Tag: property rights

Oklahoma Homeowner Charged with MANSLAUGHTER After Gunning Down Squatter Who Took Over One of His Houses

An Oklahoma homeowner earlier this month took deadly action against a lazy squatter and now faces a serious threat to his freedom.

As KOCO reported, 59-year-old Timothy Smith was arrested by police and charged with first-degree manslaughter after fatally shooting 42-year-old Justin King, who had taken over one of his homes in Oklahoma City.

KOCO revealed that Smith discovered King was living on the property and went to confront him on May 1. When Smith arrived, he stumbled upon the squatter having carnal relations with a female in one of the home’s bedrooms.

Smith claims he shot King in self-defense after the squatter took a step toward him.

The squatter died one week later.

From KOCO:

Smith, who was not living in the home at the time, said he entered with a gun and confronted King when he found him in the back bedroom with a woman.

When he ordered King to leave, Smith claimed that King stepped toward him, so he aimed at the area of the squatter and pulled the trigger, per court records cited by KOCO.

He hit King in the neck, and he was taken to the hospital. He died a week later on May 8.

Smith was initially arrested on charges of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He was then charged with first-degree manslaughter after King died in the hospital.

Criminal defense attorney Ed Blau told KOCO that the self-defense claim in this case may not apply because Smith was not living in the home at the time of the shooting.

“There’s no death penalty for squatting in the state of Oklahoma. You can’t just take a gun in and shoot somebody,” Blau explained.

Blau added that while Oklahoma’s Castle Doctrine allows homeowners to defend their primary residence against intruders, the law is different for a vacant home.

“If a trespasser or a burglar breaks in or comes into the home that you live in and you’re there, you can pretty much shoot them or do whatever you want to with them,” Blau told KOCO. “And because of the Castle Doctrine here in Oklahoma, in a situation like this, an abandoned house, it’s much different.”

“You can’t go in, put yourself in a situation and say, ‘This is my house, so I felt I had the right to shoot him.’”

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A Century of Progressive Apartheid

This year marks the centennial of zoning in the United States, when the Supreme Court upheld comprehensive municipal land-use restrictions over the claims of property owners. The decision, Euclid v. Ambler Realty, was a milestone in the progressives’ campaign to overcome constitutional impediments to their plans for social engineering. In the ensuing century, zoning fundamentally altered the geography of American life, turning what had just become an urban-majority nation into a suburban one. Critics on both the libertarian right and woke left condemn zoning as a back-door version of apartheid, a stealthy way to keep immigrants and blacks out of “desirable” neighborhoods.

By 1900, Southern states had enacted segregation laws for “places of public accommodation” (hotels, restaurants, railroads, and the like), and the Court upheld these in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. The residential segregation campaign began later, a response to the “Great Migration” of blacks into border-state cities in the 1910s. This campaign faced more constitutional difficulties due to American doctrines of property rights.

Baltimore enacted the first residential segregation law in 1910. Louisville enacted a law that prohibited members of one race from moving into a block in which the other race was a majority. The NAACP cleverly arranged a case in which a white man, Buchanan, sued to overturn the law. Buchanan sold his house on a white-majority block (situated between the only two black-owned houses on the block) to a black man, Warley. When Warley refused to complete the purchase because of the Louisville ordinance, Buchanan sued him. Given his house’s situation between the only two black-owned houses on the block, Buchanan argued, no white man would buy it. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court struck down the Louisville law as a violation of individual property rights. Edward Bassett, the “father of zoning,” lamented that cases like this indicated that American law “gave real estate owners almost total control over the use of their property.”

To get around this constitutional impediment, segregationists devised the “racially restrictive covenant,” in which a purchase contract forbade selling the property to members of certain races. The title search for a house that I purchased in 2007 turned up a restrictive covenant from the 1925 sale of the property. The purchaser agreed never to sell the parcel “to any one of the Ethiopian or African descent.” He also promised “that no dwelling house shall be erected on the property that costs less than $1500”—a zoning-use restriction avant la lettre. The Supreme Court upheld such covenants in 1926, the same year that it upheld more comprehensive zoning laws.

Zoning was a “quintessentially progressive concept,” historian Michael Allen Wolfe observes, exemplifying the movement’s faith in expertise and state power. It fit particularly into the progressives’ belief that the state could improve the genetic stock of the population, based on their belief in racial group hierarchy and eugenics. One can see the first zoning ordinances in the efforts of cities like San Francisco to control Chinese laundries, and in New York City’s tenement-manufacturing laws.

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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NYC Mayor Mamdani’s Housing Plan Sparks Property-Rights Alarm Over Forced Transfers To Nonprofits

NYC socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani released “Block by Block: The Housing Plan for a New Era,” which presents a sweeping, deeply troubling blueprint to tackle the metro area’s deepening housing crisis.

Mamdani told the crowd:

When necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers. And for buildings that have suffered chronic neglect, we work to transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Stewards include community land trusts, nonprofits, or even the tenants themselves.

X user Difficult Froyo outlined what he described as the obvious playbook by the socialist mayor:

Rent control so landlords cannot raise rent to properly maintain the property. NYC takes the property and gives it to his political friends that donate to him. This is all going to be a theft scheme.

Another X user asked:

“Insane. If this isn’t communism, I don’t know what is. Has America really reached the point of communism?”

Mamdani’s backdoor property-seizure strategy will likely spook lenders, insurers, and small landlords. That’s because it caps landlord income, allows residential buildings to become distressed, then uses the city’s enforcement to push properties into nonprofit, community land trust, or tenant ownership.

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Communitarianism: The Evil Unleashed on America PT 2 the Montana Water Rights Protection Act

There is a myriad of ways to take our property – and the “powers-that-be are using them and more that they just make up on the spot.

We’ve written about many in our Workbook, in Tom DeWeese’s Sustainable, and in scores of articles. And in more ways than most of us could ever conceive of an act being pulled-off, for instance killing hundreds of ostriches because a couple of years earlier two had been ill but recovered. In fact, the government of Canada had them shot! Another example is capturing” CO2 from atmosphere and compressing and storing it in geological formations. I won’t even get into what could go wrong or, even more, how absurd it is to take CO2 from the atmosphere where we and plants thrive on it.

Many people do not realize that “property” is more than land or a house. Your clothes, your written words, the food in your house and the gas in your car are your property. And your children. Don’t think those taking other forms of your property won’t touch your children.

The U.S. Supreme Court defines property:

“As protected from being taken for public uses, is such property as belongs absolutely to an individual, and of which he has the exclusive right of disposition. Property of a specific, fixed and tangible nature, capable of being in possession and transmitted to another, such as houses, lands, and chattels. Scranton v. Wheeler, 179 U.S. 141, 21 S.Ct. 48, 45 L.Ed. 126.

Note: Chattel represents physical, transferable items like furniture, jewelry, cars, or livestock. It is used to distinguish personal belongings from real property.

Keep in mind that if you have nothing, you are chattel – you are property.

So, let’s look at the Columbia River Basin and the “New Compact”. I am using Catherine Vandemoer, Ph.D.’s report “Meet the New Compact, Same as the Old” to give you the background of the Columbia River Basin project introduced to Montana in 1993.

At that time we were told that the project was to take the area back to pre-Columbian times. Note:Dr. Vandemoer’s words will be in Times New Roman.

Dr. Vandemoer has been following this issue for years, and her writings on it are invaluable. She points out that Senator Daines “put forth the same bill that Senator Tester had done earlier – the CSKT Compact in full, ‘wrapped” it into the “new” Daines Compact and then added ‘new’ and more ‘goodies’ than even the Democrat did,” in addressing the Western Montana portion of the Columbia River Basin Project.

“As with the Tester bill, the intent of the Dains Compact is to have us all now be distracted by the “goodies” and forget about the documented problems with and substance of the provision of The original CSKT Compact whose true economic, environmental, and nation-wide legal precedent-setting impacts have never been examined.

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Tennessee lawmakers pass bill allowing deadly force to defend property

In Tennessee, a stolen item could soon cost someone their life under a bill that’s now headed to the governor’s desk.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Kip Capley (R-Summertown) and Sen. Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) would allow people to use deadly force to protect their property if they believed they had no other option and there was a serious threat to human safety.

“Right now under current law, if someone is breaking into your property, if they’re stealing from you, if they’re destroying what you’ve worked your entire life to build, you’re expected to wait,” Capley said. “You’re expected to hesitate. You’re expected to second-guess and take a calculated risk at defending what’s yours.”

Democrats pushed back on the legislation.

“The reason we were taught you don’t kill people over property is because they are not putting at risk an innocent human life,” Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) said. “What this legislation seems to be doing is lowering that threshold significantly and substantially, and the department is going to have to reteach in future classes for those who get their lifetime permit that you can now kill people over property, and I don’t think that is right.”

Even some Republicans expressed their concerns. Rep. Greg Martin (R-Hixson) told lawmakers on the House floor he was worried the bill could justify someone shooting an older person with dementia who unknowingly was in the wrong place just because the person believed they were going to act nefariously.

“The Good Book says that it’s an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, and what that really is given to humanity for is to restrain us from going after someone in a greater way than they have harmed us,” Martin said. “My concern is, Rep. Capley, what I’m hearing you say is that if someone is stealing from you — not harming you in the sense that they’re going to kill you — but if they’re stealing from you or your property or maybe they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you could do something more than an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.”

However, Capley defended his legislation and argued someone shouldn’t have to stand idly by while a criminal steals their life’s work.

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The Great Taking: Global Looting of Humanity Imminent?

When the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted in 2015 that “you will own nothing and be happy” by 2030, people worldwide recoiled in horror at the thought, but almost nobody understood the mechanism by which it might take place. Now, thanks to brave whistleblowers and attorneys, the plan to seize virtually everything is plain to see. The real question at this point is: Can it be stopped before it’s too late? 

If the WEF’s Great Reset is the marketing campaign for global “transformation,” what retired investment banker David Webb calls “The Great Taking” is the legal and financial machinery designed to make the transformation unavoidable. The plan involves ending private-property rights in securities — stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments — to allow mega-banks allied with governments to take everything when the next crisis hits.

In essence, you no longer own your securities; the deed has already been done. The stocks and bonds in your retirement and investment accounts may seem like they are yours. But thanks to little-noticed changes in state law going back decades, they are actually not. And when a major economic and financial cataclysm strikes, the Deep State establishment and the governments and megabanks it controls will take over everything from you.   

Great Reset Reality

If the scheme is not stopped, the World Economic Forum’s prediction that “you will own nothing” could become a reality in the not-too-distant future. Imagine: Ownership and control of every publicly traded company in the hands of a tiny, megalomaniacal elite. And this plan is not just for the United States, but for the world.

Webb, who first blew the whistle on the scheme to steal all securities in recent years with a book and documentary that went viral, explains the operation in terms any non-finance person can understand. For centuries, stocks and bonds were treated as personal property, which insulated the public from failures inside the financial system.

“For hundreds of years … securities were your property,” he explained to this writer during a 2025 interview. “If the banker or the custodian failed … that was entirely their problem.” Historically, the investor could simply tell those holding the securities, “here’s where you send my stuff.” But that “bulletproof” protection is now gone, he warned.

“Security Entitlement”

In fact, even the direct record of ownership has been severed. Securities are now held in pooled form. And what investors possess is not ownership, but a legal abstraction. “You no longer have a property right — you have what’s called a security entitlement,” warned Webb.

Right now, that may not seem too important. After all, you can still call you broker, put in a sell order, and receive your cash. But when the next crisis hits — and many experts and economists believe it could be just around the corner — the significance of this change will be clear.   

This concept was first embedded into American law through amendments adopted across the states beginning in 1994. In short, through seemingly minor changes to commercial and contract law adopted quietly nationwide, Americans were stripped of their property rights to their securities.

The practical consequence is stark: “If the intermediary fails, you have no right to take your property back,” Webb explained.

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Zohran Goes to War with Landlords, He Will Possibly Seize Properties

Landlords and property owners in New York City are Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s prime targets.

“If your landlord does not responsibly steward your home, city government will step in,” Zohran said.

Councilwoman Vicki Paladino believes he intends to seize properties. Frivolous complaints will be responded to and taken seriously, as he suggests in the clip below.

In New York City, buildings and other structures can be seized for negligence if they are found to be unsafe or in violation of building and safety codes. The city has strict building and safety codes to protect tenants and the public. If property owners ignore these standards, they risk lawsuits for negligence and unsafe living conditions.

When a building is deemed unsafe, the city may take action to seize it, which can include taking it down or ordering repairs. The city’s legal team will assess the situation and determine the appropriate course of action.

Property owners must comply with building and safety codes to avoid potential legal action and the risk of seizure.

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OUTRAGE IN DC: Court Allows Squatter to Remain in Woman’s Home for MONTHS After Overstaying Airbnb Stay — Homeowner Faces Financial Ruin While System Protects the Trespasser

In yet another stunning example of the nation’s upside-down justice system, a DC court is allowing a squatter to remain inside a woman’s home for nearly a year after overstaying an Airbnb reservation, despite having no lease, no tenancy agreement, and no legal right to occupy the property.

The case has left homeowner Rochanne Douglas trapped in a nightmare that has cost her tens of thousands of dollars and pushed her to the brink, while alleged squatter Shadija Romero continues living inside Douglas’s property with total impunity.

Romero originally booked Douglas’s short-term rental for 32 days, ending on March 29. But after remaining in the home for more than 30 days, just long enough to exploit DC’s tenant-friendly laws, she suddenly declared herself a “resident” and refused to leave, 7News reported.

“I never gave her any tenancy,” said Douglas. “I never gave her a lease.”

From there, the situation spiraled. Douglas:

  • Served a 30-day notice to vacate
  • Called the police repeatedly
  • Sought court intervention
  • Even offered Romero $2,500 just to acknowledge she wasn’t a tenant and get out

Romero signed the agreement, but when her eviction date came on November 15, she refused to leave the property and claimed the arrangement “no longer works for me.”

To make matters worse, when Douglas attempted to enforce her rights, DC Metropolitan Police told her they could do nothing, despite Douglas being legally barred from entering her own home.

Neighbors later reported that Romero and her companions packed their bags, loaded the car, and left the property. Police cleared the home and informed Douglas she could secure it.

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Judges Rule Against Property Owners Seeking Compensation for SWAT Team Damage

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 3 that the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team is not liable for damage done to a business while chasing a criminal in 2022.

NoHo Printing & Graphics Owner Carlos Pena will ask the full court to rehear the case, his attorneys from the Institute for Justice said in a statement posted to the Institute’s webpage.

A majority ruled that arresting a criminal is an exception to the takings clause in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. That clause requires the government to compensate the owners of property taken by government action.

In August 2022, a criminal barricaded himself inside the business Pena had owned for 30 years. Police actions resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in damage and lost profits. Pena’s insurance and the city refused to pay, so in July 2023, he sued.

In March 2024, the court ruled against Pena, and he appealed to the Ninth Circuit. Pena vowed to keep up the fight. In an email to The Epoch Times, Pena wrote that the battle is larger than just his business.

“What happened to me isn’t right and sometimes it feels like the deck is stacked against good citizens. I just don’t want anyone else to lose everything they worked for, like I did,” Pena wrote.

Pena and McKinney, Texas, homeowner Vicki Baker both filed claims against their respective cities after police damaged their property.

In Baker’s case, a fugitive high on methamphetamine barricaded himself in her house with a teenage hostage. He eventually released the teen girl, who told police that her kidnapper told her he would not be taken alive.

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