How Liz Cheney and P’nut became the bizarre closing symbols of the 2024 election — freedom vs. authoritarianism

P’nut the squirrel and Liz Cheney are two bizarre closing symbols of this election campaign. If we read the tea leaves, we can see how they represent what’s really at stake on Tuesday: freedom versus authoritarianism — only it’s the reverse of what Kamala Harris has been saying. Hint: it’s her political compatriots who killed the squirrel.

The brutal seizure and euthanasia of a pet squirrel by New York state officials, and the embrace by Harris of the turncoat Republican daughter of the architect of the Iraq war are really two sides of the same coin: the authoritarian nature of the modern Democratic Party and its Deep State allies.

First to P’nut. The cute pet squirrel was orphaned when his mother was hit by a car seven years ago and adopted by an upstate New Yorker, engineer Mark Longo.

Last week, P’Nut and his friend, Fred the racoon, were seized by officers of the departments of Environmental Conservation and Health who raided Longo’s home in rural Pine City, and searched it for five hours. 

The animals were taken away and euthanized. According to a statement from the DEC, they were acting on complaints about “the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets.”

Longo, 34, complained on a TMZ video that has gone viral: “Ten to 12 DEC officers raised my house as if I was a drug dealer.

“Four departments and a judge signed off on a search warrant for a squirrel and a raccoon,” he said, as his wife quietly wept behind him.

P’Nut “became the world’s most famous squirrel . . . He became the first squirrel on TikTok to ever hit a million followers,” Longo said.

P’Nut canary in coal mine

The seizure and killing of P’nut and Fred by jackbooted bureaucrats was Big Government overkill reminiscent of the FBI’s armed raids on Trump supporters and pro-life Christians — an undercurrent of this campaign. While murderers and rapists are set free to roam the country, the full might and power of the government will come down like a hammer on good citizens and their innocent pets.

It’s that tyrannical echo that propelled the late P’Nut to become a viral sensation online, and instant emblem of the Trump campaign over the weekend, with Elon Musk, Don Trump Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. all weighing in on his plight, amongst a flurry of memes. There was even a song portraying the squirrel as a MAGA martyr, and Trump as a modern-day St. Francis of Assisi, surrounded by cute squirrels along with the cats and dogs who have been allegedly eaten by illegal migrants.

“Government overreach kidnapped an orphan squirrel and executed him,” Musk posted on his site X.

Trump supporters recognize the sad death of P’nut as a harbinger of authoritarian rule they fear will escalate in a future Harris-Walz administration, with increased weaponization of the national security agencies, lawfare and arrest of political dissenters.

As a far-left radical pretending to be a moderate, Harris’ past pronouncements belie her intentions, such as the 2007 video when she was San Francisco district attorney and declared: “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see that you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.”

Left’s favorite Cheney

Then there is the strange elevation to sainthood by Democrats of Trump-deranged war hawk Liz Cheney, once the highest ranking Republican woman in Congress, and the daughter of Dick Cheney, the vice president once loathed by Democrats as the warmonger hellbent on regime change in Iraq. 

For days, the Harris campaign and their media toadies have excoriated Donald Trump for daring to point out that Cheney, now a Harris surrogate, was a “radical war hawk” like her father, eager to send other Americans to war. 

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” Trump said last week in an interview. “Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face. They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies.’ ”

It’s a sentiment that used to be standard liberal rhetoric for years, as former Democrat Glenn Greenwald pointed out, “until neocons became their foreign policy gurus.” 

As The New York Times pointed out on the weekend, Democrats now have a vastly more favorable opinion of the CIA and the FBI and other security institutions than do Republicans, with a 62-point favorability gap for the FBI, for instance — a reversal from past years, before the agencies were politicized.

The transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of war and Cheneys was solidified at the DNC convention when Harris was installed by the political machine without receiving a single vote and thundered about a “lethal military.”

It was no accident that center stage at the convention was former CIA Director Leon Panetta, leading light of the CIA’s “Dirty 51” election interference operation of October 2020, when then-CIA Director Gina Haspel cleared for publication the letter signed by Panetta and 50 fellow former spooks falsely claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

That our intelligence services have been politicized in such a way should frighten every American. What might help Democrats today can easily turn against them tomorrow. 

‘The Blob’

The politicization of the CIA into a partisan Democrat weapon is chronicled in a new book, “Diversity Dysfunction,” by former CIA official John Gentry. His thesis is that the DEI — Diversity Equity and Inclusion — policies of the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris administrations were the Trojan horse that propelled the “overt politicization of the intelligence community especially the CIA, in 2016 and thereafter in opposition to [Trump].”

The same cabal from the CIA, FBI, State Department, Pentagon and DOJ who protected Joe Biden and his family from the consequences of their corruption to ensure Trump did not win re-election are now propping up Harris. 

They want a puppet who will carry out their malign foreign policy agenda, not an uncontrollable president like Trump who approached problems with common sense, who had Iran broke and on its knees, unable to find proxies to attack Israel; who had Vladimir Putin in a box, not invading his neighbors like he did under Biden and Obama; who tamed Kim Jong-un; who laid down the groundwork for peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords; who vanquished ISIS; and who started no wars. 

To this Deep State cabal, what Obama advisers called the “Blob,” Trump is an existential threat — not to democracy, as they pretend, but to their power and control of the presidency.

Freedom from these puppeteers is what is at stake Tuesday, as Trump and his supporters understand only too well.