Blog

Higher Education Must Not Become a Research Arm of Militarized Power

hat happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.

Keep reading

UK Encryption Backdoor Could Hit US Data, Jordan Warns

Britain has refused to let a US technology company brief Congress about a secret order to weaken encryption and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is treating that refusal as a problem in its own right.

Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Friday warning that Britain may be using encryption powers to reach the private data of US citizens.

The underlying dispute is not new. For more than a year, the UK’s use of secret “technical capability notices” under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 has strained relations with Washington, ever since reports that Britain ordered Apple to open up encrypted iCloud data. What is new is the wall Jordan says he keeps hitting when he tries to learn more.

He met Sir Christian Turner, the British ambassador to the United States, in March, after a US company asked to brief members of Congress about one of these notices, something that would require Mahmood’s sign-off.

The ambassador suggested it could happen. Mahmood then refused.

“This denial is inconsistent with our understanding from Ambassador Turner and raises serious concerns about shared cooperation on these sensitive matters, particularly as Congress exercises its important oversight responsibilities,” Jordan wrote, the Telegraph reported, adding that it cast doubt on the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”

He asked Mahmood to “review this matter and grant the US company’s request to speak with Congress about an alleged technical capability notice,” which he said would “honour the representation made by the ambassador during our meeting and uphold the spirit of transparency and cooperation that is the foundation of our shared security relationship.”

The secrecy Jordan ran into is built into how these orders work and it is worth keeping in view.

The UK may be building “backdoors into their encrypted services,” he wrote.

A backdoor is a deliberately built flaw, a master key, or a hidden bypass that lets an intelligence agency read encrypted data without the user ever knowing. It defeats end-to-end encryption, the design that normally keeps a message readable only to the person who sent it and the person who received it.

A company served with a notice cannot tell its customers, the press, or apparently even a foreign legislature, without the express permission of the Home Secretary.

Keep reading

Penis Measurements Cannot Justify a Sex Offender’s Indefinite Detention, South Carolina’s Top Court Says

South Carolina is one of 20 states that authorize indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders after they have completed their prison sentences. Under state law, such continued detention is allowed only when a jury concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that a respondent qualifies as a “sexually violent predator” (SVP), meaning he “suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder that makes [him] likely to engage in acts of sexual violence if not confined in a secure facility for long-term control, care, and treatment.”

Although the South Carolina Office of Mental Health (OMH) concluded that Andy Hyman was not an SVP, a jury disagreed, swayed by a second opinion based largely on penile plethysmography (PPG), a scientifically dubious technique that aims to measure sexual response to images, audio narratives, or textual descriptions by gauging tiny changes in the circumference of the subject’s penis. That test, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously ruled last month in response to Hyman’s appeal, is “generally inadmissible in judicial proceedings” because it suffers from a “glaring lack of standardization,” which casts doubt on its validity as a predictor of recidivism.

With that decision, the South Carolina Supreme Court joins a long list of state and federal courts that have deemed PPG results unreliable and inadmissible. The technique is so controversial that the OMH, which is charged with conducting pre-commitment evaluations under South Carolina’s SVP law, eschews PPG as a matter of policy. But the state is allowed to solicit a second evaluation if it does not like the OMH’s opinion, which is what happened in Hyman’s case.

Hyman, who pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct with a minor in 1997, served “a short term in prison” and “completed several years of supervised release in 2003,” the South Carolina Supreme Court noted. Thirteen years later, Hyman pleaded guilty to the same crime, this time in the third degree, which resulted in a 10-year prison sentence. Before he completed that sentence, the state sought to continue detaining him as an SVP.

Marie Gehle, the OMH’s chief psychologist, conducted “a series of standardized tests” and diagnosed Hyman with “pedophilic disorder.” But she concluded that he did not fit the statutory criteria for civil commitment because he was not especially likely to reoffend. Unsatisfied with that assessment, the state asked Emily Gottfried, director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic and Lab at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), for a second opinion.

Gottfried agreed that standardized tests placed Hyman “squarely within the average rate of recidivism” for sex offenders. But unlike Gehle, she also conducted a PPG test, which seemed to play an important role in her conclusion that Hyman posed “a heightened risk of reoffending.”

During the trial, Gottfried described PPG as “an objective physiological measure of male sexual arousal,” “the gold standard” for assessing that response, and a “strong predictor or risk factor for future sexual offending.” The PPG results, the state’s lawyer told the jury, “clearly indicate[d]” that Hyman had a “current sexual interest in children.” That was enough, “in and of itself,” to justify his civil commitment, the state argued.

The jury deliberated for just 22 minutes before agreeing with Gottfried. It rejected the contrary assessment offered by Gehle, who testified that most of the tests Gottfried had used were not designed to measure the likelihood of recidivism. In particular, Gehle said, PPG is not reliable, since retests produce inconsistent results, or valid as a predictor of future offending, which she said is why the OMH does not use it for pre-commitment evaluations.

Keep reading

Federal Marijuana Prosecutions Hit Another Record Low In 2025 As State Legalization Expands, Government Report Shows

Federal marijuana trafficking cases fell to another record-low in 2025, with a new report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) revealing a continued trend amid the expanding state-level reform movement that has given consumers more places to buy legal cannabis.

A recently published USSC fact sheet on drug prosecution trends shows just 383 federal cannabis trafficking cases in the last fiscal year. That marks a decline from the 471 cases reported in 2024.

More broadly, USSC said, marijuana trafficking prosecutions have dropped 62 percent from fiscal year 2021 to 2025.

Shifting federal priorities, which seem to have coincided with state-level marijuana reform efforts, have gradually pushed cannabis near the bottom of the list of drug trafficking cases.

The 383 cases from last year stands in stark contrast to the nearly 3,500 cannabis trafficking cases that were reported in 2015. Just two years before that, in 2013, the marijuana prosecutions amounted to approximately 5,000.

Colorado and Washington State became the first two states to approve recreational marijuana legalization in 2012.

Methamphetamine trafficking cases have dominated the list over the past decade, the USSC document published last month shows. In 2024, cases targeting fentanyl took over as the second most common drug trafficking target, followed by crack cocaine and powder cocaine. The number of heroin trafficking cases (356) was marginally lower than marijuana last year.

Keep reading

Toronto’s meter maids are ripping off taxpayers for $6 million/year

Rebel News recently returned to the scene of the crime. But there’s a twist to this true crime story: the criminals aren’t gangbangers, but rather, members of law enforcement!

Astute viewers of Rebel News might recall that earlier this month, we paid a visit to the headquarters of the central division of Toronto Parking Enforcement in north Toronto.

The reason for our house call: we were told by an insider that parking enforcement officers were engaging in time theft. Which is to say, they are supposed to work 10 hours per shift, but they are only putting in eight hours (or less).

Teaming up with Jay Bannister of Mad Lab Press, we documented the morning shift starting duty at 6 a.m. They are supposed to be working until 4 p.m. But no: at around 1:30 p.m., the meter maids began returning to HQ.

This time, banditry works out to almost $6 million in theft.

Our insiders say it has been going on for years now, meaning the City of Toronto (a.k.a. the taxpayer) has been hoodwinked out of tens of millions of dollars!

And yes, we caught them red-handed coming back to HQ early. Surely, yet another P.R. black eye for the Toronto Police Service.

So, what happened in the aftermath?

You’re not going to believe it…

Keep reading

Senate Investigation Finds FDA Officials Covered-Up 25 COVID Shot Safety Signals

A new Majority Staff Interim Report from Sen. Ron Johnson’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was released today (April 29, 2026), titled Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.

In early 2021 — just weeks after the COVID-19 vaccines rolled out under EUA — FDA senior medical officer Dr. Ana Szarfman (a key developer of the agency’s own data mining system) teamed up with Dr. William DuMouchel (the statistician who literally invented FDA’s “gold standard” EB data mining algorithm) to run an upgraded analysis on VAERS data.

Their new method (Regression-Adjusted Gamma Poisson Shrinker — RGPS) fixed a known flaw called “masking” — where signals for one COVID vaccine get drowned out by the sheer volume of reports from the others.

What they found was explosive:

  • 49 examples of extreme masking
  • ~25 new statistically significant safety signals that FDA’s standard MGPS method completely missed
  • Signals included: sudden cardiac death, acute myocardial infarction, pulmonary infarction, Bell’s palsy, non-site specific embolism/thrombosis, dementia, and “Death and sudden death” — for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J shots

Dr. Szarfman repeatedly shared these findings with senior CBER officials (the very people in charge of vaccine safety), including Dr. Peter Marks, in March, April, May, and July 2021.

Their response?

  • Told her to “hold off” on creating and sending any more data mining reports
  • Called her work a “major distraction”
  • Worried it would “create erroneous conflicts that feed into anti-vaccination rhetoric”
  • Eventually ordered her to “cease and desist”

Later, FDA quietly locked down distribution of its own weekly data mining reports to CDC — right around the time FOIA requests and Sen. Johnson’s letters started coming in. One CDC official even admitted they may have asked FDA to stop sending them “because of the FOIAs.”

Even after Dr. Szarfman and DuMouchel published their findings in Drug Safety (2022) showing masking was eight times more likely with COVID vaccines, and Dr. Robert Califf replied “Thanks. These are good,” no changes were made to the methodology.

This is documented, internal FDA communication showing deliberate suppression of safety signals at the exact moment millions of Americans were being told the shots were “safe and effective.”

The cover-up continues to unravel. Accountability is urgently warranted.

Keep reading

UK Deputy PM Says Equality Before Law Doesn’t Mean Treating All Ethnic Groups the ‘Same’ After Nowak Killing

British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said that not all ethnic groups should be treated the same by police in the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died in police handcuffs after officers refused to believe he had been stabbed by a Sikh man.

Lammy, who also serves as the left-wing Labour Party government’s Justice Secretary, said that while the “starting point” should be equality before the law, it is not always appropriate to be treated “the same”, noting the disproportionate arrest rates of certain ethnic minority groups, such as Roma travellers [Gypsies] and black Britons.

“We are all equal before the law. So that is not the starting point, but it is the case. Recognising that in our country it is still the case that on arrest, prosecution, and conviction, I’m afraid in our prisons, ethnic minorities are disproportionately [represented] in the criminal justice system. So context can matter, but it cannot eclipse violence or the fact that we need our police to act to mitigate and deal with crimes in our communities, whatever the color of your skin or background,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Saturday.

The BBC presenter put to Lammy the guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council on its anti-racism policy, which states: “Our commitment to racial equity means producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups… It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality).”

The leftist government minister denied that this meant that there was not equality before the law, stating that “the complexity is [that] equality does not always necessarily mean the same” and that it is important to “understand that context can be different for different groups.”

Keep reading

Rigged Election Buries LA Mayoral Candidate Spencer Pratt in Latest Ballot Dump – Democrat Nithya Raman Projected to Win

Los Angeles Mayoral Candidate Spencer Pratt fell into third place behind Democrat City Councilwoman Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayoral primary after a damning ballot dump heavily favored the Democratic candidates.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has already been projected to advance to the November runoff. The top two candidates will advance if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.

Raman gained over 19,000 votes in the latest dump, Bass gained nearly 16,000, and Pratt gained just under 8,500. 80% of the batch went to the Democrats.

With an estimated 146,000 ballots remaining to count, Pratt now trails Raman by more than 3,000 votes. Previously, Raman trailed by roughly 40,000 votes.

Pratt dominated with mail-in ballots received by election day, but those received after election day have heavily favored the Democrats. Where are these votes coming from? How can anybody trust these results?

ABC7’s Jory Rand suggested that, while unlikely, Pratt could “somehow” come back if “we see a batch in the last couple of days of those mail-in ballots that were heavy on Spencer Pratt.”

Keep reading

Andrew Left faces 20 years in prison — but having a correct opinion about a stock shouldn’t be a crime

This past Tuesday afternoon, I rang up Andrew Left, the high-profile short seller long known for meticulously documenting allegations of alleged corporate malfeasance and placing bets against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Shopify and Chinese real estate giant Evergrande.

“Hey Charlie, I’m at the airport,” Left said as he picked up. “I’m sitting down, having a vodka.”

Given what had transpired just hours earlier, it wasn’t hard to understand the sitting-down-having-a-vodka part. Late Monday night, after a two-week trial, Left was convicted in Los Angeles federal court of 13 counts of securities fraud.

Prosecutors alleged Left circulated his research on social media and financial TV to move a bunch of stocks and make a ton of money. That constituted market manipulation, they said, and got a jury to agree with them.

It sounds to me like what Wall Street does every day — people who “talk their book” — not to mention all the retail trolls you see on X trying to gin up interest in speculative stuff that loses money. Even so, Left now faces 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in ­August.

Truth be told, there’s something unsettling in what Left admits he did: Purposely pushing stock prices around to make a quick buck. Big firms have strict rules around trading off research, placing stocks on so-called restricted lists. Reporters like myself don’t buy individual stocks out of fear our reporting will get us jammed up because we can move prices.

Yes, the trading may look fishy, and this type of trading around ­research reports and public comments has been a legal gray area. Purposely moving stocks can be construed as stock manipulation. Fishy, though, isn’t something that’s supposed to land you in prison for 20 years.

Try telling that to a jury — as Left’s lawyers did. In one day of trading, Left could make more than most of those people earned in a lifetime. It didn’t help that Left made his bones as a short seller. Making money from pushing stocks down in value just doesn’t sit well with most people, even if it means exposing various abuses and is necessary for markets to function properly.

Keep reading

Trump clashes with ‘Meet the Press’ interviewer, calls outlet ‘crooked’ before ending segment

An exchange between President Donald Trump and NBC’s Kristin Welker became heated in a “Meet the Press” interview.

During a Sunday segment focused on a proposed “anti-weaponization” fund, which is meant to provide compensation to Americans who were politically or ideologically targeted under the administration of former President Joe Biden, the discussion quickly became tense.

“You had a bunch of dirty cops, and frankly what they did was weaponization of our government,” Trump said, the conversation specifically focused on the January 6th protesters.

“There’s no evidence of that,” Welker said.

“Try looking at the tapes one time,” Trump replied.

In support of her assertion, Welker brought up the number of people who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers.

“They plead guilty because they were frightened,” Trump claimed, purporting people had been told they would be jailed for significant periods of time.

He noted that the fund, which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced the Department of Justice (DOJ) would no longer be pursuing, would have been applied on an “individual case basis,” rather than blanket allocations.

As the interview continued to heat up, the discussion turned to the topic of election fraud, including about the 2020 presidential election, as well as Trump calling out the lengthy vote counting process in California. Registered voters are automatically mailed ballots before elections in California, leading to long ballot counting times and concerns by some of the opportunity for fraud.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later they’re nowhere close to picking a winner,” Trump said of the Golden State.

“State and local officials acknowledge they are slow…” Welker said.

“No, they’re crooked,” Trump said. “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

“You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they are rigged,” he continued, accusing the press of lacking credibility due to unbalanced reporting.

Besides NBC, Trump accused several media outlets of being “crooked,” naming ABC, CBS and CNN.

Keep reading