BAR-W Goes Underground with Controversial Meeting

Bulverde Area Republican Women (BAR-W) Thursday announced they were canceling tonight’s general meeting at GVTC Auditorium due to protests against featured speaker Jim Gibson of the 300-strong Texas Border Volunteers, who patrol ranchland in Brooks County to help U.S. Customs & Border Patrol agents apprehend illegal immigrants.

Instead, at approximately 6:15 p.m. Monday they began live-streaming the event, including Gibson’s presentation, on their Facebook page with a promise to reveal the new, secret location once the meeting ended.

Approximately 25 to 30 men and women listened to Gibson’s first-hand accounts of what it’s like to apprehend Mexicans, Central Americans and possibly even Pakistanis and Chinese trying to enter the United States in Brooks County. He spoke in a windowless room whose walls were decorated with a Buck & Doe’s Mercantile sign, antlers, and gun and lethal-force posters.

To see the hour-long presentation, which is now archived, visit BAR-W’s Facebook page by clicking here.

Gibson thanked BAR-W for proceeding with the meeting despite protests last week by Democrats, who said a flyer promoting the event used the same hate speech as the manifesto written by the shooter who killed 22 people in an El Paso Wal-Mart on Aug. 3.

The retired U.S. Air Force senior master sergeant commended BAR-W for its ability to “improvise, adapt and overcome,”  a reference to a comment by Clint Eastwood’s character in the 1986 movie Heartbreak Ridge.

Gibson also jokingly suggested someone check outside to see if there were pigs flying.

But Gloria Meehan, deputy chair for the Comal Democratic Party, didn’t find anything humorous about BAR-W’s decision to take its meeting underground. She said she was ‘gobsmacked’ by its Facebook Livestream.

“I’m kind of taken aback by their very cavalier attitude about this, essentially snubbing their nose at a sensitive time in our state and then having the event anyway,” she said. “When you have an event anyway behind the very public declaration that they’re not, it gives one pause as to what their true intentions are in the community.”

BAR-W’s flyer describes immigrants as an “illegal alien stampede, caravans of ‘migrants,’ drug cartels and terrorists, human trafficking and disease.” BAR-W’s August newsletter, The Bugle, promoted Gibson’s Aug. 12 presentation as an “eye-opening” talk about the “front line experiences of this war on Texas and the nation to Bar-W!”

BAR-W President Kaci Sisk urged members who attended the meeting tonight at Buck & Doe’s Mercantile, 24250 US-281, San Antonio, to go out and “spread the word about the truth” of the immigration crisis along Texas’ southern border.

However, BAR-W’s Livestream stopped less than five minutes after Gibson’s presentation ended. It is unclear whether further business was discussed this evening.

Also unknown is exactly who the protesters are. Although a war of words was waged on Facebook, BAR-W did not clearly identify any groups or individuals directly involved in their decision to cancel the original meeting scheduled at GVTC.