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.

Taos County deputies set up DWI, COVID-19 checkpoints

For the second night in a row the Taos County Sheriff’s Office will set up DWI checkpoints that double as COVID-19 information spots. The checkpoints will be set up Friday night on Highway 522 and Highway 285. Deputies will pass out information on the state mandates and phone numbers for the CDC and the Department of Health. They’ll talk to people about symptoms and signs of the virus and where they can get tested.

“It’s been overwhelming support and gratitude, especially from the out of staters who are entering New Mexico – because they just don’t know… so they’re grateful that we’re handing out this information,” said Sheriff Jeffy Hogrefe. He says Thursday night deputies screened at least 500 cars at two checkpoints. Roughly half of the cars were from out of state. They did not make any DWI arrests.

Taos County deputies set up DWI, COVID-19 checkpoints

Sen. Josh Hawley Says He ‘Took on an Asian Trafficking Ring’ and ‘Freed a Dozen Women in Sex Slavery.’ That’s Not True.

When Missouri police raided several Springfield massage parlors in 2017, as Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) tells it, it was a righteous rescue mission led by a promising young attorney general who would later go on to become a rising Republican star in the U.S. Senate.

Hawley’s self-aggrandizing account goes like this: After getting wind of a potential sex trafficking ring at Asian massage parlors all around Greene County and the city of Springfield, Hawley’s office helped state and county police free “female victims” from being trapped in massage parlors and “forced into sex work,” while “the participants in the ring were charged.”

In fact, Hawley said at the time, “some evidence collected by Highway Patrol, leading up to these raids, suggested that there are potentially ties to Asian organized crime.”

While this tale nicely reinforces Hawley’s long-standing preoccupations with public morality and Chinese hegemony, the evidence doesn’t back up his version of events. The real story is one about police and prosecutor overreach at the expense of potentially vulnerable immigrants, followed by grandstanding and falsehoods from a senator intent on rewriting his own history.

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