Earlier today, we covered how journalist Nick Sortor was arrested in Portland by their local police, here and here. In the first of those two links we saw Bill Melugin say he had spoken on the phone and he did his best to relay the substance of the conversation.
But there’s nothing like hearing it from Sorter himself, in this Fox News segment:
The cut off word is "arrest."
And to square the circle, the detail that is infuriating? According to Sortor, he went to the police for protection and ended up being arrested instead.
(This was touched on in earlier coverage, but it needs to be highlighted.)
The entire thing smacks of a low-level version of the Kyle Rittenhouse case. That young man—then a teenager—was attacked by a convicted sexual predator who had just been let out of the looney bin that day and then was attacked by a mob, and even after video came out exonerating Rittenhouse, the local authorities still prosecuted him all the way through to a verdict—including on a gun charge where the prosecutors admitted to facts that meant he was allowed to keep and bear the gun in question. To this day, we suspect the real motive behind the prosecution was politics. The rioters were Democrats and Rittenhouse committed two cardinal ‘sins:’ 1) He didn’t cower in his home when the militant wing of the Democratic Party was rioting, and 2) he dared to fight back when those militant Democrats were attacking him. They wanted to make such an example of him that no one will commit those ‘sins’ again.
(And we think they were happy just to put him through a trial. As people say, ‘the process is the punishment.’)
Fortunately, as Mr. Sortor indicated, we are seeing interventions from the Trump Administration in his case as we write this and we plan to talk about that in a follow up piece.
But we are constrained to note that Mr. Sortor did intervene to stop the burning of a flag as you can see here:
The cut off text:
Nick was arrested later in the night by Portland PD after videos appear to show him surrounded by anti-ICE protesters. It’s unclear what exactly happened, we are working on getting in touch with him once he is released from custody.
We had seen Nick get surrounded and verbally threatened by protesters the previous night. He posted on X that he felt Portland PD would arrest him if he tried to defend himself.
While most patriots are likely to support this behavior in stopping the flag burning, it might be technically illegal. Allow us to explain.
First off, burning a flag under these circumstance might have been legal. The government cannot ban flag burning as flag burning. That is according to the Supreme Court, in a precedent that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But burning anything is potentially dangerous, and the government is allowed to enact content and viewpoint neutral restrictions on burning. We don’t know if any such laws applied to that burning.
Another way that the burning might be illegal is if the flag was being burnt without the consent of the owner. As we have repeatedly said, the right to burn a flag is the right to burn your flag not someone else's. So, when we saw the story of a person who tore down the flag outside of Union Station in Washington, D.C. we recognized that this was not free speech, because the First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to destroy government property.
So, that is two ways the flag burning might have been illegal. If the burning was illegal, then Sortor was likely legally justified as he was stopping a person from breaking the law and creating a potentially dangerous situation.
But if it was a legal flag burning, then Sortor technically committed a battery, by taking the flag from its owner and then he trespassed on that property by stomping out the flames. So if government officials in Portland were bound and determined to ‘get’ Sortor, he may have given the prosecution the ammunition that they needed. It sucks, but that is the reality.
On to reactions:
We are not sure how much Trump can do to help this guy’s specific complaints. Trump simply doesn’t have the same power in the states that he does over Washington, D.C., because of the principle of federalism. But he seems likely to be able to improve the situation in Portland.
Unfortunately they seem to think they work for ‘The People’ in the sense that China is technically called ‘The People’s Republic of China.’
Finally:
Exactly. People who say ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ (or ACAB), or who think every cop is always right, are both wrong. We tend to think most cops go into the profession and stay in the profession for the right reasons. But some cops really are ‘Al Capone with a badge’—as they used to say about the protagonist on The Shield, and the case books are filled with them. And others mean well, but still make mistakes. In this case, we think the problems with Portland Police comes more from their political leadership than anyone else. But cops have a duty to uphold the law—including upholding the Constitution—and we don’t believe they are doing that right now.
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