We usually don’t associate late-night police visits for “unapproved” speech with the United States. At least, we never used to. But this is exactly what Florida beautician and mother of three Angelique Contreras experienced — all because she made an innocent anti-mask joke on Facebook. There’s video of the encounter, too.
According to National File, what apparently sparked the social-media exchange is a Palm Beach County plan to put citizens who wish to attend County Commission meetings, and are medically exempt from mask-wearing, in a separate building. This would prevent them from addressing their leaders directly.
A man Contreras was discussing this with on Facebook didn’t appreciate the policy and quipped that he’d like to dump garbage on a county administrator’s lawn. To this Contreras responded, also in jest, “thousands of Mask[s].”
It was sometime afterward that Contreras heard a knock on her door, on February 12 at 10:30 p.m., while she was putting her children, ages 11, three, and one, to bed. Confronting her was a Detective Horton of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBCSO), who told the mother that they’d examined her social-media posts and warned her that trespassing and “dumping garbage on people’s property is a crime — so don’t do it.”
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According to National File, Contreras confirmed with the PBCSO that it was a sheriff’s officer who came to her home.
To see precisely what inspired the police action, view Contreras’s Facebook posts below.
And what follows is the video of the mother’s late-night law-enforcement encounter.
Contreras was understandably upset, and made her feelings known. “No matter what a person’s political beliefs are, I do not believe anyone deserves to be bullied by our local government officials,” she told National File. “We should not be intimidated by law enforcement. What happened at my house was clearly political intimidation.”
Pointing out that the mother “hails from a family of patriotic Cuban refugees,” National File also quotes Contreras as saying, “I know what Communism is and we have been living in it for the past year.”
Contreras further mentioned that when she spoke of dumping masks in her post, it might have been construed as referencing public property where government meetings occur.
Since it seems obvious Contreras and her friend were joking, we have to ask: Would the police have arrived if she’d made such a remark in a liberal cause’s name? It appears likely that some ideologically contrary “county administrator” (mentioned in the joke) arranged the late-night harassment.
Enduring citizen ire is, however, part of being a public official. Politicians who can’t tolerate it ought to resign.
Detective Horton, who appeared highly unprofessional, also should do some soul-searching. As one commenter under Contreras’s YouTube video remarked, “Wow, he offers a gun or handcuffs as ID. Say something like that to a cop and they’ll charge you with uttering death threats. What an absolute piece of garbage.”
A different commenter noted another double standard, one by the media. “If you were black, this would be on CNN,” he wrote. “IN 30 SECONDS AFTER THE INCIDENT,” a responding poster added.
Yet another double standard: The detective lectured Contreras about trespassing. Yet he did nothing about a woman accompanying him who he implied was not a police officer, but who was trespassing on Contreras’s property.
Unfortunately, though, persecuting citizens for innocent online comments is not unprecedented. Most outrageously, Texas teen Justin Carter was arrested in 2013 for making an obvious joke that he explicitly identified as such. What’s more, authorities set his bail so high that he spent five months in prison and, as of 2018, was still awaiting trial. Prosecutors kept delaying his case in an apparent attempt to make his life miserable, as he was subject to limitations on his freedom as a condition of his release.
This will only get worse, too, if the United States moves toward European-style “hate speech” laws. Just consider Sweden, where criticizing Islam, immigration, or sexual devolutionaries (the LGBTQ crowd) online can bring arrest.
Then there’s Britain. In 2019, mother Kate Scottow was arrested and detained for seven hours for calling a man a man on the Internet — because he “identified” as a woman. The same year, “a docker in Northern England was informed by the police in Humberside that he would be the subject of a formal investigation for tweeting out a limerick about transgender people,” reported LifeSite at the time.
“Several weeks after that, the police in Suffolk contacted a 74-year-old woman, and an officer asked her to stop tweeting comments critical of transgender ideology, and to perhaps consider deleting some of her previous social media posts,” the site continued.
So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that Angelique Contreras didn’t quip about dumping patriarchal Fauci face-burkas on a “transgender” county administrator’s rainbow-flag-replete lawn. She’d be in the pokey right now.
Oh, by the way, the police in the Scottow case justified their actions by saying, “We take all reports of malicious communication seriously.” But I wonder: Will anyone take reports of malicious policing seriously?
