Author: William Norman Grigg

Sheriff Doug Rader of Missouri’s Stone County complains that he is being“attacked” for a “patriotic gesture” – decorating his department’s patrol vehicles with the motto “In God We Trust.” By focusing on a largely symbolic controversy, both the sheriff’s defenders and detractors are ignoring a more tangible threat – the sheriff’s insistence, typical of his profession, that citizens render immediate, unconditional obedience to law enforcement officers as duly appointed ministers of violence on behalf of the divine State. “Where’s our patriotism?” Sheriff Rader theatrically protested during a recent interview on Fox News. “Anytime anybody wants to be patriotic and make … Continue reading →

Seattle resident Nathaniel Caylor wears a large, conspicuous metal appliance on the right side of his face, a souvenir of a May 5, 2009 incident in which Seattle Police Officer Eugene Shubeck tried to murder him in front of his twenty-month-old son, Wyatt. The police had arrived in response to a third-party report that Caylor, distraught over the death of his wife, was suicidal. Following seventeen surgeries – which included bone grafts and the insertion of metal screws and plates to hold together his shattered face – Caylor was offered $1.975 million by the City of Seattle to settle his … Continue reading →

Chris Penner, owner of the Twilight Room Annex club in Portland, Oregon, had bills to pay and a payroll to meet. He called up his business account only to find that it had been completely drained. “All my money was gone,” Penner later related to the Oregonian newspaper. He was shocked, but not completely surprised, by this development: “I raced to the bank, kind of having an idea what had happened.” The criminals who had siphoned away Penner’s earnings were employed by the Oregon State Department of Revenue, who were enforcing a $400,000 punitive damage award against the bar owner … Continue reading →

In a collectivist society, “offenses” aren’t defined by behavior, but rather by identity. This is compellingly illustrated by cases of Antonio Darden and Elaine Huguenin, New Mexico residents and business owners who, acting in the service of their principles, exercised their property rights by refusing service to potential customers. Darden operates a hair salon in Santa Fe, where Republican Governor Susana Martinez has been a regular customer. Darden announced in 2013 that Martinez was no longer welcome in his shop because she didn’t support legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Nor would he share his secret hair coloring formula with the … Continue reading →

By declining to make a wedding cake for Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman, Aaron Klein and his wife Melissa saved the lesbian couple roughly $350. This is a case in which discrimination on the part of a business materially benefited the supposed victims – even before a Soviet-grade “civil rights” bureaucrat in Oregon ordered the business owners to pay $135,000 to the aggrieved couple. In January 2013, the Kleins, who operated a bakery called “Sweetcakes by Melissa,” turned down the couple’s business proposal. Within a few days, the would-be customers contracted with another bakery called Pastry Girl. The second vendor … Continue reading →

The Secret Police in Orwell’s dystopian society were employed by the Ministry of Love. In that ironic designation we find the genuine meaning of the insistent refrain that “love” triumphed when the US Supreme Court consummated the long campaign to bring the most intimate human institution fully under the state’s control. Those presently celebrating the state’s “affirmation” of same-sex relationships are intoxicated by the knowledge that they are the “who” rather than the “whom” in Lenin’s famous formula (which defines the essential political question as “who does what to whom”). Like countless others they have been beguiled into believing that … Continue reading →

The eleven-year-old girl shrieked in horror as the shower curtain was ripped away, leaving her exposed to the view of a large male stranger. Her sense of  violation was compounded by the threat of immediate, violent death: The marauder was wearing body armor and aiming an assault rifle at the naked, terrified child. Downstairs, the offender’s comrades were ransacking the house and barking profane orders at the traumatized child’s family. Sterling Harrison, her 19-year-old brother, was sitting in front of a game console when three of the invaders burst into his upstairs room, bound him, and shoved him down the … Continue reading →

It isn’t often that honest people receive detailed intelligence about a planned gathering of violent men who steal for a living and kill with impunity. An event of that kind will occur from August 10-12th here in Idaho. In fact, I can provide the specific address of the armed robbers’ summit — 700 South Stratford Drive in Meridian. The location is conspicuously marked and easy to find: It is the Idaho Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Academy, which will host a two-day session of Desert Snow’s “Phase 2015” asset forfeiture workshop. “Civil asset forfeiture,” for the mercifully uninitiated, is a … Continue reading →

When Cleveland Police Officer Michael Brelo mounted the hood of a Chevy Malibu and fired fifteen shots through the windshield, killing Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams, he behaved in an “unreasonable” and “unconstitutional” fashion. This was the testimony offered by W. Ken Katsaris, a nationally renowned expert witness on use-of-force issues, during Brelo’s bench trial for two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Brelo’s actions amounted to the execution-style murder of a terrified, unarmed couple whose vehicle had been immobilized following a 22-minute high-speed pursuit and a 137-round onslaught by police. This isn’t why Katsaris found Brelo’s behavior to be “unreasonable” or … Continue reading →

“Is anyone present carrying more than ten marks, or planning to take out of the country any foreign money, gold, jewels, or other valuables?” demanded the German customs inspector after boarding the Innsbruck-bound train. “Any violation of the law will be punished with penal servitude –special cases by death.” Freya Roth, a single woman in her 20s traveling with her mother and younger brother, produced her passport and handed it to the inspector. After the document was stamped, the truculent bureaucrat noticed the young lady’s luggage. “Whose suitcase is that?” he snapped, his voice colored with an implied threat. “Take … Continue reading →

The bloody incident at Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant was not a “biker shootout.” At present there is no evidence that any of the nine victims were killed by fellow bikers, rather than being “taken out” by the scores of police — including snipers — who had effectively turned the parking lot into a kill zone. The Twin Peaks Massacre has prompted the predictable outpouring of state-centered outrage over the purported threat posed by Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs (OMCs). Buried beneath the blizzard of re-purposed official press releases is a critical disclosure made by former FBI undercover operative John Matthews: During the … Continue reading →

It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib. Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed. The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him … Continue reading →

At the end of every shift, police officers call their loved ones to assure them that they “made it through another day without injury,” observes a recently published paean to the police. “From 2000 until 2014, over 700 officers were unable to make that call because they did not survive their tour of duty on that last day.” Alvin Kinney didn’t make it home at the end of his shift on February 12. The 60-year-old officer, who had served in a very dangerous job for more than 20 years, was fatally shot trying to prevent an armed robbery in Houston. … Continue reading →

By the time Lt. Frank Powell hurled a satchel bomb onto the roof of a three-story row house on Philadelphia’s Osage Avenue, the siege had gone on for nearly twelve hours. Powell was a member of the Philadelphia PD’s bomb squad, and like the “firemen” in Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novelette, he was performing a function assumed to be the opposite of his expected role: Rather than disposing of a military-grade bomb, he was using it as a weapon of mass destruction. The building targeted by Powell was occupied by members of a militant group called The MOVE.  Aerial photographs taken … Continue reading →

Josh Tewalt has a drug problem that led to several arrests. Like many others afflicted with that weakness, Tewalt eventually wound up in prison. Unlike most of them, however, he landed on the right side of the bars in the very lucrative position of Deputy Chief of Corrections for the State of Idaho. Without the dubious benefit of a college degree or substantial experience in law enforcement apart from his own time in jail, Tewalt receives a base salary of at least $83,000 a year to manage the human inventory of Idaho’s prison-industrial complex. Under Idaho’s state code, Tewalt’s repeated … Continue reading →