In this video, filmed spontaneously on West North Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan (just west of North Park, I’ll embed a map) in the summer of 2010, we watch a police stop in the background while discussing the significant possibility that simply by recording this video, I was risking arrest. As I write this in 2021, there is an active case in process that may make that more true. Thanks to noted asshat and anthropomorphic suppurating rectal polyp James O’Keefe at Project Veritas and his bullshit, a court in the eastern district of Michigan has put this state’s long-standing position as a “single party consent” state for audio recording – meaning only one person, and not all of them, need consent to a conversation being recorded – into jeopardy, and the state supreme court is expected to rule on the matter fairly soon (if they haven’t already; I couldn’t find anything in a quick google search).
The ability to record authorities in the execution of their official duties is absolutely critical to of a free state. Honorable execution of the duties of public safety should never require hiding in shadows and forbidding an independent record. It is absolutely incumbent of each of us as citizens to remain vigilant and diligent in holding our public servants to account, every time.
These laws also represent something that I didn’t discuss in the video, and that is how the right wing has engaged in a long play of stuffing every possible office from president to dog catcher with fundamentalists advancing authoritarian and – as is now much less radical to say than when I was saying it at the time this video was filmed – even fascist agendas. You have to keep your eyes open, you have to remain engaged, and even if it means running for office yourself you have to take an active and ongoing part in protecting the necessary freedoms that allow us to exist in a free nation, no matter how abridged that freedom may be at any given moment in any given circumstance. To whatever extent American freedom is succeeding at all, it is succeeding because we, the people, keep our eyes open.
Here’s a test message posted by logging in to the comment form with my Facebook account.
Edit: Since I use the same e-mail for this account and one of my Patreon logins, it automatically found my prior login with the Patreon account by matching e-mail addresses, and used the existing account instead of creating a new one (which is the normal process).