A video shows U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters pushing down a man who refused to leave a campaign event in Green Valley.
Masters, a Republican who grew up in Tucson, was holding a campaign event at a space in a shopping plaza when the man, Democrat Peter Jackson, showed up apparently aiming to provoke. He wore a T-shirt that said, โBlack Lives Matter more than White Feelings/Check your privilege,โ as well as a hat that said โJail Trumpโ and a button that said โFully vaxxed.โ
Event organizers asked Jackson to leave, but he offered to pay and stayed, recording with a Go Pro camera and his phone as some attendees grew increasingly angry with him. Dan Shearer of the Green Valley News first reported the story and posted the video to YouTube.
In the video, a small crowd bunches around Jackson, telling him to put down his phone and to leave. One woman grabs at Jacksonโs cellphone, and when he pulls it back, she punches him in the face. After that, the video is hard to distinguish, but Masters appears to say โenough,โ put his hands around Jacksonโs shoulders or neck and pushes him back.
Masters, by the way, is 35, and Jackson is 73.
Other attendees then threw Jackson out the door.
When Pima County Sheriffโs Department deputies responded, they cited Jackson for two misdemeanors, trespassing and assault.
Sheriff Chris Nanos said responding deputies saw the video at the scene and thought that Jackson provoked the crowd by pushing one of the women on the shoulder.
โIt got way out of hand and it shouldnโt have,โ Nanos said. โThe deputies did the best they could.โ
Masters, who was recently endorsed by Donald Trump, said via Twitter that he witnessed Jackson hit the woman, something that does not appear to be the case from the video.
He tweeted, โThis guy hit a woman in the jaw. I saw it, clear as day. He should not have done that!โ
Nanos said he would not instruct deputies or detectives to dig further into the case.
โWe have bigger and better things to do than to investigate adults acting like kids,โ he said. โIโve got to trust my deputies to do their job.โ
Masters appears to be relishing the opportunity to burnish his tough-guy credentials. The Stanford Law School grad tweeted the night of the event, โA masked-up guy with a BLM shirt crashed this GOP event tonight. Started causing trouble, then he hit a woman. So me and some guys put him on the ground, then the police came for him.โ
Hernandez, Engel find dividing line
Democrats Daniel Hernandez and Kirsten Engel, who are running for the partyโs nomination in Congressional District 6, are pretty well aligned on the issues.
But Hernandez recently found a line to divide them โ the border. Specifically, in a late May forum Engel would not describe the situation at the Arizona-Mexico border as a โcrisis,โ Hernandez did.
Asked by host Ted Simons if Arizona has an โimmigration crisis,โ Engel took a deep breath and said โNo.โ She went on to explain โWe do need help at our border. We do need to secure our border. We have issues of drug trafficking and human smuggling that need to be addressed, but certainly not (with) walls. Walls are a 13th Century solution to a 21st Century problem.โ
Hernandez said he disagreed with Engel, perhaps because heโs represented border residents in Santa Cruz County at the Legislature the last six years.
Asked to elaborate in separate interviews this week, Hernandez and Engel largely coincided on their view of border issues. They both said that the federal government has failed, that the issues are multifaceted, that we need to increase security, in part through applying technological solutions.
Hernandez emphasized the need to help economically struggling border communities; Engel emphasized the need to strengthen asylum processing so that people present themselves at ports of entry instead of crossing between them.
And they both said the Biden adminstration needs a plan for replacing Title 42, the Trump-era pandemic policy that allows agents to return illegal crossers immediately due to public-health concerns. Neither knew that the Biden administration presented just such a plan in late April, before a court ordered the administration to keep Title 42 in place.
So, again, they largely coincide, except on the use of that word โcrisis.โ
By the way, a third Democrat will also be on the ballot in the Democratic primary Aug. 2 โ Avery Anderson. He did not attend the late May debate.
Another forum, hosted by the Pima County Democratic Party, takes places at 1 p.m. Saturday in Room N210 at the University of Arizonaโs Steward Observatory, 933 N. Cherry Ave.
Hotel Congress protest sign
You may have noticed the sign for Hotel Congress has been out at night lately. Thatโs not by accident.
The management of the iconic downtown hotel explained on social media this week that the sign will be out for a total of 21 nights โ in memory of those killed in the Uvalde, Texas, massacre and in support of stricter gun laws.
โWeโve never purposely darkened our sign, but the recent tragedy in Texas compelled us to do something,โ the statement read.
It goes on to call for โcommon sense gun legislation โ universal background checks, raising the purchase age to 21, red flag laws, mandatory training and licensing, a federal assault weapons ban and a minimum three-day waiting period.โ
