When I heard that Sarah Palin was speaking at Treason Lobby operative Ralph Reid's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, I assumed that this was a further step in the steady (but no doubt very lucrative) decline of a once-brilliant political career. It's gone down the MSM Memory Hole now, but Palin really did galvanize white Middle Americans when John McCain chose her as his running mate in 2008, and the GOP ticket led Obama for several weeks, until the world financial crisis and McCain's own utter uselessness prevailed.

However, greatly to the disappointment of some VDARE.com readers, Palin has never said much about immigration and that little was not promising. She also endorsed McCain in his desperately hard-fought 2010 primary against immigration patriot J.D. Hayworth.

But, while Palin didn't exactly pull an Ann Coulter on her Conservatism Inc. hosts on Saturday morning, her reference to the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill was brief but devastating (it's at 15:08 in the video):

Let’s not kid ourselves in thinking we can rebuild our majority, by the way, by passing a pandering-rewarding-the-rule-breakers-still-no-border-security-special-interest-written amnesty bill.

My emphasis. In other words, Palin not only deliberately uses the term "Amnesty," which the Treason Lobby is frantic to evade for obvious reasons, but she attacks the "special interests" who have written a surge in legal immigration into the bill. To my knowledge, this is the first time she has ever implied a criticism of legal immgration.

Palin went on to jab Jeb Bush over his "fertility" fumble, despite that appalling clan's notorious vengefulness:

I think it’s kind of dangerous territory, territory to want to debate this whole one race’s fertility rate over another, and I say this from someone who’s kind of fertile herself.

I'm less enthusiastic about the rest of Palin's immigration comments:

I don’t think that’s where we want to go in deciding how will we incentivize the hardworking responsible families who want to live in the light, follow the law, become Americans, versus those whose very first act on our soil is to break the law? There are different ways that we can debate this, how to make it work. [Emphases added.]

Make what work? Legal immigration?

But even here, Palin voices the key moral hazard objection, little heard in the Imperial capital, to amnesty.

Moreover, the rest of Palin's speech contained such a fierce attack on the GOP Establishment that it's clear she views her future as an insurrectionary, if not in a Third Party.

And there is no more insurrectionary issue than Patriotic Immigration Reform.

Palin (and/ or her minders) have been extremely cautious with their franchise since 2008. It's good news that she has taken this small, but very significant, step.