He started out as an academic, but after teaching stints at the University of Denver and the University of New Mexico he headed for the private sector, eventually founding four different companies in the 1980s and ’90s that partnered with major banks and insurance companies to market annuities, investment counseling, and health care to their clients.

About his subsequent career as a co-author of topical screeds, he says, “I can’t have Jim Gilchrist’s experience of founding the Minutemen, but I figure if I can work with a guy like Jim, I can try to capture it the way Jim has lived it. I knew he had been in Vietnam and figured that was an important part of the subject.” Vietnam is also an important part of Corsi’s resume—he participated not as a soldier but as a true believer in the rightness of our anti-communist commitment of 500,000 troops and the perfidy of the anti-war movement at home, which came to include returning veterans like John Kerry. Corsi was exempted from military service because of hereditary eczema. “My skin wasn’t good enough to kill the Vietcong,” he says.

As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, Corsi was less concerned with the tons of bombs being dropped on the Vietnamese by U.S. B-52s than he was with the violence associated with the anti-war and civil-rights movements. He wrote a research study, “Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police,” that was published in 1968 by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. That same year he was accepted into graduate school at Harvard. He says James Q. Wilson, the Harvard government professor famous for the line “There are no more liberals . . . they’ve all been mugged,” was one of those most responsible for bringing him to Cambridge.

While it is not news that conservatives can be found at Harvard, where influential professors such as Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington hold sway, Corsi might be pushing the horizon on just how far to the right a Harvard Ph.D. can fly. He has accused Kerry of consorting with the communists in North Vietnam and reportedly hurled the “C” word at President Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Katie Couric.

In 2004, on the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, he unleashed a stream of invective that raised his public profile in a most unacademic fashion, calling Islam a “worthless, dangerous, Satanic” religion, calling Hillary Clinton “a fat hog,” and referring to Kerry as “John F-ing Commie Kerry.”

Called to account, Corsi did not deny that he had said these things, but he explained then, and repeats now, that “they were written to be provocative” and were not intended for the general public but for a conservative chat room audience. He apologized to anyone who was offended and vowed never to do it again. “I’m not intending to make a career as a provocative writer like Ann Coulter,” he says. Still, one is left to wonder in what context his description of Senator Clinton might have sounded more circumspect.

Last year he threatened to move to Massachusetts and run for Kerry’s Senate seat in 2008. He has since decided against it, saying his wife exercised her veto. David Wade, Kerry’s spokesperson, refers to Corsi as “the Kim Jong Il of the right wing: a paranoid nut-job who makes increasingly bizarre assertions in a desperate grab for public attention.” Maybe Wade hasn’t seen him in the Jimmy Buffett hat.

In fact, Corsi can be cordial as a pastor at a church picnic, but one who never gets off message. During the day I spend with him at the border he never allows himself to climb down from his temple of dire musings to let slip a casual remark about the weather, baseball, or his family. (He is married, with a 10-year-old daughter.) He is too hard at work, selling his version of history, long past and recent.

He grew up, interestingly enough, the son of a union man in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was PR director for the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. “The Teamsters would come to the house for dinner,” he says. He got some early training in the powers of persuasion by going to work in his dad’s office as a teenager. But unions of the 1950s, though allied with the Democratic Party, were not necessarily liberal or anti-establishment, Corsi points out. “My father came from an era of labor people who today would be considered conservative. When I got accepted to Harvard, my dad said, ‘So, you’re going off to Harvard to become a communist.’ The union movement had been fighting communism and socialism since the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World],” in the 1920s. “The surviving strength of the labor movement in the U.S. was middle class—World War II veterans. Today they would be considered moderate conservatives.”

When he got to Cambridge, he was not put off by the political climate. “I was always more conservative than those around me. I liked the intellectual challenge.” He wrote his dissertation, “Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent,” which, he says, evolved from the Pentagon Papers case and the Nixon administration’s 1971 attempt to stop the New York Times from publishing a classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “If you knew somebody was going to publish something that was going to endanger national security,” Corsi summarizes, “could you prevent publication?”

Far from succumbing to the liberal influences of Harvard, Corsi was jolted further to the right. “My intellectual tipping point was McGovern and [Eugene] McCarthy, when the extreme left got control of the Democratic Party. JFK and LBJ were social conservatives. But then there were more and more radical elements.”

And yet last year, speaking before the Harvard Club of New York City, he said his father had adored FDR and was friends with Lyndon Johnson, whose War on Poverty and attempts at “social engineering” so alienated the younger Corsi that he split with his father politically while still an undergraduate at Case Western.

In any case, Corsi is now after Bush, whom, it can be posited, he helped re-elect with Unfit for Command. The president has disappointed him. “Bush has essentially undertaken a liberal Democratic agenda in his second term,” he tells me. What about the war in Iraq? “That’s probably the one exception,” he says.

In a column published in Human Events Online in June, he asked whether the president might be in the process of pulling a coup d’état inside the executive branch by agreeing to a trilateral North American union with the leaders of Canada and Mexico without consulting Congress or informing the public.

Corsi says he believes that Bush privately wants open borders to grease the skids for this union. And he says illegal immigration is an issue that might sunder traditional political alliances the way the issue of slavery divided both the Whigs and the Democrats in the 1850s and led to the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party.

Although many would say the Republicans today seem positioned to ride the wave of resentment toward illegal immigration indicated by opinion polls, Corsi is not convinced. “What remains to be seen is whether the Republican Party will survive,” he says. “Or if a more logical configuration is for Republicans like John McCain to move in the direction of becoming Democrats, and a new Republican Party will emerge—a conservative party that captures the true conservative factions that are disenchanted with the handling of immigration and will not reconcile on a compromise, any more than the Know-Nothings or the Republicans would compromise on slavery.”

It’s not every day that you hear a fond reference to the Know-Nothings—the super-nationalistic (and secretive) party that was spawned in the mid-nineteenth century by fears of Irish Catholic immigration but that joined the Republicans in opposing slavery. But then, after all, such references are what Corsi, the historian, is here for. His slavery analogy associates the anti-immigration effort with Lincoln, but his sympathy for the undocumented is often muted by his tendency to demonize them as “criminals,” even though illegal entry into the United States is classified as a misdemeanor (hence, the Minutemen cannot make citizen’s arrests; that right is reserved for witnesses to a felony).

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