It's Suddenly OK To Ask If The 2020 Election Was Stolen

From Robert Spencer at PJ Media:

As of this writing on Friday, Donald Trump’s popular vote total stood at 74,269,316. By the time you see this article and click on that link, however, that total is certain to be higher. Trump’s final popular vote total has now exceeded his official 2020 total of 74,225,926. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has 68,800,347 popular votes, a steep decline from Old Joe Biden’s 2020 total of 81,286,454.

He cites a piece by Victoria Taft, who asks, Did God Rapture Some 15 Million Democrat Voters? If Not, Where'd They Go?

Before the election I wondered if this would happen. After universal mail-out ballots had been curbed in some places for the 2024 election, and despite same-day registration and voting and even outlawing voter ID in California, would America have the same numbers of voters as 2020? Would they show back up?

At this point, it looks as if there could be a significant reduction in Democrat voters from 2020 to 2024.

On Wednesday, the AP fact checkers were on the case:

CLAIM: President Joe Biden won approximately 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris earned in the 2024 race, proving either that Trump has cheated his way to a second term or that there was widespread fraud four years ago.

THE FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison with previous races would not be accurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote have reported no significant issues with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been debunked countless times.

Buit as of Friday afternoon, NBC News's popular vote totals were Trump 73,517,201, Harris 69,204,767, only slightly higher than the numbers Spencer cites. It's highly unlikely that another 11 to 15 million votes will suddenly turn up to match the 2020 figures, but the idea that they might is the whole basis for the fact checkers' argument.

On October 5, I first linked to a report of now Vice President-elect Vance's exchange with comedian Jason Selvig on this subject:

“Who won the 2020 election? Could you just answer? Did Donald Trump win?” Selvig asked.

“Yes,” Vance replied.

After asking Vance to confirm that he was saying Trump won in 2020, Vance replied “Yep.”

As I posted then, Vance has been widening the Overton window to make questions about the 2020 election respectable. But those who now question the legitimacy of the 2024 election are using the disparity to suggest Trump is the one who cheated this year -- all of a sudden, that's beginning to make skepticism about 2020 OK as well. YouTube legal commentator Robert Gouveia discusses this development here:

At 8:40, for instance, he discusses the totals of registered voters who actually voted in Milwaukee precincts in the 2020 election and finds that they remarkably reported totals verging on 100%, and in a few cases exceeding 100%. Robert Spencer at the link above continues,

That Trump would have gotten roughly the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020 is perfectly reasonable. He is, thanks to the left’s relentless campaign of defamation, a highly controversial figure, and while the 2024 campaign certainly changed some people’s minds about him, it is no surprise that his base of support remained roughly the same size that it was the last time around.

But what about that massive drop-off between Old Joe, the most popular president in American history according to his vote total, and Kamala? Not only did eleven million voters not show up for Harris as they did for Biden, but they didn’t go anywhere. Not only did Kamala not get those votes, but there is no comparable increase in anyone else’s vote total.

. . . For four years, it has been impossible even to ask questions about the 2020 election. Those who dared even to suggest that it may not actually have been the most secure election in history have been defamed as conspiracy theorists and deplatformed and silenced accordingly.

The big difference now is that with Trump allies poised to come into the Justice Department, we'll begin to get much more clarity. On Wednesday, my theory was that Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz weren't just bad candidates or surrogates, they were all outright annoying, which caused even Democrats to stay home. But that was before people began to raise this new issue of an overall disparity in vote totals betwen 2020 and 2024. Kamala's phony nasal weepiness alone can't explain around 10 million missing voters.

Trump Isn't Messing Around

Via hte New York Post:

Mayor Eric Adams is ending his administration’s controversial program supplying migrants in city shelters with prepaid debit cards to pay for groceries.

The pilot program distributed the preloaded Mastercards to asylum seekers at hotels-turned-shelters, with a family of four receiving about $350 a week to cover the cost of groceries and baby supplies.

The city hired New Jersey-based tech startup Mobility Capital Finance in a $53 million, one-year “emergency” contract that drew backlash when the city failed to conduct a typical bidding process before picking the company.

But with the one year up shortly, the Adams administration decided against renewing the contract, ABC7 reported.

Accxording to this post on X, Adams's decision "reportedly" came after a phone call with Trump yesterday.

NEW: Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams announces that NYC will no longer be issuing vouchers to illegal immigrants.

Remarkable. Trump gets elected and everyone falls in line.

The decision came one day after Adams reportedly had a phone call with Trump.

"As we move… pic.twitter.com/gI8HyJiqdg

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024

It sounds as though the New York program is at least a first cousin to the programs in Sprinmgfield, OH; Charleroi, PA; Aurora, CO; El Paso, TX; and elsewhere, whereby federal funds authorized by "emergency", "temporary" or "experimental" programs are routed through NGOs to for-profit companies and various other third parties that benefit from the illegals. All that's needed is to cut a single link in the chain for the whole scheme to fall apart.It sounds like Trump's people knmow what's going on, and we'll see more of this even before Trump resumes office.

According to Politico, federal employees are anticipating similar moves:

Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration.

Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make it easier to fire federal employees — a move that was quickly reversed by the Biden administration.

In fact, this is item 1 on Trump's plan to dismantle the deep state:

Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Deep State.

1. “Immediately reissue my 2020 executive order, restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.”

2. “Clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”

3. “Totally reform… pic.twitter.com/Xhg297uWCe

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024

This applies especially to the FBI:

The Washington Times learned through several anonymous bureau sources that senior executives who run the agency were “stunned” and “shell-shocked” by Mr. Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“You know the fit test? How they let the standards slack on the fit test?” the first FBI source said, referring to the agency’s physical fitness requirements. “Everyone’s going to have a real problem when they’re running for the door.”

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate have little chance of remaining at the bureau by the time Mr. Trump is sworn into office, sources say.

. . . Others on the 7th floor of the FBI are so concerned about their own jobs that they are likely to flood the Washington, D.C., private security job market, sources say.

According to most of the sources, no one in the FBI at a GS-14 level or higher is safe from losing their job after Mr. Trump is sworn in, and they fully expect the president-elect to “smash the place to pieces when he gets in,” and that it will be a “bloodbath.”

Former FBI whistleblower George Hill told The Washington Times that people in the agency say the current state of the FBI is “frazzled.”

“I have friends still at the Bureau telling me that no less than 50 Senior Executives (SES) are scrambling to retire ASAP,” he said.

A few commentators have also raised statements Mitt Romney raised during the 2012 election cycle about "self deportation":

The term “self-deportation” has found its way into the GOP presidential primary race, with candidate Mitt Romney outlining a vague immigration platform which includes "self-deportation," or the idea that unauthorized immigrants will voluntarily choose to leave the U.S. if life here is made unbearable enough.

What I think we're beginning to see is a scramble in a number of quarters to get out of Trump's way even before he's inaugurated, in other words, a self-execution of Trump's promises either out of fear or a desire to stay on his good side.

Following The Money

I've begun to see some productive insights into the election results, and I'll probably be bringing more of these up in coming days. But I continue to be influenced by Ferdinand Lundberg (1902-1995), best known for his 1969 book, The Rich and the Super-Rich. I think he was a proto-Trumpian populist whose view was that American politics, media, and popular culture, at least in the 20th century, were dominated by the behind-the-scenes interlocking interests of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes.

So let's look at the election through a Lundbergian lens. The first thing to note is that the billionaires didn't operate behind the scenes in this election. Trump himself is one of them, after all. George Soros had Tim Walz to dinner at his condo; Mark Cuban was a Harris surrogate. Bobby Kennedy Jr joined the Trump campaign. Most notably, Elon Musk donated heavily to the Trump campaign and became a highly visible surrogate. Other, lower-profile Silicon Valley types were heavy donors to both campaigns.

The best insights so far into how the money moved, and why, over the campaign is at Conservative Treehouse.

You will remember last year when I dug deep into the financial system around Twitter, Elon Musk’s purchase, and the viability of the business model. In short, by the time he reached October/November ’23 there was going to be no way for Musk to continue operating Twitter without some serious change in financial construct.

So, what happened?

Larry Ellison happened.

In a little-known background conversation that President Trump is well aware of, Oracle founder Larry Ellison said, “I will not allow Musk to fall.” Thus, an immediate and opportune alignment began that shows the strategic thinking of billionaire Larry Ellison.

Ellison gains around $50 billion per year from his operations. Oracle is huge. The X-platform subsequently began big contracts with Oracle. Twitter’s fate is now intrinsically linked to Ellison. Nuf said.

. . . As a direct consequence of Musk’s position, Larry Ellison -by extension Oracle- is now easily positioned to be the biggest beneficiary of a Trump win. Ellison is the biggest influence operation; but as all influence and leverage operations go, he’s also the quietest influence.

Larry Ellison (Oracle) is the hand on the Elon Musk Marionette. All Musk moves are with this background alignment as the underpinning.

But another insight here is into Jeff Bezos's intervention with the Washington Post's editorial policy, reversing its tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, which amounted to a tacit endorsement of Trump in 2024. Why did Bezos do this? Well, if Larry Ellison is the puppet master pulling Elon Musk's strings, which in effect then control Trump, then

the biggest loser was set to be Larry Ellison’s billionaire competitor, Jeff Bezos (Amazon).

Jeff Bezos needs to position himself to avoid being totally shut out from White House influence ability. The non-endorsement was the first move. The shift in ideological alignment within the Washington Post . . . is the second move. Bezos is mitigating and strategizing risk. That’s what is going on.

These are not media outlets in your traditional frame of reference. These are influence operations aligned with the interests of the billionaires behind them. It’s a game of thrones thing. Each interest has their own advocacy group. That’s what you would call “modern media”. Bezos has the Washington Post, Ellison positioned himself with Twitter; the intent is the same.

The biggest winners from the Trump victory will be Larry Ellison (Oracle), his super influence operator Elon Musk, and their smaller -albeit ideologically similar- friend, Peter Thiel (Palantir).

This is the inside baseball stuff that circles the President Trump campaign orbit in very close proximity. This is the command-and-control influence operation that determines outcomes. When Trump wins, these interests are positioned for strongest influence.

If you want to really understand what is happening, follow this background context as the intellectual filter and you will be watching President Trump Term-2 politics with clear eyes. However, always remember, these are their personal interests. As long as they align with MAGA, all is cool. If their personal interests diverge from MAGA, we will have a problem.

This is very much in the spirit of Ferdinand Lundberg, except that Lundberg saw the super-rich as a group of about 60 families whose fortunes were inherited from the post-Civil War robber barons and whose interests were interlocked. It didn't much matter if the Hearsts or the Ochs-Sulzbergers controlled media; they were effectively the same interests.

Notice the fortunes behind Trump and Harris now -- much of the money is from Silicon Valley, a whole new industry, or set of industries, based on computers and the internet. The 19th-century fortunes are fading into the background. The oldest money directly involved in the 2024 campaign is from the Kennedys, but the founder of the fortune, Joseph Kennedy Sr, (1888-1969) was from a different generation than J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, or Henry Ford, and his fortune didn't come from basic industries like steel, railroads, oil, or automobiles; he was into real estate, liquor distribution, and Hollywood.

I think the older money came from a tradition whose greatest fear was a world proletarian revolution on the paradigm of the Soviet Union, which that level of wealth had begun to fear well before 1917. Their political strategy was aimed at averting this revolution, and on one hand, they created a multigenerational intelligence-driven deep state designed to subvert that effort. On the other, they supported a Fabian socialist political strategy aimed at symbolic appeasement of working-class demands without actually improving working-class conditions.

Lundberg understood that this consensus strategy created the New Deal on one hand and the FBI-CIA on the other, and it was partially successful at least insofar as it averted Marxist-Leninist revolution without threatening the interests of the super-rich until the failure of the Marxist-Leninist model late in the 20th century. The problem is that the Fabian socialist program and the intelligence-driven state have outlived their usefulness while continuing to demand unsustainable expense.

Thus what I think we're seeing is a new generation of influential wealth looking for a new strategy, since the old one has outlived its usefulness and is unaffordable -- the level of debt has surpassed the ability simply to pass the expense on to the working and middle classes. But neither Musk nor Trump is driving the innovation, it's people like Ellison, with Bezos now looking for a piece of the action; Warren Buffett is also tentatively and quietly joining that side, though only as long as it suits his purpose. Gates, Soros, and a lot of the older money are still on the side of the old cold war and quasi-appeasement strategy, with the middle and working classes bearing the cost.

Words Of Wisdom From Sean Trende

I've never understood the point of Sean Trende, or in fact of Real Clear Politics. I've commented on his obtuseness many times here. A week ago, I saw this piece at RCP, Please Don’t Pay (Much) Attention to Early Voting Numbers. I had an instinct that, although it was conventional wisdom, it wasn't going to age well, and I bookmarked it for review after the election. Here's what he said:

Every two years around this time, we finally get [solid numbers] in the form of early voting data. Like manna, these data seem heaven-sent, tempting those who analyze elections into making predictions about the future.

And, every two years around this time, I find myself writing the same column with the same message: Don’t do that. It is not manna. It is more akin to a poisoned chalice offered to a thirsty man.

. . . To see why this is a problem, it is useful to think of a party’s vote total as a part of an equation: The number of votes cast early times the party’s share of the early vote, plus the number of votes cast on Election Day times the party’s share of the Election Day vote. If you do this for both parties, you can calculate a winner.

Here’s the rub: We have only one of those four numbers. All we know is the number of votes being cast early. We might guess at a party’s vote share among the early votes by registration data, but even this is a fraught endeavor since we don’t know how registered independents are voting (if the state has party registration at all).

. . . Republicans are actively encouraging their voters to turn out early. So maybe what we’re seeing in states like North Carolina and Nevada is Republican enthusiasm in early voting that will result in fewer Election Day voters turning out. In other words, the strong Republican performances in early voting might cause a smaller Republican Election Day vote.

Except that that by November 4, the day before the election, even CNN could see what Trende couldn't:

The key states of North Carolina and Georgia both saw record numbers of voters participate in early in-person voting, with the totals in Georgia exceeding the numbers from 2020. The total pre-election voting in North Carolina, however, was still lower than four years ago due to significantly fewer people choosing to vote by mail.

. . . Republicans have made up more of the pre-election vote than they did in 2020. The Trump campaign made more of an effort this year to encourage Republicans to vote early and by mail, a major shift from messaging against pre-election voting in 2020.

Across the 27 states for which Catalist has comparable data, registered Democrats have cast 37% of pre-election ballots, while registered Republicans have cast 35%. That’s a significant tightening in the partisan gap since 2020, when, at the same point and in the same states, registered Democrats held a 12-percentage point lead – 42% to 30%.

In four of the seven key states that will likely decide the presidential election, voters register by party, and in every one of them, Republicans have made up a larger share of the pre-election vote than they did at the same time four years ago. Democrats in these states have overall decreased their share compared with 2020.

In other w0rds, by looking closely at early voting numbers, which Trende said please don't do, CNN came up with important insights into the election night outcome, which seem to have evaded Trende. Jim Hoft at The Gatewaay Pundit points out another intriguing development:

It’s still a bit early in the counting but it appears that Democrats and Kamala Harris not only lost the 2024 election to former President Donald Trump but they lost around 15 million votes in the past four years.

In 2020 Democrats and the legacy media claimed that Joe Biden tallied 81 million votes to defeat President Donald Trump who gained 74 million votes – more votes than any US president in history.

. . . Fast forward to 2024.

So far in 2024 Kamala Harris and Democrats were only able to must[er] 66 million votes – down 15 million from their 2020 total.

Those numbers are expected to rise in the coming days but it is unlikely that Kamala will get anywhere near 80 million votes.

On one hnnd, I think the shift in strategy to early voting was a consequence of Trump's seizure of the Republican National Committee during the 2024 primary season, control he never quite had in 2020. On the other, the decrease in Democrat vote count was almost certainly due to what I pointed out Monday, that Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz weren't just bad candidates or surrogates, they were all outright annoying, which caused even Democrats to stay home.

So far, neither Sean Trende nor anyone else at RCP has pointed this out.

Mark Halperin: Kamala Is Winning The Info Flow!

I've been noting here that Mark Halperin, who was banished from cushy corporate media jobs after sexual harassment allegations in 2017, has been workling to rehabilitate his career as a putative honest and non-partisan commentator in this year's election cycle. The problem is that, as I did in part, he grew up in Bethesda. I don't know where he lives now, but I do know you can take Mark Halperin out of Bethesda, but you can't take Bethesda out of Mark Halperin.

In yesterday's edition of his Morning Meeting show on 2WAY, embedded above, entitled "How to Lose an Election", he announces that Kamala is winning something called the info flow. At 7:08, he says,

. . . From Madison Square Garden until yesterday, [Trump] has lost the info flow. . . . Sean [Spicer}, do you agree that he has lost the information flow in the past week and explain your counterargument.

At 12:02, he demands that Sean

Name a good moment Trump has had since Monday [October 28].

Spicer, who seems like an agreeable sort of guy, and he probably doesn't want to lose his gig on the Morning Meeting, stutters and stumbles, appearing to forget one of Trump's best moments in the whole campaign, the garbage truck and the hi-vis vest at the Green Bay rally on October 30.

Halperin never really defines the information flow, and I had to do a web search to see if it means anything at all. Wikipedia says,

Information flow in an information theoretical context is the transfer of information from a variable x to a variable y in a given process.

Well, that clears it all up. Halperin seems to think it has something to do with Trump being dark, pessimistic, and rambling, while Kamla is bright and disciplined, and she has celebrities endorsing her, so she's gonna win. Or something like that. But later in the day, he returned to reporting the generally bad news for Democrats from the early voting patterns. So which is it? She could lose the popular vote, lose the Electoral College, but win the information flow?

As best I can see, Halperin is doing what he can not to disrupt the consensus psy op from corporate media at the end of the campaign, that Kamala has had a last-minute surge, and she's going to pull it out. There's been a coordinated dump of optimistic polls into the RCP aggregate that's erased the popular-vote lead Trump had last week, which I suspect doesn't even convince the corporate media who put this stuff out, and certainly not the editors at RCP, but they do it anyway.

Nevertheless, Halperin is fully aware that at this stage of his rehabilitation campaign, he absolutely can't come off looking like a Trumper, even if the real situation is that Trump is the likely winner. His goal is getting back in corporate media, not reporting the truth.

It occurred to me last night, and I don't know why it didn't earlier, that the public is tired of Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz, and they can't wait to get them off the news. This is behind the low Democrat turnout in early voting; the Democrats are just as tired of those characters as everyone else, and they're going to stay home today as well.

Halperin is no dummy; he's got to be fully aware of this, but he wants his corporate media career back, and he'll keep his mouth shut. He simply isn't an honest broker, he's from Bethesda, he wants his career back, and he can't be trusted.

Hugh Hewitt Storms Off Talk Show, Nobody Notices

I was a little surprised this morning to discover there had been some sort of non-event Friday where Hugh Hewitt, a talk show B-lister stormed off a Washington Post show,

“First Look,” the Post’s live show hosted by Jonathan Capehart, alongside Ruth Marcus, an associate editor and columnist at the Post, during a discussion over former President Donald Trump [sic] legal efforts in battleground states.

This happened Friday, but it didn't reach YouTube or the aggregators until this morning. It seems to me that this says something about Rush Limbaugh and the huge gap his departure has left in public discourse. Nobody has been able to replace him, least of all Hugh Hewitt, for all Hewitt seems to be trying. The whole episode has the air of something Hewitt cooked up to promote himself in the wake of Jeff Bezos's intervention at the Post:

“We are news people, even though we have opinions, and we have to report the whole story if we bring up part of the story,” Hewitt added. “So yes, he’s upset about Bucks County, but he was right, and he won in court. That’s the story.”

Capehart replied: “I don’t appreciate being lectured about reporting when, Hugh, many times you come here saying lots of things that aren’t based in fact.”

“I will not come back, Jonathan, how’s that? I’m done,” Hewitt fired back as he stood up from his chair and removed his earpiece. “This is the most unfair election ad I have ever been a part of.”

“You guys are working, that’s fine, I’m done,” Hewitt said before walking off screen.

Boy, he quit his job over principle! What a sacrifice! Except,

After storming off the show, Hewitt confirmed to Fox News that he had parted ways with The Post.

“I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so,” Hewitt told Fox.

So this was a gig that paid him a few hundred bucks, if that, every six weeks or so. He could afford to lose it if he could get publicity for coming out on Jeff Bezos's side, or something like that, except it looks like nobody actually noticed. He made a statement about it on YouTube this morning:

At 6:07, he says,

On Friday I quit the Washington Post, and some of you will know that. But I want to make sure you understand -- thank you to all of you who've texted me and posted me and sent me your kudos, thank you Elon Musk, thank you President Trump, everybodyh who's said something or anything else -- I just want you to know. Ruth Marcus has nothing to do with this. Ruth Marcus is my friend, Ruth Marcus is a fabulous jo0urnalist, she has got legal chops the equal of anyone in the business. Ruth and I are the same age. . .

He then goes on and on about how wonderful Ruth Marcus is, and then he expands into all the wonderful editors he's had at the Post: "You can be wrong, but not rotten." He lists all the wonderful editors by name,

Michael Duffy, Michael Larrabee, David Von Drehle, Mark Laswell, many others, the New Boston editorial page, David Shipley is a wonderfully nice man. Ruth is the equal of any edifor I've had over alol these years. . . . I quit the Post for reasons unrelated to any of that. . .

So, after all this kissy-kissy, he never quite gets to why, precisely, he quit the Post. I think this is because the only reason he did it was to call attention to himself. Rush Limbaugh has been off the scene for nearly four years, and nobody has risen to anything like the status he had before his death, least of all Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt in fact had been almost completely unknown before he was made a moderator for the February 25, 2016 Republican primary debate, where he pestered Trump with gotcha questions, only to have Trump reply,

First of all, very few people listen to your radio show, that’s the good news, which happens to be true – check out the ratings.

Commentators then noted that it was in fact a real challenge to find Hewitt's show on the air. I suspect that Hewitt's aim at the time was to do what Megyn Kelly had been unable to do in August 2015, end Trump's candidacy by taking him down with le mot juste. Nobody should try this, Trump will win it every time. Hewitt's main gig has always been a syndicated show with Salem Media, a Never Trump outlet. He couldn't manage for Salem Media the task Megyn Kelly had been assigned by Fox, but at least he kept his job.

But none of his self-promotion has managed to make him anything more than a B-lister.

How Many Pet Ferrets Are In California?

California and Hawaii are the only states that make it illegal to own a pet ferret. The reasons have never been clear, but more important, according to California's own Department of Fish and Wildlife,

Published estimates for total numbers of pet ferrets in California for the last 3 decades range from 30,000 to 1,000,000, but most cluster around 100,000.

According to this reddit thread,

I'm from California... Get them in Las Vegas, not Arizona. Just got to toss a blanket over them when you drive thru agriculture checkpoint.

Someone else posted,

[I]t only takes one assh* of a warden, AC, or cop to have your ferret confiscated, deported, or possibly euthanized. It's a risk, but there are supporters out there. Good luck!

Which brings us to the case of Peanut the Squirrel:

Peanut the Squirrel, a beloved pet who was an internet sensation before New York state officials confiscated and then killed it, is drawing even more social media attention after the rodent's death.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) seized Peanut and a raccoon named Fred from owner Mark Longo's home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border, earlier this week. The agency, which said it had received complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally, then euthanized the critters, to the horror of Longo and about 550,000 of Peanut's best friends. As word got out, the X memes went up.

. . . Longo told his followers that he had taken the rodent in after he witnessed the squirrel’s mother being hit by a car. The squirrel refused to return to the wild and became attached to the couple.

The legality of pet squirrels varies from state to state:

Squirrels are considered exotic animals and many Americans do enjoy keeping them as pets. In some states, you can own a pet squirrel with no paperwork or permits required. Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming all allow people to own pet squirrels.

Additionally, Nebraska requires that the squirrel wasn’t captured from the wild for it to be a legal pet. New Jersey allows red squirrels and flying squirrels to be kept as pets. South Dakota allows squirrels to be kept as pets as long as they were purchased from a state where they are legal. Massachusetts and Montana allow pet squirrels as long as they are flying squirrels.

Other states allow pet squirrels if a permit is obtained. These states are Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Florida allows for many exotic animals to be owned, but squirrels are not specifically mentioned. It is unclear if squirrels can be kept as pets in Florida.

I haven't been able to find statistics on how many squirrels are kept as pets in states that prohibit the practice. Some states, including California, are especially strict about even feeding wild animals. In San Bernardino County:

§ 32.1301 Food Left Outside for Certain Mammalian Predators. (a) No person shall feed or in any manner provide food for one or more non-domesticated mammalian predators. A non-domesticated mammalian predator shall include coyotes, raccoons, foxes, opossums, bears, mountain lions, and bobcats.

§ 32.1302 Food Left Outside for Any Animal During Certain Hours. No person shall leave or permit to be left out-of-doors food for any animal between the hours of 10:00 p.m. of any one day and 6:00 a.m. of the following day, unless the area where the food is left is not accessible to non-domesticated mammalian predators.

My wife and I, had we lived there, would have been in violation of these ordinances simply by leaving bread out for our backyard birds if a possum had happened on it, or indeed, even if a bird had found it between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM.

Most of these laws are simply unenforceable. At best, they're equivalent to the current situation with marijuana laws: even in states where marijuana is still illegal, police will usually just seize it for destruction or stamp it out on the ground unless the quantity appears to be for sale; they'll usually either issue a citation or just a verbal warning. As a practical matter, officers have fairly wide discretion, and they recognize that when it's legal in one state but still illegal in their jurisdiction, the perception of fairness is important.

So it's particularly puzzling that the New York authorities treated Mark Longo so harshly:

Mark Longo, whose pet P’nut captured the hearts of 3 million social media users, was stunned when a convoy of vehicles carrying officials from the state departments of Environmental Conservation and Health arrived at his Pine City home Wednesday.

They served him with a surprise warrant allowing them to snatch away P’nut the squirrel and Fred, a raccoon he’d taken in.

“They treated me like I was a terrorist. They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house for five hours,” Longo told The Post Saturday.

“They asked my wife, who is of German descent, what her immigration status was. They asked if I had cameras in my house. They wouldn’t allow me to go to the bathroom without a police escort, who then checked the back of the toilet to see if I was hiding anything there.”

State laws allowing raccoons as pets vary as widely as those for squirrels. In addition, Longo was apparently working to obtain legal status for the squirrel:

State law requires people to get a license if they wish to own a wild animal. Longo has said he was working to get Peanut - also known as P'Nut or PNUT - certified as an educational animal.

Those who watch On Patrol: Live know that officers who stop motorists for registration irregularities are often lenient if the motorists can explain what they're doing to get the problem straightened out, recognizing that they need the car to get to work. I'm puzzled that the New York authorities couldn't take a similar position with Longo, considering the high public profile of the case. According to the link,

"We will make a stance on how this government and New York state utilizes their resources," Mark Longo said in a phone interview.

He declined to specify his possible next steps but said officials would hear from him soon about what happened to Peanut the squirrel and Fred, a rescued raccoon that was also confiscated and put down.

. . . Longo said Saturday that he didn't see Peanut bite anyone during what he described as an hourslong, heavy-handed search. The authorities haven't spoken with him since they left the property, he said.

. . . A request for comment was sent to the DEC on Saturday.

At best, it appears that the New York authorities displayed remarkably poor judgment, the sort of thing that could result in disciplinary problems for an ordinary police officer.