Carol wrote:REQUIEM FOR A SQUIRREL ~ Sunday, November 3, 2024 ~ C&C NEWS
Bonus post! Why is a squirrel story so important? It's important for surprising and unexpected reasons. Today's post offers the known facts and the astonishing implications. -JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, loyal C&C supporters and the rest of the C&C Army. It’s Sunday! Only two days remain until Election Day. I decided to open today’s pre-election bonus post to everyone after my beautiful but bemused wife asked, “what’s the big deal about the squirrel? I don’t get it.” It IS a big deal, and it’s important, so let’s get to it. A special tree-rat edition.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY
>> Social media is burning in an out-of-control conflagration. USA Today ran the widely discussed and well-reported story yesterday under the headline, “Social media star Peanut the Squirrel has been euthanized after being seized from NY home.” Right away, we see why people hate corporate media so much. It wasn’t this fussy about using the words “kill” and “killed” in headlines to describe Governor DeSantis’s pandemic re-opening plan. Don’t say euthanized. Just say they killed him.
CLIP: Mark and Peanut enjoying happier days, before the tree rodent’s untimely death (0:54).
Before I begin, I must provide full disclosure. When I was 12, I had to get a painful and quite unforgettable rabies shot after a squirrel bit me in a park. Also, our family cats have, over the years, also euthanized several unlucky wild squirrels. Not often, but still. So, I harbor no bias, neither pro- nor anti-squirrel. Thus my report can be considered cold, pitiless, and unswayed by any improper squirrel sympathies.
By profession, Mark Longo is an engineer. In his spare time, he runs an animal rescue farm in rural New York, where he and his wife Christy live with over 300 different animals rejected by the world. His animal activism began seven years ago after Mark witnessed a car run over a squirrel —Peanut’s mother. He found little baby Peanut nearby, his tail mangled so badly that he could not live on his own.
For eight months, Mark tried to rehabilitate Peanut to the wild, and tried to rehome him to an animal shelter, but due to his injuries and having been domesticated, Peanut could not and did not want to leave.
Over the last seven years, Mark, Christy, and Peanut have become fast friends. Peanut lived happily with Mark and Christy. The little guy ate waffles, wore tiny cowboy hats, performed for TikTok on miniature obstacle courses, ‘helped’ with the cooking and the baking, and greeted Mark every single day when the engineer got home from work.
For seven years, Mark, Christy, Peanut, Chloe the cat, and all the other animals have lived as one happy New York family, bothering no one, living life, making short internet videos, and generally minding their own business. Which made some Democrats very angry.
Peanut became so beloved on social media that he helped Mark’s TikTok channel explode. At the time of his death, Peanut enjoyed performing for half a million followers. Mark used the income generated from his TikTok pet content to help support his growing animal rescue operation.
But the busybody hawks of doom were silently circling over the unwitting mammal and the Longos. Hawks in the form of liberal squirrel fanatics, who were offended that the Longos were flouting the laws of New York by keeping a pet squirrel, even if that pet squirrel couldn’t live in the wild anyways. After all, the law is the law.
In New York, citizens may not keep wild animals of any kind unless they obtain a special permit and pay license fees to the state.
Peanut is also dead, of course, because of Karen:
While the Longos and their furry friends blithely made TikTok videos without knowing anything was amiss, a relentless barrage of complaints by out-of-state snitches landed on the State of New York. Four State “environmental protection” and “animal protection” departments sprang into coordinated action to address the developing public health crisis. They took their paperwork to a Democrat judge and got a legal break-and-search warrant for Mark and Christy’s home.
You couldn’t have scraped together a nanometer of common sense between any of the dozens of state officials and bureaucrats who must have been involved in this tragic miscarriage of justice and singular example of government overreach.
Four days ago, an environmental SWAT team of heavily armed officers descended on the Longo’s home, taking the small farm’s human and animal residents completely by surprise. A crack team of highly motivated climate agents forced Mark and Christy outside at gunpoint, fingers ready at the triggers, just waiting for one of the innocent homeowners to try something stupid or even complain.
For five hours, state agents turned the Longo’s home inside out. What they were searching for is anyone’s guess. They didn’t say. According to Longo, the climate cops even took his toilet apart. The Longos were told that, to use the bathroom, they would have to do their business while monitored by law enforcement during the, er, procedure. Christy held it.
Later, and hilariously ironically, agents sneeringly interrogated Christy over her legal immigration status. When they finally departed, the state’s literally brown-shirted, jack-booted “environmental police” hauled away two illegally housed rescue animals: Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon.
Mark and Christy immediately took to social media to get help. They quickly organized a petition drive (28,000 names) and a GoFundMe for legal expenses, to help get Peanut and Fred out of climate jail. The Longos pointed out that they had a legal license to operate the animal shelter and they were near the end of a years-long process of getting a special state permit for Peanut as an educational animal.
But two days later, before Operation Save Peanut could even get its wheels attached, New York State officiously announced that, because completely domesticated Peanut allegedly bit an unnamed and unidentified state official trained in wildlife management, both animals were immediately put down, killed, executed, so that their brains could be harvested for rabies testing. (In other words, Peanut and Fred were dirty, unvaccinated animals. And you know what happens to the unvaccinated.)
The news set social media ablaze. The conflagration is still burning. Elon Musk has repeatedly posted about Peanut’s murder, more than he’s done for any other single news story in recent cycles. Conservative media is up in arms. Social media influencers of all stripes are weighing in against this official squirrel-cide.
New York is basically a one-party, Democrat state. While there are some conservative counties in rural parts of the state, Albany’s state officials are all liberal Democrats. Especially its climate police.
Why is this story going viral? What is it about this particular news development that’s engaged the public’s rapt attention? In what way is the legal confiscation of illegal wildlife worse than vaccine mandates, quarantine camps, courts ordering kids to receive trans hormones, and many other important issues you could mention?
The answer is surprising. I can think of at least three reasons why this story is so explosive.
> First, the story of Peanut’s execution at the hands of wildlife officials is a story of the inhumanity and inherent irrationality of liberal government. The Longos loved their pet squirrel. They were trying to navigate the bureaucracy to get the required permit and pay the state for the privilege. Peanut was also a significant financial resource to the family and the other rescued animals.
It might have been legal, but the officials, bureaucrats, and at least one sitting judge all ignored the elements of compassion, prosecutorial discretion, and the use of least necessary force. They could have simply fined the Longos. They could have helped accelerate approval of Peanut’s educational permit.
But no. They did none of those things. Why not? Because they didn’t have to.
The Peanut saga exposes the complete absence of compassion from Democrat governance. They’re like anti-human robots. They simply don’t care about how the Longos were treated, how much they loved their little Peanut, or the financial damages, since it was a lawful use of force. In fact, Democrats are truly sort of confused. They are unsure of what, precisely, conservatives are so upset about this time.
Lately, the Democrats have, confetti-like, been enthusiastically throwing around comparisons to the mustachioed dictator of the 1930s. But who, pray tell, are the Nazis now?
And what about compassion for poor, disabled Peanut? The New York Department of Environmental Protection’s press release claimed that Peanut was seized in part because domesticated squirrels can become unable to live independently in the wild. In other words, I am not making this up, they claimed it was for Peanut’s own good. Plus rabies. Maybe. You can never be too careful.
> Second, unlike the messy vaccine mandate controversy, Peanut’s sad story is a straightforward cautionary tale about government overreach and a metaphor for the inherent dangers of big government. Practically nobody except partisan Democrats think the government should be SWATting citizens’ houses to confiscate and execute domesticated squirrels when there are bigger problems that need attention. So at least 65% of us can agree on that.
A lot of us would agree the government should never SWAT a citizen’s home to confiscate and execute a domesticated squirrel before all other options that don’t require the use of force have been exhausted.
Peanut and Fred’s confiscation and execution exposed the New York Government’s instinctive use of maximum force against citizens who violate technical paperwork requirements. Had the Longos completed obtaining a permit for Peanut, the State would have been fine with it; so it was never about any legitimate threat to public health.
This story was directly relatable to regular folks in an unforeseeable way. While most people can’t relate emotionally to excessive force complaints when it’s applied to drug dealers, they can relate to excessive force applied just because somebody adopted an injured squirrel and didn’t complete their paperwork.
Any of us, any of our children, could have innocently done the same thing. It takes a hardhearted person to leave an injured baby squirrel to die. I don’t even like squirrels, but I still wouldn’t do that. Regardless of their rodent status, saving baby squirrels is by definition compassionate.
What nobody expects when they rescue a baby squirrel is for a remorseless, Spanish Inquisition-style machine to kick into gear, resulting in armed agents tearing our homes apart looking for evidence of even more crimes just because our six-year-old adopted an injured hedgehog.
> Third, Peanut has become a squirrel-sized symbol of liberal government’s insanely misplaced priorities and a dire warning of what a Harris Administration would look like. New York has a lot of problems. New York has a lot of crime problems. New York has a lot of rat problems. What on Earth is the State doing, sending more than a dozen climate cops to forcefully confiscate an injured squirrel? Is that “crime” really the state’s highest priority?
New York’s Democrats’ priorities are dangerously misplaced. Peanut and Fred aside, Mark and Christy could have been badly injured or even killed had things gone sideways.
So, Peanut’s murder represents a metaphor for what the Harris Administration would be like: more maximum force. We’ve already seen maximum force in operation, in the January 6th cases. Rank and file democrats are cheering on the maximum-force policy, since they are brainless nitwits without imaginations, incapable of recognizing they too will be in the state’s overbearing crosshairs once the smoke clears from phase one.
>> Finally, let’s now consider the political impacts, starting with a coverage survey. Peanut was news on most local media platforms, but was conspicuously absent from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Which means the deep state knows it’s politically dangerous to the Democrats. But the squirrel story was media catnip everywhere else:
Politically speaking, first of all, Peanut provides a direct and immediate metaphor about illegal immigration. For example, Donald Trump, Jr.:
What seems absolutely clear is that Democrats are rightly receiving the blame for this excessive use of force. Here’s a random example to give you the idea:
Lest there be any doubt that Democrats in New York are out of control, note that this is the same political party that literally tried to open covid quarantine camps during the pandemic, until my good friend and fellow small-firm lawyer Bobbi Ann Cox sued to shut it down.
What should we do with all these overreaching, use-of-force-friendly bureaucrats? Unfortunately, it’s not legal to tar and feather them anymore or run them out of town on a rail, like our forefathers would have done. So instead, let’s put their force-loving skills to work. I suggest they be assigned for all of 2025 to New York City’s rat detail. Let them catch rats. Let the judge hear only rat cases. Put Karen on the front lines in the rat war. For the whole year.
It would be just and appropriate, if you think about it. Rats are part of the environment, check. Rats are creating a bad climate in New York, check. And rats need as much excessive force as possible, check!
More importantly, we must elect President Trump, and start rolling back over-criminalization and over-regulation. Even for squirrels. (And raccoons! I haven’t forgotten Fred!)
Let’s keep government’s skeletal fingers off our wildlife, our pets… and our lives. Justice for Peanut!
Have a very blessed Sunday! Vote, and keep nagging everybody to go vote as well. Then hide your pet squirrels, and get back here tomorrow as we kick off one of the most momentous weeks in our lifetimes.
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. Good health means less money for them. Not a good expert (doctor) to me considering the fact that personal bias can cloud someone's judgement as how to 'help' someone. 
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 
