights, a lot of these men, some of them in their 40s and 50s would hang out like a bunch of teenagers, asking white men to buy them a jug. My dad frequently obliged them, but we couldnl’t tell anyone, as our neighbors would certainly ostracize us for violating the mores of the majority culture. That would be the culture that gave us Orrin Hatch.

  • It’s true. There’s nothing they won’t do.

    They’ll wash your dishes, mow your lawn, clean your toilets, pick your fruits and vegetables, and process your chickens. Then they take those hard-earned American dollars and use them to feed and shelter their families!

    Can’t get more satanic than that.

  • Oddly enough, it’s mostly Republican businessmen and farmers that rely on cheap immigrant labor. So another wedge isssue is dividing the GOP loyalists.

  • The CIA World Factbook says that the Mexican population is 89% Catholic. I know some religions view Catholicism as evil but I think it’s a stretch to say they’re in cahoots with the devil.

  • Just to amend my post above, that’s 89% of religious Mexicans are Catholic. But, I’ve always been under the impression that a majority of Mexicans are religious. Either way the point still stands that the Repub party in Utah is run by a bunch of wingnuts.

  • If Satan’s helpers were all guest immigrants then we could send them home, but most of the hell raising these days is being done by indigenous Republicans.

  • I’m no fan of David Brooks, but he really nailed the predicament of the Republican Party in his NY Times column today. Brooks writes:


    The Republicans suffered one unpleasant event in November 2006, and they are headed toward an even nastier one in 2008. The Democrats have opened up a wide advantage in party identification and are crushing the G.O.P. among voters under 30.

    Moreover, there has been a clear shift, in poll after poll, away from Republican positions on social issues and on attitudes toward government. Democratic approaches are favored on almost all domestic, tax and fiscal issues, and even on foreign affairs.

    The public, in short, wants change.

    And yet the Republicans refuse to offer that. On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P.

    They are like people quietly marching to their doom.
    …
    [T]here are structural barriers to change. As it has aged, the conservative movement has grown a collection of special interest groups that restrict its mobility. Anybody who offers unorthodox tax policies gets whacked by the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform. Anybody who offers unorthodox social policies gets whacked by James Dobson.

    Brooks is still too much of a hack to acknowledge it, but the root of the problem is that his party has fully embraced a top-down authoritarian structure in which The Leader is infallible, and there is no middle ground between absolute loyalty and outright treason. So while Republicans might be “privately disgusted” with Bush–as I’m sure many are–they know that to directly challenge him means that the party apparatus will turn on them, with primary opponents, a cutoff of financial support, and endless hounding.

    They’ve put themselves in this jam, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

  • Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald, said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because “they are not going to become Republicans….”

    Well… At least she was *honest* about her reasons. Invoking Satan is but a tactic in the partisan war. And all is fair, in war, no?

    “I would like to believe that the more entrenched the true religious wing-nuts become within the Republican party, that it would result in more ‘moderate’ or sensible Republicans to turn their back on the party.” — Bruno, @1

    Don’t hold your breath; would hate to lose you.

    I have an acquaintance, a well-educated, well-travelled, and intelligent woman. When we talk about issues — education, immigration, civil rights, healthcare, immigration, you-name-it — she’s perfectly reasonable, sensible, moderate. When it comes to politics — as in voting — she votes Repub most of the time or not at all.

    According to her, Repubs stand for personal responsibility,for non-interfering govt, and are pro business (as in small business). An ideal party. When I point out evidence to the contrary, she says it’s not the norm; it’s exceptional. Take away the greed of the corporations and the nutty flavour of the fundies, and everything would be perfect. When I say that taking away the greedy corporations and the loony-fundies would mean there’d be no Republican party, she says “I don’t let realities interfere with my behaviour”.

    You can’t win with true Repubs like that. She doesn’t take her talking points from Fox, she takes them from WST, but they’re the same talking points — we can’t pull out of Iraq too soon (“when will not be too soon?” I ask.”I don’t know” she says. “But it’s tooo soon now”); the nation has no stomach for sacrifice, etc, etc, etc…

  • Now if I understand this correctly, God gave folks a little gift quite a while back called “free will.” It allows folks to make choices.

    These Utah Brimstone Republicans don’t seem to like people being able to make choices for themselves, so it sounds as if they’re against people being able to do what God wanted them to do when he gave them the gift of free will.

    If someone tells you not to do something that God is telling you to do, then they must be somewhat on the “anti-God” side of things.

    Therefore, I must insist that Utah Brimstone Republicans, being somewhat on the anti-God side of things, and in league with Satan….

  • llegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to “destroy Christian America” and replace it with “a godless new world order — and that is not extremism, that is fact,” Larsen said.

    Ho hum. I guess the Jews who were in control of the media and trying to destroy Christian America have moved on to bigger and better things.

    I love the way this dipshit tries to validate his droolings by saying it is a fact. Oh yes, of course Herr Larsen, if you say it is a fact, it must be true.

    ReThuglican Talevangicals. They aren’t just raging brainless arseholes, they’re unoriginal raging brainless arseholes.

  • No God = No Satan. Problem solved.

    Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants “hate American people” and “are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won’t do.” — As a description of the original illegal immigrants, the white colonists, it’s fairly accurate.

  • Did you hear the one about Utah letting students carry guns on campus?

    Sounds like a lot of fun doesn’t it?

    Can you carry them into sessions of the State Legislature too?

    I am praying that you can… — ROTFLMLiberalAO @21

    That would be the logical extension of the relaxation of the gun laws. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see any compromise between rethugs and logic

  • “Immigration is all Satan’s Fault.” These and similar senseless rantings are from senseless people who don’t seem to realize these United States are a land that welcomed immigrants since its founding and is exemplified in the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. They have lost touch with reality and our country’s democratic principles, all for their belief in one party rule–theirs and no other. And they question our patriotism?

  • So sayeth the Talibangical: “You are either with me, or you are my enemy.” Beastly little Siths. A good dose of global warming’ll clear that wingnut rash right up—and they’re not getting one drop of the Great Lakes, either….

  • Like I said in another forum, this just proves that Satan is a Republican, He wants to keep labor cheap. Seriously, Republicans are not going to do anything about immigration, because Big Money runs the GOP. They find the theocrats useful tools at election time, they being so easily duped. You here this noise often at state GOP conventions, complaints about the “Country Club Republicans”, that they are RINO’s and not behind God’s program. What they are to dim to see is that the Republican Party is all about government of, by and for the moneyed elites, and has been since Reconstruction.

  • Correction: While it’s true that it’s a marshmallow world and that it’s clearly divided into “good” and “evil”, “Christ” and “Satan”, or, realistically, Pat Sajak and R.J. Reynolds, let’s talk about Utah’s GOP, the “Satan” resolution, and the hero of all that is good and decent in part of the country where Denny’s is the closest you get to 5 star dining – Orrin S. N. Hatch. When we last left our abandoned, unappreciated anti-hero, he was desperately trying to sell his latest deranged underground clandestine music CD/DVD containing a special Satanic backward masked diabolical stratagem to dominate the naïve and unsuspecting nubile teen/young adult consumer market, as it was recently discovered that their collective “taste” in the musical arts, which recently was amply uncovered on the local cable dumbshit music channel, showed a clear-cut lack of even a scintilla of edifying discretion and, with the proper resource outlay, abundant methodologies for zeitgeist shifting and the resultant subsequent rewards in the form of financial enumeration, which proved altogether to be too overwhelming a inducement to ignore in his present state of financial/philosophical paucity due to the recent GOP “fixing” of the economy.

    Other than blowing up the moon, and a particularly offensive habit of not keeping his hands to himself whence in the company of buxom legal-aged women, he takes a little time out from his usual digital hijinks to contemplate the absurd sequence of events and pratfalls that resulted in his present state of languor in regards to taking the “next step”. He remembers a retarded adage his whiskered mother used to tell him: “Better to have not tried, than to permanently wear the royal ass hat”, and with that needle-to-the-amygdala recollection punches himself really hard in the upper abdominal area, directly in front of the isles of Langerhans.

    After praying to his most guilt mongering lord and licking every door knob in the building, he went home and experienced Satori.

  • It’s highly unlikely that these rethuglicans are evangelicals: they are undoubtedly Mormon. Mormons are the majority in Utah and th majority of Mormons in the U.S. are rethuglicans. Indeed, one of their recent profits was a strong supporter of the John Birch Society, though only his wife was actual member. see Ezra Taft Benson.

  • Welcome to life Behind the Zion Curtain, as we call it here in Utah. As some have said, this isn’t really that odd for Utah. A few years ago at the UtahRepub caucus they booed Orrin Hatch and Mike Leavitt (then-guv, now HHS secretary) because they were too liberal! To be fair, this was the Utah County Repubs; along with Davis County (on the other side of the Salt Lake valley) they are the absolute worst in the state. The Utah County GOP did kill the resolution, but as the Salt Lake Tribune noted today:

    Utah Co. GOP kills resolution on Satan
    By Steve Gehrke
    The Salt Lake Tribune

    OREM – The Utah County Republican Party on Saturday killed a controversial resolution asserting Satan’s role in illegal immigration and supporting the closure of U.S. borders.
    The move was due not necessarily to lack of support, but because the convention lacked a full quorum. Seventy percent of the attending 471 delegates, or 334, had to be present in order for a vote to take place.
    http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_5778186

    So it wasn’t because they disagreed with it, it was because it was time to go home; the next day was Sunday, after all! This is just everyday life in Utah, except for Salt Lake County, where Rocky Anderson helps us all stay sane.

  • Utah was originally established as Morman Theocracy. There was even the near genicidal “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” (look it up)

    The Taleban just called, they want their crazy back.

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