While this North Carolina case does not rise to the level of pathos of these other cases, the mindset of modern law enforcement is uniformly and oddly resonant everywhere. The names have been changed to protect the guilty because God knows the dog has suffered enough.

After almost exactly one hundred days Gil McGillicuddy’s (not his real name) dog was returned to him.

The dog, Cuddles, (not her real name) was imprisoned for three months in the Cornucopia County Animal Shelter (not a real North Carolina County) at the direction of one Cornucopia County Deputy Sheriff Brassbadge (not his real name) as part of an aggressive animal abuse investigation.

McGillicuddy’s trip through Alice’s Looking Glass began at twilight on Saturday evening, April 21, 2001, when he peered through the window of his mobile home and was surprised to see three uniformed Cornucopia County Sheriff Deputies standing in his front yard, each of whom had arrived in a separate vehicle.

Gil, a house painter of modest means lived by himself with his dog in a rural area out toward the county line. He generally did not bother anyone and usually no one bothered him. So naturally he was congenial and cooperative when the Deputies arrived. Initially he figured they had mistaken his mobile home for the mobile home across the drainage ditch and down the road, an address that generated numerous nuisance 911 calls.

In fact, they were there to question him in response to an anonymous tip that a dog was yelping in pain as a result of a beating at his address.

Gil, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, allowed that he and dog had cavorted around in the front yard for a few minutes earlier in the evening prior to going inside the house. He also brought out the dog to demonstrate the cheerful demeanor and good health she enjoyed in his custody.

For whatever reason this was considered by Deputy Brassbadge to be tantamount to a confession of animal abuse and Gil was summarily handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police cruiser.

Cuddles, a beagle/border collie mix whose only crime in the presence of strangers was to attempt to stamp a clear set of muddy paw prints on every crisply starched shirt possible was thrown into a second police cruiser and the two partners in crime were whisked downtown for processing.

Convinced this was a terrible mistake that would be quickly corrected, McGillicuddy patiently awaited his turn to speak to the processing Magistrate.

The Magistrate was moved to tears when he read the charge against McGillicuddy, possibly because of the official grammar.

Deputy Brassbadge used a North Carolina Uniform Citation ticket to charge McGillicuddy with his violation. The North Carolina Uniform Citation lists over a dozen possible traffic offenses and provides a blank category for an arresting officer to fill in with some other offense should circumstances warrant.

So the text of the actual charge presented to the court read as follows: “The undersigned officer has probable cause to believe that on or about Saturday 2030 PM the 21th day of April 2001 in the named county the defendant did unlawfully and willfully operate a (motor) vehicle on a 14. did beat him dog by kicking him in the dog and around the head with his hand, and did pick up dog throw him out the front door this Abuse is in violation of GS”

McGillicuddy spent the rest of Saturday night in the Cornucopia County Jail and posted bail early Sunday morning.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while and Gil was now convinced the better part of wisdom would be to locate evidence with which to defend himself in court.

Material favorable to his case did not require much effort or trouble to locate.

The Cornucopia Animal Shelter manager was a veteran of a number of horrible animal abuse cases and she was amazed to receive custody of Cuddles as part of an abuse investigation.

She wrote the following letter for McGillicuddy’s benefit in crisp clear longhand: “To Whom It May Concern: Cuddle’s condition when she arrived at the Cornucopia County Animal Shelter was excellent. She is well groomed, happy and healthy. She does not appear to have been abused or neglected. She is very energetic and a wonderful dog. Sincerely, (name) (phone)”

In addition, using the resources of the modern internet, McGillicuddy quickly found the North Carolina General Statutes relating to animal abuse—an entire Chapter (19 A) with 5 Articles and some several hundred paragraphs which included Article 4—Animal Cruelty Investigators.

Article 4 listed the requirements for animal abuse investigations very clearly and specifically. The Cornucopia County Sheriff did not meet a single listed condition in McGillicuddy’s case.

Among other requirements, an Animal Cruelty Investigator is a completely separate listed position independent of any law enforcement organization with specific rigorous training requirements. Only an Animal Cruelty Investigator can initiate an abuse investigation and only upon a sworn complaint filed with the court BEFORE taking custody of an abused animal. Forcible entry investigations must be conducted only during daylight hours—and on and on and on.

Confident his case would be quickly resolved, Gil now patiently awaited his court date in the first week of June. He even took pictures of his property from the road to demonstrate the foliage was so thick no witness could possibly see any abuse even if they were trespassing.

He visited the incarcerated Cuddles as often as his schedule would allow him to make the trip across the county to the shelter; usually at least twice a week.

The appointed day arrived. Gil dressed in the suit he wore to weddings and funerals and assembled his defense papers into a neat new manila folder and made his way downtown to the courthouse.

His turn in the crowded court docket finally came. The Judge harrumphed when he saw the case file and looked over his glasses at the young Assistant District Attorney and in turn looked at Officer Brassbadge and finally at Gil who appeared before the Court in his own defense. The three parties were instructed to approach and Gil listened in amazement as the DA and the Deputy Sheriff explained this case could only be prosecuted with the complaining witnesses present. The Judge looked at Gil and ordered the case continued. The new court date would be the first week of July.

Amazed he was not allowed to present his evidence or get the case dismissed, Gil left with a heavy heart and the loss of one day’s pay from his job.

The July court appearance involved a different Judge and a different Assistant District Attorney. This Judge appeared sympathetic when Gil somewhat passionately argued that this was his second appearance before the court on a frivolous case and he would like a resolution to the situation.

The Judge agreed that if the witnesses did not appear at the third hearing the case would be automatically dismissed. Case continued. The next court date would be the first week of August. Gil was out another day’s pay.

On the appointed day in August the somewhat weary McGillicuddy appeared before yet another Judge with yet another Assistant District Attorney prosecuting his case. Deputy Sheriff Brassbadge appeared wearing civilian clothes. He had just been promoted to Plain Clothes duty in the Sheriff’s Department. The atmosphere of the court was almost jovial. There were no prosecution witnesses anywhere to be seen.

The Judge, a silver haired veteran of the Cornucopia County Courthouse struck a stern posture behind the bench.

“An awful lot of red ink in this file folder Madame District Attorney.”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Are your witnesses present?”

“No, your honor.”

“Officer Brassbadge, were the subpoenas properly served?”

“As well as possible within the limits of time and available personnel your honor.”

“You realize I have no choice but to dismiss this case.”

“Yes, your honor.”

Gil was stunned. There would no opportunity to present his evidence and clear his name. Worse, he was now out three days pay and liable for the boarding fees for Cuddles with no clear resolution to his long ordeal.

“Your honor, I wish to enter my evidence into the record.”

“Sir, your case is dismissed and the matter is settled.”

A cheerful Officer Brassbadge presented McGillicuddy with the papers he would need to take custody of his dog. Gill drove across the county to the Animal Shelter and was allowed to donate $55.00 to the shelter in lieu of the $800.00 boarding fee he was technically indebted to pay.

Cuddles was pleased to receive a thorough bath, her first in a hundred days, and to run in her own backyard free of the confined cage standard to animal shelters everywhere.

Asked to sum up his ordeal Gil had this to say: “I’m sure as hell not opening the door the next time any Deputies show up in my front yard. They are going to have to drag me out kicking and screaming.”

The post The Strange Case of Gil McGillicuddy appeared first on Free the People.

To wit: We, the Exasperated, might do well to remind ourselves and each other how unsurprising a feral piece of legislation like the USA Patriot Act can come into existence at the blink of an eye even in this Representative Constitutional Republic of these United States.

For instance, students of The Whiskey Rebellion know the ink was barely dry on the ratified Constitution when President Washington mobilized 10,000 members of the same American Militia that stumbled their way through the Colonial Revolution to suppress opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s fever dream of a gigantic bureaucracy of clerks whose task would be to administer a comprehensive tax on distilled spirits. They marched right up to the American Frontier of the day (Western Pennsylvania), rounded up the usual suspects, dragged a handful back to civilization and the whole affair more or less fizzled when the powers-that-be decided maybe, sort of, kind of, this was not a great idea. Or so I have been told.

Another fine cluster foxtrot of the early Republic introduced the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Not to be outdone, the 20th century gave We, the Trampled, a Sedition Act Redux.

In fact, the Wilson Administration was a virtual cornucopia of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object to evince a design to reduce the great unwashed masses from coast to coast and sea to shining sea under absolute despotism.

The IRS, the FBI, or the Federal Reserve, are all at minimum aconstitutional if not outright unconstitutional and yet, they continue unchallenged to this day.

While intergenerational conspiracies may not be common, intergenerational cults and behaviors must be examined at some point.

We, the Frayed Collar Workers, must acknowledge the opposition we confront is a hive mind—a self-aware, self-actualizing Bolshevik entity integrated vertically and horizontally.

To translate: if some peanut farmer in the heartland has even the semblance of an idea to advance the cause of code compliance bureaucracy that notion will travel rapidly through the ranks and reach a secure government SCIF within days.

Conversely, no one needs to tell true believers what to do when they encounter a random free range member of the loyal opposition in a grocery store. They must immediately administer the joy and wonder of an ad hoc harangue right then and right there on the spot.

Destruction of a middle class is not new. The Versailles Treaty enraged the German population to the point of total war.

Stalin redefined a word—Kulak—when he declared war on the prosperity of the Russian middle class.

Today, caste stratification between the effete elite in the executive suite and pedestrian Americans has reached Marie Antoinettian levels. Let them eat taxes.

Whoever programs Joe Biden’s teleprompter has no trouble posting one egregious whopper after another. Gas was $5.00 a gallon when Joe took office. Remove food and energy costs from the Consumer Price Index and the economy is booming. People need to buy premium electric vehicles to comply with Green Agenda mandates. Lies on an order of magnitude previously unuttered even by American politicians.

Here in the Shire, as members of the largest political party in the United States (Unaffiliated), we understand the phrases “bipartisan support,” “common sense legislation,” and “reach across the aisle” are all just code for the one party rule of the Kakistocracy, by the Kakistocracy, for the Kakistocracy.

Even now, with clear signs of impending tribulation, neither Pastor Allen Jackson nor Pastor David Jeremiah will be likely to relinquish their pulpits to a modern Patrick Henry’s declaration “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Unless or until We, the People, seek God’s Grace to take charge of our own affairs, America will be neither saved nor great again. Expect to see many more laws and restrictions emerge out of the code compliance pipeline built on the foundation of legislation pioneered by the Patriot Act.

The post The Patriot Act: More of the Same-Old Same-Old appeared first on Free the People.

Remember the carotid artery? When clogged, humans experience sudden numbness or weakness in the face or limbs, sudden trouble speaking and understanding, sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes, sudden dizziness or loss of balance, sudden, severe headache with no known cause. In other words, a serious medical emergency—a stroke of life threatening proportions, one that requires immediate EMS response because every minute counts. No, the first aid kit in the back seat of the car is not sufficient to deal with a problem of this proportion.

But for some unknown reason, all the usual nitwit news outlets have more or less yawned and thrown out a few headlines from the Institute of Alarming Studies about “supply train disruptions.” The same blasé reasoning offered for a worldwide assault on mom-and-pop enterprises from coast to coast and sea to shining sea in the United States and countries around the Pacific Rim, and elsewhere during a heavily exploited pandemic is now applied to the most basic human trade goods.

So, when a cargo ship ran aground blocking one of the world’s most important waterways and resulting in a loss of $9.6 billion in trade every day, one would have expected more than the tepid indifference we’ve seen from the Biden administration.

Fundamentally, this crisis is all about ball bearings or other critical machine components, a detail hidden way under the radar right now. For example, the list of companies sucker punched by Suez Canal turbulence includes Caterpillar, often described as the world’s largest heavy equipment manufacturer, but more significantly a source for many proprietary short life consumables—oil filters, seals and o-rings, sensors, remanufactured sub-assemblies, hydraulic components, even specialty commercial radios. A $946,000 627 K scraper could be sidelined for the duration if replacement hydraulic lines or oil filters are suddenly hard to find or completely unavailable.

Yes, this sudden shut down could even affect Nancy Antoinette Pelosi’s $24,000 commercial kitchen freezer if the spare parts needed to keep her ice cream hard frozen through all her Antoinetteian travails, present and future, are suddenly unavailable at any price. She may resort to looting used (ugh!) parts from the commercial freezer in the downtown pizzeria where Mom and Pop keep the ingredients for their community beloved deep dish pizza, but hey, we are all in this together. Right?

So this time, things could be a little different. This time discussion will not be centered around the difference between ground up dairy cow beef and Wagyu steak supply chain hardships. This time discussion will be centered around whether the conveyor belt that moves the ground up dairy cow beef and Wagyu steaks through the abattoir can be fixed in an economical and timely fashion. Or, more importantly, whether the ready-to-eat diced salad onions will arrive fresh from the field unmolested in their plastic clamshell packages after an uneventful wash, rinse, and dry through the processing plant conveyor belt system. No arguments about flattening the curve or mandatory mask policies need apply.

The crazy thing here is this incident might be a genuine Act of God and not some calculated Hitlerain feint crisis since militaries around the world have long understood the importance of free navigation through the canal proper and in surrounding international waters, and have doubtlessly war-gamed countless scenarios over the past fifty Cold War years. Which makes a limp, tepid response to the current event even harder to fathom. In Biblical Egypt, artisans cried out for straw to make bricks; in Revolutionary France, the peasant class demanded salt to make bread; in the 21st century, workers of the world demand free access to ball bearings because God knows growing food is a completely alien concept.

With luck this will all sort out soon. Otherwise, sic semper tyrannis.

The post Pelosi’s Ice Cream Will Melt if Suez Canal Blockage Is Not Cleared Quickly appeared first on Free the People.

In the Second Amendment Corner stand people with business experience—(Motto: Better, faster, cheaper), sports experience—(Motto: When the going gets tough, the tough get going), and military experience—(Motto: Capitulation occurs after the enemy’s assets are depleted beyond replenishment).

In the Fabian Socialist Corner stand people with psychology backgrounds—(motto: Get touchy-feely with your inner child), theatre backgrounds—(Motto: All the world’s a stage and I’m the most important actor), and the unholy marriage of the two known euphemistically as marketing/public relations—(Motto: We can produce graphic demonstrations of “facts” that don’t exist anywhere outside our imagination).

Obviously a no-brainer: in a direct contest between the two groups, the Second Amendment should win hands down! Yet… yet… that doesn’t seem to happen nearly as often as it should. Why?

Isaac Asimov, in his original Foundation Trilogy, offers a possible answer with his explanation of the difference between thought control and mood control. In summary, he points out that to control the thoughts of any individual person is impossible. What IS possible however, is to create a “mood,” a “climate,” an “atmosphere” among a population of people that block the thoughts of all individuals when they attempt to communicate their thoughts to the larger group.

So, we have the example of ordinary English words and phrases converted into labels and epithets when skillfully manipulated by a literal army of socialist fellow travelers who use them to dominate the citizenry around them.

The phrase “risky tax cuts” overwhelms public policy discussions of the most heavily taxed American population in the history of the United States. The word “extremist” becomes an all purpose bludgeon applied against anyone who can’t or won’t accept the prevailing agenda of big government meddling in every aspect of life from birth to death.

This is “mood control” in action. A tyranny established over every element of public debate by well-equipped, well-trained and well-financed warriors in the army of the left who walk among us virtually unchallenged. The munitions these warriors use are measured in miles of video and audio tape, wattage of broadcast power, and tons of newsprint that examine and explore every facet of their philosophy and lay waste to every aspect and detail of the culture they oppose. They literally “live off the land” in termite fashion consuming the foundations of the structure that supports them.

While—We the People—of the Constitution have barely discovered the Gutenberg printing press, they—the Fabian Socialists—have taken our tax dollars to erect institutions and organizations to thwart our every move. The Federal Communications Commission, an organization that magically determines who shall own and build the fortresses known as television and radio; the Federal Election Commission, an organization which establishes dominion over the kind of people who can run for office and the terms under which they may get their hands on the levers of power known as taxation.

Self defense guru Jeff Cooper reminds us humans that fight with their minds. Any tool, whether a firearm or a video camera, is only an extension of that mind and is only effective if used in a deliberate and conscious fashion. Unless or until—We the People—of the Constitution start fielding crew-served weapons systems known as satellite uplink trucks with all the raw power of the broadcast television they represent; unless or until—We the People—of the Constitution develop the two man search-and-destroy teams known as the “On Air Personality and her Videographer,” we will lose every battle and every skirmish we enter.

At this late date, the luxury no longer exists of public debate, when the archival transcript of an event whether audio, video, or print is solely in the control of hostile forces. Now is time to seek out and acquire the facilities and equipment necessary to counterattack the tyranny of mood control that poisons every aspect of public discourse.

Everything we need to know can be found in the playbook written by the left over the last century. Let’s make a copy of that playbook and use the information to defend our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor before the “mood” turns ugly and we all enter a conflagration none of us seeks.

Are you with me lads? We may not have everything we need to triumph, but let us begin!

The post A Meditation on Our Current Predicament appeared first on Free the People.