patrick.net

I saw KamalaToe wearing that Peanut tail hat at her rally. She's the devil.

While big government is awful, you also shouldn't have wild animals as pets. I know that sounds hypocritical but I don't think you should have a raccoon living with you or squirrel. It's not remotely close to a dog or cat (I hate cats). If it were we'd have drug sniffing raccoons. Not gonna happen. Just let them live in the wild.

I also don't care about any back story or rescue story. Animals die everyday. Non-purpose bred animals from the wild could also have a host of issues as far as passing disease onto humans and that dip shit human passes it onto to other humans. Fish are about the only wild animal besides dogs I find acceptable to have in a home. Anything else is in the wild and maybe a zoo. Don't like zoos either.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/requiem-for-a-squirrel-sunday-november

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
Nov 03, 2024

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.

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).
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1852747382393274542

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!

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/squirrel

Seven years ago Mark Longo found a baby squirrel orphaned when someone ran a car over its mother. Longo brought him into his home and named him Peanut. Peanut imprinted on Longo as his new mother; when Longo tried to release him back into the wild, the little guy had no idea how to survive in the wild, returned frightened and injured to the only home he knew, and thus their relationship became permanent. ...

Longo and Peanut went on a journey together. Over the next several years Longo turned Peanut into a social media star with a half-million Instagram followers. A year ago, Longo moved to rural New York to open the P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, which currently houses 300 rescue animals.

Their bucolic coexistence was shattered when on October 30th Longo’s house was raided by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Armed agents showed up with a warrant they’d obtained after receiving an anonymous complaint. They held Longo and his German wife outside for five hours. While their home was ransacked in a search for their illicit animals, his wife was interrogated about her immigration status, because everyone knows German women are a big illegal immigration problem, Germans being infamously bad at following rules and keeping their paperwork in order,

In the course of the search, Peanut reportedly bit one of the agents.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?" – Solzhenitsyn

The DEC agents invoked Peanut’s exercise of his castle doctrine rights as an excuse to euthanize him, dissect his tiny brain, and test for rabies, rabies being a known problem with house pets. They also kidnapped Fred the raccoon, who met the same dark fate.







Allegedly, the tip came from one Monica Keaser, who lives all the way down in Texas, and who has since deleted all of her social media.



I don’t know if Keaser is really the snitch. If she is, it beggars belief that she could harbour any genuine concern about paperwork irregularities in a small town on the other side of the country. I’ve seen people speculate that this could be some kind of Internet beef, the animal control equivalent of SWATing, and this wouldn’t surprise me.

The director of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, under whose watch this farcical tyranny unfolded, is apparently named Karen, which is just a bit too on the nose.

Apparently Longo didn’t have a permit to have wild animals in his house. He claims that the paperwork was all in order, the documents all signed, and he was simply waiting on approval for some last-minute detail. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sounds entirely plausible.

This isn’t the first time that the dead hand of the zombie state has murdered innocent animal friends for the crime of being cared for without a permit.









The obvious line to take on this is that the government can’t seem to prevent illegal migrants from pouring across our various borders (indeed, it subsidizes them), while it will go all hands on deck to assassinate an illegal squirrel and his raccoon friend, but this is just anarchotyranny for you. This story isn’t really about the prefix of that portmanteau. It’s about the suffix.

We live in a society in which a vengeful busybody on the other side of the country can anonymously harness the implacable machinery of the state to ruin the lives of people they’ve never met, who are generally powerless to do anything to obtain satisfaction from the faceless bullies hiding within the miasma of the permanent bureaucracy.

We live in this kind of society because we have allowed our natural liberties to be nibbled away at, a little bit here and a little bit there, until there is practically nothing left of them. Like Gulliver, we are held down by thousands of tiny threads, a net of laws and regulations, all of them enacted ‘for our safety’.

We have put Safety First, and if safety comes first, it necessarily follows that everything else comes after safety. There is no price too high for safety, and so we pay everything for it.

No one believes that Peanut’s death made the world any safer, including the anonymous stool pigeon that sicced the NYDEC on him, or the mouth-breathing toughs sent by the NYDEC.

Peanut’s death was about power. The state’s goons got to rip apart someone’s house and snuff out the lives of helpless cute animals, which made them feel powerful, and the snitch got to snicker from the sidelines, which made her feel powerful.

Safety is just the excuse. It is a very effective excuse, one that the managerial state and its cultists and clients in the general population adore, because it morally disarms all opposition to their tyranny. It gives them all the cover they need. “I’m doing this because I like ripping the wings off of butterflies” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “I’m doing this to keep you safe from the butterflies”. No one has ever been hurt by a butterfly, you say? Well, perhaps, but you never know. If it saves even one life!

This plague of safetyism infects everything.

The left has used the doctrine of ‘safe spaces’ to turn schools, universities, workplaces, and most of the Internet into one giant censorious Maoist playpen for gay race communism, screaming that it traumatizes gay race communists to hear hate facts that challenge gay race communism, that it makes them feel ‘unsafe’. Safety at any price. If it saves even one feel.

The carbon cult is safetyism writ large, on a planetary scale. To head off hypothetical dangers that might happen if anthropogenic global warming is real – the reality of AGW, the extent of the AGW, and the consequences of AGW all being the output of unreliable computer models, mind you, with uncertainty compounding on uncertainty until it expands into a cloud castle of vaporous what-ifs and maybes – in order to prevent this postulated apocalypse, no damage to the economy, limitation on technological progress, or fetter on human health and freedom, is too great. Each your plant-based diet and shiver in the dark, climate criminal. If it saves even one tenth of a degree!

The COVID debacle was safetyism on rampage mode. To keep us safe from the sneeze, we were locked inside for a year, swaddled in masks, children were prevented from socializing with their friends, the economy was nuked, and untested gene therapy juice was shoved into our bloodstreams to prevent the spread I mean prevent infection sorry uhh slightly reduce hospitalizations just take it or we’ll fire you.

Those migrants flooding into formerly civilized countries which the government can’t seem to do anything about (although it can kill a squirrel)? They can’t be remigrated because bad things might happen to them in their homelands – they might be oppressed by homophobic governments, endangered by violent crime, or prosecuted for their own violent crimes. Remigrating migrants is unsafe for the migrants; (the migrants’) safety comes first!

Note that none of these keep you, or anyone else, safe. They do not increase human life expectancy; they do not reduce the rate of injury; they do not improve quality of life; they do not clean the environment. To the contrary, they reliably make everything much, much worse.

The left’s rabid assault on discourse merely poisoned the social environment, destroying public trust in institutions, dissolving the natural bonds of affection between people, dividing society down the middle, and leaving everyone angrier, more afraid, more anxious, and more on edge than before. ...

The COVID lockdowns left children emotionally and socially stunted, while the jab crippled and killed so many people we still don’t know just how bad it was. Turbo-cancers, anyone? ...

Most of the mismanagers’ myriad impositions are like the safety band on a Bic. They aren’t life-threatening, just little annoyances and frustrations, each of which makes life just that little bit more expensive, onerous, joyless, and ugly, but which compound together into a gargantuan burden of soft despotism that smothers the life out of life.

Economists like to point to the example of car seats, which prevent some very small number of child deaths per year – the number I’ve seen is under 100 – while preventing many thousands of children from being born at all, because when every child must have a bulky car seat, more than two children necessarily demands a larger and more expensive car. ...

This has become intolerable. Beyond a certain point it’s time to go to war with it. Not with this or that pointless regulation or officious busybody or pernicious little tattletale, but with the entire rotten system. We need to drain the swamp, as it were. We need to do snap the safety band off of the ignition wheel, so we can light the fire of civilization again.

In life, Peanut the squirrel spread joy to millions. In death, he has become a martyr – the innocent victim of a blundering machine built of the inept, the useless, and the cruel, a clumsy blind killer robot that stomps out lives and dreams and hope and beauty and love as it seeks to perfect its control over a world that it is gradually crushing out of existence.

All while simpering that it’s keeping you safe.

Don’t listen to it.

Nothing is safe when safety comes first.

When you hear them say ‘safety first’, remember Peanut.

And bite the bastards.

https://www.malone.news/p/sunday-strip-first-they-came-for

The New York State police raided Mark’s home this week:

A total of 10 officers raided his house

He and his wife were not allowed to use bathroom alone

He was not allowed to feed his other rescue animals

They interrogated his wife about her immigration status

There were search warrants from 4 bureaucratic departments, including FISA.

This week, despite massive public outcry - both Peanut and Fred were murdered by the New York State Environmental police. Their crime was living in captivity.

To be clear:
"Based on the search results, it is extremely rare for squirrels to contract rabies. The data suggests that squirrels are not considered vectors of rabies and have never been known to transmit the disease to humans."

Type thoughts guys. This photo shit is getting annoying. I won't leave the site, but it gets really annoying. Write something worth reading. If you can't, don't post it.

DemocratsAreTotallyFucked says

I guess Shatner never had a dog? There's a difference of insane magnitude. Time doesn't matter. Dogs are bred to be pets. You can say their name and they respond. Do tricks and obey. Show me a squirrel or raccoon that can do that. I don't think anyone can.

This is an election ploy. I'm voting Trump but my overall point is this a stupid story and makes Trump voters seem dumb. These animals were not pets. My neighbor growing up had a squirrel and got his arm mauled and he ended up killing it. I was 5 and there when it happened. Don't need to be a zoo keeper to know this.

This one is weird: in one breath we demand all illegals to be deported and in another we cry about illegaly kept squirrel? "But it was adorable!" So what? It's like saying "deport all illegals except for cute chicks". We need to get back to being the country of laws. Don't like the law - change it using legal methods. The only exception should be for clearly unconstitutional stuff, but the right to keep and bear squirrels was not in the Constitution last time I checked.

RWSGFY says

This one is weird: in one breath we demand all illegals to be deported and in another we cry about illegaly kept squirrel? "But it was adorable!" So what? It's like saying "deport all illegals except for cute chicks". We need to get back to being the country of laws. Don't like the law - change it using legal methods. The only exception should be for clearly unconstitutional stuff, but the right to keep and bear squirrels was not in the Constitution last time I checked.

I don't want illegals. Come here respectfully and legally. I'm just not a fan of people putting wild animals in their home. Hell a zoo. I think it's bizarre. Just let the animals do their thing. I don't think zoo's should exist. As I've said I'm independent, but this topic is the leftie in me. Chickens, dogs, cats, cows, pigs, goats, etc. Animals bred to produce meat/eggs, be functional or a family pet.

Cats are only one or two generations from being feral. Experiments on wild foxes showed they too, with selection for low aggression, could be domesticated in three generations. Our terms of pet vs not are somewhat arbitrary.

This was a blatant case of government overreach. And anarcho-tyranny, where major crimes are overlooked (or abetted) by govt, while small infractions are hammered down. The outcome hinges on whether you’re in a favored group. This would be Harris’ DEI govt.

It’s like the dog that sees a “squirrel!!” and gets distracted. Don’t be that dog.

WookieMan says

This is an election ploy.

We know the woman who called the authorities, she's an artsy Kamala voter. She simply couldn't stand seeing a happy man with a pet; all leftists are killjoys.

The man tried to restore the squirrel to the woods several times but the squirrel refused to go back. There was also a raccoon.

Both squirrels and raccoons can be domesticated.

The same government that will invade your home to kill your pets will do that over other things.

BTW, squirrels have NEVER transmitted rabies to a human in medical history. Smaller rodents aren't generally vectors, which is why they generally don't give rabies protocol for small rodent bites anymore. The only smaller rodent that passes rabies to humans are the Golf Course Destroyers, Groundhogs, and Ferrets, but in the latter case it's vanishingly rare.

AmericanKulak says

Both squirrels and raccoons can be domesticated.

The same government that will invade your home to kill your pets will do that over other things.

Gotta read what I wrote. I'm not for government interference. I don't think people should have squirrels and raccoons in their home. That's level 10 retardation. Both sides of this are retarded. Government shouldn't be involved and a thinking person shouldn't have those animals in their house. This was a lose lose situation. I don't like those.

WookieMan says

This is an election ploy. I'm voting Trump but my overall point is this a stupid story and makes Trump voters seem dumb. These animals were not pets. My neighbor growing up had a squirrel and got his arm mauled and he ended up killing it.

On the one hand, yes, the murder of a squirrel is being used as political fodder right before the election.

On the other hand, the squirrel was legit raised from a pup and very tame, definitely not rabid, so murdering it is a perfect illustration of how Democrats don't care if ten million criminal aliens swarm over the border, but somehow do care if someone is defying the Democrat bureaucracy, even if just in a trivial way.