Gregory Girard: Political Prisoner

 Arrest this man! Civilian disarmament in Massachusetts Colony, 1775: The Regime deployed Redcoats. Civilian disarmament in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, 2010: The Regime deploys SWAT teams and psychiatrists. 

Massachusetts resident Gregory Girard has never been formally charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. Yet after spending four months in jail, he will spend the next four years as a ward of the court.


Girard's legally obtained firearms will remain in the possession of the thieves in uniform who stole them on February 9, the same day he was kidnapped by a SWAT team. He will undergo involuntary psychiatric evaluation and treatment, including the administration of psychotropic drugs.


If it is deemed "necessary" by any of the legal or therapeutic apparatchiks who are now in charge of his life, Girard will be taken into custody for "in-patient treatment."


This would almost certainly occur if Girard were once again to express the unacceptable political views that resulted in his four month imprisonment, to wit: The Regime ruling us will eventually send paramilitary goon squads to confiscate legally owned firearms and imprison those who own them.


Because possession of such views made Girard a "danger to the community," a paramilitary strike force was sent to seize his guns, and he was summarily imprisoned.Under the terms of a "continuance without a finding" announced by Salem District Court Judge Richard Mori, Girard will avoid prison only if his conduct and attitude meet with the approval of people who can consign him to the psihuska at whim.



The local Vyshinsky disciple, District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, isn't satisfied with this arrangement and most likely won't relent until Girard is sent to prison. The 45-year-old inventor was initially charged with possession of five "infernal devices" -- which proved to be legal smoke and tear gas grenades -- and four counts of "carrying" what were described as "dangerous weapons" -- police batons and hunting knives he had legally stored in his home.



The remaining accusations involve discharging a weapon in a home-made target range on his property, and possession of two items ambiguously identified as "silencers." Girard and his attorney maintain that the cylindrical objects, which were found on his boat, are flash suppressors he intended to use in order to avoid violating a law against sending up a false distress signal.


It's doubtful that even in Massachusetts a jury would find a reason to send Girard to prison. Yet Blodgett, according to his errand girl (or, as she prefers to be called, assistant DA) Michelle DeCourcey, was "very troubled by the presence of the two silencers and felt it merited a jail sentence" of at least two years.


Gregory Girard has no prior criminal record. He is not accused of committing crimes against person or property.


The same Jonathan Blodgett who is determined to send Girard to prison for possession of two cylindrical pieces of metal is anxious to protect the people who beat Worcester resident Kenneth Howe to death last November 25. That's because Howe's murderers are among the numinous personages swaddled in government-issued costumes and invested with the presumptive authority to kill.

Kenneth Howe  was co-owner of a barbershop, a husband, and father of three children. His contributions to society were immeasurably more valuable than anything done by a tax-feeder in an “official” capacity. Last November 25, he has the misfortune of riding in a car that encountered a "sobriety checkpoint."




This particular roadblock -- or "joint sobriety enforcement operation" -- involved the Andover Police Department, the Essex County Sheriff’s Office, and the Massachusetts State Police. Like all such operations, this was an orgy of overtime for people who wear government-provided costume jewelry.  For the helots on wheels who are forced to endure them, checkpoints of this kind are pregnant with the possibility of lethal violence, as Howe and his friend learned.


Police accounts say that Howe was observed making a “furtive movement” as the car in which he was a passenger approached the checkpoint. The driver says that Howe, who had been smoking a marijuana cigarette, was trying to snuff it and put on his seat belt.


When Jodi A. Gerardi, a female state trooper, approached the car, Howe told her, “It’s only a marijuana cigarette.” After being ordered from the vehicle, Howe tried to flee. (In the official police version, the middle-aged man supposedly jumped through the passenger-side window -- something that would tax the athleticism and agility of a Parkour master.)



As Howe tried to flee, the distaff tax-feeder shrieked, “I’ve been assaulted” — something the driver, the only objective eyewitness, disputes: In fact, that witness claims that it was Gerardi who placed hands on Howe, rather than the reverse.


Gerardi’s account describes Howe as “releasing” a pit bull and “assaulting everyone in his path” as he fled the scene. This is of a piece with her claim that Howe busted a move that would have put the Prince of Persia to shame.



Once again, the other eyewitness to the events doesn't support Gerardi's version. However, he did testify that at least a dozen -- and as many as 20 -- police officers swarmed Howe, beating and otherwise brutalizing him, after their little tag-along (or was she a camp follower?) claimed that he had laid an unholy hand on her sanctified person.

Shackling a dying man: Several members of the thugswarm that killed Kenneth Howe cuff him and put leg restraints on him as he slowly dies from the injuries sustained at the hands of at least a dozen police officers. 


Somehow, despite his Jedi-level physical prowess, Howe was taken to the ground “where he continued to disobey orders to ‘stop resisting’ by several other officers,” Gerardi reports, reflecting the common assumption that Mundanes must patiently endure whatever abuse their plunder-supported betters see fit to inflict on them.



After being “softened up,” Howe was  handcuffed and placed in leg restraints. He died at a local police barracks shortly after midnight on the morning of November 26.



In a very real sense, Howe was a victim of the federalized Homeland Security State, which underwrites checkpoints as a way of keeping the local condottieri loyal to the Regime. He could also be considered a casualty of Leviathan’s longest and most destructive war, the federal “War on (Non-Government-Approved) Drugs.” More to the point: It is a matter of settled fact that he was a homicide victim.


The Essex County Medical Examiner ruled that the official cause of death was homicide by way of  “blunt impact of the head and torso with compression of the chest.” This means that the 45-year-old father was beaten to death, at an East Berlin-style checkpoint, by a tax-subsidized thugswarm.



Acting out of solidarity with the rest of the tax-consuming class, the ME's office moved quickly to take the edge off its findings.



“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner uses the term homicide to mean a death at the hands of another,” explained the M.E.’s attorney, Jacqueline Faherty. “A medical examiner does not offer an opinion regarding criminal wrongdoing or civil liability.”


In keeping with routine procedure in any case involving the death of a helpless Mundane at the hands of the Bullies in Blue, the Medical Examiner eagerly described the victim’s cardiovascular disease as a “contributory factor” in the death.

 Death by Government: Rest in God's Peace, Kenneth Howe. 


When someone dies at the hands of an assailant or assailants whose violence is  sanctified by the state, we are supposed to believe that the victim wasn’t killed by the police — he just happened to die in their custody.


Thus victims of lethal Taser strikes succumbed to “excited delirium,” rather than being murdered through electro-shock torture. The state-licensed assailants similarly seek to exculpate themselves when an innocent person suffering from heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, or other medical problems is beaten or suffocated to death by a police mob.


Curiously, “contributory factors” of that kind aren’t treated as mitigating factors when someone is fatally beaten or otherwise subjected to lethal violence by a gang of bullies who do not bear the insignia of state “authority.”  


By way of contrast, when violent deaths are inflicted by commonplace criminals, the victim’s health problems — if they are mentioned at all — are taken as evidence of the exceptional viciousness of the crime.


Despite its patent viciousness, the beating death of Kenneth Howe -- although ruled a homicide -- will not be treated as a crime. “There is absolutely no way reasonable force was used in this case,” insists attorney Frances A. King, who is representing the murder victim’s widow and children. “He has handcuffs on part of that time and leg irons and [the police] are beating him to death.”


Let it not be said that DA Jonathan Blodgett -- the same law-and-order zealot presiding over the persecution of Gregory Girard -- was indifferent to the events of November 25, 2009. In fact, his office was prepared to file charges and prosecute ... the victim, Kenneth Howe, for the supposed offense of "resisting arrest." If Howe had survived the beating inflicted on him, he most likely would be in jail awaiting trial.

Predictably, Blodgett has displayed no measurable interest in building a case against the people who beat Howe to death. Like practically everyone else in his profession, Blodgett apparently assumes that police are entitled to kill anyone at any time who displays anything other than immediate, complete, unconditional submission.


That totalitarian assumption makes a nice matched set with the one undergirding Blodgett's Soviet-style persecution of Gregory Girard -- namely, that Mundanes seeking the means to protect themselves against the Regime's armed enforcers should be treated as fodder for the gulag.

Pro Libertate Radio is now heard each Saturday night from 8:00-11:00 Mountain Time (9:00-Midnight Central) on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Murder as a Punchline

 (Do) Fear the Reaper: A Predator-B or "Reaper" unmanned drone, one of the Regime's most celebrated kill-gadgets, takes to the skies.

The same theory of criminal conspiracy being applied to the prosecution of Michigan's Hutaree Militia would justify the arrest and trial of President Obama for conspiring to murder the Jonas Brothers. In fact, the case against Mr. Obama -- based on previous criminal conduct and the means at his disposal -- is far stronger than the single-ply tissue of speculation and innuendo that constitute the federal case against the notorious Michigan Nine. 

During the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday (May 1), Mr. Obama uncorked what his scribes doubtless considered to be a certifiable thigh-slapper regarding the president's power to murder human beings at whim: 

"[Obama's young daughters] Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys [addressing the Jonas Brothers, who were seated in the room], don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming."

In response, the audience rendered unto Caesar the dutiful laughter required anytime the Pontiff of the Civil Religion favors us with an insipid specimen of pre-fabricated presidential "wit." 

None of the spangled sycophants in attendance displayed a tremor of discomfort at the thought that the individual who had just made a joke about assassinating Americans by remote control actually attempted to kill a U.S. citizen -- New Mexico-born radical Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki -- by way of a Predator drone strike last December. The Obama administration, which admits to maintaining a hit list of U.S. citizens subject to summary execution, has annihilated hundreds of innocent civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere over the past year. 

Such thoughts, if they occurred to anyone in the room last Saturday, weren't allowed to taint the revelry. Perhaps at next year's dinner Obama could get his Caligula freak on, calling out individuals by name and describing various horrible things he could do to them at whim; that routine would surely bring the house down like a Predator-deployed Hellfire missile! (Drum kick.)

But seriously, folks, this kind of thing is funny -- until someone gets killed. That's the entire point: people are getting killed, at the orders of the guy who was willing to read from his Teleprompter a line intended to extort humor from the slaughter.

Some might contend that a bad joke doesn't constitute evidence of a criminal conspiracy. The people responsible for compiling the indictment against the nine Hutaree defendants apparently think otherwise, since they are treating ill-advised talk about killing people -- at least some of it best characterized as misguided juvenile attempts at humor -- as evidence of a "seditious conspiracy."

In her order granting pre-trial release (under conditions of house arrest and electronic surveillance) to the Hutaree defendants, U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts provides extensive excerpts from the evidence. This includes redacted transcripts of conversations in which militia David and Joshua Stone, Michael Meeks, and Kristopher Sickles talk about killing judges and law enforcement personnel. 

The ellipses littering the transcript are tangible evidence of cherry-picking by the prosecution. 

Even orphaned from context, however, the recorded conversations don't amount to evidence of a criminal conspiracy, but rather a tendency to engage in the worst kind of self-deluded, adolescent locker-room braggadoccio. 

Here, in its entirely, is the "evidence" adduced by the prosecutors to substantiate the supposed plot to kill police and then ambush the mourners, gleaned from a recorded conversation that occurred on February 20:

                                                                   David Stone: 

Or, or better yet, we shoot one, from a distance, high powered rifle, you sit back you take him out -- you go, kapop! -- You just shoot one. And then you just kind sit back, they'll pack out a huntin' [sic] for ya. Try to find out who you are, but they have this thing, that everybody has, and it's called a funeral. Now for that funeral, you'll have cops from every state of the country come where? To his funeral.

 

[...]

Why not just take care of the situation? Kabunk! Kabunk! [Sound effect] 

[...]

I'm thinkin' IEDs and you just blow the whole convoy up. Boom!

[...]

                                                               Kristopher Sickles

Sneak in their house, poison their milk.

[...]

                                                              David Stone

No, no, you set their house on fire and you have another team sitting back watching the local fire department try and come down the road and it's just pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! As trucks go baba, "we're over heating," Rrrr [sound effect]. "Hey, we're not gonna make it to this fire."

[...]

I mean, there's a hundred and one scenarios you could use.

(End of excerpts.)

The ellipses in the excerpt above are from the original transcript, as provided to Judge Roberts by the prosecution. We're not reading a conversation; we're being fed lurid soundbites carefully juxtaposed in a way intended to elicit maximum outrage with minimal detail.

The prosecution insists that the foregoing demonstrates a "general concept of operations" in which the defendants were preparing to ambush and murder police. But if there was an actual agreement to carry out such acts, or preparations to do the same, the relevant excerpts were left on the cutting room floor. This is the "A-list" material the prosecution cited in its effort to deny bail to a group accused of seditious conspiracy involving weapons of mass destruction. 

"Discussions about killing local law enforcement officers -- and even discussions about killing members of the Judicial Branch of Government -- do not translate to conspiracy to overthrow, or levy [war] against, the United States Government," wrote Judge Roberts. She followed with the observation that during the recording, "the Defendants laugh, make sounds, and appear to talk over one another. There is also a discussion of strippers." 

This wasn't a strategy session conducted by a terrorist cabal, but a bull session involving angry people who -- most likely under the influence of an adult libation or similar conversational lubricant -- indulged in what Roberts calls "hate-filled, venomous speech" that enjoys unconditional First Amendment protection. 

The most extensive expression of the Hutaree's "seditious" intent, Roberts points out, was a lengthy address written by David Stone that "speaks of reclaiming America, not overthrowing the United States Government."

Reduced to what John Wayne would call the "spitting out words to watch them splatter" mode of argumentation, the Feds insisted that the Hutaree defendants "pose a danger to the community because they lack respect for lawful authority." 

The prosecution could demonstrate that the Hutaree defendants had abundant contempt for the government -- what perceptive person doesn't? -- but it hasn't demonstrated that they were hostile toward lawful authority (which of itself wouldn't constitute a crime, either).

The American political tradition, beginning with that instrument of sedition called the Declaration of Independence, clearly distinguishes between government and lawful authority, making the former subordinate to the latter, which itself is vested in the people. That same literary product of irrational anti-government fanaticism also states unambiguously that there are times when defense of lawful authority requires that the people "alter or abolish" the government ruling them.

By any honest reckoning, the government ruling us is the single most promiscuous law-breaker on record, and the contempt of our rulers for the legal authority under which they supposedly operate -- the U.S. Constitution -- is inexhaustible. This helps explain why the Regime's secret police infiltrate and entrap inconsequential groups of socially marginalized people who live in rotting mobile homes, while their Dear Leader -- an individual who lives in a fortified mansion, and has at his disposal power sufficient to destroy human life everywhere -- can make puerile jokes about his ongoing murder spree.

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"Mysteries of Policy": Officially Sanctioned Murder

To prove that these sort of policed societies are a violation offered to nature ... it needs only to look upon the sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence, which are every where used to support them.


Let us take a review of the dungeons, whips, chains, racks, gibbets with which every society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in pride and madness, and millions in abject servitude, and dependence.


There was a time, when I looked with a reverential awe on these mysteries of policy, but age, experience and philosophy have rent the veil; and I view this sanctum sanctorum ... without any enthusiastic admiration.


-- Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)


Troy Meade killed Niles Meservey in the parking lot of Everett, Washington's Chuckwagon Inn last June 10. Meade shot the unarmed, intoxicated man seven times in the back. These facts are not in dispute.


In his recently concluded trial, Meade justified his lethal assault by describing it as self-defense: At the time of the shooting, the drunken Meservey was behind the wheel of his Corvette, and Meade was standing behind and to the left of the vehicle.


The jury rejected the claim of self-defense, because Meade was never in significant physical jeopardy. Meservey had plowed his car into a chain-link fence; if he had put the car in reverse, he wouldn't have hit Meade.


Trial testimony established that Meservey was not backing up when Meade pulled his gun. The wrecked Corvette was still embedded in the fence when the crime scene investigators arrived.


Meade was charged with first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. The same jury that rejected Meade's self-defense claim acquitted him of both counts.


Guilty on the facts, acquitted by the jury: Officer Troy Meade and his wife react to the verdict.


If the killing of Niles Meservey wasn't self-defense, how could it be something other than an act of criminal homicide?



Since Troy Meade is a police officer and his victim was a mere Mundane, this question typifies what Edmund Burke described as the "mysteries of policy" -- those special exemptions from the moral law claimed by the exalted beings controlling the state's apparatus of coercion.


Any other individual who killed a man under the circumstances recounted above would almost certainly be found guilty of criminal homicide. Because Meade was dressed in the sacerdotal vestments of the state's punitive priesthood, his lawless act of lethal violence was transmuted into an act of policy.


To borrow the expression used by the government ruling us when it audits the shortcomings of other officially established criminal syndicates, this was an "extra-judicial killing" -- a term found in descriptions of murder rampages carried out by police in such places as Nigeria, Pakistan, and Latin American dictatorships of yore. Meade's extra-judicial killing of Meservey was a form of "street justice" by way of summary execution.


"Time to end this -- enough is enough!" According to Officer Stephen Klocker, who was on the scene at the Chuckwagon on June 10 and on the stand as a prosecution witness at Meade's trial, this was what his fellow officer exclaimed as he drew his gun and killed Meservey.


Klocker, a 21-year police veteran, offered his testimony against his own professional interest -- and, as police whistleblowers elsewhere would attest, at some risk to his physical safety.


During the trial Everett's municipal government -- which faces a lawsuit by Meservey's family, and thus had an interest in seeing Meade acquitted -- took the remarkable step of providing the defense with documents intended to undermine Klocker's reliability as a witness. It is ironic, but hardly inexplicable, that the city government didn't make an issue of Klocker's credibility until he testified that another cop had killed a citizen without legal cause or justification.


According to the jury, this purely discretionary killing was not a criminal act. Apparently the lethal fusillade was just an unusually assertive way to bring "closure" to an encounter between an obstreperous drunk and a stressed-out police officer.


That encounter lasted less than a half hour. There were no exigent circumstances involved. By exercising minimal force and exposing himself to an all-but-undetectably small amount of personal peril, Meade could have deprived Meservey of his car keys, immobilizing him until he was either unconscious or cooperative.


Nah. Too risky. The only safe option here, obviously, was open gunplay.


The reasoning behind the verdict seems to be roughly this: "Sure, the circumstances didn't legally justify the use of lethal force, but we have no right to second-guess a decision reflecting the inscrutable wisdom of an agent of state authority."


Somewhere (eternal judgment not being my prerogative, I don't claim to know where) Joseph de Maistre, the 18th Century apostle of absolutism, is smiling with approval over the verdict in the Meade trial. In Meade's acquittal, Maistre would find vindication of his foundational authoritarian maxim:


"[A]ll greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner; he is the terror of human society and tie that holds it together. Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears."


In Maistre's vision of the world, terror is the foundation of "society." His contemporary, Edmund Burke, drew a crucial distinction between "artificial" or "policed" societies, on the one hand, and "natural" societies, on the other.


The latter are rooted in tradition and cooperation; the former are controlled through "sanguinary measures, and instruments of violence" -- institutionalized terror and officially sanctioned homicide.


Cheerfully oblivious to besetting reality, many still believe that our society is governed by laws, rather than the arbitrary will of individuals.


The morally contorted verdict in Troy Meade's trial offers a useful corrective by starkly illustrating that sanctified official violence is the foundation of the "policed society" in which we live.




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The Borders Are Closing In

Ihre papiere, bitte: A defining demand of a police state.



Slavery consists of being "subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man."

-- John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government


When an officer tells you to come inside and sit down, you come inside and sit down.... When an officer tells you to do something, you do it .... There is no "why" here.

-- U.S. Border Guard to a befuddled Canadian citizen arbitrarily detained while trying to visit a shopping mall in Niagara Falls, New York.



Returning to his home in Toronto following a brief visit to the States last December, author Peter Watts had the misfortune of being "randomly selected" for a search by members of the Regime's Border Guards Directorate stationed at the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Michigan.



The science fiction novelist's bad luck was exacerbated by a momentary miscommunication: He saw a "flicker of motion" outside his car that he assumed was a wave, rather than a demand to pull over. His passenger understood what was happening, and urged Watts to pull over -- which he did.


"When I go like this, I'm not waving hello," sneered the border guard, assuming the snarky tone of unmerited superiority that armed functionaries use when addressing Mundanes.


"I guess we're not in Canada, because sometimes that means `hello,'" Watts replied, thereby committing a potentially fatal offense called "contempt of cop."


He compounded that supposed sin by getting out of the car and asking what the guards were doing as they pawed through the luggage in his trunk and the bags in his back seat.



As a citizen of the freest country (by default) in North America, Watts made the critical error of assuming that he had the right to ask why his privacy was being invaded, and that his question would be answered. His question was answered with repeated demands that he get back in his car.


After Watts hesitated, one of the guards seized his arm. This provoked a predictable "flinch response" from Watts, who pulled his arm away.


For reasons that make perfect sense to those attuned with Kafka's sense of reality, American law enforcement officers often construe the act of pulling away from their unwanted physical contact as a form of "assault" -- and thus as a pretext for the summary administration of "street justice."


First two, and then eventually three, of the stalwart guardians of our sacred northern frontier took turns pummeling the slender, mild-mannered 52-year-old man. Watts was punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, then thrown wet and partially disrobed into an unheated cell. He was then interrogated, held overnight, and charged with "assaulting a federal officer" after being denied access to legal counsel (and pestered repeatedly to repudiate his Miranda rights).


After Watts' computer, flash drives, and loose-leaf notebook were confiscated, he was unceremoniously dumped -- in shirtsleeves, without so much as a windbreaker -- on the Canadian side of the border.


Ironically, in his novel Maelstrom, Watts -- a Hugo nominee who specializes in dystopian fiction -- appears to have anticipated his experience. Describing the abuse suffered by a character at the hands of customs officials, Watts observes: "Technically, of course, it was not an assault. Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose."


A jury of dutiful collectivist drones found Watts guilty of the supposed crime of "non-compliance with a border guard"; his "crime," reduced to its essence, was to ask, "why?"


Although Watts could have been forced to spend years as part the world's largest prison population, the presiding judge was content to pilfer $1,628 from the victim of the assault at the border -- after treating him to a patronizing lecture about the need to be "nice" to the feral armed adolescents who constitute the State's punitive caste.


Watts' experience leaves a decidedly totalitarian aftertaste. Crossing the border of a totalitarian state — in either direction — is an experience fraught with visceral anxiety. Finding himself in the unwanted company of humorless, heavily armed goons of questionable competence and dubious intelligence, the traveler is vividly aware that he can be arrested, imprisoned, beaten, or even shot at whim.

The best thing to do in such circumstances, travelers are told, is to assume a posture of utter servility, meekly and quietly enduring whatever indignity inflicted on them until they are safely through the checkpoint. In coming years, it most likely won't be necessary to visit the border in order to have a sample of what Watts endured; experiences similar to his will become increasingly commonplace for citizens and other residing legally within the United States.

Is it easier to build a police state from the inside out, or from the outside in? We may never know, since the architects of the Homeland Security State are doing both simultaneously.

Whenever a society descends into totalitarianism, the ruling clique will eventually close the borders -- not just to prevent contamination by politically troublesome foreign influences, but also to prevent the egress of refugees and (most importantly) the flight of capital to more congenial economic environments.


In our case, the invasive and arbitrary powers exercised by in the name of border security are becoming embedded in routine law enforcement within the interior. Although the geography of the contiguous 48 states remains unchanged, there is a very real sense in which the borders are closing in on us.


The Border Patrol -- the kind folks who treated Mr. Watts to a dose of uniquely Amerikan hospitality -- already carries out warrantless, suspicionless checkpoints as far as 100 miles inside the national boundary. The Department of Homeland Security insists that the Fourth Amendment proscription of "unreasonable searches and seizures" doesn't apply to "border enforcement" searches. This would mean that the two-thirds of the U.S. population living within 100 miles of an international border are residents of a "Constitution-Free Zone."


Tragically, the expansion of the immigration control "Constitution-Free Zone" is being propelled by some of the most outspoken critics of "big government."


Last week, many (by no means all) adherents of the Tea Party movement briefly suspended their campaign against invasive government to promote and applaud the enactment of a measure turning Arizona into an authentic police state -- that is, one in which police can demand identity papers from practically anyone and arrest those who don't comply.

An ill omen: This billboard was photographed in Arizona by libertarian activist Ernest Hancock

Under SB 1070, signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on April 24, any "lawful contact" between a law enforcement officer and a citizen can end with the latter being arrested and detained if he cannot satisfy a "reasonable suspicion" that he is in the country without official permission.


An incident that occurred two days before that law was signed by Brewer demonstrates that a valid driver's license may not be sufficient to allay that suspicion, and that it's entirely possible for a native-born U.S. citizen who fully cooperates with the police to end up being handcuffed, arrested, detained and humiliated.



On April 22, an Arizona resident who identifies himself as Abdon (he hasn't chosen to disclose his surname) pulled his truck into a weigh station. As his vehicle was being inspected, Abdon was asked by an official to display proof of legal residency. He promptly handed over a valid Arizona commercial driving license; he also supplied his Social Security number and additional personal details.


For some reason this was considered insufficient, and Abdon ended up being cuffed and hauled away to an ICE detention facility while his wife -- who was dragged out of work -- was dispatched to their home to retrieve Abdon's birth certificate and other documents.



The unfortunate truck driver's birth certificate listed his birthplace as Fresno, California. This means that he -- unlike one, or possibly both, major party candidates in the last presidential election -- has an unassailable claim to being a "native-born United States citizen." He had complied with every demand made of him at the weigh station, and did nothing to suggest that he harbored criminal intent of any kind.


The only source of the "reasonable suspicion" that led to Abdon's arrest was his visible ethnicity. This is the standard under which American citizens (particularly, but not exclusively, of Latino ancestry) can now be harassed, arrested, and detained in the State of Arizona.


The more frequently this kind of thing happens, the likelier it becomes that innocent people will be seriously hurt -- as if being accosted, questioned, and detained by armed strangers for reasons beyond one's control weren't sufficient injury.



SB 1070 has been the equivalent of a public works project for the "tolerance" industry, which is busy planning boycotts and other expressions of punitive sanctimony against Arizona. This had the predictable, albeit unfortunate, effect of leading at least some honorable people of goodwill to assume the best about the measure without examining its impact on individual liberty.


Every invasion of individual rights
happens with the eager support of people acting in the sincere and thoroughly mistaken confidence that what they permit the state to do to others will never be done to them.


The seminal error is to insist on exceptions to the principle that government -- assuming, of course, that one should be permitted to exist -- must be strictly limited to protecting the life, liberty, and property of every individual.


When that error is coupled with a fertile topic of public concern -- such as terrorism, drug addiction, child abuse, or illegal immigration -- politics becomes pregnant with large-scale abuses of individual rights.


Supporters of the Arizona immigration law define the controversy as an issue of "sovereignty" -- preservation of Arizona's reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment and the national independence of the United States. Political sovereignty, valuable as it is, must be regarded as a "good of second intent" -- something that, while of great worth, is derivative of, or subordinate to, a much greater good. The paramount political good, according to America's founding premise, is individual liberty protected by law.


In dealing with immigration, as with all other matters of public concern, government's only legitimate role is to protect individual rights against criminal aggression -- such as crimes of violence, fraud, or trespassing on private property.


Current policy, however, is to abet and reward aggression in the form of participatory plunder by illegal immigrants by way of welfare subsidies, which obviously have to be abolished (and not just for immigrants, but for everyone -- beginning with the corporate welfare whores on Wall Street and in the military-industrial-homeland security complex).


Enactment of Arizona's "your papers, please" legislation -- which, Judge Andrew Napolitano predicts, won't survive constitutional scrutiny -- comes at a time when the problem of illegal immigration is in remission, both in that border state and nation-wide. It's entirely likely that with immigration beginning to taper off, the border enforcement apparatus being built today will increasingly be directed inward.


As the government consummates its transformation into an undisguised corporatist kleptocracy, many Americans seeking to preserve some portion of what they have earned and saved will be driven to expatriate themselves.


The Regime already treats Americans living abroad as tax slaves, irrespective of their current place of residence. Economist Doug Casey warns that currency export controls are all but inevitable -- indeed, in a small but significant way, they are already a tangible reality.



Many of Obama's conservative critics simultaneously condemn him for building an invasive collectivist state and for his inadequate zeal in closing down the border. If their perception of Obama's intentions is sound, those critics had better hope and pray that he doesn't reverse course and become a border control zealot.



Be sure to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio each weeknight from 6:00-7:00 Mountain Time on the Liberty News Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!

"Find Me The Man, I'll Find The Crime"

A menace to society, seen here in his lair: Telecommunications professional, inventor, and law-abiding gun owner Gregory Girard (above, left) hard at work to support his wife and son, along with the tax-fed parasites who plunder his paycheck. Below, left: The photograph released by police to demonize Girard after a squadron of stormtroopers dragged him away to jail on spurious firearms-related charges.

All of the serious charges against Gregory Girard have been dropped, yet he remains behind bars and denied bail until the people responsible for putting him there can devise a suitable "crime" to justify his imprisonment.

This task shouldn't tax the malicious creativity of the Salem County Prosecutor, given that Girard, a resident of Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, is a middle-aged male gun owner and unreconstructed "right-wing extremist."

As Josef Stalin's secret police chief Lavrenti Beria put it: Find me the man, and I'll find the crime.

In early February, police learned of Girard's unremarkable gun collection -- invariably described as an "arsenal" or "cache" by the statist stenographers who call themselves local journalists -- when his wife, a psychiatrist, told them that she was afraid to return to their home following an argument.

On the following day the police were contacted by the ATF, which relayed a report from someone described as a "friend" of Girard's wife who supposedly saw hand grenades in the condo.

At the time, Girard held a Class A firearms license and had dutifully registered all of his weapons. A "license," of course, is a document that redefines an innate right as a government-granted privilege, and its purpose -- as Girard would learn -- is to simplify the process of revoking that "privilege" at the whim of a government functionary. Glenn McKiel, Chief of the Manchester-by-the-sea Police Department, revoked Girard's license and called in the Cape Ann Response Team (CART) -- the Homeland Security State's local paramilitary affiliate -- for a joint assault on Girard's home.

Would you trust your life to these guys? Well, Gregory Girard didn't think it was a good idea, either. Below, right, we find an example of the Massachusetts State Police Tactical Team conferring the blessings of order on an unarmed, outnumbered, helpless protester.



Among the specific concerns related to the police by Girard's wife was his supposedly alarming view that martial law is imminent.


Since it is unacceptable for people to believe that government agents will carry out paramilitary raids to confiscate firearms, a paramilitary force was sent to Girard’s home to confiscate his firearms.

Stormtroopers from CART, the ATF, and the state police surrounded the condo, evacuated two units, and then called Girard to invite him outside. Seeing his home surrounded by a ring of heavily armed, black-clad bucketheads clearly possessing malign intent, Girard understandably declined the invitation. After the police barged into his home, Girard put up no resistance, beyond insisting that his "hand grenades" were innocuous and perfectly legal smoke grenades.

The first media accounts of the incident were a bulimic recital of pre-chewed soundbites fed to the press by the police.

Girard’s collection of “approximately twenty” firearms — in fact, he owned 11 rifles and two handguns, all legally purchased and duly registered — suddenly became an “an alarming, nearly military-grade stockpile.”

In similar fashion, Girard's food storage, flashlights, batteries, and camping gear were also described as "military-style items."

I suspect that the only reason Girard's home wasn't similarly transformed into an "armed compound" is the fact that it was a multi-family condominium.

In addition to the firearms, Girard’s arms cache reportedly included “four police batons” he had “illegally” acquired.

Clubs in the "right" hands: Blackshirts employed by the Massachusetts State Police deal with a "suspect." This image, incidentally, is from the SERT's webpage; they're proud to offer "service" of this kind.

That’s right: Civilian disarmament is not limited to “gun control,” but includes “club control,” as well.

In the hands of the armed servants of the tax-feeding class, tear gas, pepper spray, and batons are considered “less-than-lethal” weaponry. But such items become dangerous implements of violent disorder when they fall into the hands of mere Mundanes. Accordingly, Girard was charged with four counts of possessing “an infernal device” and four counts of possessing a “dangerous weapon.”

Girard also reportedly converted his third story into an “illegal indoor firing range,” complete with what was described as an “illegal ballistic plate” (apparently possession of metal plates of a certain thickness is now impermissible without explicit government permission).

“We feel our community is safer having this kind of weaponry off the street,” intoned a police spokesman as he performed the familiar post-raid gun-grabber liturgy.

As it happens the “weaponry” in question was never on the “street” to begin with -- and its mere possession by Girard wasn't a crime even in a positivist sense.

No charges were ever filed relating to Girard's "arsenal" of firearms. The charges of owning "infernal machines" -- five "explosive" hand grenades -- have been dismissed because, as he had patiently tried to explain to the armed marauders who abducted him, the objects in question were perfectly non-explosive gas grenades. The charge of "carrying dangerous weapons" was also vacated, since Girard was never accused of carrying a knife or baton outside his home, and no state or local ordinance forbids private ownership of knives or clubs.

The only remaining charges -- discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a dwelling, and two counts of illegal possession of silencers -- are made of the same alloy of dishonesty and prosecutorial desperation.

Rebecca Whitehill, Girard's attorney, has pointed out that while firing a weapon inside one's own home might be unwise, it is not a criminal offense under state law. She also insists that the objects described as "silencers" are in fact flash suppressors, private ownership of which is not prohibited by state law.

Even if he is found "guilty" on the remaining charges, Girard wouldn't face prison time. Yet Judge Richard Mori of the Salem District Court refuses to grant bail.

Prosecutor Michelle DeCourcey, the Beria disciple heading the case against Girard, insists (as paraphrased by the Salem News) that "the facts of the case have not changed, only the charges." What this means, assuming that it means anything, must be that the prosecution is following the Stalinist formula of finding a "crime" to fit the facts. And Judge Mori is willing to facilitate this fraud by keeping Girard behind bars, because Mori "still"considers Girard "to be a danger to the community."

Stolen property: A police official fondles some of the firearms his department pilfered from Gregory Girard.


Like assistant DA DeCourcey, Judge Mori is employing Soviet legal concepts to justify undisguised violations of Girard's individual rights.


Specifically, they are treating him as what the Soviet penal code called a "socially dangerous" person -- a designation used to justify summary punishment of political dissidents and others deemed enemies of the state, whether or not they were charged with an actual criminal offense.


More than a decade ago, the state government of Connecticut enacted a “law” permitting state agents to confiscate firearms from people suspected of “dangerous” tendencies — a variation on the Soviet idea of pre-emptive punishment of “socially dangerous persons.”


Almost exactly a month after Girard was kidnapped and his gun collection was stolen by the local police, David Pyles of Medford, Oregon endured a similar assault. Shortly before dawn on March 8, a mob of heavily armed police -- two SWAT teams, officers from two local police departments, sheriff's deputies from two counties, and troopers from the Oregon State Police -- ringed Pyles' home and demanded his surrender.


Pyles had recently made a wise and timely investment by purchasing two handguns and an AK-47 rifle. Shortly before Pyles bought the guns -- something he had long planned to do, but hadn't been financially feasible until he received a tax refund -- he had been put on administrative leave by the Oregon Department of Transportation.


This convergence of events led police to categorize Pyles -- without evidence of criminal intent or derangement -- as a "disgruntled employee" planning retaliation of some kind against his ODOT supervisor. Thus they demanded that he submit to a mental health evaluation -- an ominous echo of the Soviet regime's habit of forcing dissidents to undergo psychiatric confinement. They also seized his firearms for "safekeeping."


"They woke me up with a phone call at about 5:50 in the morning," Pyles told Reason magazine.
"I looked out the window and saw the SWAT team pointing their guns at my house. The officer on the phone told me to turn myself in. I told them I would, on three conditions: I would not be handcuffed. I would not be taken off my property. And I would not be forced to get a mental health evaluation. He agreed."


The negotiator, being a police officer, did what comes naturally to people in that profession. He lied.


"The second I stepped outside, they jumped me," continues Pyles. "Then they handcuffed me, took me off my property, and took me to get a mental health evaluation."


Within a few hours Pyles had been discharged from the hospital. He never saw the inside of a jail cell. The local police -- most likely in reaction to a nation-wide spasm of outrage triggered by their Orwellian persecution of an innocent gun owner -- returned the firearms, albeit not before lying to him again by claiming that he would have to undergo a second "background check."


All of this, according to Sgt. Jeff Proulx of the Oregon State Police, was a successful exercise in "proactive" police work. Stalin and Beria would undoubtedly agree.


Note: In the original version of this essay I mistakenly referred to Mr. Girard's Massachusetts carry license as a "federal firearms license." My thanks to commenter OldEasterner for catching and correcting this error.

Obiter Dicta

During the past week I've been busy finishing the manuscript of my next book, the working title of which is The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Reflections on the Rise of the Robber State. It's a collection of essays, only two of which were published here. Stay tuned for further details.


Yesterday I had the privilege of participating in the annual Patriots Day commemoration on the steps of the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. The video of that event will be available soon (you'll have no trouble recognizing me; since I'm not running for anything, I was the only speaker who didn't wear a suit). Yesterday's Pro Libertate Radio broadcast dealt at length with the meaning of Patriots Day and the escalating campaign to vilify and criminalize those of us determined to preserve the principle of self-ownership.

Tune in each weeknight at 6:00 Mountain Time (7:00 Central) for your daily injection of unfiltered anti-government outrage, courtesy of Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!