So-called "First Amendment auditing" is the practice that some people in the United States engage in (and similar practice in some other countries), where someone goes with a camera to a public place or a publicly accessible area of a governmental building in order to see if his rights to film in public are respected by police officers and other government employees (as well as the occasional private guard).
I could classify "First Amendment auditors" into three distinct categories (although, of course, the line between them can be blurry at times):
- The auditors who not only know and obey all the relevant laws, but always act very professionally, cordially and respectfully, never incite anything by themselves starting an encounter with someone (and thus only interact with other people if they engage first), and who maintain a calm, respectful and professional demeanor as far as possible when conversing with someone, be it a police officer, a governmental employee, or another private citizen. They know their legal boundaries and always respect them, they never deliberately trespass on private property or restricted areas, and if they are (at least seemingly) lawfully trespassed, they obey.
- The auditors who technically never break any laws and stay within their legal rights, but who nevertheless tend to be very rude, very confrontational, sometimes even outright verbally aggressive, who respond to even mild scrutiny by government officials, and even private individuals, with rude and strong responses.
- The "wannabe auditors" who have absolutely no idea what they are doing and are just trying to follow the trend, and who not only are very rude, provocative, confrontational and mocking, but also have no understanding of the law nor actual limitations, and may, for example, actually trespass on private property and refuse to leave when ordered to do so. There have even been some proven cases where the so-called "auditor" has actually called the police on himself in order to artificially create a confrontation (obviously without telling his YouTube viewers that it was him who called the police).
Needless to say, I heavily oppose and object to that third type of people, I heavily disapprove of the tactics used by that second type, but I defend their right do so as long as they don't break the law nor outright harass people, and the auditors I support the most are those of the first type. That's, of course, because that first kind of behavior is the most constructive and beneficial.
Some people have coined the derogatory term "frauditor".
One would think that that term would be used to describe that third type of "auditor". Especially the ones who actually stage the confrontation by calling the police themselves (or in some other extremely objectionable, perhaps even illegal, ways deliberately and purposefully cause people to call the police), especially when they keep this fact hidden from their viewers. They are quite literally defrauding their viewers by staging such an encounter and not showing their viewers the whole chain of events.
One would think that, but one would be wrong.
The term "frauditor" is most commonly used by some people in a very derogatory manner to describe all First Amendment auditors, completely regardless of their behavior and their type of video. Even the nicest and most respectful and professionally-behaving auditors they call "frauditors", and oppose what they are doing.
There are, in fact, entire YouTube channels dedicated to nothing more than to "expose" these so-called "frauditors". Very rarely, if ever, do these channels feature the third type of "auditor" described above. Most videos are of the second and even first type.
Some of those YouTube channels are very small and with quite poor-quality videos, and quite clearly created solely to try to capitalize on some kind of made-up "controversy" that they are trying to conjure out of the original auditing videos.
However, other such channels are quite big, with very sizeable numbers of subscribers.
And the arguments that they are making are pretty much always quite petty and incomprehensible. Oftentimes they just laugh at or scoff at, making mocking and sarcastic comments at something that happens in the original auditing video, without ever explaining what exactly was so ridiculous or wrong about that thing. They just mock it as if it were obvious why that thing was so ridiculous or wrong. Othertimes they might make some kind of argument, but usually it's something either completely petty, splitting hairs, or they may just make some kind of generic complaint about the auditor being a "nuisance" or something along those lines.
Invariably, if the video shows some police officer harassing the auditor, the "anti-frauditor" author, and hundreds of people in the comment section, will approve of it. If the officer makes an unlawful action against the auditor (such as demanding ID when the officer has no legal right to do so), the "anti-frauditor" author will support the police on this. If the auditor ends up arrested, the champagne bottles are uncorked in celebration (both by the video author and the hundreds of people in the comment section). This completely regardless of whether the arrest was lawful or not.
Very rarely do they present any arguments about why they oppose the actions of the auditor so heavily, or why the actions of the officers were justified. In fact, there are many instances where the "anti-frauditor" outright lies to his viewers about something eg. regarding the law (such as stating that a particular state is a so-called stop-and-ID state, when in fact it's not. Something that anybody could corroborate with a quick Google search but which, obviously, none of the viewers of the video will do.)
The biggest such channels also deal (usually even primarily) with so-called "sovereign citizens" and how ridiculous their arguments and antics are. Those videos are, for the most part, actually quite agreeable, and (most usually) what the video author says is actually true, and it's in fact quite often fun to watch the sovcits get stopped by traffic cops and have their car windows smashed when they refuse to comply, and to hear their pseudolegal word salad in their court hearings, which never leads to anything positive for them.
The problem with these channels, however, is that for some reason they are never purely "anti-sovcit" channels (or at least so far I have never encountered a channel that's purely dedicated to them). Instead, they bunch First Amendment auditors with the sovcits, and consider them all the same (even though the two groups have pretty much nothing in common). And, without exceptions, they bunch all auditors into the same category, not just the type 3 auditors.
I honestly cannot understand these channels. They are attacking people who have done nothing wrong, have not broken any laws, and most egregiously, when they get unlawfully mistreated by police officers they outright celebrate it, loudly and proudly. They go their way to defend the actions of police officers, even when those actions are clearly unlawful.
They are extreme bootlickers of the worst kind.
Comments
Post a Comment