Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Federal Court Rules School Can Use Electric Shock as Punishment for Special Needs Children

As TFTP reported, in 2018, Family Court Judge Katherine Field denied a motion to stop the use of electric shock on disabled students, a form of punishment that has been controversial for years after news of the practice first reached the public in 2013 when video surfaced of an 18-year-old student receiving dozens of shocks for refusing to take off his jacket.

“(The state) failed to demonstrate that there is now a professional consensus that the Level III aversive treatment used at JRC does not conform to the accepted standard of care for treating individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” Judge Field wrote in her decision.

The facility in question is the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JRC), a special needs day and residential school in Canton, and it is the only school in the country that was still using electric shocks on its students. Records show that at least 58 students at the school have received shocks as of August 2017.

People living at JRC aren’t just from Massachusetts. According to The Guardian, they come from 15 states including Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California. In 2014, ProPublica found that New York taxpayers spend $30 million a year sending children from their state to the Massachusetts school.

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The FBI Allegedly Used At Least 12 Informants In The Michigan Kidnapping Case

The government employed at least a dozen confidential informants to infiltrate groups of armed extremists who allegedly plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to a new filing in federal court on Monday.

The filing, made by one of the five defendants in the federal case, asked that prosecutors be ordered to share more information about those informants, their relationship with the FBI, and the specific roles they played in building the case. It came among a blizzard of 15 new defense motions in the high-profile case, including requests to move it to a different district, to suppress evidence from a search warrant, and to try at least one defendant separately from the others.

Taken together, the new court papers offered a glimpse of the evolving defense strategies in the case, with several attorneys saying that they plan to argue that the FBI “induced or persuaded” the men to go along with the scheme.

The alleged plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made international headlines last October, when the Department of Justice announced it had charged six men in a kidnapping conspiracy. Five of the defendants — Barry Croft, Adam Fox, Daniel Harris, Kaleb Franks, and Brandon Caserta — have all pleaded not guilty and have been held without bail since their arrests. A sixth, Ty Garbin, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in the case in January.

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Judicial Watch files open records request asking USPS to disclose social media monitoring documents

Judicial Watch Announced Monday that it filed an open records request against the United States Postal Service, asking the organization to produce documents on its alleged tracking of social media posts regarding protests.

The conservative judicial watchdog group originally filed the suit on April 28 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The group asked for all documents related to the tracking and collecting of Americans’ social media posts through its Internet Covert Operations Program, according to The Epoch Times.

The FOIA is specifically looking for communication records between the USPS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security from Jan.1, 2020. 

“Did the Biden administration weaponize the United States Postal Service to improperly spy on Americans?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton asked in a statement Monday.

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YouTube reverses censorship of journalist Alison Morrow who highlighted YouTube pro-corporate media bias

YouTube censored and suspended the channel of independent journalist Alison Morrow after she posted a video highlighting several examples of the mainstream media violating the “medical misinformation” rules that are regularly used by the tech giant to punish independent creators on the platform.

After facing mounting backlash over the decision, YouTube reinstated the video.

In the now reinstated video, which is titled “Corporate news can break YouTube’s rules” and features Matt Orfalea (an independent video producer who was recently censored by YouTube for highlighting YouTube censorship), Morrow highlighted two examples of corporate news channels violating YouTube’s medical misinformation policy.

The first example showed a February 2020 clip from the NBC News YouTube channel where one of the presenters states: “Experts caution, masks are not always the answer.” Another presenter states: “If you’re sick or somebody in the family’s sick, then doctors say the mask is an effective way to prevent that virus from spreading, but in a public place, not so much.”

The second example showed a March 2020 clip from the CNN YouTube channel where its Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta discusses the coronavirus and says “there’s some solace in this idea that the vast majority of people aren’t going to get sick from this” and “this is reminding people, I think a little bit, of, of, just flu in general.”

Morrow noted that both of these corporate news clips violate YouTube’s current medical “misinformation” policy but have not been removed with the first clip violating the rule that prohibits claims “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19” and the second clip violating the rule that prohibits “claims that the symptoms, death rates, or contagiousness of COVID-19 are less severe or equally as severe as the common cold or seasonal flu.”

She also emphasized that YouTube’s medical misinformation policy is antithetical to the purpose of both science and journalism:

“How is science not always going to be medical misinformation, if science is the very practice of discovering new things? It’s just impossible to do science on YouTube or journalism for that matter. You can’t really do journalism on YouTube unless you’re a corporate entity because obviously journalism is also about questioning narratives and proposing new ideas and you can’t do that if the community guidelines are all about protecting the status quo.”

Morrow then suggested that the purpose of YouTube’s medical misinformation policy is to create “a cast of safe characters that are basically part of the same corporate class as YouTube” and notes that “you could even be saying the exact same thing the corporate news is saying” and still “face the consequences that they are not going to face.”

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FBI Asks Americans To Spy On Own Families And Friends To Prevent ‘Extremism’

The FBI fired out a tweet Sunday afternoon urging Americans to check on their own family members and make sure they aren’t planning any ‘extremism’, prompting a wave of comparisons to authoritarian communist governments.

The wording of the tweet, which links to a Department of National Intelligence (DNI) “booklet” about “homegrown violent extremism” is clear.

The 2019 document contains images commonly associated with radical Islamic terrorism and lists “mobilization indicators” including “communicating directly with violent extremists online.”

Yet there is a distinct ‘Hey Americans, spy on your families for the government’ vibe in the FBI tweet, as numerous detractors noted.

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Woman Charged With ‘Hate Crime’, Facing Prison Time, for Stomping a ‘Back the Blue’ Sign

In 2015, in an outburst of pure insanity, the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing over 300,000 officers, called for cops to be included under Congress’s hate crimes statute. This demand has since materialized into multiple acts of “Blue Lives Matter” laws, and TFTP has reported on their use multiple times. Never, however, have we seen hate crime legislation used to prosecute the free speech of an innocent person — until now.

A 19-year-old woman in Utah has been charged with a hate crime after she allegedly stomped on a “back the blue” sign at a gas station. There was no victim and no one had been harmed, yet a Garfield County police officer claimed the young woman’s actions made him fear for his life and therefore pushed to have her charged with a hate crime.

According to the arrest affidavit, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, the Garfield County police officer was conducting a traffic stop for speeding at a gas station when the officer saw a woman “stomping on a ‘Back the Blue’ sign next to where the traffic stop was conducted, crumble it up in a destructive manner and throw it into a trash can all while smirking in an intimidating manner towards me.”

The “smirking” caused the cop to fear for his safety and he moved to detain and subsequently arrest the woman for her completely legal act.

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