The fringes of the SJW media would like nothing better than to generate another Ruby Ridge out of Owen Benjamin’s Beartaria:
A group of nine of Benjamin’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of Benjamin’s fans trekking out to the property, which they say is zoned for agricultural or forest uses.
In an email to county officials, one neighbor pointed out that the property isn’t serviced by utilities, raising the threat that inexperienced campers could start forest fires in their attempts to have campfires. The property is connected to a narrow, crude road, according to the neighbors, whose meager maintenance amounts to residents adding rocks to it every year.
Benjamin’s neighbors have also become alarmed over the possibility of organized military training at the property.
“This poses a clear and present danger,” a Vietnam War veteran who lives near Benjamin told the Kootenai Valley Times. “This is a commercial enterprise offering training in weapons and tactics and not a use allowed in this zone. There is no conceivable reason to allow this use. If we wait too long, it will be too late.”
Benjamin told The Daily Beast no guns have been fired on the property since he purchased it. But his attempts to downplay the possibility of guns at Ursa Rio have been undermined by his habit of describing grandiose plans for the land in hours-long livestreams several times a week, with the most incendiary statements archived and analyzed by his online detractors.
For example, Benjamin has often referenced having a paramilitary force at his property, saying he is “friends with, basically, a paramilitary group” in Idaho.
“If you try to squat on my land when I offer you campgrounds, I have my own paramilitary squad,” Benjamin said in one video, warning off “Bears” who might try to live on the land permanently.
“I’d have my own private paramilitary force, which is always a good thing,” Benjamin said in another video.
Benjamin insists he was just joking about the paramilitary.
“I do not have a paramilitary squad,” Benjamin told The Daily Beast in an email. “I was making a joke as a comedian. Unless you consider my goats and chickens a military.”
In his videos, Benjamin has also discussed the prospect of guns at “Beartaria.”
“Shooting range?” Benjamin said in one video, describing his plans for a bear-themed community in Idaho. “Yes! Will there be a gun range? Yes!”
By his own accounts, Benjamin does not come off as an ideal neighbor. In several videos, he relates stories where he berates store employees or fellow customers who asked him to wear a face mask. In one incident, according to Benjamin, he called an elderly man in a post office who asked him to wear a mask a “crusty old hunchback” and accused him of being a pervert, saying that masks are only used by criminals or perverts.
After a reporter in the area covered the controversy over Benjamin’s property, the comedian baselessly accused the reporter during a livestream of being a pedophile and mocked him for using a wheelchair.
The entire article is nothing but a series of baseless accusations. Notice that not a single one of these “concerned neighbors” is named. But it’s a good idea to keep this article in mind if you think you’re ever going to escape the conflict simply by moving and minding your own business. Once the media decides you are dangerous to it – and the defeat of Patreon in court by Owen’s Bears combined with the retreat from arbitration on the part of every Big Tech company from Amazon on down is probably what alarmed the media – they will always look to find a way to sic some sort of authority on you.
And unfortunately, unlike in Europe where defamation laws are still enforced to the point that a well-known television celebrity is now facing bankruptcy for a single tweet falsely accusing a woman of having had an affair, the US media can still expect to get away with nonsense like this. So remember, everything you say and write will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
Knowing Owen, he’ll befriend those frightened neighbors before the end of the summer, at which point the Daily Beast will be forced to invent some other fake controversy. But Owen really needs to up his media game. He really should have known the correct way to address the reporter’s alleged idiosyncracies was to say that “a group of the reporter’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of the reporter being a pedophile and fear that he might run over their children’s toes with his wheelchair.”