08/23/2017
The Phoenix Rally
By Jeff Falls
Photo below of terrifying George Soros funded left wing agitators (Or is it a Phish concert? Who can say? The truth is out there!)
I’m reading some reports this morning from both left and right oriented media that I feel doesn’t really accurately capture what Sammy and I witnessed last night. Other folks I know were there (Sue Castner, Tony Kure, Noah Wright) and may have their own impressions but these are mine.
#1. Traffic. I live downtown and we arrived at exactly 8. We drove down Central Ave. from Camelback and there was no traffic at all until we got to Roosevelt where the police had it blocked. I turned off of Central and we came down 7th Ave. to Van Buren and then proceeded towards the Convention Center. It was very busy for downtown Phoenix which is normally empty at night but if you hadn’t known about the rally you wouldn’t have known anything was going on until you got right up on the convention center. As we arrived near the Convention Center, many hundreds of people were leaving and we were concerned that we had missed it.
#2. Parking. We parked on 5th Street north of Van Buren at the downtown ASU campus, about 3 blocks from where we wanted to go. It could not have been any easier.
#3. Logistics. The City used garbage trucks and dump trucks as bomb barriers to close streets. All anti-Trump protestors were funneled onto 2nd Street next to the Convention Center. There were lots of police everywhere but they were smiling and interacting with individual protestors for the most part.
#4. Atmosphere. Overwhelmingly mellow and peaceful. It was more like some weekend hippie festival than an angry political protest. The first music I heard was Bob Marley. People were burning sage. I told Sammy “All that was missing was somebody playing hacksack” and she said “I think somebody was playing hackeysack.” There was absolutely none of that scary bad energy that an angry crowd creates that becomes palpable in the air when big public demonstrations go bad.
#5. Demographics. The crowd was overwhelmingly white and middle-class. There were several prominent Latino groups. Very few black folks. People brought their small children and there were many elderly people. Many of the older folks were leaving as we arrived. There were some crazy people as there always are at these kinds of thing and in downtown Phoenix in general.
#6. Propaganda. I’ve been at many demonstrations and more than a few riots. The police were a model of restraint. I’m seeing the scene described in the media as “chaotic”. That’s bu****it. Old Town Scottsdale is way more chaotic on any given Saturday night. I’m seeing several other politically prominent people accusing the police of fascist brutality and say that they fired tear gas for no reason. That’s not true. If you thought that this rally was “brutal” you have never been in a real political demonstration or situation of civil unrest. I have and this wasn’t it.
The protesters threw projectiles at the police. I saw the first object come from the protester's side and thought it was a smoke bomb but it was apparently a tear gas canister.
If you throw s**t at the police, they’re going to disburse you. The police ordered them to disburse. Most did. Some did not. The police launched pepper spray and a tear gas canister and again ordered them to disburse. We had ample time to fall way back (which in this case meant about 100 feet away). I am a liberal Democrat and extremely anti-Nazi and anti-Trump and I would give the Phoenix PD an A+ for how that handled it.
Nobody lost their life, nobody got beat up and if you got tear gassed it was because you were blatantly refusing a police order to fall back. In the old days they would also administer a severe ass-beating. Nothing remotely like that happened. And they continued to give these warnings for 45 minutes while attempting to clear the area.
And no, George Soros did not bus in thousands of Antifa protestors FFS. These were just average Phoenicians.
Most people were very well behaved, period. That includes the few Trump supporters we saw wandering amidst the protests. They didn’t engage the anti-Trump people and nobody yelled at them or anything like that.
The only group of truly rowdy people that I personally saw were a half dozen young white skinhead types who looked pretty wound up – and who were on the protestor side – and even with them, it wasn’t any worse than a bad night on Mill Ave.
The feeling that both Sammy and I had was that it was a group of really nice people on both sides who were trying to be a bit edgier than they really were. As we were leaving, we saw a young female protestor carrying a sign saying “Phoenix We Will Recover” or something like that which we thought was kind of hilarious given the extreme civility of the whole thing.
