Steven Pinker's Statist Gospel

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has said that he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written a theodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the Leviathan State. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker insists that humanity has “evolved to become less violent” through the ministry of elites who employ the State to evangelize on behalf of what he calls “enlightenment humanism.” 

According to Pinker, since the emergence of the modern secular state in the 18th century there has been a dramatic decline in primitive expressions of aggressive violence. People who live in contemporary developed societies “no longer have to worry about abduction into sexual slavery; divinely commanded genocide; lethal circuses and tournaments; punishment on the cross, rack, wheel, stake, or strappado for holding unpopular beliefs; decapitation for not bearing a son; disembowelment for having dated a royal; pistol duels to defend their honor … or the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself,” Pinker asserts. 

The precipitous decline in private violence, which Pinker heralds as “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history,” is a triumph of the “social contract,” an arrangement in which political government asserts a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. By over-awing those inclined toward individual acts of violence, the State supposedly suppresses “demonic” impulses – such as greed and sadism – while emancipating the “better angels of our nature” – empathy, self-discipline, and peaceful cooperation.

"Oh Divine State, protect us from the unenlightened...."

 As is the case with most religious doctrines, Pinker’s theology of the divine State is built on a paradox – in this case the idea that the human tendency toward violence can be eradicated through the scientific application of the same by enlightened people who have supposedly transcended such primitive impulses. 

Given that Pinker is one of the leading exponents of the “box with wires” view of the human brain, there is also a rich vein of irony in Pinker’s unabashed use of the terms “demons” and “angels” in describing a conflict over competing visions of morality. 

In an interview given more than a decade ago, Pinker described human beings as “nothing more than a collection of ricocheting molecules in the head.” Like others who subscribe to that view, Pinker has yet to submit a schematic explaining how morality is produced through molecular reactions. And like theologians from other traditions, Pinker is content to leave such matters undisturbed in the unfathomable depths of mystery. This would be a perfectly acceptable arrangement – were it not for the fact that Pinker, like fundamentalists from other traditions, embraces the use of sanctified coercion as a means of purifying those less enlightened than he.

As a child, Pinker, says, he thought as a child, embracing anarchism at about the same time he converted to atheism. But as an adult, he has put away childish things: “I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” What this means in practice is that he merely abandoned one sect of totalitarian statism for another.

Rousseau, it should be remembered, was  was the author of what he called "The Civil Religion" — a doctrine that would enable the masses, in Rousseau's phrase, to "bear with docility the yoke of the public good." 

The most important article of Rousseau's Civil Religion was the absolute divinity of the State; the gravest transgression was "intolerance," which was regarded as evil not because it injured the rights of individuals, but because it challenged the State's authority.

According to Rousseau, the ideal social arrangement would be a "form of theocracy, in which there can be no pontiff save the prince, and no priests save the magistrates.... [W]hoever dares to say, 'Outside the church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the prince the pontiff."

The State would make belief in its dogmas compulsory, even as it denied it was doing so: "While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them…..” Apostasy would be a capital offense: "If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death -- he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Rousseau believed that man --until corrupted by traditional institutions -- was intrinsically good. Thomas Hobbes – not to put too fine a point on the matter – didn’t share that opinion. He did agree that the State, as the embodiment of what could be called the “general will,” should combine the civil and ecclesial functions and exercise unlimited power to regiment the lives of its subjects. The objective wouldn’t be to save people’s souls, or elevate their morals, but merely to impose order.

Pinker claims to be “eclectically, non-dogmatically libertarian” in his political outlook. Given his unbuttoned embrace of Hobbesian absolutism, that’s a bit like claiming to be an “eclectic, non-dogmatic vegan” while subsisting on a diet of steak tartare.  

Although Pinker began his academic career in a Montreal counter-cultural milieu “dominated by hippies ... and US draft dodgers,” he has endorsed the exercise in State-inflicted violence called the “War on Drugs” in terms that would earn Hobbes’s approval:  “A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will get a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.”  

This process involves filling the streets with State-licensed “violent people” in military attire, and granting them a plenary indulgence to loot and terrorize the public. The “by-catch” gathered by thegovernment’s trawling net includes perfectly innocent people. But it is not our place to question the inscrutable wisdom of the divine State, which causes the pain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Leviathan's "by-catch": A 71-year-old victim of a wrong-door drug raid.

 There is also the matter of quo warranto: By what authority does the State assault and imprison people who peacefully ingest mind-altering substances? 

This is where Pinker’s Rousseauist background comes into play: It’s not necessary for subjects to understand the logic of the State’s decrees; they simply must have faith in its bottomless competence and unalloyed goodness – or suffer the penalty for their apostasy. 

All religious belief requires the acceptance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Pinker’s dogma requires that we ignore the evidence of things that are clearly visible in order to embrace his vision of something yet to materialize. The most compelling argument against Pinker’s claim that humanity has evolved beyond violence is the systematic slaughter during the 20^th Century of at least 170 million people by governments claiming and enforcing a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force. 

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker – to his credit – does recognize R.J. Rummel’s pioneering research into the phenomenon of "democide." Given the body count compiled through war and politicized mass murder during the 20^th century, and the persistent bloodshed in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, the idea that humanity has progressed beyond violence “seems illogical and obscene,” Pinker admits. This is something else we simply have to take on faith as well, it appears. 

The rampages carried out by totalitarian states were a tragic prelude to the “Long Peace” that has prevailed since WWII, Pinker insists. We’ve reached a point at which mass violence only among those sub-populations that have resisted signing on to a “social contract that [gives] government a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” That heathen population, he points out, includes Americans who reside in the southern and western states, where people “retain the right to bear arms [and] believe it is their responsibility, not the government’s, to deter harm-doers.” This means that “private citizens, flush with self-serving biases, [can act] as judge, jury, and executioner….”

Of all the impious nerve! Such power can only be exercised by those duly anointed as emissaries of the divine State – beginning with the Exalted One in the Oval Office, who commands the power to imprison, torture, or execute anybody  on the face of the planet. 

In a 2007 TED lecture, Dr. Pinker urged Leviathan’s subjects to count their blessings: A mere century ago, he pointed out, some of them may have been “burned at the stake for criticizing the king, after a trial that maybe lasted ten minutes.” Today, by way of contrast, a U.S. citizen who condemns Washington’s imperial aggression can be summarily executed by way of a drone-fired missile without the benefit of a trial. The latter approach is acceptable to at least some people of Pinker’s persuasion because the State’s priestly caste possesses the mystical power to transubstantiate violence into “policy.” 

Although he followed a different vector, Steven Pinker, a proudly irreligious cultural Jew, has arrived at the same destination as the reactionary 18th Century Catholic writer Joseph de Maistre, who insisted that "all 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." While Dr. Pinker criticizes the death penalty, his view of social order ultimately rests on the supposed authority of State functionaries to kill those who refuse to submit to them.

The modern material and ethical progress Pinker properly celebrates are not the product of State coercion. They are the result of private, mutually beneficial action based on reciprocal respect for individual rights -- in other words, the application of the Golden Rule, which Pinker acknowledges in passing while pointedly ignoring uncomfortable questions about its provenance and most notable Exponent. 

To use Pinker's categories: The impulses unleashed by the State are demonic, not angelic. 

Your donations to keep Pro Libertate on-line are much-needed, and very much appreciated! God bless. 

Dum spiro, pugno!

"Heroes In Error", Again (Media Update)

"We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Iraqi con-man Ahmed Chalabi (seen at right standing next to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with former Iraqi Viceroy Jerry Bremer looking over Rumsfeld's shoulder); Chalabi was the chief source of pre-war disinformation regarding Saddam's supposed WMD arsenal, replying to a question posed by the London Daily Telegraph in February 2004 about his role in misleading the public.


In her element: Media-favored FLDS critic Flora Jessop, a one-time polygamist "child bride," appears on the Fox "News" program "On the Record."

"I would like to hug her [Rozita Swinton]. She accomplished getting 416 children out of a very abusive situation. But I'd also like to slap her because she went about it the wrong way." --

Flora Jessop, former member of the FLDS Church-turned-anti-polygamy crusader, speaking with reference to the disturbed 33-year-old woman whose false child abuse report triggered the raid in Eldorado.



"I would like to point out that the system absolutely worked in this case," insisted Phoenix-based anti-polygamy activist Flora Jessop during the April 18 edition of "On the Record." "When -- as hotlines get calls from children purporting to be abused, just as I do, it's not my responsibility and my job to decide whether those calls are legitimate."


Which is to say that the system "worked," in Miss Jessop's view, because it brought about what she considered to be a desirable result -- the armed invasion of the YFZ Ranch, and the seizure of children from their parents by force -- irrespective of the truth. In fact, Jessop's statements on the record indicate that she considered the truth to be inconsequential.


In recounting her conversations with "Sarah," the supposed polygamist child bride and abuse victim at the YFZ Ranch who was actually a childless adult woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Jessop describes how the caller suddenly -- and conveniently -- became twin sisters named Sarah and Laura. She also candidly described those conversations as an elaborate game of "Let's Pretend":


"[At] one point during my conversations with the girl I was speaking with, I had actually asked her and confronted her ... and said, If you're the twin sister of Sarah, Sarah is in Texas, Dale Barlow [the supposed abuser] is in Colorado City [Arizona], things don't add up. And she said, Well, can we pretend? And I said, yes, we can pretend. And she said, Well, then let's pretend that when Sarah called, she couldn't tell the name of her husband because then she would be hurt worse. So Sarah actually used the name Dale Barlow because Dale Barlow was hurting her twin sister in Colorado City. And I said, So are we pretending that Sarah was trying to get help for both Sarah and Laura because they were both being hurt? And she said, yes, let's pretend that. I asked her, I said, Can we pretend that Dale Barlow is Laura's -- the twin sister's new dad? And she said, No let's not pretend that. And she was very elaborate in her ruse, very well rehearsed."


So: We're supposed to believe that the child "protection" system worked because it sprung into action on the basis of a transparent "ruse"?


Indeed we should -- assuming that we, like Jessop, the Texas CPS, and others who believe themselves to be exalted above normal human considerations of honesty and equity, subscribe to a purely consequentialist worldview.


In a conversation with the Arizona Republic, Jessop insisted that (in the words of the paper's paraphrase) "the calls in Texas had a good outcome, even if they were fraudulent, because they prompted police to raid the FLDS ranch."


This is a good thing, supposedly: FLDS children behind barricades in a detention facility health care workers called a "concentration camp."



In fact, she considered it necessary to continue the deception long after it was clear that the calls were phony, and even after the raid and child-grab were underway. Explains the Republic: "Jessop said she had to maintain the pretense that her caller was real so that Texas police could continue investigating."


"At that point," Jessop observes, "I was working with authorities and trying to keep contact with her."


This isn't the first time that Jessop has peddled puerile fabrications to the media. Four years ago, after taking in two 16-year-old female runaways from the FLDS redoubt in Hildale/Colorado City, she dramatically announced that six more teenagers had sought her out for support and shelter. "The majority are boys, but there are some girls," Jessop insisted, claiming that they were "spooked" and "not talking to anybody but me." She also refused to provide any tangible proof that the runaways existed.


Jessop's claims prompted a mixture of puzzlement and annoyance from others working to free discontented FLDS members from the authoritarian community.


"The information Flora's putting out that there's a mass exodus, it just isn't happening," insisted Bob Curran, director of a St. George, Utah-based group called Help the Child Brides. Rowenna Erickson of Tapestry Against Polygamy complained that Jessop's "inaccuracies" and "rumors" were undermining the credibility of the anti-polygamist cause.


According to Pennie Petersen, another FLDS defector who fled at age 14 when confronting the prospect of being "sealed" to a middle-aged man who reportedly had molested her, Jessop actually had come across a group of FLDS youth, but they weren't interested in leaving.


"There are no runaways," Petersen told the Deseret News. "Those kids were partying and they all went home late. They never wanted to leave." Petersen, who has often been at odds with Jessop, shared the concerns expressed by others in the counter-polygamy cause, and expressed them a bit more pointedly: "Flora's been getting away with these stories for a long time now, and it's time to shut her down. She's just hurting the organizations and our cause."


Flora's "stories" -- by passing Swinton's fabrications along when she knew them to be false, Jessop took ownership of those lies -- have now hurt hundreds of children who were pried away from their parents and placed into one of the country's most notoriously corrupt foster care systems.


It could have been even worse -- much, much worse. There were snipers targeting the YFZ property when the Child-Snatchers attacked. It's a matter of God's grace that none of the parents and children therein met the fate of Vicki and Sammy Weaver.


If such a tragedy had ensued, Flora Jessop -- who has a longstanding relationship with Texas law enforcement -- would likely have been among the first to insist that the bloodshed was entirely the fault of the FLDS and their leaders.


As it stands, nearly all of the FLDS families from YFZ Ranch remain torn apart. Despite recent legal reversals and the fundamental illegitimacy of the entire enforcement action (given the fatal defects in the original warrant), Texas authorities are continuing their criminal probe.


If they're looking for a slam-dunk criminal indictment, they could have one against Flora Jessop:


She has publicly confessed to making a "False report regarding [a] missing child or missing person," as defined by Chapter 37, section 081 of the Texas Penal Code.


Given that Flora Jessop appears to be the proverbial poisoned tree in this entire matter, she is the only legitimate target for a criminal probe -- unless, of course, the probe turns up tangible evidence of deliberate criminal misconduct on the part of CPS officials.


Assuming that her much-flaunted passion for justice extends beyond an understandable preoccupation with the FLDS Church, Jessop should cooperate in a genuinely independent inquiry, if such an undertaking is possible now. It would be fascinating to learn what she knows about the following questions:


*Was she, as many suspect despite repeated denials, the chief "anonymous" source mentioned in the original search warrant? How long and how extensive is Jessop's relationship with law enforcement bodies in Texas? What role did she have in tuning public and official expectations about the FLDS -- to the extent that a heavily armed raiding party was sent to confront the YFZ community?

*In her above-mentioned Fox interview, Jessop mentioned this interesting detail: "It's my understanding that [Rozita Swinton] was caught with -- when they went into her apartment, that they found reams and documents and just tons of information on the FLDS." Oh? Who provided Jessop with that "understanding"? Might she help us find out exactly what kind of information Swinton had, and -- if it's something beyond what might be turned up through diligent googling -- who provided it to her?


Miss Swinton, likewise, presents us with some very interesting questions. According to a profile in Westview (.pdf), a publication out of Nashville, "Rozita is a Mormon who suffers from MPD/DID [Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder] which falls under the heading of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.... Since she was a teenager, Rozita has flashbacks to a time when she was an abused child ... and to times when she had been locked up and kept hostage."


Swinton's Tennessee childhood was troubled in other ways. Her father was convicted of first degree murder in 1965 and released in 1977 along with hundreds of other felons by former Governor Ray Blanton, who was eventually convicted of granting pardons in exchange for bribes. In 1992, continues the profile, Rozita was a ward of the Tennessee Department of Human Services and protected from contact with her father by a restraining order. She spent years shuttling from foster home to foster home, eventually ending up in Colorado in 2005.


One of her foster parents has published books under the pseudonym Kate Rosemary. One of those books, Raising Shane, refers to Rozita by name, describing her as a loving member of a multi-ethnic foster family. At some point, she apparently made a mission trip to El Salvador.


Rozita Swinton's confirmed role in this imbroglio already plays like something out of a John Grisham novel. But as always, owing to the questions that remain unanswered (for instance, who posted Miss Swinton's bail in Colorado?), there are other possibilities -- not "probabilities," mind you, but possibilities -- that would take us into Dean Koontz territory.


The foster care system is a huge industry. So is the "tolerance" industry, which features such outfits as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the multi-multi-million-dollar racket operated by reputed pervert Morris Dees.


Both the foster care/adoption industry and the "tolerance" industry have had the FLDS in their scopes for a while. The SPLC, in particular, has been Jonesing for a crack-down of some kind on a "hate group" for a while, and the FLDS enclave in Eldorado -- occupied as it was by helpless, unarmed, unassuming white folks -- was an irresistible target.


The SPLC, it should be remembered, liaises with law enforcement agencies across the nation, indoctrinating them about various "hate groups" (which means, in practice, any group of people Dees and his comrades hate). And there's nothing that brings out the martial valor of paramilitary law enforcement agencies like the sight of an urban gathering of unarmed, peaceable white people. (I make that observation free of ethnic self-interest, as the photographic evidence will attest.)





















From tabloid trash to official policy: This porridge of herd-poisoning themes pretty much typifies the media's treatment of the FLDS; it also demonstrates how the same war propaganda methods used to whip up foreign conflicts can be used to demonize domestic groups targeted for assault by the State.


The foregoing is not to be construed as the beginnings of a conspiracy theory; instead, it's offered as a guide to some directions a real inquiry might take, should such a thing ever happen.


It's entirely irresponsible to think that the abduction of hundreds of children in Texas could reflect collaboration of some kind among anti-polygamy agitators, corrupt child protection and foster care officials, and the country's most obnoxious "hate group" crusader.


That would be like believing the Iraq War was somehow brought about through the covert collaboration of ideological White House zealots and a small-gauge Iraqi con artist like Ahmed Chalabi.


I mean, get real, dude.


Update --

Yesterday (Monday, May 26), Dale Williams of KTKK radio in Salt Lake City had me on to discuss the FLDS atrocity. The MP3 of that program can be found here (scroll down to the archive section). I consider Dale to be a bold, honest, and exceptionally insightful host, and also appreciate Barbara Jean for including the interview in her archive.




Available now.










Have you done something today to piss off the powerful?

Texas Child Grab: Possession Is The Entire "Law"

Ready to kill for the State: A sniper takes aim at unarmed parents at the YFZ Ranch, prepared to kill any who resist as their children are stolen by lying, corrupt strangers.


"The important thing to understand," insists former Texas judge Scott McCown, referring to the status hearings for the abducted FLDS children that begin on May 19, "is this ... is not an opportunity to re-litigate the removal [of the children]. The child has already been removed, so this is about where to go from here. What's the plan?"


McCown's comment, of course, is a variation on a standard statist trope, the rapist's argument from inevitability: Look, it's going to happen anyway, so just lie down and enjoy it -- and once the deed is done, there's no point "re-litigating" the matter.


I grant that Mr. McCown, as a former judge, is most likely someone indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the point of the legal system is to validate the wisdom of the State, as opposed to punishing the guilty and vindicating the rights of the innocent. And he must have forgotten a useful rule of evidence: It is the guilty, rather than the innocent, who want to change the subject or stop the inquiry once inconvenient facts begin to materialize. That would explain the eagerness of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to foreclose a critical examination of the process that led to the criminal abduction of over 460 children.


And so, once again, apologists for the child-snatchers are taking refuge in the rapist's defense: It happened, it's over, just get over it and move on. (And, by the way, you better put some ice on that. )


The chief difference between common rape and the crime committed by the Texas CPS against the mothers and children of YFZ Ranch, of course, is that what was taken in this instance can, should, and must be returned. There was no legal reason to take the children in the first place, and there is abundant, uncontested evidence that the entire operation to seize the children was carried out in patent, palpable bad faith.


I am aware that what follows will avail nothing in dealing with the criminals who run the "justice" and child "protection" systems in Texas. Their contempt for the law is self-evident and apparently incurable. So why do I even bother to set out the facts, and expatiate on the law, given that those who stole these innocent children aren't concerned about either?


To put the matter simply:


If this crime proceeds unpunished -- as appears likely -- and if it spawns copycat crimes elsewhere -- which, once again, is a reasonable surmise -- the next such attempt will lead to bloodshed. And if that's the only option left to innocent parents trying to keep their children from the hands of State-employed criminals, I devoutly (albeit unrealistically) hope that a jury can be found that will vote for acquittal on the grounds of self-defense.


In anticipation of such a tragic but perhaps inevitable contingency, I think it's necessary to present the facts about the seizure of the FLDS children before a candid world.


Both child "protection" and law enforcement personnel knew that they had no probable cause to conduct a search of the YFZ Ranch. They knew this before they obtained the first search warrant, let alone the second one.


The critical facts, drawn from relevant legal filings and sworn testimony -- most of it offered by the child-nappers -- are presented in a 75-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus (.pdf) filed on behalf of Amy Marie Dockstader, Natalie Joanne Keate, Britton Bauer Keate, Jameson Rand Keate, and Marreta Keate, as well as their fathers, James Dockstader, Rulon Keate and LeLand Keate.


Each of the fathers lives "in a monogamous relationship with [his] wife (who was of age at the time of their marriage), and their children in single family, stand-alone, separate residences located on the YFZ Ranch property," reports the petition. "There was no evidence nor allegation of physical or sexual abuse of any of these children."


And this is where things would end with respect to those families, were the Texas CPS governed by constitutional law and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. But that agency, like its counterparts elsewhere in this once-free country, subscribes to a degenerate form of collectivism akin to the family law theories espoused by Soviet psychologist A.S. Makarenko.


Please indulge me in a brief but necessary digression.


Makarenko's The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents, was the child-rearing bible of Stalin's Russia. It was also a seminal work for many Western social activists during the 1950s and 1960s, when the pestilential Child "Protection" bureaucracy was gestating in the womb of the Regime. (Makarenko's influence on those who created our nation's child "protection" system was attested by Russian expatriate Urie Bronfenbrenner, a key architect of the Head Start program.)


The purpose of the family, Makarenko wrote, was to raise the State's children to be good collectivists: "We are living on the summit of the greatest pass in history, our day has seen the beginning of a new order in human relations, a new morality, a new law, the foundation of which is the victorious idea of human solidarity.... In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism."


"Somebody get this skeevy collectivist's clammy hands off of me!" Something to that effect seems to be going through the head of the little girl on the left as she's made to pose in the arms of Urie Bronfenbrenner, an apostle of collectivist child-rearing.


Accordingly, the Soviet family was not a "closed-in," autonomous entity, like the "bouregois" family; it was "an organic part of Soviet society," subject to intimate and constant regulation in the interests of "society." To this end it was necessary to discredit the authority of the father in the home: Makarenko identified the traditional patriarch as an "odious figure" - "Master, overseer, teacher, judge and sometimes executioner" -- even as he extolled the supposed mercies of a State headed by the uber-benevolent father figure named Joseph Stalin.


Da, Commissarina: Texas CPS Child-grabber Angie Voss



The collectivist order described by Makarenko is very different from a communal arrangement like that of the FLDS at the YFZ Ranch. In seeking to justify seizing the FLDS children, CPS Commissarina Angie Voss emphasized that she was told by church members that "they are one big family, one large community, and they have the same belief system." This is true, quite common among small religious groups, and entirely benign.


However, Voss and her legal cohorts have used this affinity to justify treating the YFZ population as one literal family: In this way, any evidence of abuse can be used to incriminate everybody in that population, toward the end of breaking up this natural, private collective and bringing it under the plenary power of the coercive collective that employs Voss and her henchmen. This is collective punishment, carried out for collectivist ends.


From that perspective, it doesn't matter whether a given family is headed by a monogamous husband and lives in an independent dwelling. The State has decreed that they are part of a rogue group that must be assimilated into the larger national Collective. And since the State now has possession of the children, the law doesn't matter, because it can now use the children as blackmail leverage against the parents -- something that is already underway.


In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, as distinct from the post-Marxist collectivism that informs that Child "welfare" system, the government has to justify its intrusion into the sanctity of the home. This is why the Fourth Amendment (and its equivalent in every state constitution, including that of Texas), defines the non-negotiable probable cause requirement in terms of "particular" places to be searched and "persons or things to be seized."


Where the April 3 raid on the YFZ Ranch is concerned, the initial warrant referred to the much-discussed "Sarah Jessup Barlow," a supposedly abused polygamous "child bride" who had purportedly been impregnated by an abusive middle-aged man identified as Dale Barlow. The entire purpose of that initial search was to find Sarah and take her into custody, and to find the 49-year-old Mr. Barlow and place him under arrest.


However, as the habeas corpus petition points out:


"The [child `protection'] Agency's pre-raid investigation determined that the accused 49-year-old man was an Arizona resident, under supervision on probation by an Arizona probation officer who resided in Arizona. Before execution of the warrant, Sheriff Doran was also advised that Dale Barlow was in Arizona and not within the [FLDS] Community. In fact, Sheriff [David] Doran spoke to Mr. Barlow in Arizona by cell phone and, after confirming his identity, Barlow told the Sheriff that he did not know any Sarah Jessup and had never been to the yearning [sic] for Zion Community nor to Texas for some twenty years. The Agency was also advised that there was no Sarah living in the Ranch." (Emphasis added.)


The assumption behind the initial raid was that Mr. Barlow -- and he alone -- posed "an immediate risk to physical or sexual abuse of a child." But even before the first search warrant was executed, Sheriff Doran and his associates in the Texas Rangers "had been apprised, and [had] even verified, that the only person these officers alleged to be suspected of criminal activity ... was not located on the premises, or even in the State of Texas."


What of the "victim," the much-abused Sarah Jessup Barlow? It is now well known that the woman claiming to be Sarah is disturbed 33-year-old woman from Colorado Springs named Rozita Swinton, who is in the habit of making false abuse reports to police agencies across the country. (.pdf)


Those calls were made by telephones with a 719 area code. When Swinton made those calls on March 29 and March 30, Texas officials who followed up "were immediately advised that one of these telephone numbers was associated with an individual who had made numerous `false reports of sexual abuse to police agencies' in the Colorado Springs area." (Note carefully the word "immediately.") In fact, she was linked to false allegations of abuse to more than ten police departments, from Monroe, Washington to Ft. Meyers, Florida.


So at the time of the original assault on the YFZ Ranch, Sheriff Doran and the CPS knew that the alleged abuser wouldn't be found therein. Yet they conducted that home invasion anyway. They also sought a second affidavit from Judge Barbara Walther -- who issued it with blithe indifference -- without informing Walther the alleged abuser had an air-tight alibi: He was in Arizona, under the constant surveillance of his probation officer.


Just as significantly, the CPS had enlisted the aid of the Midland Sheriff Department's SWAT team to raid the YFZ Ranch after it was clear that Mr. Barlow wasn't there, and that there would be no violent resistance to the CPS invasion of the commune.


The CPS had already written a narrative, and it was sticking to its script. According to a legal brief filed on behalf of the Agency, once Comrade Voss and her 12-member CPS raiding party had defiled the YFZ Ranch, "The Department's investigation was thwarted due to misinformation about the identities of the girls.... Ms. Voss indicated that she believed she was encountering a `brick wall' because some girls were saying that they were going to plead `the Fifth' and not answer questions."


This storyline -- "Polygamous Cult Covers Up Abuse of Hapless Child Bride" -- was fed into the organ of mass dishonesty called the mainstream media within hours of the raid at the Ranch. This was done by people who knew that the residents of that community couldn't "cooperate" in the search for Sarah Barlow, because she didn't exist.


Furthermore, the testimonies offered by mental health workers who attended the mothers and children in various detention facilities after the raid flatly contradict Voss's statements that the FLDS women and girls refused to cooperate. These workers -- who, unlike Voss and her comrades, have no reason to shade or misrepresent the truth -- emphasized that although the briefings they received from the CPS told them that the FLDS women would "plead the Fifth" (as if that were somehow impermissible), the captive women were very polite and cooperative. In fact, according to these disinterested witnesses, it was the CPS who routinely lied to and misled the FLDS women, rather than the reverse.


A portrait in serene suffering: One need not respect the FLDS community's teachings (I certainly do not) in order to admire the character many of them have displayed in the face of aggressive evil.



But the CPS stuck to its storyline. Those people knew that by the time the truth was available, the public wouldn't be interested in it.


And the children would be in their hands.


This is a case in which possession is the entire "law."


To the child snatchers, the only "law" that matters here is the power that flows from the barrel of a gun. Look at the photograph at the top of this essay: It documents the murderous intent behind this premeditated crime. That individual was prepared to murder, in cold blood, any parent who raised a hand to rescue his child.


The individual behind the sights of that rifle lent his potentially lethal services to a knot of criminals who violated the law flagrantly, deliberately, knowingly, and with calculated malice. They did so for reasons rooted in ideology and, quite possibly, simple statist greed.


What recourse do parents have, if their children can be seized from them through culpable fraud and the threat of lethal force -- and the law is of no avail?


Are parents simply required to submit, because the agency that has stolen their children is not disposed to "re-litigate" the issue, once it has full possession of the children? That's the "wisdom" offered by the Texas legal system.


Consider Judge Walther's glib response to an objection raised by one attorney during the cattle-call status hearing. When an attorney trying to represent one of the FLDS mothers protested that the women were being "detained" at the local sports coliseum his objection prompted Walther to extrude the following Orwellian soliloquy:


"I want to make one thing very, very clear. There is no mother at the coliseum or at the Wells Fargo [detention area] that is an adult that everyone agrees is an adult that is detained. They are free to go. The [Child "protection"] Department has said that they [the mothers] may stay and provide care for their children, should they choose. So your client, the mothers, are not being held by this Court."


That is to say: The mothers were perfectly free to leave their children in the hands of people who had invaded their homes through malevolent guile and taken the youngsters away amid threats of lethal force. As the attorney incredulously replied to Judge Walther: "I'm supposed to tell the mother of [a] two-year-old she's free to go, [but] the two-year-old gets to stay[?] That's detention, Your Honor."


To which Walther offered the snide reply:


"[I]f you want to take the position that these women are being held by the Court, I want you to go tell them that they can leave. If they want to stay, they're going to have to sign something saying that they want to stay."


So now the mothers would be required to ask the State's kind permission to remain captive with their children -- until, that is, Walther issued an order sending the children away.


This is a bit like requiring a victim to write a thank-you note to her rapist, and perhaps send him flowers as well.


Available now!











Dum spiro, pugno!