Author: William Norman Grigg

“They’re calling us murderers,” protests Adams County Sheriff Ryan Zollman, referring to local residents and others who have contacted his office to express their outrage over the November 1nd killing of local rancher Jack Yantis by two of his deputies. That appears to be the opinion of Rowdy Paradis, the only witness to the shooting who has spoken about it publicly. “They took a family man from the dinner table and slaughtered him,” Paradis told the Idaho Statesman newspaper.  At the time the fatal shots were fired, Paradis was about ten feet away from the victim.   Upon learning of her … Continue reading →

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“You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with ’til ya understand who’s in ruttin’ command here.” Jayne Cobb, demonstrating why he should never be left in charge of anything, from “The Train Job.” “We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us,” purred 18th Century arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre in the opening lines of his essay Considerations on France. “ The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance. … Continue reading →

The post Another Reason Conservatism Is Evil appeared first on LewRockwell.

Until April of this year, Christopher Penner was an entrepreneur. Now, despite the fact that he has never committed a crime against persons or property, he is an indentured servant. For several years, Penner owned an embattled but marginally successful nightclub in Portland, Oregon. Today, according to his attorney, Jonathan Rademacher, Penner has a job managing a bar owned by somebody else – and twenty-five percent of each paycheck is garnished to pay off a $400,000 civil judgment imposed by Brad Avakian, the Commissar of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) as punishment for trying to save his business. Between … Continue reading →

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Dr. Barbara LeSavoy, gun confiscation advocate and Director of Women and Gender Studies at The College at Brockport in New York, may be the authentic embodiment of contemporary totalitarian leftism. She might be LARPing – that is, Live-Action Role-Playing – in the character of a self-lobotomized ideological drone. Or perhaps she’s in the middle of an immersive, Andy Kaufman-style long-form comedy sketch. Either she, or the character she is playing, is the post-feminist equivalent of the New Soviet Man. Programmed at a chromosomal level to think and act in collectivist terms, LeSavoy looks upon Barack Obama with the same enraptured, … Continue reading →

On occasion, government-employed police can solve a crime of violence – assuming that the act is captured on video, the offender makes a point of mugging for the camera in close-up, and the clip is disseminated to a large social media audience. Closing the case is even easier when the assailant is a veteran of the criminal “justice” system, and his whereabouts are well-known. Given all of those advantages, police in Atlantic City were able to arrest Ibn Hunter for punching a homeless 45-year-old woman in an unprovoked attack that left the victim with serious brain trauma. Clearing this case … Continue reading →

Pastor Jay Dennis, who  presides over the First Baptist Church on the Mall, a large and growing “mega-church” in Lakeland, Florida, urges his congregation to see police officers as angelic beings bearing a divine commission to impose summary punishment. They are to be obeyed, prayed for, and never spoken of other than in tones of chastened gratitude and unalloyed reverence. “It grieves me on the one hand, and makes me angry on the other hand, when I hear the criticism, and disrespect towards, and violence directed at those in law enforcement,” the pastor declared during his “Law Enforcement Encouragement Sunday” … Continue reading →

Andrea Heath, a former police officer in Desert Hot Springs, California, died three years ago at forty-four years of age. Her untimely death was indisputably the result of trauma she suffered in the line of duty. Yet she was not the subject of an elaborate state funeral, nor was her name inscribed on the Officer Down Memorial Page. She was an authentic victim of what can legitimately be called a war on cops – specifically, the unending war waged within law enforcement against whistleblowers who cross the Blue Line. Heath died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head on October … Continue reading →

Three residents of Arena, Wisconsin posted critical and provocative messages on the Facebook page of the local police department. All of those comments were purged by the officer who administered that page. Only one of them, however, resulted in criminal charges.Thomas Smith was arrested and charged with “disorderly conduct” and “unlawful use of a computerized communication system” in a fashion that “tended to cause a disturbance.” Following a brief and perfunctory trial in which Smith’s written comments were the only “evidence” used against him, the 23-year-old was convicted and sentenced to a year of probation and 25 hours of “community … Continue reading →

Brian McNelis was still recovering from a police raid that wrecked his home and threatened to destroy his commercial painting business when he learned that the state intended to separate him from his daughter. On January 6, 2010, a counter-narcotics task force headed by the Ada County Sheriff’s Office invaded McNelis’s home in Boise, brandishing a warrant claiming that Detective Stephen Craig had discovered “marijuana trimmings” during an early-morning “trash pull” earlier that day. McNelis and his companion Leslie White were arrested on drug-related charges. Two days later, as Brian prepared for an “emergency shelter care” hearing for his teenaged … Continue reading →

“Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute, because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles …. Blood? Let blood flow like water . .. for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever.” From a 1920 editorial in Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet Checka secret police; quoted … Continue reading →

Glenn Beck, acting in his self-appointed role as a punitive populist prophet, has urged his audience to join “hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm,” and “ring” their local police departments in prayer. The local police are “under siege,” Beck tremulously insists, and divine intervention on their behalf is necessary. Beck hasn’t yet urged Americans to act as human shields on behalf of the heavily armed, body armor-clad functionaries who are supposedly paid to protect them. Some police union officials haven’t shied away from suggesting that the public has a moral duty to protect the police, despite the fact that police have no reciprocal obligation … Continue reading →

A Communist is merely a socialist in a hurry. Vester Lee Flanagan, by his own description, was an impatient social justice warrior. The murderous means he employed to punish those he accused of bigotry made visible the latent lethal violence that resides in State policies oriented toward the same objective. Flanagan, also known by the professional name Bryce Williams, was a promiscuous petitioner to the EEOC. After apparently growing weary of seeking to bureaucratize the violence he wanted to inflict on his former colleague, he chose a more direct approach, one we could call retail-level Leninism. As a representative of … Continue reading →

Early one morning in July 2014, a woman in Myton, Utah was startled awake by an uninvited visitor named Thomas Wayne Butterfield.“I’m a cop,” Butterfield explained to the intimidated woman when she asked how he had gotten into her bedroom. “They teach us how to do those things.” When the woman moved into the living room, Butterfield followed her, placing his hand on her leg in a gesture at once proprietary and predatory. The unexpected arrival of the woman’s father prevented what likely would have been a sexual assault – and Butterfield’s firing as the tiny town’s police chief ended … Continue reading →

Joe David, a former California Highway Patrol officer, has made a considerable fortune by teaching police officers who to steal under the color of “law” through his “Desert Snow” consulting firm. When he arrived in Meridian, Idaho for a two-day “asset forfeiture” seminar on August 10, he probably didn’t expect to be greeted by protesters. It is to his credit that he took advantage of the opportunity to speak with them, especially in light of the fact that the conversation couldn’t have been a pleasant one for him. “You come up here to Idaho teach teach our officers to be more … Continue reading →

When they reached Fort Hall in what would eventually be known as southeast Idaho, the leaders of the Oregon-bound Elijah Utter wagon train believed that the most dangerous part of their trek was behind them. Their fortunes would soon change dramatically for the worse, in large measure because of the involvement of the United States military. The 44-member train assembled at a bridge crossing on the Portneuf River near an abandoned fur trading outpost in the late summer of 1860. Their ranks were increased by five recently discharged soldiers who offered their services as guards and scouts “in return for … Continue reading →