A Redwood City attorney is taking so-called "First Amendment auditors" to court after a confrontation in Menlo Park, and honestly? It's about time someone tested the legal boundaries of this grift.

For the uninitiated, First Amendment auditors are people who show up to public spaces — often government buildings, post offices, or police stations — with cameras rolling, deliberately provoking reactions so they can monetize the footage on YouTube. They wrap themselves in the Constitution while behaving in ways that would get anyone else escorted off the premises. As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "1A auditors are almost universally a bunch of fucking clowns."

The attorney, reportedly confronted by a group decked out in matching black-and-silver T-shirts and cowboy hats, says he called Menlo Park police hours before the situation escalated to pepper spray — and was told the department "couldn't respond." That's a familiar refrain in the Bay Area: citizens flag a problem, law enforcement shrugs, and things get worse.

This is where the story gets interesting from a liberty perspective. Yes, the First Amendment protects your right to film in public. That's settled law, and we'd never argue otherwise. But there's a meaningful distinction between exercising a right and exploiting one for profit while harassing private citizens. One local observer nailed it: these encounters aren't news reporting — they're content creation for monetization payouts. When you're provoking people for clicks, you're running a commercial operation, and that comes with different legal obligations, including consent.

The deeper problem here is the enforcement vacuum. When police won't intervene in clear harassment situations, they leave citizens with no option but expensive civil litigation. That's not liberty — that's abandonment. The whole point of having a government is that it handles the basics: public safety, property rights, rule of law. When it fails at those, people are forced to become their own enforcers, which is messy and inefficient.

We'll be watching this lawsuit closely. If it establishes that monetized harassment isn't protected speech, it could give everyday people a real tool against provocateurs who've been hiding behind the Bill of Rights while making everyone else's life worse.