You’ve heard by now, I hope, that the American’s for Prosperity (AFP) Tent in Lansing, Michigan (State Capital), was knocked down and overrun by angry Union protesters–while some activists remained trapped underneath? (You can find Grok Coverage on that and more here, here, here, and here.)
AFP was there on the front lines to educate and inform people about Right To Work, which was passed and signed into law, a mission that might not have been as fraught with risk as we were led to believe.
According to these AFP Tent Truthers, the Conservatives staged the whole thing.
From Breitbart.com
A progressive blog called EclectaBlog subsequently posted an accusation that Americans for Prosperity had “staged a phony altercation.” The post featured a video interview conducted by David Holtz, Executive Director of the progressive organization Progress Michigan, with an individual by the name of Tom Duckworth.
Duckworth claims that he witnessed a gentleman in a NRA hat, whom he’d previously seen with the other activists inside the AFP tent, loosening the straps on the sidewall tent poles. He says the stakes came down from the inside and the tent subsequently collapsed, with people still inside. While he says he did not witness it himself because he’d turned away, Duckworth also said he’d heard that several union protesters, upon realizing people were still underneath the collapsed tent, cut it open, presumably to allow anyone trapped to get out from underneath the tent.
Duckworth concluded by claiming that the gentleman in the NRA hat was attempting to create the impression that it was union protesters who dismantled the tent, and implied that it was the activists with AFP who collapsed the tent themselves.
So there you have it. The Tent collapse was an inside job orchestrated to create sympathy for an oil for blood war and the US invasion of Iraq the Right To Work supporters by making union protesters look like violent thugs.
If you read the entire piece at Breitbart, and you should, the left took this tale and ran with it, trying to shift the narrative to AFP, the Koch brothers, anything but the union thuggery and the political catastrophe of allowing Michigan to pass Right to Work.
Our thanks to the brave folks with AFP and those who supported their effort in Michigan, folks who just wanted to make sure that both sides of the issue were heard on the plaza outside the capital. We know how important bi-partisanship and getting along are to real Democrats, and it is good to see them allowing free political speech to rise above partisan intimidation and violent rhetoric so that Americans can make well-informed decisions on every issue. Or not.
