"You're Not Allowed to Film!"
"Reporting on Antifa" w/Nancy Rommelmann
You're Not Allowed to Film! If someone's taking pictures on the street, and someone else doesn't like the fact that they're taking pictures, why shouldn't the person that doesn't like it be able to assault the person that took the picture? Well, because this is a crime. It's assault, alright, it is violence. And I have very, very closely dealt with this myself when I was covering the federal building being occupied by Trump forces and Antifa on the street. And Antifa wanted to only present the narrative that showed them acting heroically, showed them acting being besieged. And there was definitely violence in the streets, people were hurt, the Feds did hit people with rubber bullets and different things. But I witnessed personally on the street over dozens of nights-- Antifa being the aggressors. And they did not like me reporting that.
Ergo, they posted my picture online. And they didn't steal my camera, some little yahoo on the street stole my camera because I was filming. And I was followed around and told, we know who you are. They did not want the narrative told from any other way than their own.
We saw this a couple of weeks ago when a black bloc kid assaulted a journalist who was filming an event. That's her job. She's supposed to be there doing her job; you're not allowed to assault her because you don't want your side acting badly to be photographed. So no, you're not allowed to do that. It's a crime. And it's like anything ... if I was taking a picture of a tiger at the zoo and some guy didn't like that, and he punched me in the face, why is it any different if it's at a political event?
It's very easy to say, I'm the good guy, you're the bad guy. Well, first of all, it never gives you the right to assault someone. Even if you feel that people have behaved very badly. It clearly is not the case that everything in society are the bad guys and Antifa are the good guys. This is not true. They may want to believe that, it makes it kind of easy. But it's incredibly uninformed and it's incredibly juvenile. Adults don't behave this way.
