This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
The Government’s War on Free Speech: Protest Laws Undermine the First Amendment
Tag: trespassing
Chaos agent: Right-wing blames US Capitol riot on notorious instigator banished by Black Lives Matter & John Sullivan Is Arrested
Many activists have characterized Sullivan as an agent provocateur, while others have speculated that he is a law enforcement asset. What all seem to agree on is that he thrives off of creating as much chaos as possible.
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“John knew somehow that people were considering storming the Capitol,” Sacker told me. “He had had intelligence days before, and I didn’t believe him. I never thought that something like that would happen. And then when we showed up at the Capitol, there were thousands and thousands of people there. I didn’t think that we would be able to document what was going on. So when I said we did it, I was just shocked that we like got in there at all, and that we were on the front lines of being able to tell the story.”
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“He’s just angry,” she reflected to me. “And he says it in a lot of his videos – ‘Fuck the system, burn it down.’ He doesn’t think it can be reformed. Like he kind of wants his civil war. He’s a bit of a provocateur and he wants to dismantle the system, and he believes in the value of civil disobedience. And because he is apolitical, I think he feels more a sense of allegiance to anyone who shares that the values of, I guess, chaos.”
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Sean Michael Love, the BLM-affiliated journalist, offered a more jaded perspective on Sullivan’s motives: “I definitely think that mentally, he has some things he has to work out. But as far as him cooperating with the law enforcement, that has been our belief.”
Related:
John Earle Sullivan, Who Recorded Ashli Babbitt’s Shooting, Is Arrested
If he’s not an asset, how did he have intelligence about the storming of the Capitol and why did the FBI let him go?