DHS Too Busy Covering for the TSA To Bother With Ferguson*

Dan Johnson of PANDA kindly accepted my challenge to discover whether the Stasi-sorry, Department of Homeland Security is orchestrating events in Ferguson so as to invoke martial law. As you’ll recall, he’s on site there and so shares his impressions as an eyewitness–

As to your question on the DHS,… [h]ere’s why I think it’s incorrect:

#1: The Department of Homeland Security has not made a presence known here.

DHS is pretty much everywhere, and easy to spot. However, in Ferguson the only Federal agents I have seen were FBI agents (said so on their jackets). It has mostly been state and local police, and now the National Guard.

#2: It is highly unlikely that DHS is in control of the situation, because your source noted “DHS is running the Ferguson Police Department and that their actions are designed to antagonize and to provoke the locals to violence.”

However, the Ferguson Police Department is in no way in charge of the situation. In fact, I have not seen a Ferguson officer on the ground, and though I have seen a couple of cars, Ferguson officers are not showing up at protests.

In fact, Ferguson PD is so far down in the Command Structure they basically don’t count anymore. Here’s the command structure here:

Brig. General Greg Mason

Captain Ron Johnson

Chief Jon Belmar

Anyone else

That’s the National Guard, the State Highway Patrol, The St. Louis County Police, and then whoever else. It’s highly unlikely that the Ferguson PD have any say.

In light of these two facts, though it’s not impossible, it’s highly unlikely that DHS is controlling the situation. The locals are enforcing tyranny quite well all by themselves.

Indeed! That might quell a perennial debate in minarchist/libertarian circles: if we must have government, isn’t the local version, which is presumably smaller and more aware of and responsive to its subjects, preferable to a large, unwieldy national one with its distant, uncaring bureaucrats and politicians? (I hope I’m representing this argument fairly: it’s never made sense to me, so perhaps I’m missing some of its nuances. If so, I ask you minarchists and libertarians out there to forgive me.) Mr. Johnson’s observations indicate that local thugs are every bit as despotic as national ones.

Government at every level and of whatever size is the enemy of all mankind, white or black, young, old, rich or poor. Only by eradicating it will we ever live free and prosper.

*Perhaps this explains the DHS’s absence in Ferguson.

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9:50 am on August 22, 2014