IU Health Vaccine Mandate Protest

This is my first upload to Rumble and is the result of YouTube censoring my work for the first time ever. As someone who started documenting life on the streets of Indianapolis during a time of great personal crises, one of my original goals beyond documenting was to give everyone a voice including the homeless, protestors, first responders, politicians, and every day people. As much as the focus is on skin color and sexual orientation these days, I wanted to focus on the diversity of ideas no matter the color of a person's skin or their sexual orientation. I wanted to show that people with different backgrounds and ideas could get along on the streets of Indianapolis in sharp contrast to the tribalism on social media.

YouTube apparently wants to keep everyone in what they claim is a safe space by censoring historical events and the documentation of reality. In my case, this was done under the guise of stopping the spread of health misinformation ("any claims that go against the consensus of local health officials or the World Health Organization").

I remember a few years back while videoing a protest called the "Poor People's Campaign," one of the protesters told me that I would wind up becoming an activist if I kept doing what I was doing long enough. That day has finally come.

The following is the original text from my YouTube video description:

On my way downtown to video a protest two weeks ago near IU Health headquarters on the canal, a steam pipe erupted on the corner of Senate and Michigan while I was stopped at light in my jeep talking to my mom on my cell phone. Clouds of pink smoke rolled out from underground. I told my mom there had been some type of explosion underground and she responded, "did you Brandi (her dog) died." I had seen that, but there was something serious happening. I told her her I was sorry, but needed to get out and find out what was going on.

I parked in an apartment parking lot about a block west, got my board out and rolled back down to see what was up.

As I stood there watching, I noticed fibers that looked like fiberglass insulation floating around in the air. Luckily, I still had my mask in my pocket and put it on. Fire crews showed up, walked around, scratched their collective heads, and waited on IPL (now AES) to advise. I rolled around shooting the tornado like steam shooting out of the ground for 20 minutes or so before rolling off to catch the protest 5 blocks up the street on the canal.

It was an extremely hot day for an underground steam pipe rupture. On my way over to the canal, I could feel the sweat start to drip off my forehead.

I only made it through two and a half speakers before my camera stopped working. The warning on my Samsung Note Ultra 20 said my phone was too hot for the camera to be used. My other camera was more than five blocks away back at the Jeep.

Panicking and looking for shade, I climbed down from my seat, walked over to the edge of the canal, and dipped my phone in the water. Within a few seconds, I was able to use the camera again. Before the day was over, I wound up having to repeat submerging my phone in the water four more times.

The protest went on for almost three hours. There were many speakers including nurses, pastors, a teacher, political activists, two state house representatives, and a radio host among others. There names can be found in the video as they are introduced.

I don't want to get into the particulars of what the speakers talked about here. Social media hasn't been kind lately to those expressing themselves in ways that go against certain corporate and political narratives. Their views and opinions can be found in their speeches, most of which are in the video.

Not all of the speeches are in their entirety. Beyond the parts missing from my phone repeatedly shutting down, I also took liberty to trim out parts that went off topic or were repetitive.

The most recurring theme I found as I edited this video, (my longest one to date), is that now is the time to fight. "This is the hill to die on." If we don't stand up and fight now, there's no telling what sorts of policies and laws will be created and used to destroy the individual liberties and freedom of not just us, but our children and our children's children.