It’s baffling how some crackpots can make beaucoups bucks by crackpottery (e.g., Alex Jones) and others who may be merely eccentric can subsist on eccentrity.

In this latter category is my fair city’s Brian Wilkins, alias Chuck Bronson, whose full-time job apparently is listening to police scanners and then rushing to traffic stops, fires, etc. to live-stream video on YouTube.

He has 14,000 YouTube followers.

Thursday, he gave local police the excuse they’d probably been longing for to arrest/cite him for violating the Governor’s ban on non-essential travel. He points to journalism being deemed essential travel and considers himself a journalist.

The Hoosier Press Association is understandably ambivalent about guys like “Chuck Bronson,” as they’d like to preserve a mystique about the press, but I’m pretty firm on this: I consider him a journalist for purposes of first amendment protection. But then I consider all kinds of disreputable talking heads “journalists.” It’s a description, not an encomium.

Wilkins/Bronson says he’s going to sue. I bid him well.