Why Even the Squirrel Matters

This US election is a battle between good and evil, between liberty and bureaucratic tyranny. It should matter to everyone.

As we hit US election day, there are multiple positive signs that suggest America may save itself from destruction. Trump has built an astonishingly strong coalition which represents a broad spectrum (far from a MAGA Cult) of people who oppose perpetual war and habitual corruption. Early numbers show the Democrat vote down (many of those imaginary 2020 voters not turning up. Could there actually be anti-fraud measures that are working?) and Republican numbers up. Internal Democrat polling is disastrous, and media talk of it being close is untrue (a lie to keep Dems voting or to disguise another steal).

The last Trump campaign ad I saw was one of the most powerful ads I’ve ever seen. Whoever puts in the creativity and direction on Trump ads is a maestro of the form. Even as a person who is not an American, the goosebumps hit and there’s a mythic quality to the ad. It’s hopeful. It’s inspiring. It’s everything the manufactured Kamala Joy was aiming for and didn’t get.

Put a Kamala ad alongside a Trump ad and the difference tells you everything. The first is a product of a committee of people who have never met a real person in their entire lives. It’s actors hired to play ordinary people, mouthing lines written by purple haired twenty somethings who have never had a real job. It hilariously presents a complete misreading of the people it opposes, and an equally cartoonish misreading of the people it supports. This is what you get when your ideology never bumps into reality.

A Trump ad by contrast refers to and is suffused with reality. It’s grounded in the solid substance of centuries. Because it’s about loving your country. It is as simple and deep as that. Loving your country is a natural feeling and one validated (even in a country as young as the US) by centuries of experience. You can’t fake this stuff convincingly. There was always a hollowness when a Pence or a Cheney or even an Obama draped themselves in a flag. Serving the military industrial complex or soft soaping a Marxist takeover can be accompanied by a flag….but people see through it, eventually. It’s playing a part.

Nobody in a Trump ad is playing a part, and none of them have to be hired to do it. From Trump to the coalition of former Democrats he has drawn into this campaign, everyone is actually sincere. They aren’t selling things they don’t believe in. They are showing their own hearts and the things they do genuinely care about. That’s what makes it spine tingling and powerful. Robert F.Kennedy Jnr talks about his greatest passion, and Elon Musk talks about his. Kennedy loves the promise of his uncle’s Camelot, that early much more sane and much more hopeful liberalism. And he loves the opportunity to genuinely improve the health and lives of American children, by freeing them from illnesses created by corrupt greed. Trump lets him free to express and defend these noble aims.

It’s the same with Musk. Musk cares about some very big picture issues. He’s a fascinating mix. He has some of the dangerous technophile recklessness of a Gates (a belief that all new technology is great). This is after all a guy who sold home flame throwers because that’s ’kinda cool’ (although typically it was linked to funding the Boring Company which has been a massively sensible and profitable venture). But unlike other billionaire speculators Musk has a genuine vision of hope and, yes, progress (a word that urgently needs rescuing from the insanity that is ‘progressive’). Musk wants humanity spread among the stars. And he wants America surging ahead with prosperity and innovation. He doesn’t want to just dominate and acquire for its own sake.

Gates was reading about stocks and the Standard Oil empire when he was a kid. There’s a strong sense that Musk was reading Jules Verne instead. Imagine all the hope of the Wright brothers combined with an adopted but genuine love of America as the home of Big Dreams, mix that with boundless enthusiasm, mix that again with an ability to cut through cant and the standard way of doing things to instantly comprehend very efficient new methods, and you’ve got Musk.

And Trump set him free too. Run with what you love, and do it to build a better Dream that everyone can share in. It’s not just rhetoric. It’s a firm belief that America can do amazing things. That is what all of them share, despite their differences.

Abortion and war appeal to the feckless and the corrupt. Hope and peace appeal to the rest of us.

I have never seen campaign ads that contrast so strongly between beautiful dreams grounded in firm reality, and insane delusions grounded in spite, envy, hate, and selfish profit, and I have never seen political choices with such a strong contrast either. It is genuinely a clash of good and evil, of real and fake, in every way you can think of.

So now we come to the squirrel.

In what is probably the most bizarre incident of the campaign, we get a trivial moment of bureaucratic malice that shows much more than just itself. An American family adopted a wild squirrel and it bonded with them. They innocently filmed its antics and it became a bit of an internet star. Then someone in an entirely different State, reacting to the political stance of the squirrel’s ‘owner’ decided to get the authorities to look into it. Apparently this woman was bitter that the squirrel had more fans than her.

I said it was bizarre.

So naturally, the State in the kind of form it takes under Democrat direction, swung into action. The squirrel was duly executed…’for the safety of others’.

The fate of Peanut the Squirrel should of course be less important than the fate of the nation, or the economy, or any of the major issues that should inform a vote. But as James Woods has wisely noted, it’s wrapped up in those things. Because it describes an attitude regarding the relationship of the State and the citizen, and the nature of Democrat rule and Democrat thinking.

The Democrats are the party of Death. It’s all they have to offer. Whether it’s a foreign war where thousands are bombed, or an abortion industry and the reduction of all female rights to the claimed right of murdering your own children in the womb, they are the party of death. And death in both literal and metaphorical forms. They are the party that kills liberty, and the party that backs death shot jabs for Big Pharma profit. They kill an economy. They indirectly kill every victim of their crime policies and border policies and drug policies. They kill free speech. They want to kill the Constitution.

And worst of all they kill the human spirit, the capacity to think independently, the desire for real liberty, the ability to discern good and evil, the love of God, the love of nation, the love of family, substituting in each case some invented, synthetic, fake equivalent that is really dead and cold and unloving. They take away the flag your forefathers loved, and substitute some Rainbow invention, or the flag of another nation altogether. And they police and mandate everything except the things that should be policed and the things that deserve protection and the things that have earned respect.

Think of what happened to make the squirrel story happen.

A woman had to be so suffused with pettiness that she demanded ‘something be done’ about a bloody squirrel. A single, harmless, pet squirrel.

And the State had to take this shrewish bitter harpy seriously. Because both the State and that woman see State intervention on every fucking thing as normal. Both see their role as interfering in what other people do no matter how trivial or harmless that is.

It’s the same bureaucratic mindset of pure State authority that saw a chicken farmer called Heinrich Himmler become such an efficient agent of industrialised genocide. And no, that isn’t the same as Trump is Hitler rhetoric in the other direction.

The bureaucratic mind is the genocidal mind, ultimately, on a scale of progress similar to that which runs from socialism to communism. The automatic assumption that the authorities can and should interfere in everything no matter how petty is a pre-condition of tyranny. That same power to interfere in trivial matters, regardless of sense or logic or appropriateness or individual rights, and that same desire to do so, can run from the absurd execution of a pet squirrel all the way up to death camps, if you let it.

The very pettiness and triviality of the squirrel execution is chilling when you examine it objectively. I mean if they care this much about something so minor, how much more motivated by malice will they be with people THEY have been running around describing as Nazis? The precedent that the State can barge into your home and execute your pets, together with the precedent that the kind of people who vote for you are also the kind of people who hate someone else’s pet squirrel a thousand miles away, is the issue.

And it does speak to the nature of the choice facing America. Do you want petty tyrants, or actual liberty?

Think again of what went into the squirrel story. It went beyond taking the mad complaint seriously.

New York State had to dispatch armed personnel. They formed a Squirrel SWAT. People tooled up. They checked guns and ammo. They put on bullet proof vests. They listened to a briefing on Peanut. Maybe there was one of those white boards with a pic of the family and a line drawn to Peanut. Maybe a Squirrel Consultant did a profile. Time and energy and public funds went on this. Then a bunch of heavily armed guys sat in a vehicle driving towards Operation Peanut.

Those brave, brave men. Which of them knew what the squirrel had prepared for them? I hope they all had a will in place.

And nobody, at any point in this, stopped and said ‘hey, guys, like, what the fuck is this? Are we really going on a Squirrel Mission?’.

Nobody considered the absurdity of it. Because nobody infected with the bureaucratic mind virus (to paraphrase Elon Musk) thinks for themselves. Nobody who still votes Democrat is thinking for themselves anymore. It’s all based on authority and power and just accepting that what is ordered must make sense, even when it’s patently absurd and ridiculous. The ability to recognise absurdity is as much a defence against tyranny as anything else. And that’s another thing the Party of Death kills off.

So it turns out that even the squirrel matters.

Because nobody who launches Operation Peanut is sensible and sane enough to have authority over anyone else. None of them had a rational perception of proportion. None of them had a moral understanding of the situation that took into account the harmlessness of the adoption of a family pet or the greater rights a person has in their own bloody home and garden. All they understood was Authority, and having the power to do a thing, without the slightest recognition of the absurdity of doing it or the petty injustice of doing it.

And this is the kind of thinking that suffuses vast bureaucracy, Woke Puritanism and Democrat ideology alike. It’s the thread that runs through all of it. The people who police your squirrels but not your borders. The people who dispatch armed squads for the family pet but not for, well, armed gangs from South America. The people who will bust down your door for this will bust down your door for anything. The people who can’t respond to a call saying there are foreign thugs with guns demanding money in my building, but will respond to a call saying there’s a pet squirrel I don’t like in another State. The people who by the way also wanted to mass cull dogs and cats during COVID.

The people who think they own you, but you can’t own anything.

Not even a squirrel.

That’s what this vote is about. The choice between that level of insane, absurd control freakery and old fashioned hope, patriotism and liberty. The difference between saying tear everything down (unless you have a permit) and build something up. The difference between dreams that encompass the stars, and delusions only celebrity stars are dumb enough to share.

The whole western world faces this same choice, not just America. The whole western world is presented with the road of old liberty and fresh vision on the one hand, or established authority and fresh tyranny on the other hand. The whole western world must pick between the real and the fake, the profound and the petty, the sane and the absurd, and the fault lines are the same as they are in America. We must pick, and we must not allow the pick to be rigged.

Because we matter more than a squirrel does, and we are in danger too.