A Bureaucracy Bares Its Teeth

Entrenchment: FLDS members at the YFZ Ranch huddle behind padlocked gates while Texas State officials pursue new strategies to make their mass child abduction "legal."







There are many millions of adults who suffer from a peculiar logic disorder I call "Severe Ipse-Dixitism" that leads them to mistake assertions for evidence. This affliction is quite widespread among political pundits, particularly those who pollute the talk radio industry. Both the Texas Department of Child Protective Services and its media allies suffer from a particularly acute case of that tragic condition.


In a brief filed before the Texas Supreme Court seeking relief from its devastating legal defeat last Friday, the Texas CPS emits a dense fog of unsupported allegations about serious crimes purportedly committed by members of the FLDS Church. The CPS condemns the Texas Third District Appeals Court for insisting that the Agency provide actual evidence of crimes before seizing from the community all of the children 18 years of age and younger -- as well as several adult mothers who, the Agency insisted, were minors.


The appeals court's error, insists the CPS, can only be corrected if the state Supreme Court treats the Agency's unproven assertions as if they were proven facts.


"This case is about adult men commanding sex from underage children; about adult women knowingly condoning and allowing sexual abuse of underage children; about the need for the Department to take action under difficult, time-sensitive and unprecedented circumstances to protect children on an emergency basis," insists the CPS brief.


Oddly enough, when the CPS first slithered into the YFZ refuge on April 3rd, it piously insisted that the case was "about" the ongoing abuse of a 16-year-old child bride at the cruel hands of her loutish polygamist "husband." The Agency and its trained pets in law enforcement knew that the alleged perpetrator was not at the YFZ Ranch, and before the child-grab was consummated they also knew that the "victim" didn't exist. Not that this made a particle of difference, of course.


“The record is uncontroverted that adult men engage in ‘spiritual marriages’ with under-age children,” the CPS brief continues. “No age was too young to marry and they wanted to have as many babies as they could.” To what "record" does the CPS refer here? That some FLDS men have contracted "marriages" with under-age girls is a demonstrated fact, yes. But so far, not a single criminal charge of that kind has been filed with respect to anybody living at the YFZ Ranch.


Here the CPS, which seems determined to run the table of logical fallacies, offers up a museum-quality specimen of the fallacy of the undistributed middle: FLDS men enter into polygamous "marriages" with underage girls; the male inhabitants of YFZ Ranch are members of the FLDS Church; ergo, the men at YFZ Ranch are engaged in polygamous "marriages" with underage girls.


To which contention rational people will reply: Yes, there are some FLDS men who have behaved in just that fashion. Find them, indict them, prosecute them, and imprison them if they're convicted -- but neither the CPS nor any other government agency has the authority to abduct several hundred people on the basis of unsubstantiated assumptions that are supported by nothing but defective syllogisms and smug bureaucratic self-assurance. The statement above isn't a legal argument -- even a very bad legal argument. It is a sound-bite begotten by a cynical public relations strategy by a corrupt, dishonest bureaucracy that no longer even maintains the pretense of caring about the children it kidnapped. For the Texas CPS, the gig now is all about institutional self-preservation.


A child is saved from the "Child Savers": Dan Jessop and his wife, Louisa, emerge from a courtroom cradling the newborn son the Texas CPS had tried to seize from the couple. Louisa, 22, an adult mother of legal age, was taken into CPS custody as a "pregnant minor." Dan says that this is only the second time he has been able to see his child.


How do we know that the CPS has abandoned its pose of protecting the best interests of (make sure to speak the phrase in a voice thick with pious sentiment tremulous with affected compassion) the children? It's simple: They agreed to return a dozen children to their FLDS parents, albeit under CPS supervision.


These are twelve children, recall, who simply had to be separated from their parents.


Right now, dammit!


This was a matter of immediate, exigent, three-alarm, screw-the-warrant, kick-down-the-doors, oh-dear-I'm-wetting-my-pants urgency.


Those kids, and hundreds in identical circumstances, couldn't be left in the fell clutches of their parents, because even though no evidence is available that abuse has been committed at YFZ Ranch, the children there could someday become abusers or victims.


But now those children are being reunited with their parents, despite the CPS's borderline-apocalyptic warnings, and -- here's the really important part -- the fact that there's no material difference between those children and the hundreds who remain captives of the CPS.


If the objective here were child "protection," rather than the abduction of hundreds of children and the demolition of an entire community, the CPS (acting on their professed principles) would have reacted to the appeals court decision on Friday by returning all of the children to their parents on the same terms. Rather than doing the honest and principled thing, CPS is simply playing for time, scrambling to create "evidence," and doing what it can to manipulate public opinion.


This helps explain why the CPS, during a custody hearing over a newborn son born to Dan and Louisa Jessop, introduced as "evidence" a series of photos of FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs involved in what can delicately be called "inappropriate" behavior with a 12-year-old girl. Louisa Jessop had been seized by CPS as a "pregnant minor"; in other circumstances, this might have been considered flattering, given that she is 22 years old. The CPS stood ready to steal the Jessops' son as soon as he was born.


They call this "help."


According to the Salt Lake Tribune's account of this incident, the young girl shown sitting in the lap of Warren Jeffs, and then being kissed by him on the mouth, is Dan Jessop's sister, and he was asked -- while on the witness stand -- what he thought of the spectacle. The purpose of this line of questioning, supposedly, was to establish that Dan and Louisa were part of a "household" (the collective population of YFZ Ranch) that supports underage marriage.


The actual purpose was likely two-fold: It was to bait Jessop on the stand while reinforcing the impression that all adult FLDS members are incorrigible pederasts, or enablers of the same.


Significantly, although Jeffs (who is serving a sentence for statutory rape as an accomplice) reportedly "married" (or was "sealed" to) the twelve-year-old about a month before his arrest in 2006, a physical examination has revealed no evidence that she has engaged in sexual relations. So those admittedly nauseating photographs, in addition to being a crashing non sequitir when introduced in the Dan and Louisa Jessop custody hearing, have no evidentiary value.



While it is inappropriate for a male of Warren Jeffs' age to kiss a twelve-year-old on the mouth, that act is not a crime or evidence of one -- unless, as is the CPS's habit, we are to assume facts that have not been entered into evidence, and then use those "facts" to impute collective guilt on the basis of kinship and religious association. Unfortunately, by kidnapping the FLDS children the CPS has actually managed to manufacture some "facts" that most likely will result in some pretty severe hardship for a few FLDS couples.


Desperate to get their children back, and convinced that the only way to do so is to mollify the abductors, at least some parents have signed "family service plans" containing an admission that they have, in some sense, been party to child abuse. In fact, I'm convinced that those concessions represent the only "evidence" at the CPS's disposal.


"CPS's investigation of the Yearning for Zion Ranch found evidence under Texas law of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse," lied the CPS in the standard cover letter for the "Family Service Plan" distributed to FLDS parents. "Because of what CPS found, CPS removed your child from the ranch. After a hearing, the judge agreed with CPS's belief that your child was not safe from abuse. The judge gave CPS temporary custody of your child. Your child has been placed in foster care."


Now that the children have been taken away, what happens if parents don't placate the CPS's demands? "The judge will expect you to work with your caseworker" in carrying out the terms of the Family Service Plan, which include signing a document that states, as a matter of proven fact, that the CPS "investigation" found that "sexual and mental and emotional abuse" were underway there. "Not working with CPS is something the judge may consider when making decisions for you and your child," continues the CPS letter in the same tone of ominous condescension. "If the judge is not satisfied that you can provide a safe place for your child where they are free from abuse, the judge may decide to limit or even permanently take away all of your rights as a parent of the child. The child then could be placed in permanent foster care or be adopted."


Relieved of the cloying, euphemistic legalese, these statements are an unadorned threat: Admit that you're an abuser, submit to all of our demands, or your child will be taken from you permanently.


To their credit, at least some of the attorneys representing FLDS parents are telling their clients to avoid even reading the documents. But at least some of the parents have signed the documents, which means that they have effectively confessed to unspecified acts of child abuse. And under the collectivist theory of communal guilt being followed by Texas CPS, the Agency will almost certainly attempt to use those admissions -- obtained through extortion -- to incriminate the entire community. And thus the game will go on, as the children remain captive.


So do the parents, as the following incident at the end of the Jessop family's custody hearing illustrates (emphasis mine):


"As [Dan Jessop] spoke to reporters, a CPS worker interrupted him. `We need to take her,' the woman said, trying to remove his arm which was wrapped around his wife [Louisa]. `I'll walk with her,' he said. `We have to go,' the worker said, prodding them toward the street. `Come on, let's go.' The couple walked toward an SUV, where [Louisa] was loaded in the back seat and her baby was placed in a carseat next to her. Jessop reached in and hugged his wife."


In what sense is this a free country when a young husband and father who has not been accused of a crime can not only be separated from his wife and newborn son, but suffer such contemptuous treatment by some tax-fattened termagant?


Apropos of nothing...


Scott Watson, a good and very generous friend, has sent along some photographs I think you'll enjoy:



















Here we see William Wallace, age 10, proudly displaying an autographed Ron Paul sign at the hero's recent speech in Caldwell, Idaho.
















Here we see William Wallace's father, age unspecified, uprooting an old tree in Scott's backyard last Saturday. (Vanity, that cruel and ever-attentive mistress, compels me to point out that I'm wearing a loose-fitting shirt, and my girth isn't quite as Falstaffian as this photo would suggest.)

Tearing up this tree was the most fun I've had in weeks (I hope Scott has a few more he'd like removed.) This is old-school, Dino-style exercise. It was a good compliment to my morning workout, during which our middle son, Isaiah Athanasius, got to see me put up 410 lbs. on the bench press.



Available now!










What have you done today to earn a place on The List?

An Ambiguous Victory (Updated)

Yes, the Constitution applies even to them: FLDS member Willie Jessop turns away a CPS commissarina who demanded access to the YFZ Ranch to conduct a warrantless search. Mr. Jessop told the finger-wagging shrike to get the constitutionally mandated paperwork together, and he'd let her in.


It was shortly before noon on Wednesday, May 20, when two Texas CPS officials, in the company of armed Sheriff's Deputies, arrived at the gates of the largely deserted YFZ Ranch. Nearly everybody involved in the custody fight over some 463 people (both children and young emancipated adults dishonestly depicted as minors by the CPS) was either in court, on the way to court, or somewhere in the vast Texas state highway system trying to visit their abducted kids.


So apparently the CPS decided to exploit this opportunity to snoop around the FLDS property. The purported reason for this raid was a hot tip from a conveniently anonymous informant -- hey, we know that leads of that kind are always reliable, right? -- that five children, including one with Down's Syndrome, had arrived at the ranch sometime after the other children had been taken into government custody.


Last time, the CPS prevailed on Merrill Jessop, the Bishop (or Overseer) of the FLDS community, to order his followers to let the Child Snatchers in, despite the fact that their search warrant was entirely invalid.


Trained from infancy to comply immediately and without qualification to an order from their "priesthood head," the FLDS cooperated -- and as a result hundreds of children were abducted by the state at gunpoint on the basis of non-existent "evidence" of widespread abuse.


On Wednesday morning, however, FLDS officials were not as complaisant.


"If they have an honest complaint, we'll be honest, but we were lied to," protested Willie Jessop to the handful of reporters who had scrambled out to the ranch.


Asked later in the day about the abortive raid, CPS spokesliar Marleigh Meisner insisted (in the words of a Salt Lake Tribune paraphrase) that the agency, which "does not conduct criminal investigations, never uses search warrants. "


Those blessed with memories longer than the life-span of the typical Mayfly will recall that the CPS did get a search warrant before the initial April 3 raid. Yes, I know that the CPS arrogantly claims that its investigators aren't impeded by familiar Due Process requirements. But it's odd, nonetheless, that the agency took the time to get a warrant (albeit a spurious one) for the first raid, but conducted the most recent one with such indecent haste that it didn't even bother with the pretense of filing the proper paperwork.


Another oddity: The 5-year-old with Down Syndrome for whom the CPS was searching on May 20 had already been abducted and was in the custody of the agency. While the CPS, even at what passes for its best, is hardly a model of competence, the haste and sloppiness of this most recent attempted raid suggests that, in addition to the agency's familiar malice, something akin to panic might have been at work.


I suspect -- but cannot yet prove -- that the attempted raid on May 20 had a great deal to do with the appellate decision (.pdf) handed down the following day (yesterday, May 21) excoriating the agency for abusing its "discretion" in conducting a mass child seizure without so much as a particle of evidence that abuse was underway or an imminent threat.


The CPS surely knew the weakness of its case against the FLDS, and could probably predict how the Third District Court of Appeals would rule. I suspect that they needed to find something to supplement its anemic brief, thereby buttressing the illusion that an investigation into actual abuse was underway and that the appeals court should let them have sufficient time to build a case.


The Court of Appeals decision is significant primarily for the tone of composed indignation with which it demolishes the CPS's claim to have conducted a "child protection" operation, as opposed to a straight-up mass child abduction under the color of State power.


On pages five and six of that document, the court makes four separate uses of the expression "no evidence" in dismissing the abuse claims made by CPS (the emphasis in each use is mine):


*"There was no evidence that the male children, or the female children who had no reached puberty, were victims of sexual or other physical abuse or in danger of being victims of sexual or other physical abuse";


*"... there was no evidence regarding the marital status of [twenty pregnant females identified by CPS as being from 13-20 years of age] when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant other than the general allegation that the girls were living in an FLDS community with a belief system that condoned underage marriage and sex";


*"There was no evidence that any of the female children other than the five identified as having become pregnant between the ages of fifteen and seventeen were victims or potential victims of sexual or other physical abuse";


*Except for that same group of five expectant mothers, "there was no evidence of any physical abuse or harm to any other child[.]"


The Court's ruling came in response to a petition for a Writ of Mandamus filed on behalf of thirty-eight women (referred to as "Realtors") whose children were seized by CPS. In conducting the seizure, CPS "failed to establish that the need for protection of the Realtors' children was urgent and required immediate removal of the children.... [N]one of the identified minors who are or have been pregnant are children of Realtors. There is no evidence" -- that phrase again -- "that any of the five pregnant minors live in the same household as the Realtors' children."


The decision likewise eviscerates the CPS's novel collectivist theory that the entire community should be treated as one "household" for the purpose of a child "protection" action. Under that approach, a single alleged incident of abuse would effectively incriminate every adult in the community and justify the "protective" seizure of all the resident children.


In words savoring of chilled contempt, the Court vivisected that theory and discarded the bleeding remains:


"The notion that the entire ranch community constitutes a `household' as contemplated by section 262.201 [of the Texas Code, which deals with child protection actions] and justifies removing all children from the ranch community if there even is one incident of suspected child sexual abuse is" -- here we go again! -- "contrary to the evidence. The Department's witnesses acknowledged that the ranch community was divided into separate family groups and separate households. While there was evidence that the living arrangements on the ranch are more communal than most typical neighborhoods, the evidence was not legally or factually sufficient to support a theory that the entire ranch community was a `household.'..."


Even if were proper to treat the FLDS retreat as a single undifferentiated household, the CPS is still left with that nagging, persistent lack of evidence that actual abuse of any kind was underway.


To make the case that the children at YFZ Ranch confronted a dire threat of abuse, the CPS had to go to the First Bank of Cosmic Supposition and borrow heavily on the assumption that at some unspecified future date the children may be abused. The "evidence" presented as collateral for this loan, notes the court, was that the children "live in a community where there is a `pervasive belief system' that condones marriage and child-rearing as soon as females reach puberty."


Once that belief is wedded (if you'll pardon the expression) to an actual, provable incident of sexual misconduct, it is proper to arrest the accused offender and put him on trial. Our system of laws -- as I remember reading about that system; it was dead long before my time -- was designed to deal out justice in individualized portions once due process had provided proof beyond a reasonable doubt.


The CPS has displayed disdain for that bourgeois approach: Why deal out individual justice for crimes that have been committed, when we can accuse the entire community of participation in crimes yet to be conceived, and then blackmail the adults into accepting their guilt by stealing their children?


To its considerable credit, the Third District Court of Appeals refused to ratify this Vladimir Lenin-by-way-of-Hillary Clinton approach to collective punishment in the name of "the children." And once again, the court was able to cite key factual concessions by the CPS to demonstrate how its innovative legal theory was unsustainable:


"The simple fact [writes the court in footnote 11 of the decision], conceded by the Department, that not all FLDS families are polygamous or allow their female children to marry as minors demonstrates the danger of removing children from their homes based on the broad-brush ascription of every aspect of a belief system to every person living among followers of the belief system or professing to follow the belief system."


Digested to its essence, the decision reads as follows:


If you're going accuse someone of child abuse, you have to follow the rules of Due Process. This means, among other things, citing tangible, plausible evidence of actual offenses, rather than presenting to the court the reeking discharge from your collective emunctory aperture and describing it as a novel theory of collective punishment.


This seems like a very simple and obvious proposition. But as Chesterton once said, sometimes it takes a certain kind of courage to stand up in public and say that two times two equals four.


Unfortunately, after demolishing the CPS's legal claims down to the sub-atomic level, the Court did not issue the desired Writ of Mandamus -- an order to the department to return the children immediately. This gave the CPS the option of keeping the children in its custody while appealing the decision -- a course of action the agency has, quite predictably, followed.


A new reason to hope -- but their children aren't free, yet.


Some observers believe the FLDS court victory presages an eventual -- and perhaps immediate -- restoration of the children to their families. I wish I could share that optimistic assessment.


As an appendage of the Texas government, the CPS has the resources to drag out this legal battle for as long as necessary -- until every child taken from YFZ Ranch reaches adulthood, should it come to that. Perhaps the only thing that could prevent this from happening would be a court order to CPS -- backed with a threat to hold in contempt, and arrest, non-cooperating agency officials -- that the children must be returned while the legal dispute continues.


But as I've pointed out, the CPS isn't interested in the law, only in the physical possession of the children. As long as the children remain in that agency's hands -- as long as the CPS in any state has the power to seize children in the first place -- the law simply doesn't matter.


Chipping away at the stonewall....


This is pretty compelling evidence that CPS knows its position is completely untenable, but they'll continue to drag out this matter as long as they can:

"State child welfare authorities have agreed to reunite 12 children from a west Texas polygamist sect with their parents until the state Supreme Court rules on their custody case. Teresa Kelly, a spokeswoman for the parents' lawyer, says Child Protective Services agreed on Friday to allow the parents to live with their children in the San Antonio area under state supervision."

Two things should be understood about this grudging tactical concession.


First, there is no need for the CPS to retain custody of any of these children while the legal challenges play out. The Court of Appeals decision makes it pretty clear that there is no evidence that any of the children abducted by the CPS was in danger of abuse, much less a victim of the same.


Second, even after these children are reunited with their parents, the CPS will continue to keep the families under scrutiny, as if the parents -- who have been charged with nothing -- were paroled criminals.


I'm a full-time cynic, and in my spare time cynicism is my favorite hobby. Perhaps this is why I think the Texas CPS is desperately trying to extort abuse accusations from at least some of the FLDS children over whom the agency retains custody.


These people are as disinclined to surrender the children as Hillary is to bow out gracefully, and for roughly the same reason: A pathological lust for power.



Available now!












What have you done today to earn a place on The List?

They Have a Little List

The business end of government: It always comes down to the barrel of a gun or the edge of an Executioner's blade.

"As some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list -- I've got a little list, of society offenders who might well be underground, and who never would be missed -- who never would be missed!...

There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs [or, as we call them now, blogs]; all people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs....

Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own...the Judicial humorist--I've got him on the list!

All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life-- they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed..... The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you. But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list, for they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed!"

The song of the Lord High Executioner, from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado



For a long time, filed in the category of "Things We Always Knew But Couldn't Prove" we could find the assumption that the Regime has a Little List -- a database of people who would be subject to questioning, detention, or worse, in the event of a "national emergency."


We now can file that assumption in the category of "Awful Things We Know For Sure."


According to "The Last Roundup," a diligently researched and carefully written investigative piece in Radar magazine, The List is not an artifact of overheated imagination, but rather a tangible and portentious reality.


Although several former high-ranking government officials are cited by name in the Radar piece (some of whom spoke to the publication directly), the most important source is a "former senior government official who served with high level security clearances in five administrations." He chose to remain anonymous for reasons his key disclosure should make obvious:


"There exists a database of Americans who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived `enemies of the state' almost instantaneously."


The "List" is actually a database called Main Core that reportedly contains the names of at least 8 million Americans. Based on what is known of previous lists compiled by the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Radar speculates -- quite responsibly -- that Main Core "includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people."


As we can see, this is not the first time that the Feds have undertaken to assemble a master list of Troublesome People, to the extent existing technology made this possible.


In 1950, coincident with the Korean War, J. Edgar Hoover proposed the arrest and mass imprisonment of thousands suspected of disloyalty as a means of protecting the government from "treason, espionage and sabotage."


He had a Little List: J. Edgar Hoover, a key architect of the National Security State.


For many years prior to that proposal, Hoover had been compiling his Little List, which he called a "Security Index. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote in a message to Sidney W. Souers, a special assistant for national security to President Truman.


Rounding up these purported troublemakers would be quite simple, Hoover continued; a "master warrant" could be attached to a list naming those subject to arrest, coupled with a presidential declaration suspending the habeas corpus guarantee. Then the FBI, working in collaboration with the military, would make arrangements for the indefinite detention of those people in military facilities around the nation.


Hoover initially sought permission to compile his Little List in 1946; two years later Attorney General Tom Clark consented. While his proposal wasn't acted on, it took root within the national security establishment, mutating into various similar proposals over the following decades.


At about the time Hoover (who, ironically enough, opposed the WWII-era roundup and detention of Japanese-Americans) was poring over his list of potential detainees, the security establishment was beavering away at "Operation High Point," a crash program to build a sprawling underground survival complex at Mount Weather, a tract of federally owned land near Bluemont, Virginia.


Mount Weather is the central node of the Regime's "Continuity of Government" network. Virtually impregnable, the facility has its own secure supplies of food, water, and power, as well as most of the amenities to which our "public servants" have become accustomed. (I don't know whether this would include a Strangelovian stable of nubile young playthings, but I would be surprised if it didn't.)


The true priorities of our ruling class can be deduced from this fact: While it has undertaken a detailed, expensive plan to ensure the continuity of government, there is no corresponding effort to ensure the continuity of freedom. In fact, a crisis of sufficient magnitude to justify activation of "continuity of government" plans would be perceived as a good and sufficient justification to dispense with the troublesome business of individual liberty outright.













What Lurks Beneath: Mount Weather -- the visible portion thereof -- in its verdant Virginia setting.


Alluded to in the 1962 novel (and 1964 film) Seven Days in May, the Mount Weather complex was the subject of a 1975 investigation by California Senator John V. Tunney, an unauthorized expose via a 1976 article in The Progressive, a controlled-release profile in a 1991 Time magazine piece, and a bizarre cameo in the atrocious 2002 film adaptation of Tom Clancy's exceptional novel The Sum of All Fears.


During his 1975 investigation of government surveillance activities, Senator Tunney discovered that Mount Weather also hosted a master electronic database compiled by FEMA on 100,000 Americans.


In its expose the following year, The Progressive reported that Mount Weather's computer systems could "obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers" -- which, Radar helpfully explains, was "a reference to other classified facilities." The FEMA/Mount Weather surveillance program was run entirely outside the law, and its information was inaccessible even to House and Senate "oversight" committees.


The next significant disclosure regarding the existence of The List and the role it would play in continuity of government planning came in the mid-1980s, when Oliver North's Rex 84 program received some unexpected -- and unwelcome -- scrutiny. In the event of a national emergency (whether in the form of a natural disaster, military crisis, mass terrorism, or some other catastrophe) Rex 84 envisioned the effective suspension of the Constitution, the appointment of regional military commanders to run state and local governments, and the detention of hundreds of thousands of people -- illegal aliens, criminal suspects, and sundry non-criminal troublemakers -- in a system of at least 10 military facilities across the country.




Radar points out that this element of Rex 84 grew out of existing federal contingency plans calling for "large-scale detention" of Americans in the event of widespread unrest. "Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of`militants' and `American negroes,' who were to be held at `assembly centers or relocation camps,'" notes the magazine.


Keeping tally of kills? That seems to be the purpose of the figures drawn on the side of this APC used by the Midland County Sheriff's Department in its terrorist assault on the FLDS community.
(Hat tip: Infowars.com)


All of this helps underscore one reason why I have spent so much time examining the ongoing atrocity committed by the State of Texas against the FLDS community at Eldorado:


The assault on the YFZ Ranch by militarized police units; the subsequent seizure of children and mothers and their detention in facilities described by outraged medical professionals as "concentration camps"; the use of what could be called a "master warrant" -- obtained through what has to be conscious fraud on the part of law enforcement -- to place an entire community under arrest; the effective nullification (through judicial indifference) of the habeas corpus guarantee as it applies to the abducted children -- all of these outrages are part and parcel of the martial law system that has been developed over the past six decades. Indeed, the Eldorado Atrocity could be seen as that system in microcosm.


Therefore the question is not whether, but rather how extensively, that system will be put into use.


In order to illustrate how the Master Core database could be used, Radar sketches out the following scenario:


"[C]oordinated bombings in several American cities [culminate] in a major blast -- say, a suitcase nuke -- in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a `parallel government' that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state."


I must point out that what is described above fails to terrify me, since it is not noticeably removed from where we are now. Yes, there has been no mass evacuation of government personnel to Weather Mountain and its sister facilities, or any large-scale round-up of dissidents. But the Bush Regime has treated the other branches of government as if they were constitutional nullities -- both in matters of war and peace and domestic security.


It doesn't seem that likely to me that overt martial law will descend on our country as the result of one discrete catastrophic event. Instead, I see it as already realized in principle, and becoming a more tangible reality as opportunities present themselves. Our rulers don't need a second 9/11-style incident in order to grab more power than they have already claimed, although such a disaster would be useful in terms of cultivating public acceptance for the undisguised exercise of those powers. But that acceptance is being won incrementally, and at a remarkably accelerated rate.


To understand how this works, consider the case of former Texas Congressman Jack Brooks, featured in the film clip above trying to drag Rex 84 out of tenebrous realm of contingency planning. During the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, Brooks demanded that Col. North defend Rex 84 and its provisions for suspending constitutional government -- only to be slapped down by Committee Chairman Daniel Inoyue.



That happened, as I noted, in 1987. By 1993, Brooks -- by then Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee -- had become a craven apologist for the exercise of the very powers he had denounced, as least when "cultists" like Waco's Branch Davidians were on the receiving end. Speaking in the aftermath of the Mt. Carmel Holocaust, Brooks sneeringly said of the victims:

"Those people got what they deserved."


Why did those people "deserve" to be penned into a building and burned alive, or shot by paramilitary forces as they attempted to flee the flames? From the perspective of Brooks and his ilk, this was condign punishment for the supposed crime of resisting the lawless lethal violence of the State, in this case the unjustified initial assault by the ATF on the Mt. Carmel sanctuary.


Today, as FLDS parents are being told that they must, in effect, plead guilty to unspecified charges of child abuse as a condition of being permitted to associate with their own kidnapped children, tens of millions of Americans are giving voice to variations on the same incredibly cruel sentiments expressed by Jack Brooks fifteen years ago.


How many of those Americans could find their names on the Main Core list of potential "troublemakers"? How many of them, when given an opportunity to help the Regime's Willing Executioners with the task of "filling up the blanks," would do so with indecent eagerness?

His name was on a list, too: Patriot hero John Hancock.


It's something akin to a certainty that anybody who has made himself conspicuous by opposing the Regime and its crimes, both foreign and domestic, has already inscribed his name on the Main Core list. Anybody worthy of our heritage should already be doing something that will have that result, and treat that prospect with the same insouciance displayed by John Hancock, who signed his name large enough "so that fat King George can read it without his glasses."


Such is the perverse temper of our times that genuine patriots shouldn't let their eyes close in well-earned slumber each night without doing something to earn the hostility of the Keepers of The List.





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Dum spiro, pugno!

Texas Child Grab: Possession Is The Entire "Law"

Ready to kill for the State: A sniper takes aim at unarmed parents at the YFZ Ranch, prepared to kill any who resist as their children are stolen by lying, corrupt strangers.


"The important thing to understand," insists former Texas judge Scott McCown, referring to the status hearings for the abducted FLDS children that begin on May 19, "is this ... is not an opportunity to re-litigate the removal [of the children]. The child has already been removed, so this is about where to go from here. What's the plan?"


McCown's comment, of course, is a variation on a standard statist trope, the rapist's argument from inevitability: Look, it's going to happen anyway, so just lie down and enjoy it -- and once the deed is done, there's no point "re-litigating" the matter.


I grant that Mr. McCown, as a former judge, is most likely someone indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the point of the legal system is to validate the wisdom of the State, as opposed to punishing the guilty and vindicating the rights of the innocent. And he must have forgotten a useful rule of evidence: It is the guilty, rather than the innocent, who want to change the subject or stop the inquiry once inconvenient facts begin to materialize. That would explain the eagerness of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to foreclose a critical examination of the process that led to the criminal abduction of over 460 children.


And so, once again, apologists for the child-snatchers are taking refuge in the rapist's defense: It happened, it's over, just get over it and move on. (And, by the way, you better put some ice on that. )


The chief difference between common rape and the crime committed by the Texas CPS against the mothers and children of YFZ Ranch, of course, is that what was taken in this instance can, should, and must be returned. There was no legal reason to take the children in the first place, and there is abundant, uncontested evidence that the entire operation to seize the children was carried out in patent, palpable bad faith.


I am aware that what follows will avail nothing in dealing with the criminals who run the "justice" and child "protection" systems in Texas. Their contempt for the law is self-evident and apparently incurable. So why do I even bother to set out the facts, and expatiate on the law, given that those who stole these innocent children aren't concerned about either?


To put the matter simply:


If this crime proceeds unpunished -- as appears likely -- and if it spawns copycat crimes elsewhere -- which, once again, is a reasonable surmise -- the next such attempt will lead to bloodshed. And if that's the only option left to innocent parents trying to keep their children from the hands of State-employed criminals, I devoutly (albeit unrealistically) hope that a jury can be found that will vote for acquittal on the grounds of self-defense.


In anticipation of such a tragic but perhaps inevitable contingency, I think it's necessary to present the facts about the seizure of the FLDS children before a candid world.


Both child "protection" and law enforcement personnel knew that they had no probable cause to conduct a search of the YFZ Ranch. They knew this before they obtained the first search warrant, let alone the second one.


The critical facts, drawn from relevant legal filings and sworn testimony -- most of it offered by the child-nappers -- are presented in a 75-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus (.pdf) filed on behalf of Amy Marie Dockstader, Natalie Joanne Keate, Britton Bauer Keate, Jameson Rand Keate, and Marreta Keate, as well as their fathers, James Dockstader, Rulon Keate and LeLand Keate.


Each of the fathers lives "in a monogamous relationship with [his] wife (who was of age at the time of their marriage), and their children in single family, stand-alone, separate residences located on the YFZ Ranch property," reports the petition. "There was no evidence nor allegation of physical or sexual abuse of any of these children."


And this is where things would end with respect to those families, were the Texas CPS governed by constitutional law and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. But that agency, like its counterparts elsewhere in this once-free country, subscribes to a degenerate form of collectivism akin to the family law theories espoused by Soviet psychologist A.S. Makarenko.


Please indulge me in a brief but necessary digression.


Makarenko's The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents, was the child-rearing bible of Stalin's Russia. It was also a seminal work for many Western social activists during the 1950s and 1960s, when the pestilential Child "Protection" bureaucracy was gestating in the womb of the Regime. (Makarenko's influence on those who created our nation's child "protection" system was attested by Russian expatriate Urie Bronfenbrenner, a key architect of the Head Start program.)


The purpose of the family, Makarenko wrote, was to raise the State's children to be good collectivists: "We are living on the summit of the greatest pass in history, our day has seen the beginning of a new order in human relations, a new morality, a new law, the foundation of which is the victorious idea of human solidarity.... In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism."


"Somebody get this skeevy collectivist's clammy hands off of me!" Something to that effect seems to be going through the head of the little girl on the left as she's made to pose in the arms of Urie Bronfenbrenner, an apostle of collectivist child-rearing.


Accordingly, the Soviet family was not a "closed-in," autonomous entity, like the "bouregois" family; it was "an organic part of Soviet society," subject to intimate and constant regulation in the interests of "society." To this end it was necessary to discredit the authority of the father in the home: Makarenko identified the traditional patriarch as an "odious figure" - "Master, overseer, teacher, judge and sometimes executioner" -- even as he extolled the supposed mercies of a State headed by the uber-benevolent father figure named Joseph Stalin.


Da, Commissarina: Texas CPS Child-grabber Angie Voss



The collectivist order described by Makarenko is very different from a communal arrangement like that of the FLDS at the YFZ Ranch. In seeking to justify seizing the FLDS children, CPS Commissarina Angie Voss emphasized that she was told by church members that "they are one big family, one large community, and they have the same belief system." This is true, quite common among small religious groups, and entirely benign.


However, Voss and her legal cohorts have used this affinity to justify treating the YFZ population as one literal family: In this way, any evidence of abuse can be used to incriminate everybody in that population, toward the end of breaking up this natural, private collective and bringing it under the plenary power of the coercive collective that employs Voss and her henchmen. This is collective punishment, carried out for collectivist ends.


From that perspective, it doesn't matter whether a given family is headed by a monogamous husband and lives in an independent dwelling. The State has decreed that they are part of a rogue group that must be assimilated into the larger national Collective. And since the State now has possession of the children, the law doesn't matter, because it can now use the children as blackmail leverage against the parents -- something that is already underway.


In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, as distinct from the post-Marxist collectivism that informs that Child "welfare" system, the government has to justify its intrusion into the sanctity of the home. This is why the Fourth Amendment (and its equivalent in every state constitution, including that of Texas), defines the non-negotiable probable cause requirement in terms of "particular" places to be searched and "persons or things to be seized."


Where the April 3 raid on the YFZ Ranch is concerned, the initial warrant referred to the much-discussed "Sarah Jessup Barlow," a supposedly abused polygamous "child bride" who had purportedly been impregnated by an abusive middle-aged man identified as Dale Barlow. The entire purpose of that initial search was to find Sarah and take her into custody, and to find the 49-year-old Mr. Barlow and place him under arrest.


However, as the habeas corpus petition points out:


"The [child `protection'] Agency's pre-raid investigation determined that the accused 49-year-old man was an Arizona resident, under supervision on probation by an Arizona probation officer who resided in Arizona. Before execution of the warrant, Sheriff Doran was also advised that Dale Barlow was in Arizona and not within the [FLDS] Community. In fact, Sheriff [David] Doran spoke to Mr. Barlow in Arizona by cell phone and, after confirming his identity, Barlow told the Sheriff that he did not know any Sarah Jessup and had never been to the yearning [sic] for Zion Community nor to Texas for some twenty years. The Agency was also advised that there was no Sarah living in the Ranch." (Emphasis added.)


The assumption behind the initial raid was that Mr. Barlow -- and he alone -- posed "an immediate risk to physical or sexual abuse of a child." But even before the first search warrant was executed, Sheriff Doran and his associates in the Texas Rangers "had been apprised, and [had] even verified, that the only person these officers alleged to be suspected of criminal activity ... was not located on the premises, or even in the State of Texas."


What of the "victim," the much-abused Sarah Jessup Barlow? It is now well known that the woman claiming to be Sarah is disturbed 33-year-old woman from Colorado Springs named Rozita Swinton, who is in the habit of making false abuse reports to police agencies across the country. (.pdf)


Those calls were made by telephones with a 719 area code. When Swinton made those calls on March 29 and March 30, Texas officials who followed up "were immediately advised that one of these telephone numbers was associated with an individual who had made numerous `false reports of sexual abuse to police agencies' in the Colorado Springs area." (Note carefully the word "immediately.") In fact, she was linked to false allegations of abuse to more than ten police departments, from Monroe, Washington to Ft. Meyers, Florida.


So at the time of the original assault on the YFZ Ranch, Sheriff Doran and the CPS knew that the alleged abuser wouldn't be found therein. Yet they conducted that home invasion anyway. They also sought a second affidavit from Judge Barbara Walther -- who issued it with blithe indifference -- without informing Walther the alleged abuser had an air-tight alibi: He was in Arizona, under the constant surveillance of his probation officer.


Just as significantly, the CPS had enlisted the aid of the Midland Sheriff Department's SWAT team to raid the YFZ Ranch after it was clear that Mr. Barlow wasn't there, and that there would be no violent resistance to the CPS invasion of the commune.


The CPS had already written a narrative, and it was sticking to its script. According to a legal brief filed on behalf of the Agency, once Comrade Voss and her 12-member CPS raiding party had defiled the YFZ Ranch, "The Department's investigation was thwarted due to misinformation about the identities of the girls.... Ms. Voss indicated that she believed she was encountering a `brick wall' because some girls were saying that they were going to plead `the Fifth' and not answer questions."


This storyline -- "Polygamous Cult Covers Up Abuse of Hapless Child Bride" -- was fed into the organ of mass dishonesty called the mainstream media within hours of the raid at the Ranch. This was done by people who knew that the residents of that community couldn't "cooperate" in the search for Sarah Barlow, because she didn't exist.


Furthermore, the testimonies offered by mental health workers who attended the mothers and children in various detention facilities after the raid flatly contradict Voss's statements that the FLDS women and girls refused to cooperate. These workers -- who, unlike Voss and her comrades, have no reason to shade or misrepresent the truth -- emphasized that although the briefings they received from the CPS told them that the FLDS women would "plead the Fifth" (as if that were somehow impermissible), the captive women were very polite and cooperative. In fact, according to these disinterested witnesses, it was the CPS who routinely lied to and misled the FLDS women, rather than the reverse.


A portrait in serene suffering: One need not respect the FLDS community's teachings (I certainly do not) in order to admire the character many of them have displayed in the face of aggressive evil.



But the CPS stuck to its storyline. Those people knew that by the time the truth was available, the public wouldn't be interested in it.


And the children would be in their hands.


This is a case in which possession is the entire "law."


To the child snatchers, the only "law" that matters here is the power that flows from the barrel of a gun. Look at the photograph at the top of this essay: It documents the murderous intent behind this premeditated crime. That individual was prepared to murder, in cold blood, any parent who raised a hand to rescue his child.


The individual behind the sights of that rifle lent his potentially lethal services to a knot of criminals who violated the law flagrantly, deliberately, knowingly, and with calculated malice. They did so for reasons rooted in ideology and, quite possibly, simple statist greed.


What recourse do parents have, if their children can be seized from them through culpable fraud and the threat of lethal force -- and the law is of no avail?


Are parents simply required to submit, because the agency that has stolen their children is not disposed to "re-litigate" the issue, once it has full possession of the children? That's the "wisdom" offered by the Texas legal system.


Consider Judge Walther's glib response to an objection raised by one attorney during the cattle-call status hearing. When an attorney trying to represent one of the FLDS mothers protested that the women were being "detained" at the local sports coliseum his objection prompted Walther to extrude the following Orwellian soliloquy:


"I want to make one thing very, very clear. There is no mother at the coliseum or at the Wells Fargo [detention area] that is an adult that everyone agrees is an adult that is detained. They are free to go. The [Child "protection"] Department has said that they [the mothers] may stay and provide care for their children, should they choose. So your client, the mothers, are not being held by this Court."


That is to say: The mothers were perfectly free to leave their children in the hands of people who had invaded their homes through malevolent guile and taken the youngsters away amid threats of lethal force. As the attorney incredulously replied to Judge Walther: "I'm supposed to tell the mother of [a] two-year-old she's free to go, [but] the two-year-old gets to stay[?] That's detention, Your Honor."


To which Walther offered the snide reply:


"[I]f you want to take the position that these women are being held by the Court, I want you to go tell them that they can leave. If they want to stay, they're going to have to sign something saying that they want to stay."


So now the mothers would be required to ask the State's kind permission to remain captive with their children -- until, that is, Walther issued an order sending the children away.


This is a bit like requiring a victim to write a thank-you note to her rapist, and perhaps send him flowers as well.


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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Texas Child Grab: Cowpie ala Mode (Updated)

The news was simply too good to hide under a bushel.


Arrow Child and Family Ministries, a foster care and adoption agency with headquarters near Houston, "found out today that they will be receiving 80-100 permanent placement children," exulted the sister of an assistant to Mark A. Tennant, founder and head of the agency. "More than likely, the parental rights of their parents will eventually be terminated and they will be placed in foster homes and/or adopted out."


That letter was set adrift in the blogosphere (scroll down to comment number 71 et. seq.) sometime around April 22-23 -- that is, at approximately the same time that Judge Barbara Walther issued a "placement order" that resulted in hundreds of children being torn away from their mothers and sent away in buses.


Walther has a lot to answer for, beginning with the fact that she didn't compel the State to produce the anonymous "victim" whose call produced the original search warrant for the YFZ Ranch. It's also quite likely that she was aware of the fact that "Sarah" didn't exist, and that the original call was a demented hoax, at the time Walther issued the original search warrant; she had to have known as much when she issued the April 22 "placement order."


So it's clear that Walther, like most people who wear the habiliments of the judicial profession, is guilty of serious crimes against the Constitution. But she hasn't yet issued an order to "terminate" the parental rights of the FLDS mothers. The obvious import of the letter cited above is that this development is a foregone conclusion, since provisions have already been made for long-term custodial care for the abducted children by Arrow and other foster care/adoption agencies.


"These children will be in a wonderful Christian environment," gushes the author of that letter, who goes on to explain that the Arrow Center was in need of volunteers to help clean the facility and perform other routine tasks "over the next couple of years." Furthermore, "it looks like CPS [Child "Protective" Services] is coordinating with the University of Texas to have a charter school on site at the retreat center. This will take place in the fall. Therefore: Arrow will have to build several new buildings for the school."


Immediately after the children had been removed from YFZ, the Arrow Center "sent a staff of 15 over a two week period to assist the Department [of Family and Protective Services] and other providers on the ground in San Angelo to help with activities and supervision of the children and families from the compound."


How thoughtful of them.


Mental health workers assigned to help CPS have testified that the conditions for FLDS children and mothers in state custody were akin to those of Nazi "concentration camps." So the role played by the good Christian people from the Arrow Center was to help with "activities." You know, sort of like organizing games of Red Rover and Ring-around-the-Rosy at Ravensbruck.


Obviously, a great deal of planning and preparation went into all of this. The initial raid on YFZ Ranch took place on April 3; within less than a week, Houston's NBC affiliate KVUE reported that Arrow's staff was preparing to receive scores of children.


"The Arrow Retreat Center was built to be just that -- a retreat center," reported KVUE. "But after Hurricane Katrina, they turned it into a shelter. Now that, once again, hundreds of children are being forced from their homes in West Texas, the center could be used to house them."


Rex and Patricia Childress, foster parents of five boys, were presented by KVUE as potential foster parents for girls ripped from their home at YFZ Ranch.


"You've got to show [the children] that people do care about them, and that there are people out here that are willing to help," Rex Childress explained.


The typical passive consumer of the officially sanctioned lies we call "news" was thus invited to perceive the scores of children taken from their mothers as victims of some tragic caprice of inscrutable nature, rather than the victims of armed abduction by a state-sanctioned criminal syndicate called the CPS.


There's no evidence at all that the children of YFZ Ranch had been abused or neglected in any way, or that they had been deprived of affection from the people who mattered the most to them. And now that those kind, caring, self-described Christian people have "helped" them by terrorizing them at gunpoint and breaking up their families, at least some of these children will be left hurting, confused, and probably susceptible to whatever mind-rape the CPS sees fit to inflict on them in the course of creating "evidence" to justify this entire abominable enterprise.


After being silent about the matter for a month -- he was busy; it takes time to find the right shade of Just For Men to keep one's youthful thatch of hair a preternatural chestnut brown -- Texas Governor Rick Perry finally commented about the El Dorado affair. By way of an intermediary, Perry defended the honor, such as it is, of the CPS and promised a full investigation of the allegations of CPS mistreatment at San Angelo. That investigation of the CPS will be conducted by the CPS, of course.


"The Governor is very proud of the work being done by CPS," Perry said via spokeswoman Krista Piferrer. "CPS has handled a very complex situation both professionally and compassionately. " Perry also "applauded" the CPS for promising an "internal" inquiry into the charges, which amounts to the Governor granting the agency plenary authority to conduct a cover-up.


This is the same Governor Perry, of course, who has presided over a foster care system rife with abuse -- including murder and the sexual molestation of children as young as three years of age. It is the same Governor Perry who promised a "top-to-bottom review" of the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) following revelations of widespread physical and sexual abuse of teenage detainees by guards, staff, and other inmates within that juvenile correctional system. In the year that's passed since the TYC scandal went public, the agency has been through five chief administrators without seeing any serious improvement.


Given the near-ubiquity of criminal violence and abuse directed at children in Rick Perry's Texas, I'm starting to wonder if the YFZ Ranch was the only place in the state where children were safe from such treatment.


So far there is no evidence that anyone living there was ever mistreated in any way. And since the only witnesses to any alleged abuse are going to be in the custody of an agency with every reason to taint their testimony, it's difficult to see how any abuse allegation could be free of reasonable doubt. But with the children securely in their possession, the CPS can either manufacture the needed "evidence" after the fact, or simply hold on to the children while legal proceedings grind on interminably.


Uh-oh: FLDS women under CPS detention are seen waving at friends and family members, a gesture they were told was forbidden to them.


Like the war on Iraq, the war waged by Texas on the women and children of the FLDS community may turn out to be an immaculate deception.

Everybody knows that the reasons behind it are utterly spurious, and that innocent people are suffering needlessly, but nobody is willing to do what is necessary to end it and punish those responsible. So people just pretend as if the truth is either infinitely malleable, or entirely inconsequential.


And we can see good Christian people playing roles similar to those they've essayed where the war in Iraq is concerned. Christians have been enablers, facilitators, and supporters of official crimes, eager consumers and diligent regurgitators of official propaganda, sanctimonious sanctifiers of the State's criminal aggression, and pious profiteers when presented with the opportunity.


If those who profess to worship Jesus can't become principled opponents of the lawless Regime ruling us, the very least they should do is stop volunteering to be the ice cream every time the State feeds us a helping of cowpie ala mode.


Update: The Ice Cream's All Gone...

... and this is what's underneath:


"Abandoning their religion and husbands may be the only way that FLDS mothers will be reunited with their children," reports Rod Decker of Salt Lake City's KUTV news. "Texas officials issued new rules Thursday that dictate what the mothers will have to do before the state will return the 464 children. The plan says that the mothers will have to prove that they have provided the children with `a home free of persons who have, or will abuse the children.'"


Does the State of Texas now have a fully functioning Department of Pre-Crime? Or does it merely expect the mothers to exercise some form of precognitive gifts?


Neither is the case, of course. As Decker surmises, the People's Republic of Texas is demanding nothing less than a full and unconditional repudiation of the FLDS religion by the mothers, and the rat bastards are using their children as blackmail leverage to extract this concession.


"To hammer their point even harder," continues Decker, "Texas officials told FLDS communities that if they don't cooperate, the court could `terminate parental rights' and `appoint a conservator with authority to consent to each child's adoption.'"


None of this will come as a surprise to the supernally sweet Christian folks at Arrow Child and Family Ministries, who were advised weeks in advance of Judge Walther's April 22 "placement order" that FLDS members would have their parental rights terminated.


Among the nastiest things former FLDS leader Warren Jeffs did to rebellious members of the sect was to "reassign" their wives and children to more faithful members. He did this with the help of a state-sanctioned police force.


How, exactly, does this differ from what the State of Texas is now threatening to do to the FLDS mothers?


And of course, the most effective way for the FLDS mothers to ensure an abuse-free environment for their children would be to keep them out of the hands of the State of Texas by whatever means necessary.


It bears repeating that all of this is being done without so much as a particle of evidence that abuse has ever been committed by anyone at the YFZ Ranch. From the beginning, this entire undertaking has been carried out without probable cause, and in defiance of every principle of due process known to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty under law.


It's not just that the CPS has delivered this ultimatum without bothering to prove its case; that ultimatum has been issued without the CPS even bothering to make a case of any kind. This is straight-up mass child abduction and extortion devoid of even the pretense of legal authority. And if the perps are successful, the atrocity in El Dorado will be just the beginning of sorrows.




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Dum spiro, pugno!

Child Theft, "Concentration Camps": It's Happening Here

"The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment [he] was born. " (Rev. 12:4b)*



Even before Dan Jessop's son was born, the State had already made a proprietary claim to him because of the supposed sins of his parents.


I say "sins" because as of yet, neither 24-year-old Dan Jessop, Sr., nor his 22-year-old wife Louisa, has been charged with a crime.


This didn't prevent the instrument of totalitarian malice called the Texas Department of Child Protective Services from trying to seize control over both the child and his mother as soon as delivery was accomplished.


The Jessops were granted a restraining order preventing the abduction of their child, but given the depraved resourcefulness of the CPS the Jessop family remains in danger.


With incorrigible dishonesty comes great tactical flexibility, particularly if the incorrigible party is permitted to ignore the rules, as is the case with the CPS.


Louisa is one of the "disputed minors" -- FLDS women who were originally described by the CPS as underage mothers, despite the insistence of church members and their legal counsel that they were married women of legal age. In many cases, according to FLDS spokesmen, the CPS refused to accept legal documentation establishing the age of the "minor" women in question. Of course, it was the CPS that created the "dispute" by refusing to accept the documents.


In some circumstances, the CPS told women they had to "admit" being minors in order to remain with their children. Now that at least some of those women have been able to prove, to the satisfaction of the CPS, that they are of legal age, will the agency claim that the earlier deception -- you know, the same one abetted by the CPS -- somehow illustrates that they aren't suited to be mothers?


Lest one think the CPS isn't capable of such double-jointed deceptiveness, we must remember the sworn testimony of CPS official Angie Voss, who justified the seizure of the children because the YFZ Ranch was such a "scary environment."


What made it so "scary"?


Well, according to Voss, "I heard a report that a tank was coming on the property.... It was a situation of a very huge magnitude with so many law enforcement officers around."


She insisted that removing the children from such an environment by force was necessary so that they could be "interviewed" in a setting that wasn't "so scary and dangerous."


Of course, It was the CPS and its allies in "law enforcement" that created the "scary and dangerous" environment that, Voss said, justified the removal of the children.


Soooo.... anytime the State decides to attack a religious community (and business of that kind seems to be picking up lately), the very willingness of the government to carry out such an attack proves that such a community is an unsuitable environment for children.


This is a bit like a robber saying that the existence of wealth justifies burglary -- but worse: Wealth once lost can be regained, but children are irreplaceable.


Joseph and Lori Jessop are another FLDS couple who sought an emergency injunction against the Texas CPS to protect their son, Joseph Jr. Both Joseph Sr., 27, and Lori, 25, are certified Emergency Medical Technicians. Although the practice of "plural marriage" is widely practiced in the schismatic Mormon sect to which they belong, the Jessops are monogamous. They have three children -- four-year-old Zina Glo, two-year-old Joseph Edson, and Joseph Steed Jr., who turns one year old on Thursday.


The CPS had made plain its intention to celebrate Junior's first birthday by kidnapping him. They have already laid their violent and criminal hands on the couple's other children and refuse to let the parents know where they have been sent. The infant has been imprisoned in a children's home in San Antonio; both parents have relocated there to be near their youngest child. All of their children suffered terribly in the squalid children's shelter in San Antonio, where they were held immediately after being taken from the YFZ Ranch.


All of their children are being held by CPS without a court order of any kind. The couple produced the proper documentation -- birth certificates and suchlike -- to CPS before their children were removed from the Ranch. This deterred the child thieves not one whit.


Former Nueces County district judge and trial lawyer Rene Haas is representing the parents in filing a writ of habeas corpus to end the unlawful detention of their children. Three other monogamous FLDS fathers -- James Dockstader, and Rulon and Leland Keate -- have filed a separate habeas corpus petition demanding that they be reunited with their kidnapped children.