Brandon Raub, a 26-year-old former Marine who completed tours of Iraq and Afghanistan and lives in Chesterfield, Va., was recently arrested and forcibly committed to a psychiatric facility for mental evaluation by a court based solely on controversial Facebook postings, which took the form of song lyrics, political messages and virtual card games.
Now, the court has ordered Raub to be transferred to a psychiatric ward more than three hours away from his family and friends after Special Justice Walter Douglass Stokes of the General District Court for the City of Hopewell, Va., denied an emergency motion filed by the Rutherford Institute, which is serving as counsel for Raub, to stop the forcible transfer and detainment.
Although details surrounding these circumstances are still surfacing, so far, the only “crime” that Brandon Raub is guilty of is exercising his First Amendment freedom of speech.
He has broken no laws and he has hurt no person; nor does he have a history of mental health problems or ever exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In other words, he is no different from any other person who has used Facebook or any other social-media platform to share political sentiments of a hyperbolic nature with family and friends.
Without committing a crime, Raub has been detained in a psychiatric ward and isolated from his family against his will; these actions taken against him resist every constitutional principle that our country was founded upon.
If government officials have now been granted the authority to knock on anyone’s door, grab them and lock them up merely for suspecting criminal activity, then this is the advent of the police state. This unconstitutional treatment of Brandon Raub harkens back to the day when the USSR and communist slave states used forcible committal as a tactic to make state dissidents suddenly “disappear.”
But Special Operations Speaks will not disappear. As former Special Operators who have spent their entire adult lives learning to never leave a man behind, we will not rest until we see substantial critical evidence that Brandon Raub engaged in criminal activity. Until we see such evidence, we demand that Brandon Raub be released immediately.
A week or so back, JHo sent me a story of a Christian who’d called into a Christian radio show only to have police come to his house and take him in for a mental evaluation. As I noted in a post yesterday, mental health / medicine will be the likely way anti-2nd Amendment activists in the government and health care fields will conspire to turn the acquisition of weapons into a signal of troubling mental health — with the concomitant need for more scrutiny of applicants for firearms, etc. Through medical questionnaires, the federal government, which will soon have access to health records, will be able to put together a backdoor unofficial gun registry, which should be troubling to anyone who saw how law enforcement acted in the wake of Katrina, seizing weapons from private citizens.
Between the axis of government and medicine, international treaties meant to weaken sovereignty, and surreptitiously placed Congressional bans on magazines or ammunition in unrelated legislation, the forces of centralized power will work tirelessly to dispossess Americans of that natural right to self protection — and the check on opportunistic tyranny that it represents.
Watching US citizens marched off for mental evaluations for the exercising of speech is troubling. That the very people who presume to define what kinds of speech come to count as cause for concern are the very people who will be calling for such evaluations, should be especially chilling to a free people.
(h/t Barrett Brown, et al)
I see a future coming where doctors will see patients secretly, for cash or other goods, so the government doesn’t have access to health records.
I’ve already seen it in Texas, doctors leaving the health insurance structure and working purely on a house-call basis, for lower payments at the time of service.
Of course, Obamacare would make any doctors and patients operating outside of the system – dare I say it? – Outlaws.
But it can’t happen here. We’ve changed. We’ve progressed. We’re who we’ve been waiting for.
That happens here, too missfixit.
Greetings:
It’s pretty obvious to me that our too many bureaucracies have figured out that the process can be the punishment. You know, as “JeffG” might keystroke, for the children or to encourage the others.
Paranoia has become a survival skill.
How very Soviet. Thought crimes, mental institutions.
It should be obvious at this point that the Soviets actually won the cold war.
Whoa, those fellas need to see a therapist about their grandiose imaginations. Threatening the King? What the hell are they thinking?
Well I mean, this really is an unprecedented situation, making threats on the internet and all.
Nobody would have dreamed of doing that under Bush.
@PurpAv says
“How very Soviet. Thought crimes, mental institutions.
It should be obvious at this point that the Soviets actually won the cold war.”
I have pondered this myself.
It is said that one becomes like one’s enemy as you fight them.
We took on many aspects of the German way of war during WW2 and the same with the USSR during the Cold War. They also took on aspects of us.
I think we got the worst of the deal.
Washington was right. No foreign entanglements.
(from Washington’s farewell address 1786. link to The Documentary == http://tinyurl.com/97hq4xa)
It should be obvious at this point that the Soviets actually won the cold war.
“We will bury you……..”
And they are.
This does not bode well.
I’ve been watching this for a couple of days in anticipation of more of the story coming out, but all I can see is that they seem determined to prove Raub absolutely right. We’re in a very bad place.
I am beginning to think that World War II ought really be called Civil War II by Proggtards.
– Moe, what happened to your icon, did the brown shirts come in the middle of the night and take that too?
– Oh, never mind, it’s back.
Thank God the government doesn’t have access to all the things I’ve typed out and then had the good sense to delete.
– Moe, what happened to your icon,
sir that icon is know as gravatar which you too can have here:
https://en.gravatar.com/
What is more disturbing is that this isn’t in the mainstream news nor the conservative news.
This travesty of justice and freedom should be being shouted from the rooftops yet not a peep from any of the majors.
They have us cowed and they know it. Now they will begin to up the ante.
I’ve watched this ridiculous parade going on at airports for 12 years now. Not a peep from the sheep.
They whine and moan but let themselves be groped, laughed and sneered at and if they protest too much, they are dragged off for further detainment, humiliation and fear.
Frankly the elections are a side note. Our country’s already gone, we just haven’t got the email from the Gov’t worker notifying us to report to the designated camp yet.
On the one hand, a lot of batshit people have ben weaponinzing their crazy as of late, so authorities are understandably on edge.
On the other, this is like a “Schoolhouse Rock” episode dealing with how to perform a violation of every conceivable right a citizen has.
ben=been
weaponinzing=weaponizing
ugh…keyboard is shot
Oh oh, I thought you knew. Remember right after 9/11 when the FBI started trolling through the background check records — the records they were supposed to be deleting after purchases were approved — and found a couple of possible gun purchases by possible terrorists? Attorney General Ashcroft shut them down because they were supposed to be deleting those records, but they’d let slip that they weren’t. Their excuse? Well yes, they’d deleted the records as the law required, but of course they’d kept backup copies!
So yes, if you’ve ever purchased a weapon and submitted to a background check you’re on record….
– Thanx nr, I’d lost mine from years ago, and no, Moes wasn’t showing up for a bit.
Roddy,
The authorities should always be on edge, understandably or not. What is happening to Raub is evil, pure and simple.
“….and I ‘jess want you’all to know that these lies the Romney campaign has been spreading about me, you’all know what I’m sayin’, about my face being glued to a teleprompter….well you juat can’t go around makin stuff up…”
Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill
Well, what did you expect? The internet was shutting down their traditional methods of excluding the unpopular from the political process, they had to do *something*!
“h/t Barrett Brown” – so he wasn’t scooped up when the FBI grabbed all them thar haxXzors?
missfixit – good thing my old man retired, he used to go make emergency housecalls to neighbors…and not even charge them…it would be too shocking that he would horn in the G’s medical turf.
I cannot wait for the litigation that will follow when Raub gets out – I’d kick in to his fund.
The story is made even worse by the fact that they did a very short evaluation (15 min by Raub’s report) and then said they were holding him for up to another 30 days.
But, you know, he is a 9/11 truther. And remember what happened to Rosie O’Donnell, Michael Moore, Mos Def, Charlie Sheen, Willie Nelson, Tom DeLong, and Janeane Garafalo? [shudders]
WTF? 30 days? and moved out of the area away from his family and defense counsel for “crazy talk?”
There are legit reasons for a 5150 commitment (as it’s known in CA) but that’s 24 hours only, but this is downright Soviet.
Will Obama Keep Power ‘by Any Means Necessary’?
By Stella Paul
http://tinyurl.com/9lcxz49
American Thinker by way of Ann Barnhardt.
Just thought I’d toss some gasoline on the fire.
Be careful. They may be able to lock you for paranoia.
“….Well maybe we can’t effectively control our own borders, because, you know, that would just be too “non-inclusive” and stuff, but don’t worry, in Bunnblefucks America security is just a TSA police state away.”
Speaking of which; the TSA has turned up at a Ryan rally searching rally goers, they’re also expanding their grope fest to the rails and the highways. I say we all buy cups.
I’m guessing they’ll soon show up on your street with mp38’s, riding boots and peaked hats with a bullhorn telling you to “alles kommen hier, schnell!”
Texas Judge: We Need to Raise Taxes to Prepare for ‘Civil War’ if Obama is Re-Elected
– Aside from the idea that “yes we really need to go there” Pablo, that judge is a total nutbag. The Sherrif he mentions in his interview says he’s never even met him.
– Being in his courtroom with a case must be an interesting event.
Blake, I remember the lefties saying the same thing about Bush. And the righties saying the same thing about Clinton.
And so it goes.