Gabrielle Ellison owns a bar in Odessa, Texas. She mourns as do so many entrepreneurs that “her business is sinking and her employees are struggling” since Our Rulers forced her “to close up shop. Ellison said she’s been paying her employees with no help from the paycheck protection program.” She doubts her ability to endure Leviathan’s economic embargo: “We can’t take it no more, we’re not going to make it…”
So she re-opened Big Daddy Zane’s this past Monday, defying Gov. Greg “Stalin” Abbott’s diktat.
Ms. Ellison invited a group called “Open Texas” to her celebration. These patriots not only insist that “All Businesses Are Essential” but have banded together “to oppose the government orders telling businesses to stay closed and residents to remain at home… .” One member explained their goal in an appeal to his fellow consumers: “When we help businesses open up, support them. We get them some revenue and we get them back on their feet. We are only going to reopen the country by empowering people and helping them stand up and getting them back off their knees.”
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Open Texas proved that they love fun as much as they do philosophy when they accepted Ms. Ellison’s invitation “almost immediately.”
She also announced her protest on Facebook, dubbing it “Bars and bartenders standing united.” It featured “a photo of armed men in body armor posing in an undisclosed location. ‘[Open Texas] will be here to help protect our rights as a small business owner to open and be able to feed our families,” she wrote, adding that she’s “doing this for ALL BARTENDERS, BAR OWNERS, CUSTOMERS, FAMILY AND FRIENDS…”
She even asked the sheriff’s office for permission to host Open Texas “and was told everything would be fine as long as the armed individuals were not on the bar’s property.” Not a problem as Ms. Ellison owns acreage adjacent to her saloon; she warned her guests that they must congregate there to protect them from Texas’ unconstitutional laws banning guns from Big Daddy’s premises. (So sensible a prohibition would prevail even in the absence of illegitimate regulations because barkeeps who appreciate live customers, from whom their repeat business comes, would undoubtedly refuse to serve armed patrons.)
Our heroes must have been thirsty when they arrived: they’d already supported other struggling businesses that day, including “Anytime Fitness.” Its owner, “Clint Gillispie, says he was issued a citation for keeping his business open. ‘If they cite me it’s one thing, because I’m the owner,’ explained Gillispie. “I am responsible for the business, but to assume that they are going to come in and start issuing citations for anybody that’s here, to me, that’s a separate violation of their first amendment rights. I feel like they’re just doing that to intimidate and harass.” Amen, Mr. Gillespie. “He says Monday’s gathering is not a revolution, but a response to what he believes is unconstitutional. ‘Best case scenario is we’re allowed to open, we’re allowed to survive.’”
Not if Leviathan has its way. The beast responded to these pillars of the community whom tyrants have turned into desperadoes with SWAT teams.
At Big Daddy Zane’s, Ms. Ellison deplored this belligerence. “I am aware of what’s going on down the road. I am shocked. I had customers come through saying, ‘You know they have SWAT built up, they have SWAT built up.’ Why would you bring in SWAT on a peaceful situation?”
Because, Ms. Ellison, Our Rulers—even those in the grand land of Texas—differ not at all from Soviet Russia’s, Communist China’s, or any other dictatorship’s. Only circumstances and their subjects’ varying toleration for injustice determine how much power they will grab. They decree and we serfs immediately, unquestioningly obey, or they arrest, imprison, and even slaughter us.
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Arrest is what happened here. “Members of the protest coming from a rally at Anytime Fitness in Odessa showed up to Big Daddy Zane’s Bar at around 5 p.m. Monday with loaded ‘AR-15 type weapons’ which they said they did not intend to use, but only had because it represented their Second Amendment rights. They said they carried in defense of the bar’s First Amendment rights.”
I guess these folks haven’t heard that Our Rulers turned the Bill of Rights into toilet paper to alleviate the shortage. Such considerate autocrats!
“Multiple ECSO Deputies and Texas Troopers drove their vehicles including an Armored Personnel Carrier behind the bar and pointed guns at the armed protesters telling them to put their hand’s [sic] up. Those who were carrying guns were handcuffed and transported to the Ector County Detention Center. ECSO Sheriff Mike Griffis said in a phone interview that six people were arrested for felony unlawfully carrying a weapon on a licensed premise, Ellison was arrested for violation of the Governor’s order and one bystander was arrested for interfering with duties of a peace officer. Eight people were arrested in total.”
The sheriff industriously spins his assault on these dissidents: “This was not a protest of their second amendment rights.” No, Moron, it was a protest for those precious rights: they are all that protect us from thugs like you. “It was a show of force to ensure this lady could violate the governor’s order…” It certainly was, which proves that even an imbecile can be right sometimes.
Griffis also claimed to “understand their side of it … Defying the Governor’s orders is one thing, but when you bring a bunch of armed vigilantes in from other parts of the state for a show of force, I just got a problem with that,” he said. And since he’s a sheriff, he can persecute those with whom he has a problem.
Prior to her arrest, Ms. Ellison had opined, “I think some rights were taken away from us which one of them was like a right to survive. We have to survive and I think those rights were stripped from us.”
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Indeed they were. And that despite her placating the State in its forbidding of guns from bars—just as businesses that re-open in defiance of tyrants hope to please them by adhering to the lunacy of anti-social-distancing, masks, et alia.
I have never re-opened a business, let alone one that politicians have shuttered. I’m therefore unworthy to advise these brave souls who have. But despots are bullies, and appeasing bullies never works. Abiding by any arbitrary regulation legitimizes all of them: if you cede government the right to dictate how far apart your tables sit and whether you and your patrons must wear masks, you are tacitly agreeing that it may order you to close your doors as well.
Meanwhile, we are rolling with frightening speed down the checklist that the Founders provided for authorizing a revolution: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, … a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. … In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury…”
And so it has become our right, indeed our duty, to throw off such government. May Almighty God bless and preserve us when we do.
