Opinion: Peanut the Squirrel and an Election Brought into Focus at Last

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

As the 2024 election approached, many voters found themselves with a dilemma. They’ve been told for a decade that they must dislike President Trump, though he did a good job as president. They’ve been told that they should like Kamala Harris, though everything about her from policies to behavior seems weird.

So, while many have been able to comfortably cast early votes with confidence, others put it off until the last minute, hoping perhaps for a flash of clarity, a winning argument, or maybe even a sign from Heaven to help with their decision.

And then, in the final days of the campaign, the clarity came from the weirdest of places: the story of the killing of Peanut the Squirrel by the state of New York.

The story can be summed up simply. A fellow well known on the internet for his animal rescue operation has been raising a pet squirrel named Peanut for seven years, sharing the antics of this squirrel on his social media pages, making him and his nonprofit, P’Nut’s Freedom Farm, somewhat famous. Some Karen (for lack of a more precise word) reported him to the state and demanded that the bureaucrats enforce some rarely enforced rules concerning the keeping of normally-not-domesticated animals). The New York State bureaucracy kicked into gear, raided and searched his home in SWAT team style, and confiscated both Peanut the squirrel and his raccoon named Fred.

As these petit fascists were manhandling the animals, the squirrel bit one of the petnappers – perfectly understandably, since any scared animal will do so when provoked and terrified – so the government used that bite as an excuse to kill them both.

Naturally, when you’re talking about animals, you’ll use the euphemistic term for it – “they were euthanized” – but, euphemism or no euphemism, the man’s pets are still dead, at the hands of bureaucrats, for no good reason.

Most of us think of pets as being dogs or cats alone, but there are tons of programs out there that focus on wild animals. (full disclosure: this writer’s daughter has worked for several such programs that care for injured and/or endangered wild animals, from owls to sea lions; it’s not nearly as rare an activity as you might think).

Should government regulate such programs? Sure, a case can be made that there’s a role for government in ensuring that animals aren’t mistreated by such programs. And the Longo family’s program is a legitimate nonprofit, though they were still in the permitting process for the aspect that brought the full jackboot of government down upon them last week.

But would anyone have agreed that this acknowledged government role should be so powerful, so threatening, as to descend on a family with a SWAT team, throw them out of their house for the day while ransacking their home, then confiscating and killing the animals under investigation?

As Mark Longo and New York Congressman Nick Langworthy pointed out in the immediate aftermath, it’s not like New York doesn’t have genuine needs that government could be addressing. They shouldn’t be so lost for projects to occupy their time that they attack a harmless nonprofit and kill the guy’s domesticated squirrel.

All weekend, Americans have been asking themselves, how on earth did things get to this point?

Well, once upon a time, some people wanted government to be strong enough to help this demographic or that demographic. They wanted government to be powerful enough not only to protect our rights, but to provide certain privileges as well. And somehow, they forgot, somewhere along the way, the old dictum that a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have.

Different interest groups, whether local, state, or federal, have spent decades gradually growing the powers of government, always with the intention of doing good, of course, but as the bureaucracies have grown ever stronger with the years, it has become more of a challenge to define just what that “good” is that they’re allegedly fighting for.

How did we get to the point where to guarantee a girl’s right to have an all-girls boxing or wrestling team, government insists that they have to allow a boy to join that team if he just calls himself a girl?

How did we get to the point where to guarantee a gay couple the privilege of getting married, the government claims the power to force a private bakery to cater the event?

How did we get to the point where, in order to guarantee a girl, her right to sexual determination, government insists on providing taxpayer-funded abortion on demand to all and sundry without so much as requiring parental consent when the young mother is a minor?

How did we get to the point where to help wheelchair-bound sports fans, government can force the doubling or trebling of construction prices, singlehandedly transforming a potentially successful business into an economically unfeasible project, just by citing the ADA?

Over the decades, the federal agencies originally created with such good intentions – EPA and CDC, FDA and OSHA, and so many more – have grown powerful beyond their inventors’ wildest dreams. Maybe they attract megalomaniac applicants from the start? Or maybe good, generous applicants are hired and gradually get warped once they’re there?

But there’s no denying the ultimate result.

Four years ago, when a Chinese lab unleashed Covid-19 on the world, our own mayors and governors mandated the wearing of pointless masks and banned people from government buildings if they weren’t worn. They mandated ridiculous direction arrows on grocery store floors and made factories install acrylic dividers at face level on assembly lines. They surrounded playgrounds with chains and disabled slides, swings, and basketball hoops, just to prevent children (who were immediately proven to be naturally immune to Covid-19 anyway) from playing together. They closed churches in violation of the first amendment. They closed public meetings in violation of open meetings acts. They shut down schools in violation of their state constitutions.

Five years ago, nobody would have expected governments to ever claim such powers. Today, we forget that it happened, and our minds are clouded to forget what a shock such authoritarian actions were.

As the election approaches – and as our minds are reawakened by the image of a government storming into an animal sanctuary as if it were a den of terrorists and slaughtering a family’s innocent pets – we suddenly remember those closed schools and barricaded playgrounds. We suddenly remember how our elderly grandparents, aunts and uncles were locked away, denied visits from loved ones in their final days and weeks of life. We suddenly remember how a nation that was literally born in the cause of religious freedom had its churches and synagogues shut down by authoritarian governments.

And if we take the time to think about it – and as we face an upcoming election, we are finally making time for such thoughts, even if we do usually put them out of our minds – we finally come to the sudden realization that these excesses aren’t nearly as rare as they would appear.

In fact, our government has been exceeding its boundaries for generations.

Not always so blatantly, sure, but bit by bit, they’ve shut down grazing land so that we’d have fewer cattle. They’ve slowed down oil drilling permitting so that gasoline and diesel would be much more expensive. They’ve closed coal plants and nuclear plants, and then insisted on utterly inefficient wind and solar replacements, so that we’d have much less energy to power our overtaxed grid. They’ve even forbidden automakers from building as many gas-powered cars as we want to buy from them and forced them instead to make electric cars that we don’t want and can’t afford.

The public never voted for any of this.

We didn’t vote for a government that could weaponize every agency and flex its muscles over every American business or nonprofit. It just happened, slowly, sneakily, because we weren’t watching closely enough.

On Election Day 2024, we have the chance to right this course.

It’s not a course correction that a single change can accomplish. Electing President Trump alone won’t be enough. He’ll need help. He’ll need a Senate and House on his side. He’ll need honorable federal judges. We’ll need our state and local governments to become constitutional again too.

It’s time to return to the limited government philosophy of America’s Founding Fathers.

Whether federal, state, county or municipal, no level of government has the right to behave unconstitutionally. No level of government should have the power to flex like the New York Department of Environmental Conservation did against Mark Longo and his squirrel. It’s insane that we let it get this far, but now that we’ve seen it and understood it at last, we know what to do.

The Republican Party isn’t perfect, but the Democratic Party has gone full-authoritarian and there’s no coming back from that. The Democratic Party is a lost cause. It’s time for the Democratic Party to be purged from every branch of government. We must defeat these tyrants so decisively at the polls that they never so much as qualify as a major party again. They have forfeited the right to enjoy the honor of being an American political party.

Maybe then the GOP will need to split up, or maybe new parties will spring up. Fine. Let it happen naturally. As long as these megalomaniac Democrat politicians are no longer in a position to abuse the American people as they have instinctively done for so long.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo