With heroes like this, our country doesn’t need any villains.

This update is a rant. Sorry in advance, everyone.

A few weeks ago the subject of my video blog was Pastor Steve Anderson, a preacher from Arizona who claims he was unjustly searched, arrested, and then beaten by border patrol agent. This egregious violation of his civil rights was so important he decided to flaunt his wounds while telling his story in a YouTube video. His summary of the events basically boils down to “I had done absolutely nothing wrong, politely asked what I was being detained for, and was then tasered repeatedly, brutally beaten and taken into custody for precisely no reason whatsoever.”

The headline of the story, paired with the nasty cuts all over Steve’s face, made for an absolutely outrageous story. It’s very clear that border patrol agents are running hog wild in this country and are a force which must be absolutely abolished. That’s pretty much the end conclusion I might have drawn from the situation, had I not looked a little deeper into Steve’s YouTube channel.

The first thing I noticed was that, as Baptist preachers go, Steve is pretty extreme. He’s the type of Christian most Christians I know would call “not a real Christian”. I admit I haven’t watched more than a couple minutes of his sermons (of which he has uploaded no shortage of), but just skimming the titles shows the kind of hateful, destructive things he’s teaching in his church. I could probably fill a week’s worth of ranting, but honestly what Steve shares with his congregation is of no consequence to me. For one thing I’m not a Christian, and even if I were I don’t go to his church. But Steve has the right to share his religious and political views with anyone who cares to listen, guaranteed to him by the First Amendment of our Constitution. Until he manages to convert his vile little church into a full-blown cult nothing he preaches really affects me in any way.

No, the videos that really changed my opinion about Pastor Steve were his various run-ins with law enforcement, which I’m going to break down here. In a couple short weeks Steve went in my mind from a brave hero who is not afraid to stand up for my personal freedoms to one of the most rancid internet personalities in recent memory. Steve is not a poor, oppressed figure who is being repeatedly abused by law enforcement; he is an abrasive bully with no respect for authority. I believe he purposely seeks out confrontation in order to further his own political agenda. As evidence I present Steve’s own videos of these confrontations.

The first video I watched was a 27-minute marathon of an earlier encounter Steve had with border patrol, entitled “Abusive Border Patrol Agents w/Nun Chucks at NM Checkpoint.” It becomes immediately apparent, and I mean within the first 20 seconds, that Steve is the most abusive party in the video. Throughout the entire 27-minute argument Steve is handled as calmly and patiently by the agents as is reasonable, and he returns not one modicum of respect or civility. He even refuses to roll down his car window to speak with the agents face-to-face.

Eventually the agents inform Steve that his stonewalling is starting to hold up traffic and ask him to pull off to the side. At this point Steve shows a complete lack of respect to the agents, but also every single American citizen stuck behind him. Whatever else you may think of Pastor Steve, imagine how pissed you would be if you found out the traffic you’d been stuck in for a half hour was caused not by a collission, construction or medical emergency but by a single man who believed his rights were more important than everyone else’s.

After watching this video I concluded that Steve’s attitude could absolutely be construed as suspicious, which is all the justification border patrol needs to search a vehicle. Once they had said suspicion it was unlawful for Steve to continue to refuse to submit himself to the search, and he’s very lucky they didn’t place him under arrest. I decided that if Steve acted in his second encounter (where he was allegedly beaten) in a similar manner to this first one, he probably got what was coming to him.

Still, I was willing to give Steve the benefit of the doubt. No video existed of this second confrontation, and I figured eventually border patrol would release the security footage. I decided to withhold judgment on the man until seeing their side of the story.

In the meantime I flipped through some of Steve’s other videos. The next one was “Policeman with a Machine Gun harasses US Citizens at PHX airport.” The very first thing I noticed was that the policeman in the video wasn’t harassing anyone, US citizen or otherwise, and certainly not Steve himself; he was simply walking his patrol, carrying what is probably the weapon issued to him by his employer (or is at least cleared for use in his position). After Steve berates the officer with a number of questions he is dismissed with a curt suggestion to see his sergeant if he has any issues. After it becomes clear he’s not going to be able to bully the policeman, Steve turns his camera on a bystander who almost certainly was just trying to get the hell away from the whole situation.

What I find interesting about this video is that Steve demands the officer take time away from what he was doing to answer any number of pointless and completely irrelevant questions when he himself adamantly refuses to answer for anything at all. In the sidebar of this video Steve asks, “don’t I have the right to know what weapon a public servant is carrying?” No, Steve, you don’t. You don’t have that right any more than a public servant has the right to ask you where you work. All Steve had to do to avoid an encounter with this particular officer was not talk to him. That’s it.

Now, is a machinegun probably a bit much for an airport policeman to carry on his beat? It’s possible, I suppose. I admit it would make me a little uneasy, but then I’m a little uneasy when I see police carrying what I know are loaded pistols, too. The point is, the officer wasn’t doing anything wrong or illegal, and if Steve really had a legitimate problem talking to the sergeant is the best thing he could have done. Strangely there’s no video of Steve’s conversation with the sergeant.

The next video (which is fairly new) is “Another Cop Harrasses me for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON“. In this video Steve is sitting in a dark parking lot in the middle of the night reading over some directions when a police officer approaches and asks what he’s doing. Steve takes immediate offense to this. After telling her why he was parked there he, once again, completely stonewalls her and refuses to cooperate even the slightest little bit.

It’s important to note here that this policewoman was not placing Steve under arrest, harassing or abusing him in any way, or asking anything even remotely unreasonable. In fact, she even gives a perfectly legitimate reason why she needs to ask some basic questions of him: there had been an assault in the area involving a car matching the description of his rental car. Steve decides this is a lie fabricated by the police and continues to be belligerent until a second officer comes along and diffuses the situation.

If there had been an assault in the area, and Steve’s car did in fact match the description of the one involved in said assault, I believe he had a civic duty to cooperate with the officer. Here’s a case where a real criminal is on the loose, someone who had allegedly been physically violent, and Steve simply doesn’t care. Apparently his right to not face a minor inconvenience outweighs another citizen’s right to not be assaulted.

In the sidebar of this video Steve writes what I believe is a reply to some video comments which quote scripture at him, specifically the verses about obeying civil authority as well as divine authority. (Render unto Caesar…) He claims he holds nothing but the US Constitution itself as an authority, and that Minnesota police carry none of the weight of that authority. Steve, the Constitution is a piece of paper. It has no authority to do anything without actual people who act to enforce it. Those people are police officers.

At the end of the video Steve attempts to walk back up to the cop to ask her some more questions. She chooses to drive off instead of waste more time on him. Like the armed airport officer, I guess she decided she had better things to do.

Finally, Steve posted the footage from his beating: “ACTUAL FOOTAGE Pastor Beaten & Tased by Border Patrol & DPS.” In this video it is revealed that events didn’t play out  the way Steve claimed in his original video. What actually transpires is this: border patrol agents had a canine alert on his vehicle (which means the dog smelled something worth looking into). This gives them reasonable suspicion to search the car. He refuses to let them, and is placed under arrest. He still refuses to cooperate, and is thus forcibly removed from the vehicle. Which is exactly what cops are trained to do when the person they’re arresting refuses to go peacefully. They do this by breaking his window, tasing him, and then dragging him out of the car.

I think the most telling part of this whole video is the man who breaks the window and fires the taser. The look on his face is like, “Is this guy really serious? Why did he push it this far?” It’s impossible to hear what the agents were talking about during this part of the vehicle because Steve had once again refused to roll down any of his windows. If I had to speculate, I imagine it would be something like “Do we really have to tase this guy?” But of course I don’t know for sure.

The video has three parts: the first is footage from Steve’s own camera from inside the car. After he is tased it switches to the border patrol’s security camera. It then switches to an inside camera, presumably where Steve was taken for questioning. Steve has dubbed a lilting, sympathetic piano melody over these portions of the video, which contain exactly zero seconds of anyone hitting, kicking or beating him in any way. The only physical contact I can see are when the officers pull him up from off the ground to take him inside, and then later what looks like someone applying bandages to his head, where he had sustained cuts from the broken glass.

So the only thing we know for sure from the video is: Steve resisted a lawful arrest and was forcibly taken into custody. That’s it. If there’s more to the story than that, there certainly isn’t any video evidence of it.

I have to say, Steve, I am 26 years old and I have never once in my life had a negative encounter with law enforcement of any kind. How did I manage to achieve this miraculous feat? I don’t provoke them. Honestly, that it took this long for you to finally get into a physical altercation tells me that our police officers and border patrol agents aren’t corrupt, abusive bullies.

Police officers have an unbelievably hard job. They often have to make life or death decisions based on little or no information whatsoever. There’s no way any of the people in any of Steve’s videos could have known he was not a criminal. It’s disingenuous at best to constantly use his title of Baptist preacher in his videos, as though Baptist preachers are somehow above the law. It’s doubly disingenuous to do this when he didn’t tell a single one of these people that he was, in fact, a Baptist preacher.

It’s obvious Steve has some problems with unfair, unconstitutonal laws. As an American, I have similar problems. However, it’s not up to law enforcement to interpret these laws on the job. Heck, it’s right there in the title: law enforcement. There’s a reason we make our cops enforce every law, whether they personally agree with them or not. We can’t have the front line of defense agains the criminal element deciding which actions are crimes and which aren’t. We have a place for that: the court system.

No doubt Steve will get his day in court. Since Steve was released within a day of the incident, I think we can safely assume border patrol didn’t find anything in his car when they searched it. He can argue how unfairly he was treated in front of a judge, draw all the media attention he likes, and sway people over to his way of thinking while acting within the legal system. The kicker is: he was going to get this regardless. If he, like any reasonable person, would have stepped out of the car the moment he was placed under arrest, he wouldn’t have been injured.

I’ve seen people compare Steve Anderson to Martin Luther King Jr. The big difference is, when King was arrested, he went peacefully.

WordPress tells me I’ve now written about 2200 words about Steve’s completely disregard for law enforcement. What’s the point of this? Unlike the sermons at his church, I do feel as though his “I was beaten and tased videos, please love me” series is harmful. Not too many people are going to look too deeply at Steve’s story. He knows this, and is counting on it; that’s why all of his video titles are carefully constructed to be as inflamatory as possible, and the image of his scratched and bleeding forehead permeate his YouTube page. People like headlines and think research is boring. The problem with people believing Steve’s story without really understanding it is that it will spread distrust and fear of law enforcement.

There are two things I find to be very personally offensive about Steve’s attitude towards the police force.

First, being a police officer is a dangerous job. Every single officer goes to work every single day knowing they might be hurt or killed in the line of duty. They do this duty willingly, as a service to us. In order to protect themselves they must treat every situation as volatile until they can be certain it isn’t. When an officer encounters someone who is hostile (as Steve always is with them) they have to assume he’s dangerous — because if they don’t, they might get shot and killed. Too many officers are killed every year for citizens to flaunt that danger in their face the way Steve does. If you absolutely must have an altercation with the police, at least do them the service of showing them that you are neither dangerous nor armed beforehand.

The second is: I believe the Constitution is a shield, not a sword. It is there to protect us from oppression and persecution, not to be used as a weapon against authority when things aren’t going our way. It exists to ensure our continuing life and liberty, not as ammunition to be fired at those who would inconvenience us. And it certainly shouldn’t be used as justification to infringe on the rights of others, which is how Steve uses it in his videos.

Pastor Steve Anderson isn’t an American hero who fell as a casualty in the war for our civil rights. He’s a hypocrite and a bully at best, an anarchist and a liar at worst. I offered direct links to all Steve’s videos along with my commentary on them because I feel actually sitting down to watch them (rather than just reading one person’s interpretation of them) reveals the kind of person he is, and why he seems to keep running afoul of the law despite not being a criminal. I don’t want people like him standing up for my rights.

For all its faults and problems, America is a damned great country and I am honored to live here. I think the simple fact that Steve’s videos are freely distributed and viewable by everyone is the best answer to Steve’s own question, “What happened to freedom in this country?” It’s alive and well, Steve. The rest of us are enjoying it. Perhaps you should as well.