OPINION: Kansas raid reflects the danger of current trends

This editorial was published in the Yakima Herald-Republic.

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Marion, Kan., is a long way from the Yakima Valley — more than 1,300 miles by car.

But don’t kid yourself: The same wrongheaded thinking that drove a chilling police raid in Marion on Aug. 11 already is cruising the highways and backroads of central Washington.

It’s no longer hyperbole.

Marion is small — fewer than 2,000 people, according to the most recent census. It’s about 60 miles north of Wichita, and a little more than 150 miles southwest of Kansas City, Mo. It’s the county seat of Marion County.

It’s also the home of the family-owned Marion County Record, a spirited, but principled, weekly newspaper.

All five of Marion’s town police showed up at the newspaper’s door Aug. 11 and raided the place. They searched everything, then loaded up papers, computers and cellphones and hauled it all away.

The Record’s editor and publisher — who spent 20 years as a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal and 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois — said the stress of the raid contributed to the death of his mother, the 98-year-old co-owner of the paper, a day later. Police also raided the house where he and his mother lived.

The cops had a magistrate’s order, but so far nobody’s offering much explanation of what they were looking for or what legal grounds they had to conduct such a search to begin with.

The county’s top prosecutor said Wednesday that there was insufficient evidence to justify the search, and he has asked the court to return the newspaper’s equipment.

Evidently, it’s all connected to a local bar owner who feared an old DUI conviction of hers would be published in the Record (it wasn’t) and claimed the paper had obtained records of her past illegally (it hadn’t). The paper was, however, investigating reports that the police chief had left his previous job to avoid a potential sexual misconduct case.

In other words, the Record was doing its job — being a responsible and relentless advocate for the community’s interests and being a watchdog on government power. It was doing exactly what any number of other community papers, including the Herald-Republic, do every day.

It wasn’t stealing records. It wasn’t inappropriately sharing or publishing sensitive information. And it wasn’t trying to seize power by twisting the words of the Founding Fathers or plotting to bypass the wishes of voters.

Make no mistake: What happened in Marion on Aug. 11 is exactly the kind of thing that’s been going on in countries under the fist of authoritarian rule for decades — in the brutal banana republics of Central America and Africa, in 1940s Nazi Germany, and in modern North Korea and Russia.

Up to now at least, it’s what America has staunchly resisted — and fought bloody wars to block.

The Marion raid smacks of fascism. Autocracy, totalitarianism. It’s the kind of thing we used to think of as evil. An evil we thought could never take hold here in a country built on the idea of individual freedom.

But now, despite the brave Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting that evil in World Wars I and II, Korea and other conflicts, it’s creeping into the very heart of our country. In this case, Kansas of all places.

It’s important to note that a rural judge and a handful of hometown cops didn’t come up with this kind of thinking on their own. They’ve had plenty of help and encouragement, particularly in recent years:

They’ve heard crackpot political pundits distort clauses of the Constitution and falsely proclaim that they’ve found secret passages within those words to excuse everything from racism and sexism to cruelty toward the sick, the poor and the old.

They’ve watched cable networks stage slickly produced shows that look like news reports but instead hammer cleverly packaged extremist talking points to mislead millions of viewers 24/7.

And they’ve listened to a former president — who faces numerous serious criminal charges in connection with his desperate attempts to cling to power — repeatedly refer to the working press as “an enemy of the state.”

Why wouldn’t folks with guns and badges in Marion figure it’d be OK to just raid the local newspaper office and see what they could dig up?

More troublingly, why wouldn’t the same sort of overreach be just as possible in eastern Washington, where we’ve all heard elected public officials — including law enforcement leaders — announce menacingly that they won’t uphold democratically decided laws with which they disagree? These same officials, who swore an oath to uphold our state constitution, have also openly defied legal orders from a governor elected three times by a clear majority of voters.

In short, a nation that has adhered to the rule of law for more than two centuries is now veering toward some of the same tendencies of our most dreaded enemies.

It’s tragic, alarming. And yes, it’s no stretch to think that it could happen here.

And if we want to keep calling this a free country, it has to stop.

TNS