Ready. Aim. Shoot!

Another round of pro-illegal immigration demonstrations is scheduled to take place tomorrow. One of the groups organizing tomorrow’s demonstrations is a Communist organization called International A.N.S.W.E.R. A.N.S.W.E.R., which has championed every tyrant from Kim Il John to Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein, has now taken up the cause of illegal immigration, and was the principal organizer of the massive demonstration in southern California a week or two ago.

Last Wednesday, there was an A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting in Washington, D.C. at which A.N.S.W.E.R.’s National Coordinator, Brian Becker, and Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director of Latino Movement USA, spoke about illegal immigration as an aspect of the socialist movement and about the upcoming demonstrations. One of tomorrow’s biggest demonstrations will take place in Washington, and A.N.S.W.E.R. and other radical organizations are expected to play a prominent role.

Unfortunately for A.N.S.W.E.R., the meeting was attended by a couple of bloggers from Vital Perspective, who taped the meeting and reported on it on their site. They shared their audiotape of the proceedings with us, and we have posted a short excerpt on Power Line Video. In this excerpt, you can hear Becker wonder whether there are undercover policemen present (he forgot about bloggers), pose a tough question to his audience, and speculate about how illegal immigrants could be the “catalyst for a broader class struggle, even possibly a revolutionary struggle.”

Tomorrow, pro-illegal immigration demonstrations are planned to take place in around 60 cities. You can find the schedule of events here. If the past is any guide, conventional news coverage of the demonstrations is likely to be unilluminating. We think this is an opportunity for a bit of citizen journalism. Anyone with a video camera (or most digital cameras) can attend one of the demonstrations and record what he sees. How many people are participating in the demonstration? What signs are they carrying? What flags? Who seems to be in charge? If people are arriving in buses, who runs the buses? Are professionally made signs being distributed? If so, by whom? How about flags? How visible are radical groups like A.N.S.W.E.R.?

We’re encouraging our readers, and anyone else who is able, to attend the demonstration in your city and record what you see. Send your videos to us, and we’ll put up a cross-section of interesting footage–assuming, of course, that we get some. It will be interesting to compare the first-hand observations of citizens with cameras to news accounts.

How do you get video footage to us? In small files, suitable for posting on the web (i.e., Power Line Video). There are several ways to do this. First, if you use the video function of a digital camera, you will get files of the right size. Second, if you use iMovie, you can reduct your footage to email size in a click; I assume there is similar software for Windows. Third, you can send your footage to YouSendIt.com, and they’ll reduce the file size and send it to us.

Where do you send video footage? Click on the “Send Us Video” link at the top of this page. The email address is [email protected].

This is an experiment. It should be interesting at a minimum, and a tune-up for many future occasions when on-the-spot citizens may provide information that is truly newsworthy.

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