San Diego Protest: “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me” (VIDEO)
Coalition of unions, environmentalists and open borders advocates protest ALEC Annual Meeting
On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, I was on a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Keynote speakers at the Annual Meeting include Scott Walker and Ted Cruz.
The topic of my panel was Freedom of Thought in Higher Education.
The panel chair was Utah State Senator Howard Stephenson, and fellow panelists Dr. Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, and Robert Shibley, Executive Director of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The panel was the best attended workshop of the day, with over 100 attendees, mostly state legislators.
[L-R – Robert Shibley, Peter Wood, Howard Stephenson, William Jacobson]
About one-third of the more than 100 mostly state legislators in attendance had heard of BDS. I covered the history of BDS, which was created at the anti-Semitic 2001 Durban Conference, and how systematic academic boycotts pose systemic risk which is appropriate for narrowly tailored legislation that protects the system without unduly infringing on academic freedom and free speech. I discussed, among other things, my challenge to the tax exempt status of the American Studies Association.
ALEC has become the bogeyman of the left, with all sorts of farfetched conspiracy theories floating around surrounding the mythical powers of ALEC to drive a conservative agenda at the state level.
Numerous unions and activist groups organized a protest outside the conference hotel, with people bused in from L.A. and elsewhere.
The promotional material and lead banner of the protest declared California an “ALEC-free Zone.” There was obvious irony of having just finished a panel devoted to Freedom of Thought while protesters outside declared California free from thoughts with which they disagreed.
The protest was noisy, and well organized, with union marshalls in place to make sure no one tried to rush the hotel as they marched from a nearby park. There was heavy security outside the hotel, with police lines keeping protesters away from the entrance.
I mingled among the protesters, a mix of young people and older union folks. There also were the obligatory aging socialists.
A big portion of the speeches and protest signage was devoted to immigration and legalization of illegal aliens.
One of the first speakers (see video below) fired up the crowd with claims that there was no such thing as illegal aliens because the border doesn’t represent anything:
“I’m here today because I was one of those immigrants that were really, really upset right now because I’m one of those immigrants, I don’t know where this government or ALEC or anybody got this illegal alien, dude. I didn’t come from out of space, you know.
So I am an undocumented immigrant that came to this country, but technically, now that I’m supposed legal because no one’s illegal, anyway, is I always tell people, it you want to get technical Tea Party, be technical about this — I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.”
There also were was a group of Planned Parenthood activists, one of whom was handing out flyers urging people to change their Twitter avatars to a message supporting PP.They all repeated the same line, “I can’t , of course, speak officially for the orangization” when I asked them about the recent videos of fetal organ sales. When I asked them to speak unofficially, they all declined.
And then there was this:
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Comments
Lie lie lie…all they do is lie……
RE: “San Diego Protest: “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me”
They keep saying that, but a couple of members of local SoCal indigenous Indian tribes I know say, “The hell it did. They’re as much colonizers as the white man.”
I continue to be amused at how they draw their identity from the Spanish (who were white colonists).
Couldn’t Mexico use some of that drug money to purchase California?
I think maybe these people would want the opposite – the United stgates purchasing more of Mexico.
Their thinking is incoherent because nobody knows how to challenge their opponents head on, and they want to carve out an exception for Mexico.
For instance, they could mention that no quota from Mexico existed before 1968, so this business of vast numbers of people from Mexico being illegally here is entirely a new situation that never ever was enforced, or they could mention that Boston Tea Party was about breaking the law.
The whole country, and the constitution, is a result of breaking the law.
They could talk about unalienable rights, but instead they parrot this nonsense.
Better that America CONQUOR and subjugate Mehico, …and then Central “America.”
ALEC has proven a very hard rock against which the Collective has thrown its poor, old, stupid bodies.
ALEC wins.
Welcome to my world! 😀
The willful self-delusion is strong in these people…
Lies, lies and more lies. But then, Obama has shown them that someone can lie without fear.
Border shifted in 1848, so the person saying the border jumped him has to be at least 167 years old. The American Southwest has been part of the United States of America longer than it ever was part of the Republic of Mexico.
And as Hillary might say, “What difference does it make now?” The Mexican state and its border was every bit the result of the colonialism and imperialism these people claim to oppose. Why are they fixated on an old border created by a state founded by colonialism? I guess its better than admitting that Native Americans didn’t have borders, but would just shove each other around the map, and the strongest was able to overpower the weaker, and take from them the resources they needed. Wow, that sounds alot like the Western Civilization they claim to despise. Just goes to show we’re all people, and haven’t changed a lot since the Stone Age.
The Unions support establishment of monopolies. The unmeasured immigration advocates support a violation of civil rights. The environmentalists proclaim that people are the problem. They all to one extent or another support violation of human rights. It’s not surprising that they find common cause under the Democrat umbrella.
That said, we’ll see if the Republicans will… If they can stand on principle and realize a better reconciliation.
Don’t you realize that it is a union </b? that is behind most of this vicious anti-illegal immigramt propaganda?
Don't you realize that it's a government employees union that that fool, Donald Trump, is listening to?
And if you ask me why the union is doing this, the only thing that really makes sense is that the current state of the law provides opportunities for corruption because of the large amount of discretion available to individual border patrol and ICE people, or because they want everybody to join in in their cruetly and inhumanity because they’ve also violated regulations and they want people not to care.
There was an article about the ALEC conference in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune. It was actually informative. I wanted to get the electronic copy, but found out that the article itself would not come up in my browser. Citations to the article, however, were easily available from a variety of websites trashing ALEC. This went on for a while, but I finally got it.
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/jul/22/gop-presidential-candidates-protest-alec/
What they like to do is post multiple stories using the same key words, in order to drown out the original. That way, if you search for ALEC, you have to wade through lots of articles that mischaracterize the organization, before you ever get to any real information.
Left-wing media bias is a “myth”, so they tell us.
Web search “biasing google”.
There is a way to specify a web site to search for something. I cannot locate the instructions at the moment.
I wonder how many of those protesters, if approached under other circumstances, would agree to lending their support to a protest against free speech? Would they outright deny their support, or would they qualify it by asking first, “Whose speech do you intend to limit?”, and then agree depending upon the target? I’m willing to bet that most who would outright deny an interest in limiting free speech would be all for the limits if their support was being enlisted against a known (and hated) target. The problem with these idiots is that they’re so blind that they can’t see that what they are doing is against their own interests in maintaining freedom of speech.
So, they were all, actually,,what amounts to speaking officially, because they were taking direction.
The same thing on the videos, Even though they did not know they were being taped, thry sll were ready with theiur legal defense, which is asign actually, that the legal defense was false, or at least precarious.
The interesting thing on the video is that Planned Parenthood is not tghe only organization selling body parts – a New York Times editorial indicated that this was also done by universty clinics.
This is not an insignificant sum of money. I think they might male three or more times from the body parts what they charge for the abortion, and the solvency, or the lack of net cost, of their abortion operations is probably dependent on it.
Sure, “borders don’t matter,” unless they’re collecting taxes to buy food to shovel into the yawning, hungry mouths of over-breeding foreigners. Do they collect American taxes from south of the border?