Petty and tyrannical and cowardly picking on innocent and helpless Americans. Shameful

Rollins is a psychopath

Everyone of these psychopaths need to be in prison! Absolutely disgusting!

I already know this probably won’t be a popular opinion in this community, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I finally reached the point where I can’t ignore the things that have been bothering me.
For some context, I have watched Long Island Audit basically from the beginning. I am a huge supporter of government transparency, accountability and the First Amendment auditing community in general. That hasn’t changed.

One of the things that originally made me like Sean so much was that he seemed different from a lot of people doing this type of content. He seemed genuinely passionate about making a difference. He wasn’t just walking into buildings trying to get someone to lose their temper for a viral video. He was generally respectful, professional and friendly, while still standing his ground and knowing his rights.

Most importantly, he always seemed to emphasize transparency and honesty. Those are things he has repeatedly presented as being important to him.
And I think that is part of why some of the things I’ve noticed bother me as much as they do.

As his channel got bigger, I started noticing a change during some of his livestreams. I have a hard time even explaining it because there isn’t one specific statement I can point to and say, “There. That’s when it happened.”
It was just a subtle change in demeanor. A little more arrogance. A little more ego. Just an overall feeling I started getting from him.
His actual audits were still generally respectful and professional, so for a long time I dismissed it. Maybe I was reading him wrong. Maybe I was interpreting something that wasn’t there.

But as the channel continued growing, that feeling got stronger.
Then something happened that gave me a very different perspective because the auditing community suddenly crossed over into my real life.

About a year or so ago, J-Town Press audited the government agency where I work. I work in child protective services. Obviously, I’m not going to identify the agency or location, but I think what I do is relevant because constitutional rights are incredibly important in my profession. We deal directly with parents, enter homes under certain circumstances, interview children, work alongside law enforcement and make decisions that can seriously affect families.
The audit itself really wasn’t a big deal and went fairly well.

Behind the scenes, however, employees were basically losing their minds.
A lot of people had absolutely no idea why someone was filming, what their rights were, what the auditor’s rights were, or what government employees could and could not demand from a member of the public.
Afterward, I spoke with our director. To their credit, they were actually very receptive to learning from what happened instead of just getting angry about it.

That made me think of Sean.
Sean doesn’t just occasionally mention that he has done First Amendment training. He actively promotes it. On his YouTube channel and website, he talks about conducting trainings and seminars with police departments, district attorneys’ offices and other agencies around the country, and he specifically invites agencies that are interested in working with him to reach out by email.

So this wasn’t me randomly tracking down a content creator and asking him for a favor. This was literally the kind of opportunity he publicly tells agencies to contact him about.
Our director asked me to reach out.
So I emailed Sean at the contact information he provides. I explained that I had followed and supported his work, told him what had happened at our agency, and explained that our leadership was genuinely interested in potentially having him come provide First Amendment training.

And just to be clear, nobody expected him to do it for free. He would have been compensated for his time and travel.
I never received a response.
Nothing.
Now, is Sean obligated to come train my agency? Of course not.
Is he obligated to accept every training request he receives? Absolutely not.
What bothered me is that Sean regularly asks his audience to support the mission—not just financially, but by watching, subscribing, sharing his videos, engaging with his content, buying merchandise, donating and helping grow the platform. And one of the things he repeatedly talks about is using education and training to “bridge the gap” between government officials and the public.

That is exactly what this opportunity was.
A government agency had just experienced a First Amendment audit, realized that many of its employees did not understand the rights involved, and instead of becoming defensive, the leadership was actually willing to learn. They were interested in bringing someone in to educate staff so that if something like this happened again, employees would better understand both their responsibilities and the rights of the public.
Isn’t that the goal?
Isn’t that what “bridging the gap” is supposed to look like?

Again, he was under absolutely no obligation to accept the training. My issue isn’t that he didn’t come. But when you publicly advertise this type of work, specifically invite agencies to reach out, and continually talk about wanting to educate government officials and bridge that gap, I think a legitimate inquiry deserves at least an acknowledgment.
A simple, “Thanks for reaching out, unfortunately I can’t accommodate this,” would have been completely fine.
Instead, there was nothing.

And I think that was the first time I really started questioning whether some of the things Sean talks about as part of the “mission” were as important to him in practice as they sounded when he talked about them on camera.
Still, I made excuses for it.
He’s busy. He gets tons of emails. Maybe he somehow never saw it.
Fine.
Then came the Brian Fahey/private-road trespassing case.
I supported Sean through that situation too. This was the case involving the “Private Road – No Turnaround” sign and the dispute over the trespassing charge.
Sean raised money for his legal defense. Later, we learned that he ultimately represented himself at trial.

Sean has explained that attorneys were still involved behind the scenes advising him, and I have no reason to say that isn’t true.
But again, something about it bothered me.
If you are raising money from your supporters specifically because of legal expenses, and then you ultimately represent yourself, I think being extremely clear with those supporters about exactly what their donations are funding matters.

Maybe attorneys were being paid substantial amounts behind the scenes. Maybe every dollar was legitimately used for legal expenses.
My issue is the transparency.
For somebody whose entire platform is built around demanding transparency from other people, I think the standard should be especially high when you are asking your own audience for money.
Again, though, I let it go.

And then we got to the recent YouTube demonetization situation.
First, I want to make something very clear because I know people will misunderstand this post otherwise:

I think what YouTube has done to First Amendment auditing channels is wrong.
Whatever anyone thinks about individual auditors, removing monetization from large portions of an entire category of lawful content is deeply concerning. Long Island Audit was one of the major channels affected, followed by numerous others.

Now many auditors are moving content to Patreon.
I understand why.
These people make content for a living. They travel, buy equipment, spend countless hours filming and editing, and they have bills just like everyone else. I have absolutely no problem with somebody being paid for their work.

But there is an obvious problem.
If 20, 30 or more creators all move their content behind separate Patreon subscriptions, the average viewer simply cannot financially support all of them.
People are struggling right now.
That is why a lot of viewers have been asking a perfectly reasonable question:
Why not Rumble?

Rumble allows viewers to watch without paying a monthly subscription while still giving creators an opportunity to monetize their content.
That doesn’t mean creators can’t also have Patreon for people who want bonus content, early access, livestreams or simply want to financially support them.
It just gives everybody else somewhere to continue watching.

Sean recently posted about the situation, and I left a comment basically making that argument.

I was a longtime supporter raising what I thought was a legitimate and respectful point about Rumble and the financial reality of expecting viewers to subscribe to dozens of individual Patreons.
Sean deleted my comment.

And strangely enough, that was probably the moment that bothered me more than everything else.
Because think about the irony.
This is somebody whose entire platform is built around transparency, accountability and the right to express yourself—
Yet when a supporter respectfully questioned something he was doing, rather than answer it, disagree with it, or simply leave it alone, the comment disappeared.

That says something to me.
Especially because some genuinely nasty comments were allowed to remain while a respectful criticism apparently wasn’t.
It made me wonder whether I had asked a question he simply didn’t want to answer.
And then, out of curiosity, I went to look at his Patreon tiers.
There are normal options: $5, $10, $25, etc. Nothing unusual about that.
Then they keep going.
Including tiers of $500 and $1,000 per month.

I’m sorry, but that was the moment where I just thought: What are we doing here?
One thousand dollars.
A month.
I understand that Patreon tiers can sometimes basically function as voluntary support levels. Maybe nobody is literally expected to pay $1,000 just to watch a video. If someone has the money and voluntarily wants to support a creator at that level, that’s their business.
But even offering a $1,000-a-month tier feels unbelievably out of touch to me.

And taken together with everything else, it changed the way I look at him.
Maybe none of these individual things would have been enough by themselves.
An unanswered email? Fine.
Questions about how legal-defense donations were communicated? Okay.
Deleting one critical comment? Whatever.
Having extremely expensive Patreon tiers? His choice.
But taken together, they form a pattern that I personally can no longer overlook.
And this isn’t coming from someone who only watched his videos for free.
My family is also a member of Attorney Shield, which is connected to Sean and his work. We signed up because I genuinely believed in what he was doing and was willing to financially support something associated with him.

I’ll be canceling that membership.
I don’t say that as some kind of threat or attempt to hurt his business. One canceled membership obviously isn’t going to make or break anything. I mention it because I think it shows where I’m at. I supported Sean beyond clicking “subscribe” on YouTube. I was willing to put my own money behind something he was involved with.

I’m no longer comfortable doing that.
The biggest issue for me is the contradiction.
You cannot constantly preach transparency while becoming less transparent with the people funding you.

You cannot talk endlessly about respecting people’s ability to speak and criticize government, but then be unable to tolerate polite criticism from your own supporters.
And you cannot build a community largely through ordinary working people donating $5, $10 and $20 at a time and then become so disconnected from those same people that $500 and $1,000 monthly Patreon tiers seem reasonable.
Maybe Sean hasn’t changed at all.
Maybe I have.

I watched Sean from the beginning because I thought he represented the best parts of that movement: professionalism, education, transparency and accountability.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like those principles were being applied equally when the transparency and accountability were directed back at him.
And after years of supporting him, financially supporting things connected to him, and repeatedly giving him the benefit of the doubt, deleting a respectful comment from a longtime supporter was finally enough for me to say:
I’m done.

Long Island Audit claimed that him and other 1st amendment auditors in that image was demonetized recently on youtube. I haven't seen other channels saying anything yet.

Recording starts after he pulls me over.

Cop was turning left at 4 way intersection. I was coming opposite direction with a green. No other cars were going my direction so cop thought it safe to turn but saw me last second and stopped short. I biked by him and gave a peace sign. He then proceeded to pull me over telling me I must have ran a red light since all other cars were stopped.

I am dubious that the police had exigency to enter her home without a warrant and to detain her under Terry v Ohio. Even if they could convince a judge in court that they had exigency for the above, they had other, less intrusive means to preserve the data on the phone until they could obtain a search warrant for it’s digital contents. They could have powered to phone off, removed the SIM card or kept it powered on inside a Faraday bag as instructed in Riley v California, Supreme Court 2014.

They might win the exigency argument if there was a missing child or other type of imminent threat to health and safety—but the victim was receiving medical care and no dangerous individuals seemed to be nearby.

I am one who thinks that Terry v. Ohio does not apply to someone who is standing inside their home. Terry is for detainments made in public based on reasonable articulable suspicion that criminal activity may be afoot.

I’m a little surprised that this content creator was so easily convinced that they could have detained her without a judicial warrant by grabbing her from inside her home. She wasn’t suspected of any criminal activity and there was a very low probability that she would delete her own RING data at that hour. Just apply for a warrant and seize the phone, after the warrant is issued, when she exits her apartment.