Jerry Falwell 2 is trying to punish journalists who reported on his endangerment of students at Liberty “University”:

Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, said on Wednesday that arrest warrants had been issued for journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica after both outlets published articles critical of his decision to partially reopen Liberty’s campus amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Arrest warrants ffs.

Photocopies of the two warrants published on the website of Todd Starnes, a conservative radio host, charge that Julia Rendleman, a freelance photographer for the Times, and Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter, committed misdemeanor trespassing on the Lynchburg, Va., campus of the college while working on their articles.

…

Falwell, a fierce supporter of President Donald Trump, was among those who were portraying reaction to the virus as overblown as recently as a month ago, accusing opponents of the president of weaponizing the outbreak to hurt him politically and suggesting the virus might be the work of North Korea and China.

Hey, you know what? The only reason the pandemic can “hurt Trump politically” is because he criminally ignored and minimized it, making the outbreak in the US worse than it would have been had the government acted swiftly. That’s his doing, not Pro Publica’s or the Times’s. Trump criminally trespassed on all of our lives and safety.

[Falwell] contended that there were witnesses for both cases of alleged trespassing, telling Starnes that there were no-trespassing signs posted at “every entrance” barring everyone from the campus except students, faculty and staff, or those with official university business.

If that’s true it’s paranoid and weird and creepy. There’s a bible college at the bottom of the hill I live on, and I regularly walk through its campus, which has a very pleasant front lawn with tall trees. It’s wide open.

See? Nice trees, and wide open. It’s Christian, yes, but it’s also part of a big city, and it doesn’t try to keep the rest of us out. Does Jerry Falwell 2 have something to hide?

David McCraw, in-house counsel for the Times, said in a statement, “Julia was engaged in the most routine form of news gathering: taking an outdoors picture of a person who was interviewed for a news story.” McCraw said Rendleman had been invited to campus by one of the students interviewed for the article.

Does Falwell allow that? Are students required to get his permission to invite people in?

“Liberty” my ass.

H/t Sackbut