Most people think of squatter’s rights as a modern liberal experiment: the government has to get involved in every aspect of our lives, even deciding who has a right to live on our property.
But as the Daily Caller’s new documentary, “American Squatter,” shows, squatter’s rights are about as old as America itself — and they once served a noble purpose. Just like everything that once made America great, liberals have perverted them to their own nefarious ends.
“American Squatter” is available exclusively for Patriots subscribers. Catch a first glimpse below.
There’s a squatter epidemic taking place in cities across America. With lax eviction laws and back-logged court systems, blue cities have empowered a whole cottage industry of housing crime.
Professional squatters use fake leases to turn nice properties into trap houses. Often, they turn to violence to keep the owners off “their” property. And good luck getting an eviction, which can take years to rule on let alone enforce. If squatters can show they’ve resided in a property for as little as 30 days, it’s almost impossible to get them out. From the smallest apartment to the grandest estate, no one is immune.
How did we get here? The Daily Caller’s investigative team traveled around the country to figure it out.
“Squatter’s rights has been around for many, many years,” real estate investor David Phelps told the Daily Caller.
“It’s kind of how the whole U.S. was settled,” added realtor Lori Greymont. “People would go out to the West and they [would] take ownership of the land, but it wasn’t meant to transfer ownership from people who really cared about their homes.”
Originally, squatter’s rights only applied to people who “took over a property for the long haul,” Phelps continued. It applied to “abandoned land,” or property “on the outskirts” that “nobody was really looking after.”
If someone “took possession of the property, fixed it up . . . maybe turned on utilities or added improvements or maybe even took care of the property taxes,” then that person became entitled to squatter’s rights to “actually gain ownership.
But the process had to occur over a “long period of time,” Phelps added: “seven years, ten years, fifteen years, depending on the state.”
The original squatter’s rights were born from America’s founding spirit: the spirit of frontier, of rugged individualism, and to man’s entitlement to the fruit of his labor.
If you poured your blood, sweat and tears into building on land that had never been owned, or restoring a property whose rightful owner had long since abandoned it, then you were entitled to that property as your own.
This is a fundamentally conservative value. The government does not just have the right to come in and take what you have built and give it to someone else. But the modern liberal era flipped this logic on its head.
Modern squatter’s rights are built on the idea of taking property from a responsible, tax-paying citizen and giving it to someone “less fortunate.”
As always with the left, it’s about “power.” You see, you, the land owner, have power. You built something, you have land of your own. You’re presumed to be relatively well off compared to the person squatting in your home. He’s just down on his luck — and our corrupt eviction system says it’s your responsibility to help him.
In this corrupt system, your “power” makes you the bad guy by default. Never mind that professional squatters purposefully take advantage of your kindness and generosity to weaponize legal loopholes against you. The squatter can’t be the bad guy; he’s just a victim of “the system” doing what he must to get by. So liberals built a new system to make sure you don’t “oppress” him more.
This is the way the liberal mind works, and it’s the reason they built a system to protect criminal squatters. The truth is, liberals don’t care about the little guy — they just hate you. Giving squatters legal power over your property is just another part of their plan to destroy the middle class and build the socialist utopia they’ve always dreamed of.
Watch “American Squatter” today to learn more about how liberals have perverted squatter’s rights, and how you can protect your property rights from a system that wants to destroy them.
The Daily Caller’s documentary productions are made possible by our faithful Patriots members, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. To watch “American Squatter,” and to help support future investigative documentaries, please consider subscribing.
