Citizen Journalist Unlawfully Removed by State Rep for Legally Filming

Any citizen in every state has the right to film and record open meetings if they do not otherwise disrupt the meeting by doing so. In this Project Veritas video, James O’Keefe teams up with Texas mother and citizen journalist Amy Hedtke who was unlawfully removed from a State Affairs Committee meeting by Republican Committee Chair Byron Cook for attempting to film it in accordance with Texas state law.

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Comment by XLFD on May 4, 2017 at 9:11pm

I appreciate your response, IHaveANotion, this video was put up without much context because I wanted to make a point about what motivates people nowadays, but I wanted to allow enough people to look at it first before establishing that context. 

This woman was doing nothing illegal back in March, she was trying to record at an open meeting of state officials in Texas.  Texas' Open Meetings Act is, if anything, more citizen-friendly than Michigan's, but this woman was carried away by several Texas Rangers, whose duty is to enforce the laws of the State of Texas.  These Rangers were following the "rule" put outside the meeting, which blatantly broke the OMA law, and was definitely in violation of equal protection laws.  The regular media effectively ignored the woman's mistreatment, little was made of it beyond her own alternate media universe.

Alternate media mainstay James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas staff, recently published this and yet they failed to frame what happened here the way I think they should have.  Recall, in April, every news agency and every branch of social media went nuts over the treatment of a doctor passenger on a United Airlines flight being taken off forcefully from the plane UA overbooked, and went through policy to correct (Don't recall, look at it here). 

But before that this happened, and when you compare the two, it shouldn't even be close for triggering your outrage meter.  This woman went peacefully to a public meeting, was not allowed to stay, was removed forcefully from the meeting for recording, arrested for trespassing,-- all against the law, all perpetrated by state officials. 

In the United Airlines case, which was deplorable in its own right, the airlines apparently had a procedure for overbooking, ticket buyers apparently had removal for overbooking as part of their purchase agreement-- together with proper reimbursement for the inconvenience.  The airlines apparently did a fair method of choosing who would have to give up their seat.  The case could easily be made that the doctor brought it on himself for not living up to the contract he effectively signed by buying the ticket. 

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