The Green Scare Has Camped out on my Doorstep
While I've written about certain aspects of it before, sharing my own experience enables me to speak with some authority on the impending eradication of the First Amendment rights of Animal Rights activists, a circumstance that should alarm social justice activists of all stripes, whether they agree with our position on Animal Rights or not.
As I've waged two consecutive intense campaigns against nonhuman animal exploiters, one a county government (Johnson County, Kansas) hell-bent on slaughtering a herd of deer when economically viable nonlethal population management alternatives existed, and the other a public university (the University of Kansas Medical Center) bilking taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct barbaric, unnecessary experiments on primates, law enforcement and government officials have trampled my Constitutional rights in an effort to silence my allies and me, to intimidate us, and to prevent us from employing legal means to impede the torture and slaughter of innocents.
Our corporatist government has taken a keen interest in my activism, presumably because I write prolifically and am widely read; publish a well-known anti-capitalist, Animal Rights blog (Thomas Paine's Corner); am a press officer for NAALPO (an entity which acts as an aboveground media outlet for the underground in the AR Movement but has no connection with, nor means of identifying members of, the underground); have written that I philosophically support the ALF's destruction of the tools of exploitation and freeing of the oppressed; and because I have written that I philosophically support Jerry Vlasak's position that counter-violence from the Animal Rights Movement is probably inevitable and could be an effective tacticas no social justice movement has been successful without it.
Employing Cointelpro-like tactics, the J Edgar Hoover crowd has paid visits to numerous people in my life, including friends, co-workers, activist allies, an ex wife, ex girlfriends, my sixteen year old son, and my son's girlfriend's parents. They have branded me as a potential terrorist via an alert that comes up when law enforcement runs me in their system and, in that same alert, have informed law enforcement officers to USE CAUTION when dealing with me, a person with no history of violence or felony arrests.
While doing a home demonstration (which is a form of peaceful residential picketing that amounts to a public shaming of an animal exploiter by exposing their animal abuse to their neighbors) my allies and I were interrupted and shut down by three law enforcement officers, despite the fact that the city in which we were picketing had no ordinance against residential picketing and no requirement for a permit. Upon threat of arrest for challenging law enforcement's claim that we had to "leave Westwood," my ally and I elected to leave peaceably as the rest of our group had already left and the demonstration was clearly over. Litigation is on the horizon.
While distributing fliers on the University of Kansas Medical Center's campus (they are the perpetrators of primate torture and the ones who were cited by the USDA for the violation of 160 animal welfare laws) one evening, I was stopped, searched and detained by four uniformed campus police officers for twenty minutes and issued a criminal trespass warning, meaning that if I set foot on KU Med's campus again, I can be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor carrying a potentially healthy fine and/or jail time. Admittedly, the fliers were provocative, but they were a form of expression protected by the First Amendment.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
