RNC Welcoming Committee: Meeting the Press at last (Mary Turck)

Another police blockade of the High Street bridge did not stop media intent on finally having a look at the RNC Welcoming Committee space and members. On Thursday morning, six RNC-WC members explained their commitment to welcoming and encouraging a variety of protesters, but disclaimed any direct role in the week’s street protests.

“The Welcoming Committee was not on the streets,” said one of the spokespersons.

{xtypo_quote_right} Offered a microphone and the stage, 19-year-old Elliott Hughes said that “me and some friends were chanting for food,” when six or seven officers came into the cell. “One punched me in the face, and I fell unconscious. An officer slammed my head on the ground, waking me up.” Then, he said, he was dragged to a retaining cell, where the officers put a bag on his head and “did pain compliance on me. I was screaming for God and crying,” he said, and eventually the officers took him to Regions Hospital for stitches and treatment. {/xtypo_quote_right} 

What about explosives? What about buckets of urine? Reporters wanted to talk about what the police claim to have found in searches of homes and the Convergence Space over the weekend.

“I didn’t see any of those things ever in this space,” answered one of the six spokespersons seated in front of a bank of cameras.

“After the sheriff’s office seemed to have such a fetish for scatology,” another young man observed, they tried to figure out where this came from. They decided that it might have started at a Town Hall meeting at Macalester’s Weyerhauser Chapel, when a man in the back stood up and said “What you people should do is throw piss at the Republicans!” The Town Hall group laughed, and “from time to time, we would mention ‘the pee guy.’”

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