One of the most important ideas in the Bill of Rights is that your private property belongs to you.
It wasn’t exactly a novel concept, but just in case there was any doubt, the Bill of Rights spelled it out: No one can seize your property without due process. And if you take a look at the major court cases in this area over the years, you’ll find that you have the strongest privacy interests in your home, which makes sense. There are all kinds of exceptions that police can use to search your car, or your locker at work, for example. But for your home, there aren’t many exceptions. Your home is your castle, as the saying goes. That’s been true since the common law was created.
But it’s not true anymore. It’s not even remotely true, in fact.
It turns out that, when you flood the United States with a limitless supply of illegal migrants, while at the same time shipping millions of jobs overseas, then housing becomes a very scarce commodity. Squatters, mostly out of desperation, pop up in every home they can find — even homes that haven’t been abandoned. And then, when homeowners try to enforce their rights, and kick these criminals out of the property they paid for, they’re finding out that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution has effectively been suspended.
As we discussed briefly yesterday, squatters — home invaders — now have more rights than homeowners. The government will assist them in seizing your property. The police, universally, will take the side of the criminal home invader, and kick the homeowner to the curb. Then, nonprofits and law firms rush in to represent the squatter in legal proceedings, should they become necessary. And then, somehow, courts will often still rule in favor of the squatter.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
We don’t have to speculate about any of this. It’s all well-documented at this point. No reasonable person can dispute it. I’ll start with an example that’s gotten a lot of attention recently.
Watch as a 47-year-old woman in Queens, New York, is dragged away from her own home — in handcuffs — because someone claims to have a lease for her property. This guy can’t show the lease to anyone, including the police and the media. But because he claims he’s been living there for around a month, they arrest the woman:
“Unlawful eviction” is what they call it when you call the police because there’s a home invader in your home. That’s what you get if you’re not willing to wait two years (or more) for New York’s completely overloaded housing court to review your case. And by the way, even once New York’s housing court does review the case, there’s no guarantee they’ll side with the homeowner. This is a city that has outlawed the right of self-defense, after all. Once that’s gone, good luck getting them to enforce any of your other rights.
This is the norm in Left-wing jurisdictions now. It’s not just that the police don’t care about squatters with zero documentation whatsoever. It’s also the fact that the courts don’t enforce the law, even when you bring flagrant crimes like this to their attention. In Washington state, a judge just granted a restraining order against a landlord whose tenant hasn’t been paying rent for years. The landlord organized a protest to bring attention to the situation, and the judge shut it down. This is a tenant who’s apparently purchased two cars while refusing to pay rent. And in Washington state, the courts side with him.
But this is not just a problem in New York City and Washington State. It’s happening all over the United States.
Consider this recent episode in Atlanta, for example. This is from just four months ago. A woman listed her home for sale — not for rent. Then complete strangers moved in and changed the locks. In response, the police did absolutely nothing. Watch:
It’s beyond parody. So the police do eventually show up. But it’s not to evict the home invaders who are stealing this home. It’s because they have their own “parallel investigation” for some other crimes that one of the squatters — a sex offender — committed in the past. So the cops take one man away in custody. But they allow the other squatter to stay on the property. The cops say the homeowner can ask for her to leave, but “it might not pan out.” That’s what law enforcement means now. You can ask people to stop breaking the law, but it might not pan out.
It needs to be said that these are not close cases. It’s true that, if it’s a confusing situation — say, a tenant appears to have legitimate lease documentation — then it’s probably best that the cops don’t arrest the tenant. But these are not difficult situations like that. When sex offenders start living in your house, without any valid documentation, the police should remove them. There shouldn’t be any question about it.
But apparently that isn’t happening anywhere. A similar scene played out seven months ago in Chicago. This time, a homeowner tries to rent out the property, and squatters show up. But once again, the police don’t do anything:
I could spend all day, going from city to city, showing you footage like this. There’s footage from rural jurisdictions as well that I could show you. It’s happening all over. These kinds of home invasions are so common that one handyman has opened up a business advising homeowners how to regain access to their own homes, when squatters show up. Basically the idea is that you need to generate your own lease, so that you can show it to the police officers, who are now trained to respect your squatter’s rights over your rights in your own home. Watch:
It’s hard to think of a more humiliating exercise than this. You own a property, and to access it, and to get the police to enforce the law, you need to draw up some fake lease for them. And this idea actually works, by the way. We know that because several years ago, the journalist Charlie LeDuff tried it in Michigan. He out-squatted the squatters. Watch:
“Are you stealing power?” Charlie asks. “I’m blessed,” responds the squatter. At least the woman has a sense of humor.
What’s funny is that, in this situation, unlike all the other ones, the police actually do take the original squatter to jail. This is the only time they’ll take action to protect your property. You have to hire a new squatter to kick out the old one. I guess the idea is that the most recent squatter gets dibbs.
This is a mockery of the idea of private property rights, obviously, and there’s a reason it’s happening. It’s the same reason you see so much mockery of religion. It’s the same reason BLM goes after the family unit. It’s why the corporate media pushes transgenderism. Private property rights — like religion and the family unit — is a bulwark against total state control of our lives. As long as we have private property, the state can’t control us — at least not as easily.
Without private property, we’re just renters. And renters can be evicted at will. You’ll own nothing and be happy.
The Biden administration has done everything it can to normalize the destruction of private property rights. The administration fought to extend the COVID-era eviction moratorium as long as they could — long past the time that there was any plausible argument that ending evictions would somehow “stop the spread.” That led, effectively, to the nationalization of private property in this country. Landlords lost the right to evict squatters paying no rent, even when they owned the property outright. Watch:
The anchor says it’s a “loophole.” But it’s the opposite of a loophole, the policy was working as intended. The eviction moratorium had nothing to do with a virus. It was intended to do something that’s never happened in this country since the Civil War, which is the wide-scale suspension of private property rights.
Once you pull off something as unconstitutional as seizing people’s homes in a time of “emergency” (as the Biden administration defined it), then it becomes much easier to seize people’s homes at any point in the future. And that’s what we’re seeing now.
That means more homes for the millions of illegal aliens who are entering this country.
It means more humiliation and destruction for American citizens.
And it means we’re getting closer to some homeowner somewhere snapping and deciding to take back his property, by force. At this point, you have to imagine that’s exactly what the people running this country want to happen.