Tag: private property

National Guard helicopter crew landed on Montana ranch and trespassed to take antlers, citations say

Three Montana Army National Guard members face trespassing charges after authorities said they landed a Black Hawk helicopter in a mountain pasture on a private ranch to take several elk antlers before flying away.

A witness saw the May 4 landing and the person who owns the property reported it to officials, who tracked down the three guard members, Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg said Thursday.

The guardsmen had been on a training flight from the city of Billings to Helena, the state capital, said Major Ryan Finnegan with the Montana National Guard. The helicopter landed briefly in the pasture located in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains, where the crew members picked up two individual antlers and an old elk skull with antlers still attached, the sheriff said.

Elk antlers — which grow and drop off male animals annually — are highly prized and can be sold by the pound. They also are collected from the wild as keepsakes.

The antlers and skull taken by the guardsmen were worth a combined $300 to $400, according to Ronneberg. They were later turned over to a state game warden.

Trespassers taking antlers from private land is not uncommon in Montana and other western states.

“This an odd one,” Ronneberg said. “Usually somebody parks on the side of the road and crosses into private ground and picks up a shed,” he said, referring to an antler that’s been shed by an elk.

Citations issued to two of the guardsmen said they “entered posted private property that was posted as trespassing for the purpose of elk antler removal.” The citation for the third again mentioned trespassing and also that “subject landed military helicopter on private property.”

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Home Invasions On The Rise: Constitution-Free Policing In Trump’s America

“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.”—James Otis, Revolutionary War activist, on the Writs of Assistance, 1761

What the Founders rebelled against—armed government agents invading homes without cause—we are now being told to accept in the so-called name of law and order.

Imagine it: it’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is asleep. Suddenly, your front door is splintered by battering rams. Shadowy figures flood your home, screaming orders, pointing guns, threatening violence. You and your children are dragged out into the night—barefoot, in your underwear, in the rain.

Your home is torn apart. Your valuables seized. Your sense of safety, demolished.

But this isn’t a robbery by lawless criminals.

This is what terror policing looks like in Trump’s America: raids by night, flashbangs at dawn, mistaken identities, and shattered lives.

On April 24, 2025, in Oklahoma City, 20 heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and DHS kicked in the door of a home where a woman and her three daughters—all American citizens—were sleeping. They were forced out of bed at gunpoint and made to wait in the rain while agents ransacked the house, confiscating their belongings.

It was the wrong house. The wrong family.

There were no apologies. No compensation. No accountability.

This is the new face of American policing, and it’s about to get so much worse thanks to the President Trump’s latest executive order, which aims to eliminate federal oversight and empower local law enforcement to act with impunity.

Titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” the executive order announced on April 28, 2025, removes restraints on police power, offers enhanced federal protections for officers accused of misconduct, expands access to military-grade equipment, and nullifies key oversight provisions from prior reform efforts.

Trump’s supporters have long praised his efforts to deregulate business and government under the slogan of “no handcuffs.” But when that logic is applied to law enforcement, the result isn’t freedom—it’s unchecked power.

What it really means is no restraints on police power—while the rest of us are left with fewer rights, less recourse, and a Constitution increasingly ignored behind the barrel of a gun.

This isn’t just a political shift. It’s a constitutional unraveling.

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Florida bill would let homeowners use ‘reasonable force’ against drones

Florida lawmakers are considering a bill that would permit homeowners to use “reasonable force” against drones — likely sparked by last year’s uptick in sightings of mysterious unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Keith L. Truenow (R) last month, was placed on the Florida Senate’s legislative calendar on April 16.

Constituents across the U.S. have signaled discontent with the federal response, prompting more questions on where the drones originated and how they could be regulated. The Biden administration stressed that the UAVs were not a threat to national security or operated by foreign adversaries.

President Trump earlier this year said he would look into the drone spotting, but he ruled they were “not the enemy” and likely authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or belonged to hobbyists.

The Sunshine State legislation seeks to change property owners’ guidelines for unmanned aircraft that remain suspended above their own land. It has already cleared several committees despite potential conflicts with federal law.

The FAA prevents people from shooting down drones even if they are hovering above their personal property.

“A private citizen shooting at any aircraft – including unmanned aircraft – poses a significant safety hazard,” the agency’s website reads. “An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air.”

“Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in a civil penalty from the FAA and/or criminal charges from federal, state or local law enforcement,” it adds.

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Lawn Gone Liberty: The Update

It’s finally spring.

Better mow your lawn.

If you don’t, your town government may fine you thousands of dollars a day. 

Worse, if you can’t pay the fine, they may confiscate your home.

Six years ago, in Dunedin, Florida, Jim Ficken let his grass grow. 

His mom had died, and he’d left town to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to cut his grass, but that friend died, too!

In the two months Ficken was away, his grass grew taller than 10 inches.

City bureaucrats started fining him.

But they didn’t tell Ficken that. When he finally got back, there was no notice of the $500-a-day fine. Only when he ran into a “code enforcement officer” did he learn he’d be getting “a big bill.”

When the bill came, it was for $24,454.

Ficken quickly mowed his lawn. Then the city tacked on another $5,000 for “non-compliance.”

Ficken didn’t have that much money, so city officials told him they would take his home.

Fortunately, Ficken discovered the libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice, which fights government abuse.

IJ lawyer Ari Bargil took on Ficken’s case, arguing that the $30,000 fine violates the Constitution’s limits on “excessive bail, fines, and cruel punishments.”

But a judge ruled that the fine was “not excessive.” 

Of course, judges are just lawyers with robes. Often they are lawyer/bureaucrats who’ve become very comfortable with big government.

I call a $30K penalty for not cutting your lawn absurdly excessive, 

IJ attorney Bargil told local news stations, “If $30,000 for tall grass in Florida is not excessive, it is hard to imagine what is.”

Dunedin’s politicians often impose heavy fines for minor transgressions.

One resident told us, “They fined me $32,000 for a hole the size of a quarter in my stucco … For a lawn mower in my yard … They fine people they can pick on … and they keep picking on them.” 

It happens elsewhere, too.

Charlotte, North Carolina, fined a church for “excessive pruning.”

Danbury, Connecticut, charged a resident $200,000 for leaving his yard messy.

Bargil notes, “It’s pretty apparent that code enforcement is a major cash cow.”

In just five-and-a-half years, Dunedin collected $3.6 million in fines. 

But by then, I and others had noticed. We were reporting on Dunedin’s heavy fines. 

So did the politicians sheepishly acknowledge that they had milked citizens with excessive fines and give the money back?

Of course not. They hired a PR firm. That cost taxpayers another $25,000 a month.

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Supreme Court Lined Up to Consider Case That Could Kill ‘One of the Most Reviled Decisions in Recent Decades’

An often-criticized precedent from the Supreme Court 20 years ago that gives local governments permission to literally confiscate a landowner’s property and give it to someone else who may have more political influence could be overturned through a new case pending before the justices.

It is the Institute for Justice that has been fighting on behalf of Bryan Bowers, a New York landowner whose property was “seized” by a local government agency.

It was then given to his competitors.

The precedent that soon could be doomed is the Kelo decision from 2005 in which the court redefined “public use.”

That’s the standard that courts must use to determine whether governments can take over private property without the owner’s consent, and it often is associated with the construction of roads and bridges and such.

In Kelo, a single-vote on the court claimed that creating jobs or increasing tax revenue was just that “public use.”

Dissenters, including a left-leaning Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that now the government “has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.”

The IJ described the Kelo precedent as “one of the most reviled decisions in recent decades.”

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‘Fraud On A Mass Scale’ – Why Trump Should Repeal Real Estate Tax

This is the short version of the Amicus created for ZeroHedge. For the full print version of the Amicus Brief Supporting Property Owners and School Districts and Accounting Fraud, both of which are being delivered by hand to President Trump click here and here.

Introduction of Argument 

The Home Affordability and Probability of Bankruptcy graphic below shows Taxation of Unrealized Gains, which is a violation of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Market Value is the mechanism in Texas and most States in the Union, from which the Assessed Value is created. 

Under current Texas Law you can protest your Market Value but not the Assessed Value. If the Market Value is fraudulent, then so is the Assessed Value. 

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The Disturbing Truth About the Home You Think You Own

The North Dakota Referendum That Could Have Changed Everything

In 2012, North Dakota held a referendum to become the first US state to abolish property taxes.

The measure aimed to amend the state constitution, eliminating property taxes and requiring the government to find alternative revenue sources.

Proponents argued that property taxes were unnecessary since North Dakota already had ample income from state taxes and oil revenues. They also pointed out that property taxes disproportionately burdened low-income homeowners and senior citizens. Eliminating them, they claimed, would provide financial relief, boost economic growth, and attract businesses and residents.

However, a coalition of bureaucrats and special interest groups fought against the referendum.

In the end, voters overwhelmingly rejected the measure—78% chose to keep their property taxes.

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The Government Says Money Isn’t Property—So It Can Take Yours

As a lawyer who sues the government, you get used to the different kinds of arguments that government lawyers use to justify abuses of individual rights—sweeping claims of government power, bad-faith procedural obstacles, and more.  

This was a new one: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that confiscating $50,000 from a small business did not infringe the business’ right to private property because money is not property.  

“Money is not necessarily ‘property’ for constitutional purposes,” the government’s brief declared—putting the very idea of property in square quotes. Reading at my desk, I practically fell out of my chair. 

The DOJ gave three rationales for the argument, all packed into a doorstopper of a footnote: (1) the government creates money, so you can’t own it; (2) the government can tax your money, so you don’t own it; and (3) the Constitution allows the government to spend money for the “general welfare.”

If a libertarian was asked to write a satire of a government lawyer’s brief, this is what they might come up with. But here it was, in black and white. 

Whose money, specifically, was the government saying wasn’t property? That of Chuck Saine, the owner of C.S. Lawn & Landscaping, a small landscaping business outside Annapolis, Maryland, which he has operated for over 40 years. 

Saine became a client of the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, when the federal government sought to impose over $50,000 in liability on his business through a “trial” held deep inside the bowls of a federal administrative agency. At said trial, both the prosecutor and the judge were employed by the same federal agency. 

I.J. sued, arguing that before the government can impose that kind of liability, it has to provide a real trial before a real judge and jury. The specifics of what the government claims Saine did wrong (in short: arcane labor law) are beside the point. If the government wants to confiscate over $50,000 from your business, you must have the chance to argue your defense to an impartial judge and jury—not an agency bureaucrat. 

Now, the DOJ argued that Saine has no right to a real judge and jury because the government was only trying to take his money, not his property. They claimed that fiat currency is a legal fiction that the government can as easily destroy as create. Lest anyone miss the implicit connection to the history of the gold standard, DOJ’s footnote prominently cited the Legal Tender Cases—where the Supreme Court upheld laws forcing people to accept paper currency, rather than gold and silver, as payment for debts. 

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The Climate and Nature Bill will destroy the UK economy and end private property

The Climate and Nature Bill has its second reading in Parliament on 24 January 2025. If it becomes law, it will bring in compulsory re-wilding of more than 30% of the UK and place controls on travel and consumption.

“You may think that all the bills that have gone through Parliament already in the last six months have been disastrous and have been an attack on our way of life our culture and our economy. But there’s something else coming up which is as bad or even worse as everything that has gone before. And this is something called the Climate and Nature Bill,” David Kurten said.

“It will destroy the economy, essentially, and it will give the Government powers over your private property …  Because of [something to do with] the climate or … nature then the government can essentially take your property,” he warned.  “Because everything that happens in the country will have to be beholden to the targets in this Climate and Nature Bill.”

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‘Wildly Off-Base’: New Push for Supreme Court to Reverse Case That Allows Property Confiscation

Ruling denied ‘the core protections of individual citizens.’

The U.S. Supreme Court bizarrely ruled in 2005, in the Kelo case, that a government could take privately owned property from one owner to give it to another, just, well, just because.

That original ruling came down to dollars and cents, when the city of New London, New York, used eminent domain to confiscate a home belonging to Susan Kelo to give it to Pfizer for one of its business operations.

She sued, but the Supreme Court said a procedure to use eminent domain “to transfer land from private owner to another private owner” did not violate the Constitution.

Actually, the authority vested in eminent domain would be for purposes of taking property to build a highway, or some similar public benefit.

That New London scheme actually failed, as the company was unable to obtain financing for its plans, and the site remained an undeveloped empty lot.

The move already has prompted 47 states to strengthen their own eminent domain laws, and now it’s time for the national precedent to be reversed, according to constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, who not only has testified before Congress as an expert on the Constitution, but has represented members in court.

He said that one case, Kelo, “has long stood out for me as wildly off-base and wrongly decided.”

He explained, “There is now a petition before the Supreme Court that would allow it to reconsider this pernicious precedent. The court should grant review in Bowers v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency precisely for that purpose,” he explained.

“Many of us expressed outrage at the actions of the city leaders of New London, Connecticut, when they used eminent domain to seize the property of citizens against their will to give it to the Pfizer corporation,” he said. “This anger grew with the inexplicable decision of the Supreme Court in Kelo v. City of New London to uphold the abusive action. After all the pain that the city caused its own residents and the $80 million it spent to buy and bulldoze the property, it came to nothing. Pfizer later announced that it was closing the facility — leaving the city worse off than when it began.”

He said the new case involves New York developer Bryan Bowers who challenged the decision of a county redevelopment agency to condemn his property and then give it to another developer to use as a private parking lot.

Turley noted that Justice Chase, shortly after the Bill of Rights was written, explained the injustice.

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