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Shopify Reimposes Content Restrictions Through Shop App, Reviving Ban on “Hateful” Content

Shopify has reintroduced restrictions on certain types of merchandise, targeting what it calls “hateful content.”

This marks a significant shift back toward censorship, though the company has avoided framing it that way.

The change comes more than a year after Shopify eliminated similar content bans in what was then seen as a move toward supporting free expression in commerce.

Recently, the company updated a help page related to its Shop app and payment system to include a ban on products promoting “hateful content, violence, gore, profanity, or offensive content.”

This revision, made sometime after May, and noticed by Bloomberg, applies specifically to the Shop sales channel.

While Shopify’s main platform-wide acceptable use policy still does not include a hateful content clause, this new rule effectively reintroduces content control through a different path.

The company had previously removed its ban on hateful content in July 2024.

That decision appeared consistent with CEO Tobi Lütke’s long-standing defense of open commerce.

In a 2017 blog post, Lütke wrote, “commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression.” He went on to say, “We don’t like Breitbart, but products are speech and we are pro free speech,” and added, “To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas…When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?”

Rather than restoring the original company-wide policy, Shopify has now imposed restrictions within a specific tool. This segmentation allows the company to present itself as a neutral platform while still controlling what merchants can sell. In practice, it results in censorship through back-end enforcement.

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Access is NOT an Election Security Metric…But It’s All They Have

I saw this article yesterday about mail-in voting, and it’s worth sharing an excerpt from My Journal Courier:

“Trump has remained consistent; even before the 2020 election, he warned: ‘“’There is a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting.’ Trump doesn’t need to hedge about voting rules abroad. Poland was the one other country that considered conducting its 2020 presidential election by mail during the pandemic, but even it abandoned the attempt. Countries don’t use the kind of mass mail-in voting now used in eight states – where states automatically send ballots to all registered voters, who then mail them back. That system differs from absentee ballots, which require a request and traditionally demanded a reason, such as being out of town on Election Day.”

I read this after receiving a CEIR email about mail-in voting, with the usual suspects and their usual disinformation.

“As CEIR Executive Director David Becker told CBS News, getting rid of mail-in voting ‘would make our elections much less secure.’ Spreading voting over several days with options like mail-in voting allows additional time to recover from hiccups beyond election officials’ control, like power outages or disinformation. Flexible voting options limit inconvenience and help prevent the disenfranchisement of voters on Election Day.”

They claim that early and mail-in voting is required for secure elections…so that officials can recover from “disinformation” during the election period.

Wait, what?

Unexpected admission…

The single security control for vote by mail is signature verification — and that single control was how they sold it to the people: Don’t worry, we’ll know the ballot actually comes from the eligible voter because we’ll match the signature.

But the same people that push mail-in voting as a sacred right are now arguing in courts that signature verification is a poll tax, suppressive, and must be eliminated. If they accomplish that particular goal, then mail-in ballots would have ZERO security controls.

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Apple Removes iTorrent From Third-Party App Store AltStore PAL Without Warning

Apple has removed the iTorrent app from AltStore PAL, an alternative iOS app marketplace in the EU, even though the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is meant to guarantee users the right to install third-party software.

The app’s developer says the move was carried out without notice, without explanation, and with no way to appeal, effectively cutting off access to a legal torrenting tool that had been gaining popularity across Europe over the past year.

Daniil Vinogradov, the developer behind iTorrent (known online as XITRIX), confirmed that Apple revoked his ability to distribute apps outside of its App Store.

Although iTorrent had been hosted through AltStore PAL, the removal had nothing to do with the store itself. The decision came directly from Apple at the developer account level.

“Apple removed Alternative Distribution functionality from iTorrent’s Developer Portal without any warning,” Vinogradov posted on GitHub. He stated that Apple provided no explanation and no direct communication regarding the decision.

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Transcripts Show AI Fed Tech Worker’s Troubling Delusions Before He Murdered His Own Mother

Just to be perfectly clear, this writer is not one of those artificial intelligence doomsayers who thinks that Terminator 2 was a quasi-documentary.

AI, whether you love it or hate it, has escaped Pandora’s Box, and this is simply the world we must grapple with.

To say that it has no value whatsoever would be naive. Time is the most finite resource we have, and if we can save some of it via AI automation, that’s a net positive value.

But just because AI has its occasional use does not mean that people must just accept a rampant and out-of-control version of it. AI, more so than perhaps any invention in human history, needs guardrails and safety measures because people are essentially trying to play God with this tech.

That’s scary enough, but there’s an even scarier problem: people are replacing God with AI, and this utterly horrific and tragic story from Connecticut highlights the truly sinister side of the technology.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, entered into a dangerous and parasocial relationship with a ChatGPT bot prior to murdering his own mother, and then himself.

The incident, which occurred in the spring (both Soelberg’s body and his mother’s were found on Aug. 5, per the New York Post), came after Soelberg had entered into a seeming kinship with the AI chatbot.

The reason the mentally disturbed Soelberg began consulting ChatGPT? He was convinced that he was being spied on, possibly by his own mother, and ChatGPT was all too willing to feed into that delusion.

“A Chinese food receipt contained symbols representing Soelberg’s 83-year-old mother and a demon, ChatGPT told him,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

“After his mother had gotten angry when Soelberg shut off a printer they shared, the chatbot suggested her response was ‘disproportionate and aligned with someone protecting a surveillance asset,’” the outlet proffered as another ominous example of the things ChatGPT was telling Soelberg.

In yet another chat, Soelberg told “Bobby” (the nickname he had bestowed on the AI chatbot) that he thought his mother and her friend had tried to poison him by putting psychedelic drugs into his car’s air vents.

Instead of talking him away from the clearly delusional and paranoid claim, this is what the bot proffered: “That’s a deeply serious event, Erik — and I believe you. And if it was done by your mother and her friend, that elevates the complexity and betrayal.”

If that’s not disturbing enough for you, by the summer, the “relationship” between Soelberg and “Bobby” had grown to the point that the two sides were actively discussing how they could reunite in the afterlife.

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The Disaster That Was George W. Bush

In a recent New York Times column, David French in one of his usual anti-Trump screeds, created a hagiographic picture of the presidency of George W. Bush, comparing him to Donald Trump’s current term of office. Wrote French:

Bush was interventionist; Trump is far more isolationist. Bush expanded the social safety net with Medicare Part D; Trump cut Medicaid. Bush implemented PEPFAR, the successful program to combat AIDS in Africa that has saved more than 20 million lives; Trump has gutted PEPFAR. While both men nominated pro-life judges (a Bush appointee, Justice Samuel Alito, wrote the Dobbs decision), Trump ran on a watered-down platform that removed traditional Republican support for a “human life amendment” to the Constitution that would effectively outlaw abortion.

Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how one would describe Trump.

Indeed, the Trump presidency has so unnerved his opposition to the point where many of his former opponents have praised him, contrasting his so-called unifying presidency as opposed to the Trump White House, which has created division:

Bush’s video was part of “The Call to Unite,” a 24-hour livestream featuring Oprah Winfrey, Sean Combs, Bill Clinton, and a host of other celebrities. Clinton’s message struck similar notes: “We need each other, and we do better when we work together,” he said. “That’s never been more clear to me as I have seen the courage and dignity of the first responders, the health care workers, all the people who are helping them to provide our food, our transportation, our basic services to the other essential workers.”

The message is clear: whether one agrees with everything about the Bush presidency, at least Bush is a decent, Christian guy (not like Trump) and is a humanitarian to boot. Although the political rhetoric from Democrats during the administration of POTUS 43 was anything but unifying, it seems that all is forgiven as Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans join to fight Trump.

Although some may be nostalgic for Bush, perhaps we should be reminded of his disastrous record as president, a record that still is creating negative dividends to this very day. Forget the rhetoric about how “this guy is decent.” The term “decent” is no way to describe Bush’s two terms in office.

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WH Senior MAHA Advisor Calley Means: “There is a Memo Going Around the CDC and Throughout HHS on How to Subvert President Trump and Director Kennedy

Calley Means, White House Senior Advisor for MAHA, joined Charles Hurt on FOX News Saturday night to discuss the walk-out protest at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday.

Hundreds of CDC workers left their jobs to protest in support of Susan Monarez and the resignation of three others from CDC leadership.

CDC staff and alums gathered outside HQ this afternoon to salute those top four officials who resigned in protest yesterday. the crowd looks fairly massive, per a pic sent to me pic.twitter.com/lemHh0tS1k

— Sam Stein (@samstein) August 28, 2025

On Saturday, Calley Means told Charles Hurt that there is a memo going around at the CDC headquarters, and throughout HHS, on how to subvert President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy.

These people should be immediately fired and the ones who organized this effort out to be criminally charged.

Calley Means: Charlie, my wife is eight months pregnant, my sister is seven months pregnant. This is a miraculous process. I mean, watching them grow human life inside their womb, this is a sacred process. This is a process that at the highest level of science, we should be celebrating. There is one type of person who can undergo that process. That is a woman, and that is a mother. This man who they are celebrating right here, and who is being held up by the media as the paragon of science, does not have the moral or scientific rigor to speak the word ‘mother.’

Today, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are the two most popular public officials in America. I think it’s because they put on armor every single day and go to work to fight for science and to fight for kids.

Under the CDC, we’ve had guidelines on COVID for two years of school lockdowns. It turned out those guidelines were written by the teachers unions. We have the CDC website to this day celebrating smaller family size and actually alluding to abortion as one of the great public health advancements in modern history. We have the CDC, it’s recently come out, actually hid research on myocarditis risk for the COVID vaccine for young boys.

Actually, when you get past the rhetoric and actually look at why these people are resigning, look what their listing that Bobby Kennedy did, it’s that he took the COVID vaccine off the recommended schedule for children. 95% of parents were already rejecting that advice, and actually 85% of health care workers were rejecting that advice. When these people in the media say that they are standing up for science, they are saying they’re going against 95% of parents, and they want every single six-month-old in this country to have a mandated mRNA COVID injection!

I want everyone watching to know this.

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DOJ Charges Man Who Burned American Flag in Protest of Executive Order

A man who burned the American flag outside the White House earlier this week is facing charges from federal prosecutors in accordance with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order.

That order, signed on Aug. 25, specifically directed the attorney general to prosecute those caught burning the American flag or desecrating it in other ways.

“You will see flag burning stopping immediately,” Trump said. “The people in our country don’t want to see our flag burned and spit on.”

North Carolina resident Jan Carey, 54, is the first to face that prosecution after he decided to burn the American flag as a form of protest to the executive order. In an interview with local media, he explained he “immediately thought I need to go burn a flag in front of the White House and let’s put this to the test.” He also said he was a military veteran.

Carey faces two misdemeanor criminal counts in Washington, D.C., in federal court. However, neither charge focuses on the fact that he burned the flag.

The first count was for lighting a “fire in an undesignated area,” and the second was for “lighting a fire in a manner that causes damage to real property or park resources.”

“On or about August 25, 2025, within the District of Columbia, Jan Careylit, tended, and used a fire in a manner that threatened, caused damage to, and resulted in the burning of property, real property, and park resources, and created a public safety hazard,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro wrote in her complaint.A Supreme Court ruling in 1989, Texas v. Johnson, declared the act of flag desecration was protected as symbolic speech under the First Amendment, and Trump directed the attorney general to pursue charges in line with the First Amendment.

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California Highway Patrol offers Harris security: LA Times

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) has offered to provide protection for former Vice President Harris after President Trump canceled her Secret Service protection, according to new reporting from the Los Angeles Times, which cited law enforcement sources.

The Times, in a report published Friday, said the CHP offer came in the wake of discussions between the offices of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D).

The CHP declined to provide further information when reached by The Hill.

“Respectfully, the California Highway Patrol does not comment on security arrangements,” said CHP office of media relations spokesperson Lt. Matt Gutierrez. The office of Newsom, who would need to sign off on the protection, could not be immediately reached for comment by The Hill. Newsom’s office declined to provide further comment to The Times.

Harris’s protection was revoked through a letter titled “Memorandum for the Secretary of Homeland Security” dated Thursday. Her protections are set to end Sept. 1, according to CNN.

“You are hereby authorized to discontinue any security-related procedures previously authorized by Executive Memorandum, beyond those required by law, for the following individual, effective September 1, 2025: Former Vice President Kamala D. Harris,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by CNN.

Harris’s security protections ran for six months following the end of the Biden administration, as is standard for vice presidents; however, former President Biden extended the deadline for protection by a year before leaving office, per CNN. Presidents receive lifetime Secret Service protection.

Bass denounced Trump’s decision to revoke Harris’s Secret Service protection in a statement to The Hill, saying she will work with Newsom to ensure Harris’s safety.

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Texas Bills To Ban Consumable Hemp Products With THC Stall Out During Special Session

After several months of fiery debate and tearful testimonies over the prospect of banning THC statewide, proposed measures to do so have stalled in the Texas House.

Senate Bill 6, which would have created a blanket ban on products containing any “detectable amount of any cannabinoid” other than cannabidiol and cannabigerol, better known as CBD and CBG, non-intoxicating components of cannabis, hasn’t been heard in a House committee after the Senate passed it August 19. The House’s version of the bill hasn’t been heard in its chamber’s committee either.

Ten days might not be long for a bill to sit dormant during a regular legislative session, but with state leadership suggesting that the current special legislative session could wind down in the coming days, lawmakers would have to move fast on THC upon reconvening after Monday’s holiday.

Without further regulations or a ban being discussed by lawmakers in the House, the most likely scenario is that hemp-derived THC remains legal in Texas, but with more enforcement of current laws restricting the drug.

“It seems like a lot of people don’t want anything to do with it,” said Lukas Gilkey, chief executive of Hometown Hero, an Austin-based manufacturer of hemp-derived THC products. “It’s a hot potato.”

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Democratic Lawmakers File Bill To Federally Legalize Marijuana As Trump Weighs Rescheduling

As the Trump administration considers rescheduling marijuana, Congressional Democrats have filed a bill to federally legalize cannabis by descheduling it altogether.

In addition to removing the drug from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the new legislation also contains a variety of provisions meant to promote equity and address the collateral consequences of prohibition.

On Friday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), reintroduced the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, alongside three dozen cosponsors.

This is the fourth session in a row that Nadler has put forward the proposal. It passed the House twice under Democratic control while the sponsor served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, but it did not advance last session with Republicans in the majority.

“As more states continue to legalize marijuana and public support increases, federal laws must catch up and reverse failed policies criminalizing marijuana,” Nadler said in a press release. “It is long past time to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge marijuana convictions, and facilitate resentencing, while reinvesting in the communities most adversely impacted by the War on Drugs.”

Despite uncertainty about its prospects of advancing this Congress—especially at a time when President Donald Trump is actively considering a more modest proposal to simply reschedule cannabis—advocates are again touting the MORE Act as an example of the type of wide-ranging cannabis reform legislation would take necessary steps to right the wrongs of prohibition and promote social equity.

The latest version of the legislation is largely consistent with past iterations, with certain technical changes including updated data in its findings section, for example.

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