Political enemies must be searched, seized, and arrested.
Is it possible that this newspaper was up to some nefarious and illegal criminal activity? Yes. Is it also possible that the police didn’t appreciate being investigated by the newspaper and decided to raid their offices.
That’s a pretty quick way to learn all the sources a newspaper has and maybe find out who’s been leaking from the police department.
Tell me, who’s going to trust speaking to the press after something like this happens?
This has been the lesson of the past decade. The state can do whatever it wants to those who oppose it. Ask Trump. Ask pro-lifers.
A small-town Kansas newspaper was investigating the background of a local public official before it was shut down by a police raid Friday, according to the newspaper’s publisher. The public official in question? The recently hired police chief, Gideon Cody, who had just left the Kansas City Police Department as a captain after 24 years.
Cody was the same police official who led the raid on the offices of the Marion County Record, backed by Marion’s entire five-officer police force, along with two sheriff’s deputies. The raid, previously reported on by the online news outlet the Kansas Reflector, effectively stopped publication of the paper and placed a national spotlight on Marion, a city of fewer than 2,000 people about 160 miles southwest of Kansas City. A search warrant shows police were looking for evidence that a reporter had run an improper computer search to confirm an accurate report that a local business owner applying for a liquor license had lost her driver’s license over a DUI.
The owner and publisher of the Record, Eric Meyer, along with First Amendment advocates and journalism organizations from across the country, have said the raid went too far. Police seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the newspaper, its reporters and the home of the publisher. Meyer said police injured a reporter’s finger while taking away her cellphone. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, a newswoman for decades and a co-owner of the paper, was upset by the police search of the home she shared with her son. She died Saturday.
“That’s one of the things my mother said Friday night before she died,” Meyer said Sunday. “Which is, ‘Where are all the good people that are supposed to stop this? How come these people that think they’re thugs, think that they’re part of the Gestapo, can come in and just bully people?’”
Welcome to 21st century America, folks. Leave your rights at the door.
