By DEXTER DUGGAN
MESA, Ariz. — Like the next-door neighbors they are, Arizona and California visit back and forth.
Desert-region Arizonans may head west for southern California beaches in the summer, while Californians flee to the east for economic opportunities lacking under the not-so-Golden State’s Democratic Party dictatorship.
Arizonans may know neighborhood streets in California towns as easily as their own backyards, and coastal Californians ogle three-bedroom Phoenix homes that cost less than three bank-account bonanzas.
When two Islamic terrorists did their massacre last December in San Bernardino, that wasn’t just a name on a map to many in the Grand Canyon State, but a city they’d driven around east of Los Angeles.
So, after open-borders radicals and rioters in California assaulted two Donald Trump events there on April 28 and 29, that struck a chord with some Arizona Republicans here at the Mesa Convention Center on April 30, meeting to choose delegates to the national GOP convention in Cleveland.
About 1,800 state delegates, alternates, and visitors nearly filled a convention hall here in Arizona’s third-largest city, with a population of nearly 500,000 people, in the southeast of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.
Some of those at the GOP gathering interviewed by The Wanderer noted kindred spirits between strident protesters in both states.
At the end of April, the California rioters blocked streets, attacked police cars, heaved debris as weapons, rushed past protective barricades to fight, and waved Mexican flags. Police suited up in riot gear to respond.
The Mexican flags were said to be a response to presidential candidate Trump’s supposed bigotry when he says massive illegal immigration is wrong.
At the Mesa convention, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told The Wanderer he wasn’t surprised at the coastal riots. Like Trump, whom Arpaio has endorsed for president, the sheriff is known for opposing unlimited unauthorized immigration. Arpaio has a large number of legal Latinos employed by his own sheriff’s office.
“Riots in California? Nothing new. They riot when I go there,” Arpaio told The Wanderer, adding that over the last three or four years when he traveled there, demonstrators against him always turned up.
Open-borders radicals also caused serious roadway disruptions when they tried to shut down a large outdoor rally for Trump in March in Fountain Hills, Ariz., where Arpaio happens to live. The radicals snarled traffic for miles. “I locked three people up” in jail for that blockade, Arpaio recalled.
Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Paul Babeu, who often appears on national television regarding border-crime issues, also recalled the Fountain Hills disruptions when The Wanderer asked him about the California rioting.
“We saw the same thing in Arizona, sense of disrespect, sense of lawlessness when it comes to other people expressing their freedom of speech,” Babeu said. “I was very disappointed about the fact” demonstrators had to be arrested in California.
A number of law-enforcement officers strolled around the Mesa GOP meeting, but there was no heightened security like metal detectors to screen people with their ID tags going into the hall.
Babeu wore a handgun holstered at the hip.
He noted the “lawlessness” in Orange County, “jumping on police cars and vandalism. The next day a couple of the protesters were scuffling with the cops, so that doesn’t end well.”
Reymundo Torres, who stepped down as president of the Arizona Latino Republican Association to run for a seat in the Arizona House this year, told The Wanderer that the violent protesters, identified with the Democratic Party, actually have the “awesome effect” of helping Republicans.
“I know their intended effect is to try to create pandemonium and disorder” to benefit Democrats, Torres said, but their protesting “shows they’re a bad fit for democracy, and a bad fit for the United States.”
Even the liberal, open-borders Los Angeles Times admitted that the unruly crowd in nearby Orange County on April 28 “appeared to be mostly Latinos in their late teens and 20s” — a fact that hardly could be denied in light of the videos of the violence.
For years, U.S. Catholic citizens including Latinos have warned the politically liberal U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of the many dangers of encouraging massive illegal immigration.
The unlimited unauthorized entry only serves to increase burning feelings of entitlement, resentment, and defiance against the U.S. by people who know they’re breaking the law just by being here, but they’re out to bend this nation to their will.
The Times quoted one 16-year-old male holding a Mexican flag: “Donald Trump is worthless. There won’t be no United States without Mexicans.”
In a separate story, the Times posted on April 30 that “Latino activists…expect more large protests” against Trump in the Golden State.
The Los Angeles newspaper reported: “ ‘I think it’s going to get worse if he gets the nomination and is the front-runner. I think it’s going to escalate,’ said Luis Serrano, an organizer with California Immigration Youth Justice Alliance. ‘We’re going to keep showing up and standing against the actions and the hate Donald Trump is creating. We are going to continue to just show up in numbers and stand together’.”
A headline in the Phoenix Diocese’s Catholic Sun newspaper in September 2013 illustrated how Church officials persisted in misleading illegal aliens into believing they have every right to jump the border and press their claims here: “Waiting on reform: Church continues to walk in solidarity with undocumented immigrants.”
Law And Order
Standing by a tree outside the Mesa Convention Center on April 30, Rob Haney told The Wanderer that the disruptions in California resemble what he has seen to suppress Arizona conservatives when border issues come up. Haney is retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, based in Phoenix.
“I’ve seen those many times, where you have any kind of conservative meeting at the state Capitol,” Haney said. “. . . They even bus (protesters) in from California….Rather than extol free speech, they are crushing free speech. . . . Bullhorns and big drums, and they scream and shout through their bullhorns” to disrupt and silence conservatives.
A.J. LaFaro, immediate past chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that individuals have the right to freedom of speech and peaceful protest, but when it comes to violence against Trump rallies in Chicago and California, “they’ve crossed the line.”
LaFaro, a Trump supporter, recalled that open-borders protesters thought it was all right to block the road leading to Trump’s Fountain Hills rally in March.
“The progressive socialists, the liberal left, and the illegal aliens are what’s wrong with this country,” LaFaro said, “and that’s why Mr. Trump wants to make this country great again.”
When The Wanderer asked about Trump’s original recent indifference to protecting sexual privacy in public bathrooms, LaFaro said, “Unfortunately, I think he was doing a politically correct positioning on that. . . . He’s got a lot to learn” on such an issue. “I don’t think Mr. Trump wants to be politically correct.”
Al Melvin, a former Arizona state senator running for the Arizona Corporation Commission, told The Wanderer, “Either we’re a country of law and order, or a country where riots (are) without consequence,” with the rioters left unpunished.
The California disruption “really brings home to me how critical this election is. The evildoers, the lawbreakers didn’t have the American flag. They had another country’s flag” that people fear to mention, Melvin said.
“One party is offering free stuff, the Democrats, and the Republicans are trying to remind people that we’re over $20 trillion in debt because of free stuff, and (Barack) Obama is accountable for half of that,” Melvin said. “. . . Those rioters with the Mexican flag are promoting the borders continue to be open, offering free stuff to those who get here.”
California is a prime example, he said, of politicians providing “free stuff” to get themselves elected.
A native of Bangladesh attending the Mesa convention, who’s now a U.S. citizen, Farhana Ahmed, replied that she’s “upset” when The Wanderer asked about the California disruptions.
“The whole world believed in America as a place of fair elections,” Ahmed said. But this unrest “is kind of shameful. . . . I don’t get it. . . . That shouldn’t happen.”
As for protesters in California carrying the Mexican flag, “I strongly believe” in carrying the U.S. flag in this country, she said. “The moment I took my (naturalization) oath…it’s a huge pledge, and you should be loyal to this country.”
New residents in the U.S. go through an educational process for assimilation, Ahmed said. “If we don’t act as a citizen, we are doing injustices to our future generations. They need to be American first.”
Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told The Wanderer regarding the California unrest: “It’s unfortunate that’s the way it’s so disruptive. . . . That’s breaking the law. . . . When they’re jumping on police cars and they’re stomping on the American flag and they’re waving the Mexican flag — ought not to be tolerated.”
Brewer’s popularity soared in Arizona when she signed SB 1070 into law in 2010 to oppose the illegal-alien invasion. The liberal elite hit the roof. Threatening mobs favoring open borders roamed through downtown Phoenix, but a heavy police presence deterred them. The U.S. Supreme Court stripped away some of the law in 2012.
Mexican native Gabriela Saucedo Mercer, who became a U.S. citizen, is second vice-chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Wearing a Trump sticker, Saucedo Mercer told The Wanderer that she used to favor Sen. Ted Cruz for the presidency, but Cruz lost her when he failed to support Trump against rioters in Illinois who shut down his Chicago rally.
“Whatever happened and who’s standing for freedom of speech?”, she asked, adding that she saw similar disrupters at a Trump rally in Tucson.
On a different topic, a Trump supporter told The Wanderer that jobs are the top issue to him.
Travis Angry said: “For me as a black Republican, it’s all about jobs. To me in the black community, we struggle to obtain good-quality jobs. I agree with Mr. Trump, our jobs are being taken away and going overseas.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress