Capitol Police Arrest Progressive Journalist
In Madison WI, the scariest terrorists imaginable are people standing in the Rotunda, singing songs. Apparently these people are so scary that they have to be arrested whenever they show up and if you’re a reporter showing this to the world, you too are apparently so scary that you have to be arrested too.
The daily arrests at the Wisconsin State Capitol took a new twist Thursday as police arrested the editor of The Progressive magazine while he was documenting the event.
Matt Rothschild says he was arrested while he was trying to get a picture of police loading a cuffed protester onto the capitol elevator. He says he was 15-20 feet away from the elevator when an officer told him he couldn’t be there. “I had my reporter’s pad out, I had my cell phone out, I announced myself as a journalist a couple times. There was no question that I was with the Fourth Estate, but that didn’t seem to matter to them at all.”
Rothschild says he was cuffed, taken to the Dane County jail in the back of a squad car, fingerprinted, detained in a holding cell and eventually ticketed for obstructing an officer. Asked about the arrest, the state Department of Administration did not mention Rothschild by name, but said a person had interfered with an officer while they were detaining someone.
The Progressive is up front about its point of view — it calls itself a left wing magazine. But Rothschild says he was not participating in Thursday’s Solidarity Sing Along, only documenting it.
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I try to be very aware of the history of the last hundred years and not godwin. But the state government of Wisconsin under the Walker Regime is moving quickly in the direction of Spanish Falangist fascism. Wisconsin is no longer a sovereign state but rather a wholy owned subsidiary of the Koch Brothers. This suppression of dissent is straight out of the right wing playbook of any number of nations over the past 100 years.
Instead of this, or racist “Stop & Frisk” programs or the destruction of Women’s Health Care, or Voter ID Suppression, or any or the myriad of other real civil liberty violations happening daily, the Emo-Progs, Pseduo-Libertarians and Dudebros want us to think the NSA and our 1st World problems with it is the most important thing we face.
I grieve for the nation I grew up in.
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