Programming note: After a week out of sync the time zones on either side of the Atlantic have resumed their customary alignment. So today's brand new episode of Steyn's Song of the Week - a special pre-election edition - airs at 5.30pm Greenwich Mean Time/6.30pm Central European, and is back to its usual hour of 12.30pm North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~The murder of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon by the goons of New York State is an important and revealing story, not least because those who enjoy ill-treating animals smoothly advance to ill-treating people*. If you were not hitherto familiar with Peanut, here he is before the Department of Environmental Conservation SWAT team swooped in and offed him:
Government overreach in action https://t.co/ymK7HHN9sE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2024
The dispatch of a poor blameless (and rabies-free) squirrel is also a blunt illustration of the limits of the desperate American reliance on "constitutionalism" and its attendant legal sophistries: There can be no remedy in law for the state's killing of Peanut and Fred. They are dead, and will stay dead. Even were Mark and Daniela Longo to get it to the US Supreme Court, that fact will not change - just as Mann vs Steyn, my own twelve-year lawsuit in the dank septic tank of the District of Columbia Superior Court, will not reach John Roberts and the gang until I am dead. As I used to say to Tucker, a republic of judges is a contradiction in terms.
It is additionally a too perfect illustration of what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny", which you'll be getting a lot more of if the fellows who've been waggling the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet these last four years manage to pull it off a second time on Tuesday. Even as "migrants" and other protected classes are loosed upon the land unburdened by the law, you will be subject to ever more capricious micro-regulation in every aspect of your life. New York is a self-proclaimed "sanctuary state": in a supposed age of contagion necessitating "vaccine mandates" for diner waitresses, the borders were thrown open to admit millions, of both unknown Covid status and unknown criminal status. In the ever more lawless dump that is New York City, you can steal a thousand bucks' worth of merchandise and not face prosecution - as the conscious policy choice of the District Attorney. Because that frees up a bunch of resources to enable a dozen agents to terrorise Mr and Mrs Longo. It's not as if there's anything else going on...
A previously-deported illegal alien with a rap sheet has been charged with killing a teenage boy after he allegedly shot his girlfriend and her two sons in New York, a sanctuary state.
MORE: https://t.co/XDTAMFz3Xx pic.twitter.com/Rnj0U2TPG6
— Dan Lyman (@realdanlyman) November 2, 2024
Oh, but you're worried about rabies? New York State has an accelerating rate of tuberculosis because "open borders" means no one has to undergo the health tests that I, as a reasonably disease-free Canadian and legal immigrant, had to go through. And indeed who's really rabid here? Peanut and Fred? Or the foaming-at-the-mouth bureaucrats? At least in the more general sense of "extremely violent" and "going to extreme lengths" (Webster's).
What explains such a perverse government priority? From a commenter at Ann Althouse's website:
But I wonder too if the fate of Peanut and Fred is not a metaphor for - and indeed a fearful premonition of - what is about to engulf America on Tuesday and in the days that follow. As you can see in that video retweeted by Elon Musk, Peanut provided hours of harmless pleasure to his over half-a-million followers on InstaGram - all fun and games, until a thug state decided to take him out - and that was that.
For Republican voters, this has been an unusually enjoyable campaign. Instead of the traditional thankless task of dragging an unsatisfactory and insufficient candidate across the finish line (Romney, McCain, Dole), Trump supporters, like Peanut followers, have had a ball watching our favourite social-media personality leap from drive-thru window to garbage truck having the time of his life. As I said the other day, the campaign has been "brilliant and good-humoured" - certainly when compared to the charmless and inept celebrities on whom the other side is dependent.
The brio has been infectious. My own congressional district is the New Hampshire 2nd - which covers the northern, western and southern parts of the state leaving a sliver of the eastern border plus Manchester and Portsmouth for the 1st District. The Democrat candidate, Maggie Goodlander, has a bazillion-dollar home in the 1st District but has rented a pad in Nashua in order to pass herself off as resident in the 2nd. She is also the wife of Biden's "National Security Advisor", Jake Sullivan.
Mrs Sullivan is running against Lily Tang Lee, who opened a can of spectacular super-sized whup-ass on her opponent:
Omg. Watch this candidate perform a live vivisection on Neocon chief Jake Sullivan's wife. https://t.co/jLIsXPa2oP
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 2, 2024
You go, girl! As Laura Ingraham put it, this is "literally my favourite moment of any congressional debate". Mrs Sullivan is a near parodic example of the talentless but entitled ruling class that has brought a once great nation to the brink of oblivion. To see her stitched up by a gal who can't afford a telly ad is heartening and inspirational.
Yet, as Peanut the Squirrel discovered, being an Internet sensation availeth you naught against brute state power. And that's what's being applied everywhere, every hour of the day. From a federal cyber-security "exercise" entirely coincidentally scheduled for the afternoon of Election Day (now "cancelled" apparently) to six-hour lines to vote in Bucks County because local officials assigned only one or two staff to each polling station... Oh, lookee here, another surprise:
The Pentagon Fails to Send Absentee Ballots to Active Military Service Members https://t.co/2XpHd7r2Dz
— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) November 3, 2024
These last few weeks have been fun: Trump at his most whimsical - musing on Arnold Palmer's spectacular endowment for ten minutes - is still more real than Kamala or Mrs Jake Sullivan pretending to be broken-down losers just like you. But Democrats know this is about power, so have your fun and then they'll kick the door down and liquidate the problem, just as they did with Peanut and Fred:
All the memes and the jokes aside, I am genuinely coldly furious at the murder of a gentle pet by cruel government bureaucrats.
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) November 2, 2024
And I think a lot of other people feel the same way.
It's pitiful to see defendants of the squirrel-killers (whose names should be known) make the case that the state executions were "legal". That is not the distinction that applies here. Me exactly thirteen years ago - November 2011:
In my book, I also quote the writer George Jonas, back when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were revealed to be burning down the barns of Quebec separatists: With his characteristic insouciance, the Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded that, if people were so bothered by illegal barn-burning by the Mounties, perhaps he would make it legal. Jonas pointed out that burning barns isn't wrong because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's wrong. A society that no longer understands that distinction is in deep trouble.
In the world they're building before your eyes, you're the squirrel and they're the "conservationists". Vote accordingly.
*[See, for example, the British state, which has just transferred Tommy Robinson to a prison with a forty per cent Muslim population and in which (during a previous incarceration) the Islamic gangs that run the place have already beaten the crap out of him. Much of the UK, US, Canada, etc are institutionally evil and need to be put down the way New York put down Peanut.]
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
The squirrel was seen at the Capitol on January 6th.