The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  At the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said she wanted to “thank the President for enabling us to gather here,” and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to the Administration for “allowing us to be here.”

  Is this for real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable with these days. But then in actual monarchies the king takes a more generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217, King Henry III signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna Carta was a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his predecessors, Henry III opened the royal forests to the freemen of England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the King’s venison. The NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but they are putting you under house arrest for taking a photograph of it. It is somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more freedom on the sovereign’s land in the thirteenth century than a freeborn American does on “the people’s land” in the twenty-first century.

  And we’re talking about a lot more acreage: Forty percent of California is supposedly federal land, and thus two-fifths of the state is now officially closed to the people of the state. The geyser stasi of the National Park Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The Government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

  I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The Government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.

  The National Park Service should be out of the business of urban landmarks, and the vast majority of our “national” parks should be returned to the states. And, after the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty this month, the next President might usefully propose a new Charter of the Forest.

  NINJAS VS. TURTLES

  These days I write often about what the militia guy below calls “the militarization of the police,” and what I usually refer to as “the paramilitarization of the bureaucracy.” Because in America everybody’s the police: Every rinky-dink pen-pusher at the Department of Paperwork can execute a warrant, and dispatch his agency’s personal Delta Force—from the IRS to the Department of Agriculture.

  If I sound a little naïve in the piece below, it’s because a lot of this stuff—the whole money-no-object flood-the-zone approach of U.S. policing—was still new to me, as it was to many Americans back then. These days, the three-in-the-morning knock from what I’ve come to call “the full Robocop” is a far more routine feature of American life.

  The Spectator, September 1, 1995

  “AT ONE TIME,” says Scott Stevens of the White Mountain Militia, “these federal agents couldn’t act without the consent of the states. Now they go where they like—like in Communist Russia: they take a Ukrainian guy and send him to keep an eye on people in Moldavia.”

  Hmm.

  To America’s mainstream media, the scrawny, mustachioed Stevens is a paranoid whacko talking through his hat, which in a sense he is, as his hat is proudly emblazoned “Live free or die with the White Mountain Militia.” “What we’re seeing,” he insists, “is the militarization of the police.” We’re in a diner, and Stevens’s voice carries, and I’m faintly embarrassed. But the waitress shoveling us hot cakes and sausage and muffins and coffee refills nods her head in agreement with practically everything he says.

  It’s not just Scott Stevens and the White Mountain Militia who talk like this. Groups from the National Rifle Association to the Northwest Imperative “white flight” movement routinely issue warnings about federal agents out of control—or “jackbooted government thugs,” to quote the NRA press release which prompted former president George H. W. Bush to resign his membership. To the gun kooks, “Waco” and “Ruby Ridge” are names that resonate as deeply as “Stonewall” and “Kent State” do to gays and hippies. In my neck of the woods, where the only federal agent in town is the postmistress, Waco and Ruby Ridge seemed even less relevant to our lives than the O. J. trial. Waco, you’ll remember, was the Branch Davidian loony commune who got fried two years ago; Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, is the other “controversial” federal raid, in which Randy Weaver’s young son and wife wound up dead, the latter shot in the back of the head by an FBI sniper as she was cradling her baby. The first of these targets was a southern religious cult, the second was a western survivalist one, and the members of both were blithely dismissed as the sort of obvious fruitcakes bound to end up blinking at the world through the other end of a fed’s gun sights.

  But it’s a funny thing: however wacky the militia sound, these days whenever you meet someone who’s been through a federal raid, it’s the feds who come over as the fruitcakes.

  Take Will Hunter. He’s a former Vermont state legislator, Harvard Law graduate, and lunch companion of Peregrine Worsthorne.1 That last bit, which admittedly his recent profile in The Valley News neglected to dwell on, came about when Hunter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and rented digs from the Conservative MP Sir Philip Goodhart. Under the onerous tax regime prevailing in Britain in the late Seventies, Sir Philip found it more advantageous to collect his monthly rent in whisky, and, in return, Hunter and his roommates were occasionally invited up to the main house for lunch with his visiting grandees.

  After Oxford, Hunter could have had his pick of America’s big city law firms. Instead, he returned to Vermont and became a country lawyer, defending those sad, straggle-bearded losers with rusting pick-ups who live anonymous lives in tar-paper shacks on the edge of White River Junction—until they’re picked up on sex abuse or dope charges. For a hotshot attorney willingly to choose those clients over O. J. or Exxon probably does look suspicious when fed into a government computer, even before you throw in associations with dangerous subversives like Peregrine Worsthorne.

  Even so, the events of Friday, June 9, came as a surprise. At three o’clock a.m. on a sleepy back road in the Black River valley, the Hunters were woken by a pounding on the door and the entrance of seven agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration in bullet-proof vests. The next day, Vermonters heard from DEA man James Bradley that Hunter had been fingered for laundering drug proceeds: “It is clear from the testimony of a cooperating informant that Sargent and Hunter had worked together to launder Sargent’s money.” No “allegedlys” there, no “helping police with their inquiries,”2 no presumption of innocence. Just “It is clear.”

  In Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects or the livelier quartiers of south Florida, drug raids are the urban equivalent of chirrupin
g cicadas, part of the soothing lullaby of the night. But Vermont is the second most crime-free state in the Union, and the village of Cavendish is sleepy by Vermont standards. (Its only notable resident hitherto was one Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who selected the township for his western exile but last year announced at Town Meeting that he’s heading home to post-Soviet Russia.) To Vermonters, the Hunter raid was unprecedented. Disappointingly for the DEA, which seized hundreds of files and four computers (including those of Vermont Law Week, which Hunter publishes from his basement), no one else seems to think he’s laundering anything.

  The line taken by the crusty old Yankee at the store is that Hunter can’t even launder his pants, which, unlike the DEA statement, has the merit of being a proved fact. His clothes come from the annual Weathersfield rummage sale, and he greets me at the door without shoes—the first barefoot lawyer I’ve ever met.

  My initial reaction is to say, “Wow! The feds really tore the place apart,” but on closer inspection, it turns out that most of the debris in his cheerfully disheveled home-cum-office is the kids’ toys, the pet turtles, and the other detritus from the Hunters’ unlaundered life: the neighbors deeded them an adjoining ten-foot strip of land, but on condition they keep that side of the lot clear of junk. Hunter makes twenty thousand dollars a year and, taking a leaf out of Sir Philip’s book, will accept payment in cheese and maple syrup—and in one case a tie-dyed cummerbund, which he wore at his wedding.

  It’s the clash of cultures you’re struck by: the DEA men shone flashlights on Hunter’s kids and in-laws, and demanded to know where he kept his weapons; his wife, April, was more preoccupied in getting the feds to keep the basement door shut so that the cats wouldn’t get out and savage the chicks in her daughter’s bedroom. “I suppose, if you’re a DEA agent, Vermont isn’t the most exciting posting,” she says sympathetically, showing me, as she showed her nocturnal interrogators, the turtles in the bathtub. Happily, in defiance of the prevailing trend when federal agents come a-callin’, in this instance they left behind no dead women or children, or even turtles.

  What impressed the locals was, as at Waco and Ruby Ridge, the sheer lavishness of the operation: Branch Davidians, Rocky Mountain white separatists, eccentric Vermont lawyers—they may all be nuts, but you marvel at the number of sledgehammers federal law enforcement can muster to crack them. In this neighborhood, public service is local and voluntary. Across the border in New Hampshire, my town can afford one cop whose accounts are scrupulously mailed to every resident:

  Item 4: Cruiser Usage

  Miles driven: 9,881

  Gasoline consumption: 761.5

  Average miles per gallon: 13.5.

  In towns like Cavendish, the fire department consists of volunteers. The townsfolk of a neighboring municipality turned out in force this month to erect—like an old-fashioned barn-raising—a new fire station. Yet the federal government apparently can afford to pay a fully-armed DEA team, accompanied by a U.S. attorney and two customs officers, presumably all on overtime, to swoop down in the middle of the night on a small-town lawyer. Let’s assume Hunter’s guilty: you can guarantee that the money he’s laundered will be significantly smaller than the cost of the raid.

  That’s the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration in a nutshell: in the two decades since President Nixon declared the “war on drugs,” the DEA have been given more and more money, more and more resources and more and more powers—and the net result is that we have more and more drugs, and more and more drugs-related crime. By any standards, the DEA must be considered the most spectacular failure—yet they’re less accountable than my town’s one-man police department.

  “I didn’t even know there were Vermont DEA agents before this happened,” says Hunter. “They’re not part of the community, they’re like flotsam on the pond, unconnected to anything. Who’s this guy Bradley who slammed me in the papers? Who does he answer to? If it were some local cop, you could call up the chief and say, ‘Hey, this guy’s totally off base.’ I don’t know who to call about this. . . .”

  It’s true, the DEA isn’t listed in Hunter’s book. I try Vermont directory assistance and get some Justice Department automated touch-tone “press four if you want to visit Canada” junk. Then I try again.

  “Bradley,” answers Bradley. Good grief. James Bradley, DEA agent-in-charge for Vermont and a mere hundred miles upstate from Cavendish. It’s that easy. And, after an obligatory “no comment,” he proceeds to comment away merrily.

  So why, I ask, didn’t the DEA go round at nine a.m. instead of three in the morning? Make it less of a “raid,” more of an “appointment”?

  “That’s not the way we do things,” he says.

  So the DEA doesn’t distinguish between raiding coke barons in Miami and a family home in rural Vermont? It’s all the same—bullet-proof vests and all?

  “Mark, it was perfectly proper,” sighs Agent Bradley.

  Even the vests?

  “They wore those uniforms because they were on their way from another raid.”

  I ask him why, almost two months after she wrote, Hunter’s wife has had no reply to her letter to Janet Reno, head of the Justice Department.

  “If someone in England wrote to the Queen,” says Agent Bradley, “would they get a reply?”

  Well, from a secretary, an acknowledgement or something. . . .

  “Mark, she sent it to Janet Reno, Senator Leahy, Congressman Sanders, the head of the DEA, the head of U.S. Customs, she sent it to everyone in the world. Do you take a person like that seriously?” The letter is lying on his desk and he starts to quote from it.

  But wait a minute: The Justice Department’s official position, as stated on CBS Television, is that they never received any letter. . . .

  Over the telephone, Agent Bradley is charming and a lot chattier than his British equivalent would be. But you can hear in his answers the assumption that Mrs. Hunter, who’s the local representative on the state environmental commission, is some kinda flake. Even if she were, would that justify not answering her letter? I’m struck by how government officials seem to take pleasure in smearing ancillary targets of their attention. Chit-chatting with the Hunters, I mention federal claims that the Waco cult was a hotbed of sex ’n’ substance abuse. The day after the conflagration, President Clinton commented gravely that all Americans would be “shocked by the depravity of what was going on in that compound.”

  “Yeah, right,” says Mrs. Hunter scornfully. “There’s children being abused in there, so let’s go in and put a stop to it by killing them.”

  “If they whack someone, they’re going to cover themselves by smearing the guys they’ve whacked,” says Scott Stevens back in the militia booth at the diner. When discussing Waco, he eschews the word “compound” and prefers “homestead,” which, in truth, whenever you see it burning on television, is what it looks like. “With Randy Weaver, they were bugging him for days, trying to get him to sell them a sawn-off shotgun. So eventually he did. Then, when they said they were ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents], he said it was entrapment. That’s why he wouldn’t appear in court. So they besiege his property, and this one agent, Lon Horiuchi, ‘accidentally’ kills the guy’s wife with a specially outfitted sniper rifle at only two hundred yards.” Stevens laughs. “You ever shot anyone accidentally with such a sophisticated outfit?”

  “Well, no,” I laugh back, trying to approximate the chortle of someone who only shoots people at two hundred yards deliberately. But I get his drift.

  “These people in Drug Enforcement and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,” says Will Hunter, “wrap the shroud of national security around them. There isn’t any Communist threat anymore, so it’s not the military and the CIA, but the feds are the Nineties equivalents: they have this mission that they’re on, and they think they can do whatever they want.”

  Leaving his house, I take a deep gulp of cool Vermont air and savor the still of the rural night. In the next valley, no doubt, one of t
hose hippie draft-dodgers who scrammed to Vermont back in the Sixties is lighting up a joint. I dislike drugs and regard them as one of the most pitiful features of contemporary existence. But, if I had to choose, I’d say that the corrosive, corrupting force here is national policing waging its “war.” Intentionally or not, it reduces everything to the worst-case scenario, so that, for a few hours one Friday morning, it policed small-town Vermont as if it were drug-infested Miami. “Reds under the beds” was supposedly McCarthyite paranoia. But feds under the beds? They’re there.

  Three years after the above piece, Will Hunter pleaded “guilty” to one count of “mail fraud,” which, like “wire fraud,” is one of the boundlessly metastasizing catch-alls of federal justice intended to let Washington prosecute anything it wants: “Mail fraud” means we lack jurisdiction to prosecute the actual crime, so we’ll get you on the covering letter. That “one count” is characteristic, too: One of the most disreputable features of federal justice is the way they bulk up the counts in order to lessen the likelihood of acquittal and therefore lean on you to settle. As The Boston Globe put it in 2013:

  By stacking charges as high as possible and wielding the threat of mandatory sentencing laws, the argument goes, prosecutors intimidate defendants and make it all but impossible to turn down their offers.