There is no real Tomi Lahren in this episode — she did not participate, and that’s the first thing you see on screen. Her side is an AI-voiced, animated character arguing the strongest pro-choice case we could assemble from positions she has actually published (“I’m pro-choice” — The View, 2017; her 2019 “pro-choice conservative” Fox News op-ed). Mike’s side is Mike — his real voice, his real argument.

The reason for the format is the argument itself. Mike didn’t want an opponent who folds. He wanted the good version of the other side: personhood, bodily autonomy, the dependent-newborn problem, burden, evictionism, consent, and the rape exception — each taken seriously, each answered, until the whole chain leads back to one question science already answered.

When does life begin scientifically — and is a fetus a person? Watch the episode above, then read every step of the reasoning below. The complete transcript is on this page — nothing is hidden behind a player.

The Episode in Nine Steps

1. Is the Preborn Baby Human?

2. Human vs. Person

3. The Dependent Newborn Test

4. Does Burden Change the Right to Life?

5. The Eviction Argument

6. Consent, Sex and the Car-Crash Analogy

7. “Invited” — and the Rape Objection

8. The Rape Exception Tested

9. Same Human, Only Younger

The Complete Transcript

Is the Preborn Baby Human?

TOMI (simulated): No. It’s a potential human.

MIKE: So let me ask you this. Is a preborn baby human? Let's say the remains of two babies were found. Could science tell us which one was aborted? Would the headlines read two human babies were found, or would it read one human and one potential human were found?

TOMI (simulated): No. DNA itself could not tell which one had been aborted and which one had lived after birth. Biologically, science would identify both as human. Biologically human, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily settle the question of personhood.

Human vs. Person

MIKE: So you said personhood was a moral concept, but that's insane. Science is what it is. What you're referring to is more akin to justifying or rationalizing after the fact. That's the whole question. Personhood is a made-up concept, as I noted above.

TOMI (simulated): The distinction I would make is that biology can establish what the organism is, while philosophy and law address what moral rights follow from that fact. A sophisticated defense of abortion doesn’t actually have to deny the fetus’s humanity. I can concede that this is a living human organism and argue instead that no human has an unlimited right to another person’s body.

MIKE: If you perceive, most people wouldn't concede the personhood argument. But if you're going to, then your next point is even easier to defeat. If I ask you, could a newborn baby survive without assistance from another, you would concede the answer is no, correct?

The Dependent Newborn Test

TOMI (simulated): No.

MIKE: And if I ask you, would it be okay for a mother to sit across the room and let her infant starve because she no longer wanted it to have access to her body, what would you say?

TOMI (simulated): No. That would be morally and legally wrong. Because parents have positive obligations toward their dependent children. And there is an important distinction: a newborn can ordinarily be transferred to another caregiver. The mother doesn’t personally have to provide the care.

MIKE: Right. But because it's a hypothetical moral argument, let's say no other caretaker would help the child. We couldn't force them, right? If you can't force the mother to, you definitely can't force someone else to use their body. So the mom shouldn't have to be bothered to call anyone anyway. But if she did, and no one would help, would the mother be right to just let the baby die of neglect because she didn't want her body used for that limited period of time the infant would require it?

TOMI (simulated): No. Under that hypothetical, I would still say she cannot morally allow her newborn to starve.

Does Burden Change the Right to Life?

MIKE: So if I understand, you're now saying that the argument becomes the amount of burden that puts on a mother?

TOMI (simulated): The amount and kind of burden would become one of the remaining distinctions, yes.

MIKE: Oh, that's a bit of a strawman for exactly the point you raised. Well, what if a child is born cognitively declined? The burden of the mother caring for it around the clock could easily be greater than the burden of carrying the child to term. So does that mean it's now okay to murder post-birth babies when the burden becomes too great?

TOMI (simulated): No. That is a legitimate objection to making burden alone the decisive criterion. The stronger distinction is not necessarily the magnitude of the burden. It is the kind of bodily dependency involved. Pregnancy requires another human organism to remain physically inside and biologically integrated with the woman’s body.

The Eviction Argument

MIKE: So what you're really getting at isn't the burden. It's the eviction tenant theory, right?

TOMI (simulated): Yes. That’s much closer to the argument we’ve narrowed it down to.

MIKE: Not we. I'm debating you. So this is where you're at, right? The eviction theory?

TOMI (simulated): Yes. The strongest remaining line I would defend is bodily sovereignty or eviction. Even conceding that the unborn child is a living human being, the mother retains the right to decide whether another human may remain physically inside and use her body.

MIKE: I would argue that the human does have a right not to have another living thing inside them. No living person, no living thing, anything else. A human has a right not to have something else living inside it, and they exercise that right by not creating it. Once they've created the baby, it's not a trespasser. It didn't ask to be there. It didn't come uninvited. It was placed there. At that point, the responsibility for its care was one you have chosen. And to commit violence and even murder because you don't like the decision you've made or changed your mind is no longer any more justified than if you changed your mind after birth.

Consent, Sex and the Car-Crash Analogy

TOMI (simulated): The strongest counterargument I could make is that consenting to an act carrying a known risk isn’t necessarily consenting to every consequence of that risk. Driving a car, for example, doesn’t mean consenting to being injured in a crash. Likewise, consenting to sex needn’t necessarily mean irrevocably consenting to nine months of gestation.

MIKE: That'd be a silly argument from my seat. I mean, driving doesn't consent to a crash, sure. But turning the key does consent to starting the engine. As great as sex is, its evolutionary design is pretty clear.

TOMI (simulated): That is the weakness in my driving analogy. Pregnancy isn’t analogous to the accident in the most important causal respect. Reproduction is a biological function of sex. Crashing isn’t a biological function of driving. I would still have one counter available. Foreseeably causing a biological outcome doesn’t automatically establish an irrevocable moral obligation to allow that outcome to continue.

“Invited” — and the Rape Objection

MIKE: There's a very deliberate set of events that have to happen to create a human life. Your autonomy exists all the way up until you decide it doesn't. There's so many ways to prevent pregnancy. You can use your autonomy all the way up until you choose not to exercise any of those preventive methods. You choose. And at that point, you've invited a real-life human guest to occupy your womb for the next nine months. And though you do have the right to choose what to do with your body, you'll never have the right to choose what to do with his body. His body is not your body or hers.

TOMI (simulated): And that is the difficulty my counterargument has to answer. If I’ve already conceded the unborn child’s humanity, then I cannot answer you simply by saying, “I withdraw consent.” I would have to establish why withdrawing consent permits killing that dependent human despite the fact that its dependency resulted from the actions that created it. The strongest objection I would make is to the word “invited.” If contraception fails, the woman can plausibly say she specifically attempted not to invite conception. And there is an even more difficult case for your argument. Rape. There the woman didn’t voluntarily initiate the reproductive act at all.

The Rape Exception Tested

MIKE: I don't really feel like I have to add rape or contraception failure, because they're statistically minuscule. But if that were your last defense, and I said I'd concede that rape victims should be allowed to murder their babies if you'd concede no one else could, you'd say no, right?

TOMI (simulated): No.

MIKE: And that would prove you're grasping at straws. I would not concede that point, by the way. But I don't have to defend that yet either, because you've moved from it's not a person all the way to the most statistically minuscule defense possible. It's the appeal to emotion. But in real life, like, it's nothing.

Same Human, Only Younger

MIKE: I think it's important to circle back to the original point, though, regarding rape. If we concede the baby is human — if we concede the baby is human — and if we then try to reduce it to something unfalsifiable as an excuse to permit the taking of human life, then the burden should be on you to prove that the human you're killing isn't a person. So if you're going to invent the concept of personhood as justification to kill a human, then you should have to prove that the human you're killing isn't a person. And as we've agreed, there's no scientific way to do that. There's no test or anything we can go on to prove that. It's just a feeling. All we can do is fall back on hard science. Science tells us unequivocally — I can't say the word — that this baby is a human. So then its treatment must be measured against all other humans, or we're simply discriminating on the basis of age. If a woman was raped and carried the baby to term, and then decided that he looked just like his rapist father, and his existence was tormenting her and making her relive a traumatic event, and then she killed him, she'd be locked away for murder. No reasonable person argues that that sort of thing should be permitted. The only difference is age.

MIKE: Right. Thank you for your time.

Keep Going

• Mike vs. George Washington — the first animated debate

• You Don’t Need Conspiracy Theories: The Admitted Record Is Worse — the Season 1 full show

• No Victim, No Crime — the principle underneath this whole debate

• Consent of the Governed Is a Lie — what “consent” does and doesn’t authorize

• There Is No Such Thing as a Humanitarian War — the same moral accounting, applied to war

The Black Market Report is published by Black Market Cattle Company — independent writing, original merchandise, and advocacy.

Shirts that argue back: BlackMarketCattle.com

Subscribe free for new episodes, animated debates, and originals.

00:00 Cold open — Washington introduces the evening

01:03 DEBATE — The Myth and the Legacy

06:44 SONG — “Government”

09:09 PART ONE — The Cowboy Myth

17:51 PART TWO — Strings Attached

21:04 PART THREE — Don’t Feed the Revenue

24:14 PART FOUR — Build the Community

24:52 PART FIVE — The Admitted Record

29:00 PART SIX — The Uncomfortable Question

The Wild West wasn’t lawless — the cowboy movies were propaganda. Every dollar comes with strings attached. You don’t feed the revenue. And the record they already admitted to is worse than anything you’d have to invent: MKUltra, COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, Tuskegee. Declassified. Documented. Nothing to believe — it’s on the shelf.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, or Substack.

Read the record for yourself: Conspiracy Theories — The Ones They Admitted To.

Shirts that argue back: BlackMarketCattle.com

#Liberty #Podcast #GeorgeWashington #MKUltra #COINTELPRO

My answer is not clever. I don’t know much about hell. I never came to Christ to avoid it. I came because I was already living inside something I had built myself and could not get out of, and grace got me out. That is the whole story.

In this episode:

• Why fear is the worst possible reason to follow Christ

• Why I think separation from God is a choice a person makes, not a sentence handed down

• Why I will not rank anyone’s sins above my own

• What it actually looks like to love people who don’t believe what you believe

• Why I share any of this publicly at all

Read the written version at The Black Market Report: https://blackmarketcattle.com/christian-not-afraid-of-hell/

If any of this said something you needed to hear today, send it to one person. That is all I ask.

Subscribe free for new essays and episodes on faith, liberty, food freedom, and the honest history of state power.

Wear the idea: https://blackmarketcattle.com/product-category/faith-christ-is-king/

READ THE REVOLUTION. WATCH THE REVOLUTION. WEAR THE REVOLUTION.

I like Tucker Carlson. I agree with him like 3/4 of the time, which is a lot, really.

And I generally like the sort of people who want to expand the debate stage. After all, it has been a Libertarian Party calling card for many years now.

But, I mean, really?

Eh…

What’s the point?

Other countries have a lot of parties?

Yeah, and most of those countries have even more draconian laws than the United States does. They’re arresting people for social media posts, for Pete’s sake.

If you want to see what a clown show this can be, watch a lot of the Libertarian presidential candidate debates.

It’s wholly unserious.

Society has a lot of serious issues, but they can only be solved by people talking to each other—not another group of power-seekers talking at us.

It’s time to leave that game behind, not expand it.

We don’t need more political choice or greater access to a larger pool of candidates.

We need fewer (no) politicians.

If this one landed, send it to one person who still believes the answer is a better party.

Read the full archive: https://blackmarketcattle.com/black-market-report/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fewer-politicians

Wear the revolution: https://blackmarketcattle.com/shop/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fewer-politicians

FAITH. LIBERTY. TRUTH.

A few things are obvious: Fauci appearing before Congress and dominating the news cycle is a ploy by the establishment to distract from Iran, Israel, Ukraine, and Epstein.

And Fauci should absolutely be in prison.

And the Stockholm syndrome of those indoctrinated into red and blue politics is something to behold.

I shared an image of this X post on Facebook and some of the responses are amazing: “People were sick and dying and the rest of the world took the same measures. Republicans are brainwashed morons.”

A lot of Republicans do fit that description, obviously, but I’m not a Republican and no one would ever mistake me for one. Nothing about this post mentions Republicans.

And it was Donald Trump who gave the green light to Operation Warp Speed, while much of the establishment was (rightfully) saying they would never take Trump’s rushed-through-the-process vaccine.

It’s hilarious to me how someone could try to make this a red or blue issue when it was an obvious state vs. you issue.

The irony of it all is that someone could have lived through that era, survived all of the gaslighting and harm the state caused, somehow managed to defend it, and then had the unmitigated gall to call anyone else brainwashed.

Another example: I also posted a video yesterday detailing some lesser-known atrocities committed by government, like Operation Midnight Climax, Operation Northwoods, and others.

I posted this while a Republican is in office covering up the Epstein files and leading the country into unwinnable wars after campaigning on not doing so.

Yet somehow quite a few commenters thought they could push my buttons by bashing Trump.

It’s as if they believe anyone who is anti-government must be a Trump supporter—the current head of government.

I responded by basically saying I appreciate them boosting my algorithm and that I AGREE about Trump but it’s not limited to him. The issue is the state.

This made one respondent so irate that he just began making fun of my lisp—even though we were seemingly on the same side.

Now I know I have a little extra hiss in my s words sometimes and if I’m going to record myself speaking, I expect to be rizzed about it from time to time—but the context was amazing to me.

To become so team-oriented that you feel the need to insult a stranger who is agreeing with you about your enemy but not about your team is sad to me.

It’s certainly not limited to the blue side of the aisle. On this article alone I will be bashed by Trump supporters for not kneeling at the altar of orange (I’m an Alabama fan. I hate orange) and I have lost as many followers who suffer from the cult-type TDS as those who suffer from the hatred type.

It’s just a shame that people divest so much of themselves into the strangers they want to rule over them.

I don’t waste a lot of time on them. If I debate them at all it’s for the silent audience/reader who may not be lost yet. I know I haven’t the talent nor desire to change the minds of those washed in the blood of the state.

But I do care about preventing others from becoming them. That’s why I did create the Black Market Report.

Do you want to know what my biggest conspiracy theory is?

It’s that most conspiracy theories were created by government to paint the AntiState movement as crazy.

If we stayed out of the high weeds and focused on what government admits, defending the state as a necessary evil would get a lot harder.

MKUltra. Operation Northwoods. Tuskegee. Project SHAD. Operation Mockingbird. Operation Midnight Climax. Vietnam. WMDs. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Social media censorship collusion.

The government and its reliance on force and deception is very easy to argue against.

The problem is discipline.

Once they can attach every serious critic of the state to the craziest theory on the internet, they don’t have to answer the argument anymore.

They just point at the lunatic.

That is why I created The Black Market Report.

Not to chase every rabbit hole.

To stay disciplined, stay informed, and make the argument clearly.

The official record is already enough.

By the way, what do you know about Operation Midnight Climax?

Collectivism is the problem with the restrictionist side of the immigration debate.

My argument is not with Republicans or neocons. Their philosophy opposes mine. I would love for them to hear my argument and change their minds, but that’s not my intended audience.

My issue is with so-called libertarians, especially the ones I joined forces with when we were calling for national divorce.

Their argument is “we” cannot allow millions of people to flood “our” borders and drain “our” coffers.

They are basically making a “for the public good” argument to restrict travel on individuals as well as condoning public ownership of property.

When confronted with the hypocrisy, they argue, “It would be great to abolish government and public property but we must live in the real world.”

The public good is the same justification progressives use to argue for gun bans or vaccine mandates or compulsory education.

The “Real World” Defense

Yet I (thankfully) never hear any of my government-property libertarian friends argue for better and less restrictive gun laws. They argue for the abolition of gun laws and support the individual’s right to bear arms.

This leaves the “for the public good” and “the real world” argument festering with hypocrisy.

And when you throw in our common stance on abolishing income taxes, ending drug prohibition, and at least at one time abolishing the national government and facilitating a peaceful national divorce, it’s hard to find a charitable way to read their position on immigration.

What Does “We” Mean?

The argument boils down to “we are a country and we have resources that must be allocated to our citizens.”

What does it mean to be a country in this instance? As far as I can tell, it means we live under the rule of the same government.

What else? Is it culture?

Culture and Commonality

I raise hogs and cattle for a living. Do I share more of a culture with a Washington politician, a Silicon Valley tech mogul, a New York Wall Street executive, or a Mexican farmer or a Nigerian cabbie?

There is far more to culture than our jobs. But in my experience, values align much more with the hardworking and off-the-books immigrant than many established subjects of the crown.

Religion?

Again, I tend to find commonality more with the immigrant than the average suburbanite.

Even if he is a Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu, and I am a Christian, I find we have a more traditional fervor for faith and devotion than the average pop-culture American.

Now if we localize that, things change a bit. I live in a mixed community with a slight black American majority and I believe we have a culture of food, language, and faith that is shared. But just 30 miles in any direction and that begins to change.

Maybe we are the ones who don’t fit whatever argument they might make about the shared culture. So why not take our property and cast us aside? Oh because we were born inside lines designated as territory of the crown?

The Contradiction

If you call yourself a libertarian who wants national divorce, how is that a coherent position? I would love to hear from you and I am open for a public debate.

About the Author

Mike Shaner is the founder of Black Market Cattle Company and River Cade Farms. He writes about faith, liberty, food freedom, family, self-reliance, rural life, and building outside centralized systems.

I laid out that argument in Defund the Police Movement Is an Authoritarian Trojan Horse, The Sedition Papers #9: Back the Blue vs. Defund the Police, and later in Paint Me a San Francisco: The Somalia Fallacy.

No police were defunded. Some may have suffered a reduction in the rate of increase, but politicians and media called that a decrease. As I wrote at the time:

“When government increases its budget by less than they increased it last year, they call it a decrease!”

The defund-the-police movement was accompanied by a media onslaught of property destruction, crime, lawlessness, and chaos. Those images were presented as the natural result of questioning police power. The same media would then show us why we actually needed to fund the police more.

In Paint Me a San Francisco, I described:

“The 24 hour news media pumping violent anarchy on the streets 24 hours a day...”

The point was not that the state would voluntarily dismantle its own enforcement arm. The point was to link opposition to militarized law enforcement with crime, destruction, and chaos until people demanded more funding, more police, and more authority.

Even progressives have either gone silent or changed their stance completely on the idea. By 2022, President Biden was telling the country:

“The answer is not to defund the police. It is to fund the police.”

The movement did not weaken the state. It helped create the impression that questioning police power leads inevitably to chaos—and that the only answer to chaos is more authority.

Government, corporations, and media are three branches of the same poisonous stream. One provides the money, one provides the strongmen, and one provides the propaganda.

I believe in free markets. I do not confuse free markets with the giant corporations that fund government, depend upon government, and would not exist in their present form in a free market. Another article on that subject is coming soon.

The media sells you an illusion of choice. If you don’t want chaos, you must “back the blue.” If you question militarized law enforcement, you must support disorder. If you’re against militarized police, you must also stand against private property and cheer as Antifa destroys it.

You are presented with opposing packages of beliefs and told that you must choose one whole package or the other.

As I asked in Back the Blue vs. Defund the Police:

“The anti-government right wants to expand the police while the authoritarian left wants to abolish the police?”

Today, the political tide has turned. More people are looking for honest liberty, but they’re still being shown a false choice.

To the young person or the everyman, it can look really strange.

You have the so-called limited-government side. They claim they want limited government, individual liberty, and a free market. But to be on that side, you have to want war, entangled alliances with Israel and others, and militarized law enforcement.

Or:

If you don’t want those things and you believe in peace, free speech, and other civil liberties, then you’re lumped in with the so-called civil-liberties side—a bunch of communist libertines. They claim to hate government but chastise you if you don’t explicitly trust the government with your healthcare and protection.

This is all by design.

People group together and then lump others in with the opposing group. What you get is political team sports, where people argue over which side is better.

The best side—the side of liberty, common sense, and morality—is lost to the mob-rule mentality we are told would devour us absent “our” democracy.

We are told that without “our democracy,” we would fall into chaos and into the hands of strongmen. But we already have the chaos, the strongmen, and the gaslighting propaganda used to convince us that choosing between them constitutes freedom.

There is an alternative.

Stop drinking from a contaminated government stream and follow me for AntiState Content.

One of the most misunderstood and deliberately misused passages of the Bible is Matthew 22:15–22.

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” — Matthew 22:21

Manipulative statists will misrepresent that as Christ justifying taxation and therefore human government. Well-meaning followers have just accepted it as truth.

An honest reading will immediately strip away the certainty of that phrasing.

Before we can unpack the words, we must understand two things: the situation and how Jesus often spoke, especially in these situations.

When hostile questioners attempted to trap Jesus, He often refused the answer their framing demanded. When the chief priests asked by what authority He acted, He answered with a question about whether John’s baptism came from heaven or men (Matthew 21:23–27). When a lawyer tempted Him by asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus answered, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:25–26). When the Sadducees attempted to disprove the resurrection with a carefully constructed question, Jesus exposed their error and answered from God’s declaration, “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Matthew 22:23–33).

The question was a carefully designed trap: “Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.” — Matthew 22:15

The literal question they asked was: “Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” — Matthew 22:17

Jesus recognized this immediately, of course, and answered in his divine way. Give Caesar whatever is his and God what is his.

So what does this mean? Let’s look at property. If I own myself, I own the fruits of myself. If I own an apple tree, I own the apples it produces.

Therefore, we must ask what exactly belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar?

God, the creator of heaven, earth, and life, is the owner of heaven, earth, and life, and by extension the fruits of the things he created are therefore his as well. Just like the apple in my orchard.

Recognizing the trap, Jesus spoke his words deliberately: “Why tempt ye me?” — Matthew 22:18

Knowing that if he said plainly taxation is illegal, he would be apprehended by Rome, and if he agreed it was legal, they could portray Him as supporting Roman occupation and discredit Him with the people.

Everyone understands that is the reasoning for the riddle, yet everyone pretends he did say it was legal anyway, and no one minded. If the trap were laid and Jesus answered as simply as it is portrayed, then the whole story doesn’t make sense. He could have easily just said, “Yeah, Caesar mints the money, and you owe it to him. That’s the sum of what they are claiming anyway.”

Obviously he didn’t. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s is plain. Everything is God’s and nothing is Caesar’s.

“You say Iran’s military has been decimated, its regime has been destroyed and replaced by third-tier leadership too incompetent to accomplish anything, and its nuclear capabilities have been destroyed. You said the only goal of this war was to make sure Iran never acquired a nuclear weapon, and you have repeatedly said that goal was achieved in impressive fashion.

So, if Iran has no military, incompetent leadership, and a nuclear program that has been decimated and rendered unusable—per your own statements—why are we still there?

If it is because of the Strait of Hormuz, how can Iran control it without a functioning military or competent leadership? You have also said the Strait of Hormuz is not important to America anyway, so why not let the countries that have a stake in it fight a crippled regime that, according to your own statements, can no longer hurt a fly?

How is continuing this war good for you or for America?”

Whether the monster wears a German mustache, a Saudi turban, or a Washington suit is inconsequential.

Some people love government, and that is their right. Who am I to say my way is better?

I only ask that they extend me the same courtesy and don’t impose their will on me. Allow those of us who disagree to opt out and govern ourselves. Don’t steal from me or trespass on my person, property, or liberty. That should be a fair compromise.

What I am interested in doing is building a community of people who already think like me and educating those who may have the same moral framework but have never understood liberty as an option.

That’s why I created my farm, and that’s why I created The Black Market Report and my T-shirt business.

We can’t all be farmers, but those of us who can and who care should offer that service to people who can’t and who care.

We can’t all be teachers, but we can invest in our community, online or locally, build community-based homeschool systems or Montessori schools, and support those who can’t teach.

I am a writer. My talents, such as they are, are grounded in telling stories and turning the dirt. So I created the Black Market Cattle Company T-shirt line to accompany The Black Market Report, with the intention of provoking individuals into asking questions.

It is my hope that these will spark curiosity and genuine human interaction and provide an opportunity to educate those who wish to be educated on the philosophy of liberty.

I have designed shirts (including “Ask Me About Jury Nullification,” “The Anti-Federalists Were Right,” “Charity Comes from the Heart, Not the Government,” “Grow Food, Not Taxes,” “Homestead. Homeschool. Home Rule,” and many others) to inspire a conversation that will develop a relationship that will spawn a community that will become a movement.

Again, I’m not interested in changing your mind, but if you’re interested in the philosophy of liberty and building a community, I would love to connect.

I’m looking for the people who want to build outside the system instead of begging it to behave.

That is the point of the Black Market Report.

That is the point of Black Market Cattle Company.

The shirts are not fashion. They are conversation starters.

Read the Black Market Report and shop the shirts:
blackmarketcattle.com

Civil disobedience is easy to praise from a distance.

Everybody loves the man who stands up to the state.

Everybody shares the story.

Everybody cheers when someone says no.

But most people do not want to be the one dragged into court, bankrupted by lawyers, threatened with jail, or made an example of by prosecutors who exist to remind the rest of us what happens when we get out of line.

That is not cowardice.

That is self-preservation.

But it is also why the liberty movement so often becomes the liberty stand-around-and-argue-with-each-other movement.

We love brave men.

We just prefer they be someone else.

That is where jury nullification matters.

Because the state can write the law. The police can make the arrest. The prosecutor can bring the charges. The judge can wear the robe and speak in sacred tones.

But they still need a jury to convict.

And a jury does not have to help enforce an immoral law.

Look at Jeffrey Scott Sovern in Virginia.

He has pleaded not guilty after being charged with destroying 13 Flock license plate cameras. The state says the crime is the destruction of government-approved surveillance equipment.

A lot of free people would say the crime is building a mass surveillance network in the first place.

If you are on that jury, the real question is not merely, “Did he do it?”

The real question is, “Was there a victim?”

And if the only alleged victim is the machinery of the surveillance state, then a good jury should have a serious problem calling that justice.

That same principle applies far beyond Flock cameras.

Julie Bass in Oak Park, Michigan, faced the threat of jail because she planted vegetables in her front yard instead of keeping the government-approved lawn.

Gary Harrington in Oregon was sentenced to jail and fined for storing water in reservoirs on his own land without the state’s permission.

Adam Guerrero, a teacher in Tennessee, faced city action over a community garden.

Across the country, people have been fined, threatened, prosecuted, and harassed for chickens, gardens, raw milk, tiny homes, rainwater, sheds, home businesses, zoning violations, and other peaceful acts that harmed nobody.

That is the key.

Nobody.

A real crime requires a real victim.

The state is not a person.

The state cannot be offended like a person. It cannot be trespassed against like a person. It cannot have rights like a person. The state exists, supposedly, to protect individuals from aggression.

So when the state prosecutes a peaceful person for violating a rule that harmed no actual human being, the jury should not ask how quickly it can rubber-stamp the punishment.

The jury should ask why it is being asked to punish him at all.

This is why jury nullification terrifies people in power.

It reminds them that the law is not magic.

A law is only enforceable if ordinary people agree to enforce it.

If juries refused to convict people for victimless crimes, many of these laws would become useless overnight.

Not because politicians repealed them.

Not because courts rediscovered the Constitution.

Not because bureaucrats had a change of heart.

But because twelve ordinary people looked at the state and said, “No.”

That is real power.

And it is power most Americans were never taught they had.

We are told jury duty is an inconvenience. A chore. A civic annoyance.

It is not.

The jury box may be the last peaceful place where an ordinary citizen can stand between a peaceful person and the state trying to destroy him.

That is why I talk about jury nullification.

That is why I made the “Ask Me About Jury Nullification” shirt.

Not because a shirt changes the world.

Because conversations do.

One conversation can become one juror.

One juror can hang a jury.

One jury can save a man.

And enough juries refusing to enforce immoral laws can make those laws impossible to use.

The next Jeffrey Scott Sovern, Julie Bass, Gary Harrington, or Adam Guerrero should not have to stand alone.

If the state wants to punish peaceful people for refusing to obey bad laws, it should have to get past us first.

Without civil disobedience, the liberty movement would be more aptly called the liberty stand-still-and-argue-with-each-other community.

It’s the willingness to stand up in the face of consequences that drives the change we are pursuing.

And we all love to cheer on the brave souls willing to face those consequences for what they believe is right.

But of course we don’t want to be in the ring taking the cheers and the beatings ourselves.

That’s not a knock. It’s self-preservation. It is sadly the thing that holds us back though. “You go first!” “No, you.” is a very real impediment.

One thing we can do, with very little consequence, is serve on juries and nullify the supposed crimes these heroes are being persecuted for.

Another thing, probably far more important, is to tell others about jury nullification and get them to serve on those juries and nullify immoral laws.

If we control the jury box, then the hero no longer has to be so brave.

It’s not easy to walk around talking to strangers about jury duty, which is why I designed the “Ask Me About Jury Nullification” T-shirt that arrived today from Black Market Cattle Company.

It has already sparked conversations.

If we can get people to talk to us about the things we could be changing, then some things will start changing.

A Virginia man named Jeffrey Scott Sovern has pleaded not guilty after being charged with destroying 13 Flock cameras because he believes mass surveillance is the real crime.

The premise of jury nullification is to judge the crime a person is accused of, as opposed to whether or not he did that thing.

In order for a crime to have been committed, there must be a victim.

The state is not a person, and because its very existence depends on aggression and theft, and its supposed intention is only to protect individuals, it can never be a victim.

If there is no victim, a good jury will always acquit the accused and therefore convict the law that persecuted him. Eventually these overreaching laws would become unenforceable.

I hope someone on Jeffrey Scott Sovern’s jury has met someone wearing my “Ask Me About Jury Nullification” T-shirt.

The rest should argue over bylaws in Hell—or New York City.

I jest… sort of.

But to the point: a suburbanite who wants the conveniences of city living and craft beer while fighting city hall should move to New Hampshire. Those who want to homestead without huge property taxes and regulations—and who want to build communities capable of resisting the advance of the administrative and surveillance state—should move to an unincorporated town in Alabama.

Neither path is inherently better than the other. Both are worthy endeavors. But your personality, commitment, and goals will determine which one fits you.

If you’re a tech guy who wants to walk to the coffee shop, grab your hipster brew on the way to the office, and meet friends at the brewery afterward, you’d probably hate everything about my life once the romanticism met the manure.

Conversely—and with fewer adjectives—I would be just as out of place in Manchester.

Someone—I can’t remember who—called the rural homesteading vision I’m describing the Free County Project. That’s as good a name as any.

I’m a bit nervous to really push the idea because I don’t want my way of life transformed by outsiders who only think they want it too.

But the pragmatist in me realizes that if we don’t intentionally build communities of free-minded homesteaders, my fight will eventually be with the city, the county, or the state anyway.

I’d rather take my chances with people who love liberty.

So which are you?

A bylaws nerd?

A Free Stater?

Or a homesteader?

Whichever you are, I’d love to get to know you and help build something worth defending.

Socials:

YouTube: AntiState Content

Facebook: Mike Shaner | Writing The Revolution | Voluntary Alabama | Black Market Cattle

X: Csawordsmith

And if you’d like to support what I’m building, subscribe to the Black Market Report at the Black Market Cattle website—and pick up a T-shirt while you’re there.

At its best, taxation is theft. At its worst, and most common, it’s violence and extortion akin to, but worse than, mafia rackets.

What’s worse is it goes on to produce more violence, to pay for more wars and more prisons and more surveillance.

Flock cameras everywhere. Spied on at your own expense.

Yet even with free money, the state cannot live within its means. So it uses a printing press. It literally prints free money but still manages to find itself trillions of dollars in debt, and you, the supplier of their existence, are hit with another hidden tax; the most sinister of all: inflation.

Inflation makes your dollar buy fewer things than it did before.

Some of the plunder is, of course, passed down to “provide services,” which we ourselves could provide much more efficiently but are not allowed to because then what excuse would they have to exist?

Obviously, I would rather individuals, farmers, anyone and everyone, have the money than the most corrupt corporation in the world.

I’m all for ending welfare, and I know that charity is better delivered by the private sector (see my T-shirt, Charity Comes From The Heart Not Government, at Black Market Cattle Company website), but I want the plunder ended first. As long as they are stealing from the public, I will encourage the public to use every service and dime available to them.

Follow me on Facebook: Mike Shaner, Writing The Revolution, Voluntary Alabama, Black Market Cattle Company

On YouTube & Substack: AntiState Content

X: CSAWORDSMITH

TikTok: Mike Shaner/Black Market Cattle Company

Go to the Black Market Cattle Company website and buy a shirt!

At its best, taxation is theft. At its worst, and most common, it’s violence and extortion akin to, but worse than, mafia rackets.

What’s worse is it goes on to produce more violence, to pay for more wars and more prisons and more surveillance.

Flock cameras everywhere. Spied on at your own expense.

Yet even with free money, the state cannot live within its means. So it uses a printing press. It literally prints free money but still manages to find itself trillions of dollars in debt, and you, the supplier of their existence, are hit with another hidden tax; the most sinister of all: inflation.

Inflation makes your dollar buy fewer things than it did before.

Some of the plunder is, of course, passed down to “provide services,” which we ourselves could provide much more efficiently but are not allowed to because then what excuse would they have to exist?

Obviously, I would rather individuals, farmers, anyone and everyone, have the money than the most corrupt corporation in the world.

I’m all for ending welfare, and I know that charity is better delivered by the private sector (see my T-shirt, Charity Comes From The Heart Not Government, at Black Market Cattle Company website), but I want the plunder ended first. As long as they are stealing from the public, I will encourage the public to use every service and dime available to them.

Follow me on Facebook: Mike Shaner, Writing The Revolution, Voluntary Alabama, Black Market Cattle Company

On YouTube & Substack: AntiState Content

X: CSAWORDSMITH

TikTok: Mike Shaner/Black Market Cattle Company

Go to the Black Market Cattle Company website and buy a shirt!