Except Joe was out of money. He had the smoking guns but no money to get them in front of a judge. If the county judge ignored them, he could probably get the court of appeals to care.
Joe called WAB, where Eric was able to help. He got Grant, who was now the “Special Assistant to the State Auditor,” involved, too. Grant demanded to see how much money the county was spending on that the lawsuit, which freaked out the county.
The real help for Joe came from Eric at WAB. He ended up getting Joe a new trial because of the obvious bias of the judge, and the trial was a success.
After the new trial, Joe could use his range again, and he was elated. Grant got to know Joe and Joe invited him and Eric out to the range one winter day. Eric couldn’t make it.
Joe didn’t know if an Olympia lawyer like Grant had ever shot a gun. He wondered if the fragile lawyer could handle the cold weather. They went out to the range with some steel targets in the shape of a human silhouette that fell down when they were hit. Joe handed Grant an AR-15 and said, “I bet you’ve never seen one of these.” Grant thought he’d have some fun with Joe.
“Hey, I’m a lawyer,” Grant said, “I don’t know anything about guns. Is that a machine gun? Can I see it?” Joe gave him a safety briefing on how to run an AR. Grant listened patiently, pretending it was the first time he’d heard these things.
“You ready to shoot it?” Joe asked. “Don’t be scared. It hardly kicks at all.”
“OK. I’ll give it a try,” Grant said, like he was afraid. He took the AR, kept the muzzle pointed in a safe direction like a pro, looked down range, racked a round with an effortless pull of the charging handle, shouldered the rifle, smoothly clicked off the safety, got in a perfect shooting stance, and fired.
“Ping!” on the steel target. “Ping, ping, ping,” on the other targets. Grant kept moving from the left to the right in between shots to make it harder for anyone shooting at him to hit him. He hit every steel silhouette. He clicked the safety back on and handed it to Joe. Joe was shocked. He didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not your average lawyer,” Grant said with a smile.
“What branch were you in? Marines?” Joe asked.
Grant laughed. “Nope. I’m UCG.”
“UCG?” Joe asked. “What’s that?”
“Untrained Civilian Goofball,” Grant said. They laughed.
Grant winked and said, “Well, untrained when it comes to formal training. I bought one of these and shoot a little on the weekends.” They shot together all day. Joe taught Grant some tips and tricks.
Ammunition was not a concern. Joe had cases of 5.56 ammunition. The Marines would bring ammo by the pallet and not shoot all of it, so he got the leftovers for personal use. Joe could not believe that a lawyer could run an AR like that. Grant could not believe that a guy he knew had cases of ammunition.
“So, you’re a lawyer and you can shoot like this?” Joe asked at the end of the day. He still couldn’t believe it.
“Yep,” Grant said. “I’m their worst nightmare: a hillbilly with a law license.”
They both knew who “they” were. People like the bastards who had tried to bankrupt Joe.
Joe felt like he could trust Grant. So he told Grant something very sensitive that he had been thinking for a long time but didn’t want to tell anyone. Joe had a security clearance and had to stay in the good graces of his military and law enforcement clients. He couldn’t be a “revolutionary.”
“Have you heard of an organization called ‘Oath Keepers’?” Joe asked.
“Is that some religious thing?” Grant asked.
Joe laughed. “No, that’s ‘Promise Keepers.’”
Joe explained that Oath Keepers was a large national organization of currently serving and veteran military and law enforcement. The “oath” in Oath Keepers was the oath every military and law enforcement person takes to “uphold and defend the Constitution, against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
And domestic. Those words rang in Grant’s ears.
Joe, who was former State Patrol SWAT guy, said, “We take a pledge to not enforce ten unconstitutional orders we might receive. Like to round up guns.” Joe told Grant about the other nine unconstitutional orders Oath Keepers pledged to not enforce. Things like conducting warrantless searches or detaining Americans as “unlawful enemy combatants.”
Wow. This stuff was getting serious. A large national organization of military and law enforcement people pledging to not round up guns. This was not BSing over beers. This was serious.
“What I like about Oath Keepers,” Joe said, “is that they’re not militia whackos. They don’t want to overthrow the government. They want people to honor their oaths. That shouldn’t be too controversial.”
Joe couldn’t figure out how people were putting up with what was happening so he had to ask Grant, who was an Olympia insider. “When are people going to rise up?” Joe asked. “I mean, I’m no radical or anything, but this system isn’t working. If they can do this to me,” he said referring to the illegal searches and attempts to take away his property, “then they’re doing it to millions of other people. What’s up? What’s going to give?”
Joe stared off at the water surrounding his compound. “I mean, I don’t want anything violent to happen. But people will not put up with this much longer.”
“It’s a numbers game, Joe,” Grant said. “Now there are only a few Joe Tantoris or Ed Oleos.” Grant told Joe the story about Ed’s fight and Ed asking the same question Joe was.
“But every year,” Grant continued, “they get more reckless and think they can get away with anything. There are more Joes and Eds each year. It’s growing exponentially as they get greedier and more power hungry. They can’t stop themselves. So next year there’ll be double the numbers of people like you, quadruple the next year, and,” Grant did some quick math, “sixteen times the number the year after that. Pretty soon enough people get it.”
Grant paused and looked Joe right in the eye. “It’s coming, Joe. I don’t want it, but I can’t see how it’s avoidable. The Joes of the world will eventually fight back.”
Grant had been thinking a lot lately about how such a collapse would unfold, so he decided to tell Joe what he thought would happen. He hadn’t been able to tell anyone else this, but Joe had shared his involvement in Oath Keepers, so Grant would return the trust by telling him what he really thought would happen.
“It will build slowly,” Grant said. “It’ll take a period of years. First it will be by people like us moving to better states like Texas. Look at how many businesses are fleeing California. Then it will be by cheating on their out-of-control taxes. A Patriot voting block will develop and get stronger each year. Elections will become nasty. They’ll try to destroy Patriot candidates. They’ll cheat on the vote counting, which is shockingly easy when their people control the machinery of the voter counting. They’ll start to charge Patriot candidates and any of them who actually get elected with crimes. ‘Tax evasion,’ probably.”
Grant went on, “A tax protest movement will start up where people openly refuse to pay taxes. They won’t be able to afford them and the government can’t put everyone in jail. Oh, and the government will scare the population with horror stories about ‘militias.’ They’ll pass all kinds of ‘emergency’ laws. The sheeple will be terrified about the ‘crisis’ and rally around the good government who is just trying to protect them.”
This was the scariest part for Grant. “Then there will be an event. I have no idea what it might be. It could be real or concocted by them. ‘Right-wing terror’ of some kind. It won’t matter if it’s real or made up. It will shock everyone. By this time, with all the new ‘emergency’ powers they give themselves, the Patriots will realize that they need to do something now or it will be lost forever. We will. Protests, some turning violent. There will be assassinations. I don’t condone that, but it will happen. The government will crack down even harder, losing more and more support each time they do. At each of the stages, the economy will get worse and worse until it basically stops functioning.”
Grant paused. He didn’t want to say what he really thought.
“Then things get ugly.”
Joe took it all in. He knew all this was true but he’d never heard another person say it, especially someone who had a front row seat to what was really going on like Grant.
“Yep.” That’s all Joe needed to say.
Joe felt he could fully trust Grant. Joe knew he had to do something about what was happening. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to do anything drastic, but he had to do something. He couldn’t let this happen to more people.
“You, my friend,” Joe said to Grant, “are welcome back at my range any day. Bring friends.”
Joe looked at Grant in the eye again and said, “I’ll bring some of mine.”
Chapter 20
A Busy Ant
It was spring after another Grant’s trip to Joe’s facility. Plants were blooming, but not many people felt a joyous springtime rebirth. Most were gloomy. The economy was horrible. Most were very worried about losing their jobs, some had lost them, and everyone knew someone who had. People were scared.
The country had just elected another big-government President.
People were figuring out that he wasn’t the “moderate” he said he would be. Plenty of people were afraid of what this new President would do. He seemed to be making the bad economy worse.
While some people were panicking about the economy, Grant was not. In fact, he felt much better than he had just a few months earlier. He had about three months of food in the storage unit and an AR-15 and an AK-47 with plenty of ammo, magazines, and even spare parts. He was starting to develop a network of friends who could help in a crisis. Most importantly, he had the survival mindset.
Grant knew that bad times were coming; he had a plan and some supplies, but most of all he knew that “normal” things would be coming to an end. He was mentally prepared for the massive changes — civil unrest, food shortages, personal tragedies — that were likely coming. He did not suffer from normalcy bias, which is when people are confronted with massive change, like the grocery stores not having food. They can’t accept the new reality. They assume everything is like it’s always been; that things will be “normal.” Instead of adjusting to the new situation, they try to shoehorn the old “normal” into the current reality. They might, for example, refuse to believe that the stores don’t have food. They might believe outlandish things like one particular store is out of things now but the other stores have plenty. They are so biased by what “normal” used to be that they can’t operate in the current situation. It’s a combination of denial, wishful thinking, and not knowing how to function in the new situation. Normalcy bias gets people killed. They make terrible decisions when they refuse to believe how bad things are.
Instead of the normalcy bias most people were suffering from, Grant channeled the anxiety of the economy and political climate into action. He added to his food storage. He went to Cash n’ Carry and got more beans, rice, spaghetti, and pancake mix. He got lots of sugared drink mix because he knew people would need the calories of sugared mix and because he knew that water might need to be treated with iodine or bleach to purify it and having some flavoring could make it much more drinkable. He started getting a few items during each trip he made to Costco for the regular things his family ate. He got cases of tuna, canned turkey, cans of refried beans, and packets of instant oatmeal.
He got a lot of oatmeal. Oatmeal met all of his criteria for prepping food; it only required hot water, stored forever, was cheap, and his family would eat it. He got eight boxes with fifty-five packets of flavored oatmeal. That was 440 servings. Each box was $9, so that was about $0.16 a serving. He vacuum sealed the oatmeal envelopes. They would last for years and years now that they were sealed.
Another thing Grant stocked up on was spices and flavorings.
Beans and rice get pretty bland after a while. Eating deer and other game meat required some spices. Hot sauce would make all the difference in the world.
The dollar store came to the rescue again. He got big canisters of flavorings and sauces for $1. Soy sauce, barbeque sauce, hot sauce — all $1. He got about a dozen one-pound canisters of table salt. Salt had a million uses and would be an invaluable seasoning, especially for someone sweating a lot. He also got a lot of coffee and tea. He didn’t drink much of either, but he knew others would. It was cheap, and nothing is more soothing than a cup of coffee or tea.
It took water to make coffee or tea. More importantly, without water, a person was dead in three days. Grant marveled that some preppers would spend thousands on guns and ammo and neglect water. If the grid goes down, water treatment is something that will fail. Waterborne illness is a real danger.
Grant got a Berkey water filter. It used microscopic pore filters to screen out everything that could hurt a person. Raw sewage could be converted into drinkable water. It cost about as much as a case of cheap ammo. What a bargain.
Grant was also stockpiling medicines. He learned on the Survival Podcast forum how to make some great first aid kits. Not the Band Aid kind of kits. These were medium-duty trauma kits. Grant also bought many over-the-counter medicines. He had hay fever so he purchased several thousand non-drowsy allergy pills from Costco for next to nothing. They would last years as they didn’t have an expiration date. Grant also got hundreds of caffeine pills. He and his colleagues might need to be awake a lot.
Grant got tons of vitamins, too. He went to Costco and got a few 500-pill multi-vitamin bottles and vacuum sealed their contents. A multi vitamin a day could keep the doctor away.
Since little cuts could easily kill people when there were no hospitals or pharmacies, Grant realized that he really needed some antibiotics. But he couldn’t get them over the counter, and forging one of Lisa’s prescription pads seemed like an extremely bad idea. What to do?
Grant learned on the Survival Podcast about fish antibiotics. They were the same as human ones, except they said “Not for human use” on them for legal reasons. The antibiotics were used to treat diseased aquarium fish. They were available without a prescription, at a tiny fraction of the price, and could be stored for years in a cool place. Even when they expired, they were still safe, though they might lose some of their potency.