Perhaps you've heard of this. It's something called the "North American Union" or NAU from here on out. It's spread over the past year to take on JFK assassination or Area 51 or 9/11 conspiracy levels of rabid discourse. I hold them all to be at roughly the same level of truth: absolutely none. And yet for some reason the NAU even gets play in the "liberal media" with xenophobes like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs repeating the issue ad nauseam. Amazingly these two haven't been laughed off the air yet.
This conspiracy theory movement started from legitimate concerns over NAFTA, enabling ostensibly more free trade between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It was argued that it would hurt the American worker and benefit the other nations and right corporations. (These fears are certainly justified.) Part of NAFTA also involved building roads that would connect the three countries to expedite trade, and it called for an easier flow of civilians with Canada, but NOT with Mexico, until the economic disparity with the US is decreased. In 2005 Bush, President Fox of Mexico and PM Martin of Canada worked out an agreement called the "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America," a non-legally binding pact formed on the assumption that helping each other with security will increase the prosperity for all.
And that's it. From these, the far-right lunatics have extrapolated that there is a secret cabal of... well, they don't say who but presumably CEOs of major corporations who want to turn the government of the US over to a European Union-style government, complete with its own currency and totally open borders. According to these people, the government of the US is at stake. (They're also the same ones who say government doesn't work and should be completely unfunded, but that's for another time.) Jerome Corsi, one of the leaders of the Swiftboat Veterans for Falsehoods, "wrote" this article (notice how it's not in a real magazine or newspaper or anything) that basically laid out the "case" for how the NAU is coming. The reason his "ideas" were so successful was because he couched them in the language of the anti-immigration crowd, the cause celebre of the racist right, which allows them to espouse their ideology while pretending it's not racism, it's about policy (right, and I'm the Easter Bunny).
This is what it's all based on: the report "Building a North American Community" by a bunch of policy wonks. Seriously. Ideas never implemented or even widely pushed are now apparently responsible for a massive conspiracy, which has been kept secret, despite the fact that it would require spending billions of dollars (maybe that's where the $9 billion they lost in Iraq went!), thousands of new government bureaucratic jobs, dozens of new government departments, and, oh yeah, they can't cover the leak of a CIA agent's name, but they cover all this up without anyone, except a group of gregarious arch-conservatives, figuring it out or finding any proof at all.
And people still take Dobbs and Beck seriously. Un-fucking-real. And it's not only them! Oh, no. Presidential "candidate" Ron Paul believes in it. Virgil Goode, one of Virginia's "representatives" in Congress, is a believer. What does your representative believe? If you've got one like mine (Eric Cantor), it's possible they do believe in it. Give 'em a call, see how crazy they are.