The squirrel isn’t just a squirrel. Peanut is for everyone who has ever feared that someone more powerful than you could walk into your home and take something that you absolutely cherish away from you, for absolutely no good reason, with no recourse

It would be existentially wonderful if the final reason why Kamala Harris lost against Trump was the actions of New York State government goons in killing a pet squirrel belonging to Mr and Mrs Longo:

Apparently some women complained to the authorities about the pet, they turned up and took Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon away, Peanut understandably took a bite of one the SWAT team, so they decided he might have rabies and euthanised him.

There’s lots of reasons why Dolores Umbrage is the most hated character in the Harry Potter books, more so even than Voldemort, and this story contains most of them.

But the story of Peanut matters because it is a microcosm of what we are facing. A nameless, faceless, and merciless bureaucracy with no sense of proportion or empathy can, at a whim, upend people’s lives over what amounts to nothing. It can seize a beloved family pet, the mascot of an organization that does enormous good, just because some nanny-stater decides they don’t approve.

Unfortunately for them it turns out that Peanut was already pretty famous on the Interwebby as the face of a charity. The story has gone viral and even for people who love abortions the meaningless, mindless killing of a pet Squirrel might cause them to pause in their support of an ever-larger State.

Mark Steyn captures the deeper meaning well and contrasts it to the treatment of illegal immigrants by the same state:

It is additionally a too perfect illustration of what the late Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny”, which you’ll be getting a lot more of if the fellows who’ve been waggling the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet these last four years manage to pull it off a second time on Tuesday. Even as “migrants” and other protected classes are loosed upon the land unburdened by the law, you will be subject to ever more capricious micro-regulation in every aspect of your life. New York is a self-proclaimed “sanctuary state”: in a supposed age of contagion necessitating “vaccine mandates” for diner waitresses, the borders were thrown open to admit millions, of both unknown Covid status and unknown criminal status. In the ever more lawless dump that is New York City, you can steal a thousand bucks’ worth of merchandise and not face prosecution.

People did try to crack wise about it of course:

The squirrel was seen at the Capitol on January 6th.

But there is much darker stuff going on here: A mere pet squirrel today – you or someone you love tomorrow.

But I wonder too if the fate of Peanut and Fred is not a metaphor for – and indeed a fearful premonition of – what is about to engulf America on Tuesday and in the days that follow. As you can see in that video retweeted by Elon Musk, Peanut provided hours of harmless pleasure to his over half-a-million followers on InstaGram – all fun and games, until a thug state decided to take him out – and that was that.

Here’s the same mentality on display for a different situation involving humans.