The short answer is yes, but let us continue.
From The Guardian:
Police in the Kansas town where Joan Meyer had lived for almost a century had just raided her home and her newspaper – seizing electronics and reporting materials – during what she understood to be a leak investigation when another media outlet called her for comment.
“These are Hitler tactics, and something has to be done,” Meyer, a co-owner of the Marion County Record, told the Wichita Eagle on Friday, invoking the fascist dictator as her colleagues contemplated legal strategies to recover their confiscated items and hold authorities accountable for what many contend was an illicit raid.
Less than a full day later, on Saturday, after hours of being unable to eat or sleep and of being “stressed beyond her limits”, the 98-year-old Meyer dropped dead in her home, according to the Record’s reporting.
I don’t know why I’ve never thought of Hitler as a fascist. I always think of Nazis as even more out there, but I guess they fall under the fascism umbrella. It appears Hitler was indeed a fascist. I can’t find many places online saying he is not a fascist. Fascism is not a big enough word to contain Hitler, I thought, but we said the same thing about continental Europe in the 1940s and it was indeed big enough in the end. Hitler: More containable than previously thought. Not great that he is containable in our available categories—ideally, someone like Hitler would be so far out there that we would not have words to describe his thoughts and methods—but alas, here we are. Back to the Nazis and fascism.
From Wikipedia:
Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, scientific racism, white supremacy, social Darwinism and the use of eugenics into its creed.
Damn, that’s a lot of things. That’s like if you ordered the fascism flavor at the bad governmental ideology frozen yogurt bar and then got all the toppings. Tough draw for Darwin, by the way. Caught a stray here. Darwin went and looked at birds in the Galapagos and ended up getting lumped in with the definition of Nazism.
Given we now know Hitler was a fascist, yes, I would say The Guardian is correct in labeling him a fascist. Let’s move on to Joan Meyer. The Guardian article is detailed and worthwhile (here’s another link), but the bulletpoints are:
- Joan Meyer, a 98-year-old woman, achieved the remarkable feat of keeping the Marion County Record alive over the last 25 years. The Marion County Record is a weekly local newspaper. Marion County has 12,000 residents and is fifty miles north of Wichita.
- At some point, the Record got a tip that a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell, lost her license due to a DUI or DWI conviction but kept driving. The Record didn’t act on this tip, suspecting an ulterior motive from the source.
- Newell went to a city council meeting and accused the Record of getting the documents related to her drunk driving conviction illegally.
- The police went and got a search warrant from judge Laura Viar, possibly without any evidence linking anyone at the Record to the alleged document breach, then raided the Record’s office and Joan Meyer’s own home, as well as the homes of other Record reporters and publishers. All five members of the police department, plus two sheriff’s deputies, participated in the raid.
- The raid allegedly took hours, and Meyer’s home was allegedly left a mess. She reportedly was unable to eat or sleep due to the stress, and she died the next day.
- Eric Meyer, Joan’s son, has since shared that anonymous sources had previously contacted the Record to allege sexual misconduct by police chief Gideon Cody. Again, the Record never reported on it, unable to verify the claims substantially enough, but the sources’ identities were allegedly on one of the computers the police department seized. The implication is that Cody may have used this as an opportunity to find out who was accusing him of sexual misconduct.
In short, a 98-year-old woman in Kansas was keeping a local paper alive and holding it to stricter reporting standards than the vast majority of media today, and her county’s police department launched an hours-long police raid of her home and office at the behest of a local restaurateur allegedly unwilling to accept the consequences of her drinking problem. The 98-year-old woman then died, quite possibly from the stress. Great work, everybody.
