While poking around Alan Swinney's Twitter page today we found something really stupid. We found a video he posted that was actually some woman filming herself snitching on him. We don't know who she is, what her affiliations are, or exactly why she was downtown filming on August 17, 2020. If we had to guess we would guess that she was probably down there with Antifa to counter protest Swinney's "patriot" rally. Swinney is a redneck conservative from Texas that comes to Portland to cause trouble. He promotes himself as a Proud Boy and a Back the Blue Trump supporter. Swinney is not a cop and as far as we know he has never gotten anyone arrested by squealing. That doesn't seem like his style. He seems like the type that likes to get in peoples faces and see if he can provoke them into doing anything that would justify him beating them up. We don't like him or his Back the Blue buddies but we don't like snitches either.
Anyone that goes to the police and tattles on someone for shooting paint balls, air soft guns, plastic balls, or rubber bullets at Antifa is snitch. Especially if that person claims to be anti-police. The anti-police community does not need snitches going to the police with information on people. That just gives people like Swinney ammunition to call out hypocrites because anyone that claims to be anti-cop while at the same time giving the cops information and asking them to work with them is a hypocrite. Rather than seek an outcome where you can say that at least you didn't need the cops to handle people like Swinney, you end up making it look like the police are not just needed but needed by the same people that are protesting them on a nightly basis. Any legitimate anti-cop activist would cringe at the though of speaking to a cop and do everything they could not to give them information under any circumstances. A legitimate anti-cop activist would be so ashamed of themselves just for speaking to the police, let alone doing what this woman did, that they would have trouble sleeping at night afterwards.
Funny how this woman films this as if it proves police misconduct. This video shows that the protests are working and the police are butting out of people's affairs. The fact that they do not have the resources to lock people up over stupid fights is a good thing. This should be a cause for celebration, but instead the same people that have been fighting so hard to defund the police are now calling for their help. Right now the internet is full of snitches posting information on social media pages run by law enforcement agencies demanding that they arrest certain people. The people on the right are posting pictures of Antifa members and the people on the left are posting pictures of Swinney. In so doing both sides are proving that their ranks are full of rats. The rats on the right have been recording live streams and sending clips to the police for months. Now that counter protesters from the right have arrived in Portland, the rats on the left have started doing the same thing and defending their actions by saying that it is alright to snitch on people of certain ideologies. As if snitching on a white supremacist is not snitching. Nothing could be further from the truth. A rat is a rat and snitching is snitching. Whether the person being snitched on is communist, democrat, libertarian, republican, or a national socialist is absolutely 100% irrelevant. Nobody deserves to be in prison over these protests and we will not stay silent while anyone tries to put anyone in prison for political reasons.
The need to protect everyone's right to free speech has never been greater. We do not agree with Swinney's speech, but we do agree that he has the right to speak. The right to speak and hopefully be ignored or get an earful of criticism. We were very concerned when Antifa and BLM protesters were banned from protesting as conditions of pre-trial release. We were afraid that such practices would only encourage selective prosecution for the purpose of shutting people up. We are concerned that the situation with Swinney may devolve into the same thing. We cannot allow the state to treat similarly situated people differently based on the content of their speech. If you have a giant brawl between two groups, then members of those groups are all similarly situated. Right now it looks like the Portland Police are soliciting help from the public for the primary purpose of building a case against Swinney. If they decide to prosecute just him and/or his people then that is selective prosecution. We are not saying that the other side should be charged, but what we are saying is that if one similarly situated person gets a pass then everyone should get a pass.