Sharpton Flops in Phoenix: SB 1070 protest was a dud
05/06/2010
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Most of the news about the Phoenix Al Sharpton protest against SB 1070 is a flat out lie, like this one:
Rev. Al Sharpton leads thousands in downtown Phoenix march, Reported by: ABC15.com, May 6, 2010
Look at this video, about 20 seconds in:More Than A Thousand March In Protest With Rev. Al Sharpton

Does that look like thousands of people to you? I was there and I can attest that what you saw there was the entire crowd, minus about half as many waiting at the capitol. I stood on 3rd street and waited until the protesters had passed me before I caught back up with them and marched the rest of the way with them. None of them paid attention to my ACU T-Shirt that said: "No Sanctuary Policies".

I walked with the protesters from about 3rd St. to the Capitol on 19th Av, which is at least two  or three miles. Being in the crowd helped me to get a good feel for who was in it.

No way there were "thousands of protesters" as claimed, but worse the TV15 video would have you believe that African-Americans were numerous enough to outnumber Hispanics and whites. I went to the first Tea Party and there were far more people, and yet the press said there were a couple hundred. How does that work? Sharpton was a flop and it showed because Phoenix has a significant black population but they chose not to show up despite Sharpton's dubious celebrity status. There were blacks in the crowd but they weren't easy to spot because there just weren't many of them — and those that did march against SB 1070 didn't show much enthusiasm. I think they were there mainly to get a look at Sharpton. The only Obama chants were from young Hispanics. I didn't hear one black person chant for Obama but that may because I couldn't hear them because there were so outnumbered. Of course things look different at street level where I chose to be.

My unofficial and non-scientific demographics are as follows:

  • 80% Latino
  • 18% white
  • 2% black
Of the whites — most of the men were over 50 years old, and most of the women were under 30. It could be I noticed the young white women because many of them stood out of the crowd with their long and flowing blonde hair, and skin that was so fair they probably don't get outside very often.

There were very few high school aged kids, which I thought was odd because so many of them ditched school on May 1st to march to the capitol. We walked right by the Suns stadium (I went both ways coming and going) but everyone must have been inside because nobody was to be seen before the protesters arrived. I didn't see a single person wearing a Suns or "Los Suns" T-shirt. This video makes it seem like "Los Suns" joined the protest.

Odd because I didn't see a single one of them. They must have done that camera shoot real quick. I was walking towards the protesters from the capitol. It was so quiet near the stadium that it looked like a ghost town. Even Starbucks was closed — and it was before 8 pm!

Once we arrived to the Capitol most of the blacks were nowhere to be seen. Sharpton did a 5 minute speech and then vacated the premises as fast as he could. He was difficult to understand because the sound system was optimized for loud Mexican Banda music. Kyrsten Sinema took the microphone after Sharpton. I'm sure very few people in the crowd knew who she was, but she stood out because of her light white skin, short bleached blonde hair, and retro style black plastic eyeglasses.

Sinema said, "more people like us are going to get elected to public office". You could see the Hispanics looking at each other with puzzled expressions (thinking "huh? What?," and Â?Que pasa?), before they gave her a polite applause.

A Latina gave a speech in English and Spanish, which made her speech disjointed and difficult to follow. She told a story about a civil rights outrage but I never could figure out what happened. She said she was going to win an election for mayor of somewhere, but I couldn't understand where. Hopefully for Phoenix as she would be a significant improvement over Phil Gordon. I didn't see many of the usual red-shirted commies from the SEIU or the ACLU; in fact they were MIA. That's weird!

There were some muscular looking young white guys who looked like bodybuilders that carried a Russian flag.(The Communist Red Flag version, not the modern post-Communist version.) Some Latinos were carrying one of those Mexican flags on top of the U.S. flag and they were yelling that they were going to take back the land that was stolen from them.

I'm not sure why, but when somebody comes to a Tea Party with a Nazi flag it's shown all over the world, but somebody comes with a Russian flag or the Mexican flag on top of the American flag, nobody in the media seems to notice.

It's not like there weren't TV reporters there — even CNN had a truck and all sorts of equipment. Two helicopters hovered overhead and reporters were interviewing many people. Anyhow, if any of you see a picture of the Mexican/US flag or the Russian one let me know — especially if it's on the news. I met a few counter-protestors that gathered together with Ted Hayes and his Soul-Jahs from Los Angeles.

Hayes told me that Sharpton declined to debate him, which didn't surprise me. Our small group of patriots were slowly being surrounded as the meeting was winding down. By this time the families had left and the troublemakers were getting bored.

Police sharpshooters sitting on top of the capitol building didn't make us feel much safer, although we were hoping that if trouble broke out they had tear gas guns. Hecklers were beginning to look threatening so we asked for police escorts to get us out before we were totally boxed in by the growing crowd. The Phoenix police were happy to help us — maybe because once we were gone they had fewer hot spots to manage, but also because we had a tacit kinship because they knew we  were on their side, and we were taking personal risks to empower them with SB 1070 — a tool they will use when criminal illegal aliens need to be apprehended. Oh, and I found out where the blacks in Phoenix were. After I left I went to a popular blues club called Char’s. It’s a small place but I saw way more blacks there, and more importantly the music was infinitely better than the Banda at the capitol.

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