The U.S.–Mexico border is marked by a crude, 12-foot-high rusting metal fence that lunges into arroyos and climbs up hillsides but stops abruptly in places where the terrain is just too rough, leaving gaps that invite free passage to anyone who wants to walk through. Along this dusty, wind-raked stretch of what was, 160 years ago, the boundary separating Upper and Lower California in the Mexican Republic, the 21st-century Minutemen have staked out a promontory that offers an unobstructed view to the south, into a valley of scrub brush and irrigated farmland that has been traversed regularly by the enemy—Mexicans headed for illegal entry into the United States. None are visible at the moment, on a sun-blasted midday in late June, but Jerome Corsi is making sure, his eyes fixed to a pair of binoculars scanning the mountain valley as he hunches beneath a flagpole where the stars and stripes flap in a stiff breeze.

Corsi passes me the binoculars with instructions to examine a house that must be at least a mile away, a stuccoed Spanish colonial–style structure surrounded by green fields. “Look at that hacienda,” he says. “There’s no economic hardship there.” Noting a semi truck kicking up dust in the far distance, appearing as tiny as a toy from this vantage point, he says, “They’re probably running drugs out of there.”

A pink-faced, doughy man in jeans and a polo shirt, Jerome Corsi is 59 years old and dour as the day is long, notwithstanding the cap plopped on his white-haired head that says “Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.” He has deployed himself here, far from anyone’s idea of tropical fun, to make the case for his latest political diatribe, Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders (World Ahead Publishing). Corsi wrote the book with Jim Gilchrist, a decorated Vietnam veteran and founder of the Minuteman Project, a two-year-old volunteer effort to help monitor the historically porous border with Mexico. Corsi appends a Ph.D. to his name on the book’s cover. The Ph.D. is from Harvard (political science, 1972). It lends weight to Corsi, who uses his facility with words and ideas to ferociously market right-wing ideology. The scholarship (and language skill) sets him apart from Harvard MBA George W. Bush, whom Corsi has lately come to see as insufficiently conservative.

“Bush has never been here except for a photo op on a dune buggy,” Corsi says tartly a few minutes later as he climbs down an embankment to identify another obvious point of entry: the 2 1⁄2-foot-wide mouth of a drainage pipe that crosses the border under the fence and extends some 15 yards onto the U.S. side. He sticks his head inside the opening and then turns back to say, “It’s a joke. Look at these footprints. Hundreds of people are coming though this pipe every night.”

Corsi is brimming with such unverifiable certainties. His numerous books include the notorious 2004 bestseller Unfit for Command (written with John O’Neill), which fragged John Kerry with questions about his patriotism and combat record in Vietnam. He insists that there was no connection between the book and the Bush campaign. He voted for Bush but has since turned against the president on the immigration issues, particularly his failure to adequately police the border. Once described by a writer as a “jack of all tirades,” Corsi now says he believes that Bush is behind a plot to scuttle the sovereignty of the United States in favor of an open-border, multicultural North American union made up of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

“Do you want to take a firearm with you?” the Minuteman on duty, Scott Paulson, asks Tim Bueler, the 19-year-old in charge of PR for the Minuteman Project, who is escorting Corsi and Gilchrist along the border today. We’ve stopped at the makeshift lookout dubbed Patriot Point. Paulson, who installed floor coverings in Orange County “until I got pushed out by illegals six months ago,” has driven here in his Dodge truck with flag decals on both sides. He wears a .45 automatic on his hip.

“There are bounties on some of us up here,” he says, alluding to how unpopular the Minutemen might be with criminals trying to smuggle drugs and people across the border, as well as with immigrants-rights groups on both sides.Bueler, who gave up a scholarship to Patrick Henry College to serve the Minuteman cause, declines the offer of a weapon even though he has strongly implied to a reporter and photographer that danger looms.

"Some of our members are armed," Bueler says later. "[Officially] we don’t support that." Many are Vietnam vets, 55 and older, who are not shy about defending themselves. When the violent Hispanic gang MS-13 made threats against the Minutemen in March 2005, Gilchrist responded, "We’re not worried, because half of our recruits are retired, trained combat soldiers, and those guys are just a bunch of punks."

Gilchrist, 56, Corsi’s latest co-author, is a retired CPA who joined the Marines right out of high school in Providence, R.I., and within six months was in heavy combat in Vietnam. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, as an independent in 2005, taking illegal immigration as his main issue. A tanned, plainspoken man, friendly and guileless, Gilchrist provides an instant contrast with the heavy-breathing polemicist at his side.

“Minuteman 6 to Patriot Point,” Gilchrist barks into a walkie-talkie, testing the frequency before joining Corsi and Bueler in an SUV headed down the promontory’s steep dirt incline and then off in search of more holes that have been blowtorched in the fence and for Border Patrol agents, who tend to be scarce. The back of Gilchrist’s Minuteman T-shirt sums up the mission at hand: “American Citizens Doing the Job Congress and the President Refuse to Do.”

If a Minuteman spots any trespassers, he whips out a cell phone and speed-dials the Border Patrol office in the hope that an agent is available to respond. If a party of immigrants can get past this lookout, it’s only a half-mile to Highway 94, where they can jump into a waiting car and be gone. At night whoever is stationed here lights up the area with two 500-watt spotlights, run off a generator. They are also equipped with infrared binoculars. “There’s someone here 24/7,” Paulson says.

Most of the patrolling Corsi does is in spirit only; he’s here today because he’s not above the occasional photo op himself. He lives in northern New Jersey, near Morristown, and the immigration issue is just his latest cause in a literary career spent trying to protect America from world government, Marxism-Leninism, and “the Left,” a term he often invokes in Minutemen to suggest a vast collusion of wayward academics, anti-American subversives, and Hispanic activists who aid and abet the Mexican invasion.

A contributor to the conservative websites Human Events Online and WorldNet.com and a frequent guest on Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy’s national radio show, Corsi comes across as one part patriot, one part philosopher, one part huckster. He likes to trace his belief in strong nation-states back to Aristotle while blaming Locke and Rousseau for the ungodly humanist views (Corsi is Roman Catholic) that have spawned socialism and the United Nations.

He has also written books with Ohio’s secretary of state and current Republican gubernatorial nominee J. Kenneth Blackwell (Rebuilding America: A Prescription for Creating Strong Families, Building the Wealth of Working People, and Ending Welfare); Christian financial advisor Craig R. Smith (Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil); and evangelical Christian minister Michael D. Evans (Showdown with Nuclear Iran: Radical Islam’s Messianic Mission to Destroy Israel and Cripple the United States).

“I’m a writer; it is predominantly what I am,” he tells me as we sit in the backseat of the SUV, driving down the dirt road that hugs the border fence on the California side.

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