FBI's Gestapo tactics now spreading, starting with a police raid at a small newpaper in Marion County, Kansas
Last month, I had the privilege of spending several days in Topeka, Kansas.
I visited the statehouse to see its famed art collections. I had a delightful chance encounter with state Sen. Mary Ware of Wichita in the elevator on my way back home, who though I was bedraggled and tired, was pure warm-hearted welcome even after her own long day at work. She was a Democrat but she didn't care what my party was. She wanted to know what I thought of Kansas, as it was my first trip. I told her loved her beautiful state. She beamed and observed: "There's a lot more here than people think."
She can say that again.
Here's the news of what's going on just an hour and a half northeast of her own 25th state Senate district, according to the Associated Press:
MARION, Kan. (AP) — A small central Kansas police department is facing a torrent of criticism for raiding a local newspaper’s office and the home of its owner and publisher, seizing computers and cellphones, and, in the publisher’s view, stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her weekend death.
Several press freedom watchdogs condemned the Marion Police Department’s actions as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. The Marion County Record’s editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, worked with his staff Sunday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday, even as he took time in the afternoon to provide a local funeral home with information about his mother, Joan, the paper’s co-owner.
A search warrant tied Friday morning raids, led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. She is accusing the newspaper of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record and suggested that the newspaper targeted her after she threw Meyer and a reporter out of restaurant during a political event.
The details of what seemed to be going on, based on the reports out there, suggest that the restaurant owner seemed to be in cahoots with the local police and was going through a divorce with an angry ex-husband who was accused of leaking her driving record to the Marion County Record. Those records revealed that she was driving on a suspended license after a drunk driving conviction, and the cops were doing nothing about it.
Obviously, there are two sides to this story, and the punishment meted to her may have been outrageously draconian, given the wide open spans of rural Kansas that I saw and the absence of public transportation, which probably would have been a business death sentence to a small restaurant owner. Maybe the cops understood this and looked for other kinds of crooks instead. Maybe something else was going on, though, such as her being in cahoots with the local cops in a two-tier justice system where some get punished, and some do not.
The 2,000-circulation small town paper did have the information, yet didn't publish it because they had suspicions about the motive of the source and the legality of how the information was obtained, given that the restaurant owner was involved in an acrimonious divorce.
They did run a piece from a city council meeting, though, where the restaurant owner publicly admitted she had a DUI and was driving on a suspended license. That was obviously in the public interest, and they probably derived as that based on the other information they had.
Yet just having the information prompted a bona fide police raid on the entire newspaper as well as the co-owner's home, much the same way "little dictator" Daniel Ortega of Marxist banana republic Nicaragua used to have his goons raid La Prensa for negative coverage in order to shut the free press down. The publisher's 97-year-old mother, a little old lady who wrote a popular "Memories" column based on her searches of the old paper's microfilm archives, actually died of stress, according to her son, Eric, who is the working publisher.
It's obvious that Eric Meyer, is an old line newspaperman of the kind we rarely see any more, who digs deep and reports professionally without fear or favor. This interview of him by the National Newspaper Association Foundation from two years ago tells us that. People like him inspired me to go into journalism myself. He was no obnoxious excuse for a "journalist" that we see in some of today's wokester reporters who view facts as optional and "narratives" as priorities.
Nevertheless, as the Guardian notes in its report, the paper got raided by the cops anyway, and the publisher's elderly mother died of stress from it, all because someone leaked to them, which was hardly something they could control, and because supposedly the news was going around the small towns of the county anyway, printed or not. That's weird stuff given that the restaurant owner did make public statements about her driving record.
What a crappy premise for a raid.
The cops said they were right to do the raid because the law lets them raid anyone suspected of a crime. The problem with that is obvious:
Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told the New York Times: “You can’t say, ‘I’m allowed to raid the newsroom because I’m investigating a crime’ if the crime you’re investigating is journalism.”
That idiot logic from the cops is pretty obvious. It's also pretty shameless.
These kinds of raids didn't used to happen in this country. Why are they happening now?
Maybe it's because the fish stinks from the head down and over in Washington, there have been some outrageous attacks on freedom of the press as well as Gestapo tactics from the FBI targeted at political opponents.
Might that have just set the tone about what's permissible, how the standards are lowered?
The cop chief, Gideon Cody, is a city boy from Kansas City and cut his ethical teeth as a cop in that big blue city environment, which Meyer now says the paper's looking into, as it should.
While Meyer saw Newell’s complaints — which he said were untrue — as prompting the raids, he also believes the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role. He said the newspaper was examining Cody’s past work with the Kansas City, Missouri, police as well.
To the mainstream media's credit. some of the big publications did step in and condemn this tinhorn-dictatorship behavior which is quite unprecedented:
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (the “Reporters Committee”) and the undersigned 34 news media and press freedom organizations write to condemn that raid. Newsroom searches and seizures are among the most intrusive actions law enforcement can take with respect to the free press, and the most potentially suppressive of free speech by the press and the public.
"Based on public reporting, the search warrant that has been published online, and your public statements to the press, there appears to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search – particularly when other investigative steps may have been available – and we are concerned that it may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal, state, and local law enforcement’s ability to conduct newsroom searches. We urge you to immediately return the seized material to the Record, to purge any records that may already have been accessed, and to initiate a full independent and transparent review of your department’s actions.
"As detailed in the search warrant, on Friday your department executed a warrant at the Record’s offices and at the home of its owner and publisher that authorized the seizure and forensic search of electronic media, as well as the confiscation of journalistic work product and documentary material related to a named individual.
"Your department’s seizure of this equipment has substantially interfered with the Record’s First Amendment-protected news gathering in this instance, and the department’s actions risk chilling the free flow of information in the public interest more broadly, including by dissuading sources from speaking to the Record and other Kansas news media in the future.
"Further, as you acknowledge in your public statement, the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (the “PPA”) protects that flow of information to journalists by prohibiting law enforcement, including local agencies, from searching for or seizing journalistic work product1 or documentary materials, except in narrow, exceptional circumstances. See Pub. L. No. 96-440, 94 Stat. 1879 (1980), codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa, 2000aa-5 to 2000aa-7.
Publisher Eric Meyer compared it to dictatorship activity abroad:
“This is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do,” Meyer said during an interview in his office. “This is Gestapo tactics from World War II.”
. But he and the other papers defending his paper would have done well to look a little closer to home.
The AP noted that a lot of little papers were actually getting raided by public officials these days:
Last year in New Hampshire, the publisher of a weekly newspaper accused the state attorney general’s office of government overreach after she was arrested for allegedly publishing advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising. In Las Vegas, former Democratic elected official Robert Telles is scheduled to face trial in November for allegedly fatally stabbing Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German after German wrote articles critical of Telles and his managerial conduct.
There has been collaboration between the FBI and Twitter, as well as possibly the Washington Post, in addition to recent surveillance on reporters during the Obama administration and the vast censorship-industrial complex that has arisen under the claims of "fact-checking" to demonetize dissident outlets.
It's pretty obvious the First Amendment is under attack and the politicized FBI as well as Democrat administrations are setting the tone. Now we are seeing this kind of Washington-style arrogance over the First Amendment dripping down into the local police departments where they are going crude goon in ways that differ little from dictatorships.
It's also notable that this happened in Kansas, which is a bellwether state for historically significant trends and showdowns. Kansas was a flashpoint in the Civil War. It was the staging ground of John Brown and his abolitionist raids with his "Beecher's bibles." It was the stomping ground of Carrie Nation and her misguided campaign to enact Prohibition. It was the site of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which ended segregated schools. It was the home of Ike, Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, all trailblazers in their fields.
Kansas is where a lot of things start.
That's scary stuff, to see this supposedly distant Washington-style corruption and bids to silence papers now spreading to the heartland of Kansas.
That calls for sanctions against these perpetrators and perhaps congressional action to strengthen what the Bidenites and others on the left are getting away with as the First Amendment becomes a paper tiger.
They need to get on it, now.
Image: Wikimedia Commons // public domain
Comparing the Tactics of the Dems to the Nazis is No Longer Seen as Unreasonable
A poll from the U.K. Daily Mail indicates what we’ve been proving all along, that the far left is emulating the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The poll shows that a majority of Republicans agree with comparing the Biden regime’s political persecution of a political opponent to the political persecution of a political opponent by Nazi Germany or the USSR.
As is the case with the double standard of Democrats and their propaganda organ, the nation’s socialist media, it’s perfectly acceptable for them to sling the Nazi slur along with the political ‘F-bomb (Fascism) all they want. With all kinds of examples of them doing so, here, here, here, here, and here. And of course, you’re never to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, because it ‘belittles Hitler.’
The socialists of the nation’s left have one set of rules for themselves and another for everyone else (because they are the controlling class). They give themselves full permission to do that all day long. While it’s verboten for the pro-freedom side to even point out how the far-left’s socialist national agenda stunningly resembles another National Socialist party from the early decades of the last century.
Well, we’re not going to play along with their one-sided rules.
So far, we’ve documented 24 startling and uncomfortable ways the Democrat Party Emulates the Nazi Party. We’ve done a lot so far and unfortunately; two factors see the task stretching off into the distance.
The very disturbing problem we face is that the combination of current events and research reveals even more similarities making the task a never-ending process that seems to go on forever. It’s to the point of having a sense of dread at the thought of researching these facts, knowing that more commonalities will crop up. But sometimes, you’re given certain duties and you have to see them through.
While the fascist far left excels at slinging bovine soil enhancement, trying to maintain their 100-year-old lies, usually with subjective and thus meaningless accusations, we’ve taken another approach.
The key difference between the left’s exploitation of the appeal to authority fallacy is that they make vague and therefore meaningless generalizations while we’ve always strived to identify specific and discrete similarities. It’s for this reason we endeavor to exclude these such as leftists and Nazis holding big rallies or having campaign slogans.
As the far left keeps pushing its socialist national agenda, it develops new and innovative ways of depriving the people of their individual liberties and rights while doing all it can to emulate socialists of another nation’s dark past. Meanwhile, doing research in the National Digital Newspaper Program, Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Internet archive, Newspapers.com, and New York Times to verify all these facts yields new leads to even more disturbing similarities.
This means we’re incentivized to exclude whatever we can. Looking back at the printouts of the previous listings and scanning through the previous articles to see if the topic has already been covered - even tangentially - is an excuse to remove it from the list. You also dismiss trivial or vague similarities because these don’t have that big an impact on policy.
These items range from the previously mentioned criminalizing free speech, and weaponization of the government against political opponents (got Gestapo?) to the people who used to pretend to be liberal protecting the administrative state, declaring that We Need a Few Good Dictators. To exit taxes, eugenics, and socialist George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of depopulation schemes who called for people to justify their existence appealing to the chemists “to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly.”
Even after all of this, current events and historic research have added so many that the list has been extended to 40 items. I hope that it will top out at that level. Unfortunately, this means both good news and bad news for the far left. We’ve mentioned the good news for them that we exclude inconsequential items. The bad news is that with a century-long difference in technology, today’s left is turning out to be far worse than the Nazis in some respects. There is nothing more terrifying at this point than the thought that history is repeating itself and will make the Nazis look tame by comparison.
All of this should make it clear that on balance, the similarities between today’s socialists of the nation’s left and the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party are a lot stronger than the facile assertions of the folks denying this reality.
Finally, could someone please educate the leftists that the Nazis in conflict with fellow collectivists talking point as a way of denying they were leftists was first explained in this academic paper: How and Why Fascism and Nazism Became the “Right”. And that we’ve thoroughly eviscerated this worn-out talking point by explaining that the “Nazis were far-right” is a lie that can be traced back nearly a century to far-left infighting over ideological minutiae no one else cares about. And that we’ve thoroughly eviscerated this worn-out talking point here and here. All they have to do is read and comprehend to finally understand that the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party was far left.
It really should bother everyone on the left side of the political spectrum that their party is in a headlong rush to emulate some of the worst ideologies of the past century. Rather than arguing over talking points that have long since been proven wrong, you should consider whether you want to be known as Nazis without the uniform. All these items should prove to you that the far left is entirely on the wrong side of history, so why are you still supporting them?
D. Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, the director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a long-time contributor to conservative websites. Find him on Substack.
Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of logos and public domain images.
