November 3, 2024 - 7:30pm
The modern American bureaucratic state revealed itself in all its absurd glory last week, not through some grand policy initiative or sweeping regulation, but through the tale of a squirrel known as “P’Nut.” In an era of endless crises — migrant surges, shrinking police forces, rising urban crime, housing shortages — New York state marshalled its considerable resources toward a singular mission: dispatching 10 agents to conduct an extensive raid targeting a rescue animal with a social media following.
The resulting spectacle would be comedic if it weren’t so emblematic of institutional decay. Here was a state agency deploying a small army of officials to spend five hours searching a private residence, right down to the plumbing fixtures, all to seize a seven-year-old squirrel living peacefully in upstate New York. The agents even found time to interrogate the immigration status of the owner’s German wife, while preventing the care of other rescue animals on the property.
The deeper story here isn’t about P’nut, who was euthanised after allegedly biting an officer wearing protective gear. It’s about how a single complaint could activate such a disproportionate display of state power. That someone would weaponise state power against a rescue animal reveals how easily regulatory systems can be manipulated for personal vendettas.
A Connecticut native who moved to Pine City to establish an animal sanctuary, Mark Longo funded his rescue work through his pornographic “SquirrelDaddy” OnlyFans account while building a following of millions around his rehabilitated squirrel. When P’nut’s mother was killed by a car seven years ago, Longo took in the orphaned kit, eventually discovering the animal lacked survival instincts for release. Rather than abandoning the creature, he provided a home and — amid his pornographic exploits — inadvertently created a social media star.
The incident has produced some strange political bedfellows. Elon Musk’s social media platform erupted with tributes while MAGA activists declared only Trump could prevent future squirrel seizures. Meanwhile, Democratic California Congressman Ro Khanna and Republican New York State Senator Thomas O’Mara found themselves unlikely allies in condemning the raid. “On its face, this was an absurd abuse of government power to issue a search warrant, enter this man’s home, ask about his wife’s immigration status, and kill their squirrel pet of 7 years,” Khanna posted on X. O’Mara was even more pointed: “Everything else our government looks the other way on as far as illegal immigrants but then come down on someone harboring a squirrel.”
The bureaucratic gymnastics are dizzying. The Department of Environmental Conservation claims they acted on complaints about a raccoon named Fred, yet Longo contends this was merely a pretext to seize P’nut. Adding insult to injury, authorities didn’t even directly inform Longo of P’nut’s death — he learned about it through local media reports.
P’nut’s tale resonates because it lays bare the machinery of state power in its most unvarnished form. When government agencies expend more energy hunting social media squirrels than addressing systemic societal issues that lead to completely senseless murders like that of New York homeless activist Ryan Carson, they expose the hollowness at the heart of modern bureaucracy. That a single complaint could trigger such an overwhelming response suggests a system operating on autopilot, disconnected from any meaningful sense of proportion or public good.
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