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Federal Reserve head is questioned on controversial “debanking of disfavored individuals”

During a recent House Committee hearing, Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell was grilled on “Operation Choke Point 2.0” — an alleged Biden administration effort that Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) described as being “particularly focused on debanking people that are disfavored by…the current…executive branch.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) told Powell that he’d spoken with multiple bankers who said “they’ve never seen a higher degree of regulatory burden, steering guidance, shaping activities in the market from regulators.”

He attributed this heightened scrutiny to Operation Choke Point 2.0 — a reference to an alleged extension of Operation Choke Point 1.0. The first Operation Choke Point was an Obama-era debanking effort that began in 2013 and attempted to prevent gun dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that were deemed to be “high risk” from accessing banking services. Some people in the cryptocurrency industry claim that Operation Choke Point 2.0 is now being carried out by the Biden adminsitration and is primarily focused on deterring banks from doing business with cryptocurrency firms.

“When people really feel like some third party is going to steer or shape their money, they don’t trust it,” Davidson added. “I mean the unbanked and the underbanked fundamentally that’s lack of trust is part of why they don’t use our banking system today. In fact, that’s part of the appeal of the digital asset space…the permissionless nature of it.”

Davidson continued by suggesting that lots of people working in the financial services space “feel threatened by the prospect of change” and are attempting to restrict access to services such as cryptocurrency.

“They’ve maybe reluctantly concluded that you can’t ban crypto,” Davidson said. “They at least want to keep it account based so some third party can actually control the assets which is a polite way of saying, ‘We don’t actually trust our citizens to control their money or their assets, we’ll let somebody else do it for them because we can control those third parties.’”

Davidson then pressed Powell on whether financial regulators use their powers to control third parties.

“If you don’t comply with the regulatory regime, you don’t get to operate a financial services business, right?” Davidson asked Powell.

“That’s right,” Powell confirmed.

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The Military-Intelligentsia Complex: How Higher Education Enables US Militarism

Throughout history, most academics have been the witting or unwitting servants of power. Socrates was accused of failing to honor the gods of Athens and corrupting the youth with his ideas. He was canceled in the ultimate way: sentenced to die. Aristotle, by contrast, tutored the young Alexander the Great, future King of Macedonia, which at the time was occupying Athens. During the rebellion, Aristotle fled to save his skin.

Today, some academics refusing to toe the line are also threatened with death. Chicago University’s John Mearsheimer was placed on the US-funded Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation’s blacklist, where he and others, including myself, were accused of committing “informational terrorism” by expressing fact-based opinions about the war with Russia. At the same time that Ukrainian fascists were placing me on their list, a cabal of liberal staff at my military-funded institution, the University of Plymouth (UK), terminated my position without warning or right of reply.

If we look at the US imperial apparatus, we see that higher education plays a major role.

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Pennsylvania Dem Threatens To Withhold Funding From University of Pittsburgh Over Conservative Speakers

A Pennsylvania lawmaker on Tuesday issued what free speech advocates are calling a veiled threat to withhold funding from the University of Pittsburgh over the school’s decision to allow several conservative speakers on campus.

During an appropriations hearing on university funding, Pennsylvania state representative La’Tasha Mayes (D.) demanded that Pitt disinvite Cabot Phillips, Riley Gaines, and Michael Knowles from upcoming campus events. All three speakers have a history of “targeting transgender students,” Mayes claimed—especially Knowles, whom she accused of saying that “transgender people should be eradicated.”

Mayes called on university chancellor Patrick Gallagher, who was at the hearing to request additional funding from the state, to “cancel the speakers who are coming to campus”—implying that she might vote against his request if he did not. Mayes did not respond to a request for comment.

The exchange alarmed Speech First, a legal nonprofit focused on First Amendment issues, which called Mayes’s remarks an “abuse of power.”

“The state is saying that if the university doesn’t violate its students’ First Amendment rights, then their funding could be at risk,” Cherise Trump, Speech First’s executive director, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Lawmakers shouldn’t be using veiled threats to hold funding over universities simply because they don’t like a person who was invited to speak.”

The shakedown highlights the growing willingness of progressive lawmakers to target offensive speech, in part by putting pressure on universities that permit it. In January 2022, for example, Democrats in both the Philadelphia City Council and the Pennsylvania State Senate urged the University of Pennsylvania to fire Amy Wax, the tenured law professor who has drawn fire for her views on race and immigration. Other Democrats, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Maryland senator Ben Cardin, have falsely claimed that “hate speech” is not protected by the First Amendment.

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Afroman sued by law enforcement officers who raided his home

Seven members of the Adams County Sheriff’s Office who raided Joseph Foreman’s home last year are now suing him claiming, among other things, he invaded their privacy.

Four deputies, two sergeants and a detective are claiming Foreman (a.k.a. “Afroman”) took footage of their faces obtained during the raid and used it in music videos and social media posts without their consent, a misdemeanor violation under Ohio Revised Code.

They’re also suing on civil grounds, saying Foreman’s use of their faces (i.e. personas) in the videos and social media posts resulted in their “emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation and humiliation.”

The plaintiffs say they’re entitled to all of Foreman’s profits from his use of their personas. That includes, according to the complaint, proceeds from the songs, music videos and live event tickets as well as the promotion of Foreman’s “Afroman” brand, under which he sells beer, marijuana, t-shirts and other merchandise.

They’re also asking for an injunction to take down all videos and posts containing their personas.

Cincinnati attorney Robert Klingler filed the suit in Adams County Common Pleas Court on March 13 against Foreman, his recording firm and a Texas-based media distribution company. Not every law enforcement officer involved in the raid is named as a plaintiff.

Foreman on Wednesday posted to Instagram promising to countersue “for the undeniable damage this had on my clients, family, career and property.”

The sheriff’s office conducted the armed raid of Foreman’s Adams County home last August. [Bodycam video]

Sheriff’s deputies acted on a warrant claiming probable cause existed that drugs and drug paraphernalia would be found on Foreman’s property and that trafficking and kidnapping had taken place there.

“They come up here with AR-15, traumatize my kids, destroyed my property, kick in my door, rip up and destroy my camera system,” he said in August.

The suspicions turned out to be unfounded. The Adams County Prosecutor’s Office said the raid failed to turn up probative criminal evidence, according to attorney Anna Castellini. No charges were ever filed.

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A QAnon Follower Booby-Trapped Her Home With Flashbangs and Pepper Spray

A troubled QAnon follower who believes that former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are trying to have her killed booby-trapped her house with shotguns and pepper spray. She claimed her ex-husband was secretly filming child pornography on the Clintons’ behalf, and is now facing felony charges after being arrested last week.

The incident is the latest example of how QAnon, a conspiracy movement that its adherents repeatedly claim to be peaceful, can drive believers to commit violent, and often deadly, acts.

But the incident earlier this month could have been much worse. In a comment on her Facebook page on Tuesday night, the QAnon believer claimed that when police arrived at her home: “I had 20 guns on me.”

On March 9, a door-to-door salesman named Dylan Martin approached the front door of a house occupied by Bryan Hill and Tracy Jo Remington in Colorado. 

Martin, who works for a house painting company, didn’t notice the “no trespassing” sign just to the left of the steps leading up to the front porch, and walked straight into a tripwire the residents had set up.

Martin heard “a loud bang [and] saw a bright white flash of light,” according to an affidavit reviewed by VICE News. He “immediately felt disoriented with his vision being blurred and [causing] his ears to ring.”

A few houses away, Martin’s colleague Christoper Howard heard the bang and was certain it was a gunshot. Howard rushed to the house and checked Martin over. At that point, the garage door opened, and Hill shouted at the pair: “No trespassing.”

After the incident, Howard and Martin quickly left the area. But over the next few days, Martin’s hearing was still affected and he had a constant headache. He called the police to report the incident, and on March 14, officers visited the property and found the tripwire. They also found a shotgun-type device connected to the tripwire that used blanks to recreate the noise of a 12-gauge shotgun but without the projectiles, in a bush to the side of the path.

The officers, after speaking to people in the area, discovered that the residents of the house had told their neighbors not to let their kids play near the house, according to the charging documents.

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Christian Crowdfunding Site Hosting Neo-Nazi Trying to Build Whites-Only Community

The rightwing Christian alternative to GoFundMe is allowing a neo-Nazi leader to raise thousands of dollars on their platform, according to online records reviewed by VICE News.

GiveSendGo, which had already made headlines for allowing far-right groups like the Proud Boys raise millions of dollars off of its platform, is currently hosting a former Marine and neo-Nazi named Christopher Pohlhaus, who among other activities, wants to build an all-white community in Maine. 

Pohlhaus has commanded a sizable Telegram following for years and once gave a live stream on how best to hypothetically shoot truckers in order to disrupt the supply chain. He has also had connections to everyone from Riley June Williams—the January 6 attacker who broke into then Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office—to NSC-131, a neo-Nazi activist network in New England that was founded by a former member of a designated terrorist group. 

Despite those credentials, GiveSendGo, a site that promotes itself as the “#1 Free Christian Fundraising Site”, has yet to boot Pohlhaus from their platform. GiveSendGo was notified at least twice last year about the avowed neo-Nazi and his affiliations to the violent far-right. In September, an analyst at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit terrorism watchdog, contacted GiveSendGo to say Pohlhaus was using it as a platform for making money and establishing a white nationalist community. 

Pohlhaus served in the Marines for four years in the 2000s and gained prominence among the far-right when he promoted a countrywide and racist banner drop on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Pohlhaus then planned a migration among some of his followers to turn Maine into an all-white ethnostate. He took the cause to GiveSendGo, where Pohlhaus began to raise money for a homestead in a remote part of the state that could one day serve as a community and a place where his group can “train.” So far, records from the fundraising site show he has accumulated just over $2000, with two large donations over $800 each, coming nearly two months ago (the campaign also received 23 “prayers”, which is a button on GiveSendGo pages). 

Within that span of time, Pohlhaus caused outrage when he and several other members of his group, which he calls a tribe, showed up armed at a children’s drag queen story event in Ohio, giving the Sieg Heil salute with their arms, yelling racial slurs, and reportedly chanting “there will be blood!”

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Neo-Nazi Leader ‘ilovehate5150’ Charged for Threatening to Kill Journalist

An American neo-Nazi who went by online names such as “King ov Wrath” and “ilovehate5150” has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a reporter who was covering his terrorist organization. 

Nicholas Welker was taken into custody by the FBI Tuesday after allegedly helping to create an internet meme that explicitly threatened the life of a U.S. journalist and then sending it directly to the reporter on Twitter. Welker has been charged with conspiracy to transmit threatening communications. 

The reporter nor the outlet is not named in the court documents. 

Welker was an alleged leader within the international neo-Nazi group, Feuerkrieg Division (FKD), according to court documents. In addition to his other pseudonyms, he also allegedly went by “DankTree2316.”

The Feuerkrieg Division is a now-disbanded neo-Nazi group that was openly accelerationist—meaning it wanted to hasten the collapse of society to build a white ethnostate from the ashes—and had ties to a plethora of violent crimes committed by young men, many of them minors. Members of the group have been charged with child abuse, assault, and plotting violent actions. 

Like many other online neo-Nazi groups, the Feuerkrieg Division loves to use memes as propaganda. So when the group allegedly felt threatened by a reporter looking into them, Welker and his fellow neo-Nazis went to work.

The piece of propaganda in particular showed a photo of the journalist with a gun pointed at their head with messages “race traitor,” “journalist fuck off,” and ”you have been warned.” The meme also contained their name and place of employment. Welker allegedly had asked another neo-Nazi to create it and when he saw his vision come to life he responded with an emoji featuring a smiling face covered in hearts. 

Welker then allegedly sent the threats directly to the reporter on Twitter asking him if he’s seen their latest work. According to the court documents, an FBI agent was able to ascertain Welker’s identity because of the work of antifascist researchers and remarkably sloppy operational security. After antifascist researchers outted Welker, he confirmed it within the Feuerkrieg Division chatrooms. A month later, he followed up by writing: “Nicholas Hazen Welker Santa Clara County Department of Corrections. That’s my information[.] In case I go missing”, before providing a date of birth.

The Department of Justice described the Feuerkrieg Division as a racially motivated violent extremist group that had “cells in multiple states.” The group took inspiration from Atomwaffen Division and was expressively accelerationist in nature. Like others within this community of groups, they drew from an aesthetic that embraced terrorism and violence. 

The Feuerkrieg Division was initially founded in the Balkans by a 13-year-old Estonia boy who was going by “Commander.” The group became known for the violent actions of its members, death threats, and propaganda. In 2019, U.K. police arrested one member for plotting a mass shooting attack and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl.  One British teenager who was a leader pleaded guilty to 12 terrorism charges in 2021, making him one of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorists. The group was declared a terrorist organization by the U.K. in 2020. 

Like other groups in this community, the Feuerkrieg Division had ties to the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group connected to child abuse and violent crimes. 

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MEME TRIAL: Defendant says he wasn’t committing ‘election interference’, was simply trying for viral meme

On Monday, attorneys gave their opening arguments in the trial of internet meme maker Douglass Mackey, also known as Rickey Vaughn, with his lawyer Andrew Frisch telling a federal jury that Mackey wasn’t looking to trick voters when he posted Hillary Clinton memes in 2016 telling supporters to “vote from home” via text messaging.

Frisch said that Mackey was merely attempting to go viral, according to the New York Daily News, stating that Mackey was “sh*t-posting,” or “stuff-posting” as he told the jury.

“It means what it says — he was posting stuff,” Frisch said. “A lot of it was online trash-talking. Juvenile, sure, and some of it was vulgar.”

“Whatever your reaction when you hear his views … whether he was a great thinker or a neanderthal caveman, you will see that none of it is proof of a criminal conspiracy.”

According to Rolling Stone, Frisch argued that people had begun texting the number only after media outlets began covering the meme. He noted that two people texted “Hillary for prison” to the number.

Federal prosecutors claimed that Mackey worked with fellow meme makers to create the Twitter posts and make them as real as possible.

“This wasn’t about changing votes. This was about vaporizing votes, making them disappear,” said Assistant US Attorney Turner Buford.

“The number was real and set up to receive incoming messages,” he explained. “The release of these fake campaign ads was timed to flood the internet before Election Day.”

Mackey posted the memes on November 1, a week before the election, and Frisch said that the meme’s message was “ludicrous to anyone with a basic knowledge of how presidential elections work,” the New York Daily Mail reported.

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German Government and Media Admit ‘Covid’ Vaccine Damage, Victims Tell Their Horrific Stories

Why were the Covid “vaccine” risks clearly stated in the EU contract with the vaccine manufacturers in 2020, while the harmlessness was mostly communicated publicly?

Long-term symptoms can occur after a Covid infection but also after a Covid vaccination. Unfortunately, vaccine manufacturers are legally protected thanks to Germany’s government, and those affected feel deeply disappointed and betrayed. They fight for the correct diagnosis and treatment, the assumption of treatment costs, and the recognition of vaccination damage.

German news station ZDF reporter Susana Santina spoke to Selin Islami, whose vaccination damage was recognized by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia after a year. And with Christian Pülz, who also successfully but gruelingly fought for it in Bavaria for a long time.

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Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles is caught collecting and selling personal data

Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) has been caught selling drivers’ personal information without their consent and without the option to opt out. Last year alone, the BMV made around $25 million from selling personal information, according to WRTV.

Asked if the BMV sells personal information, a BMV employee said to WRTV: “No. Well, you’re not supposed to. Can’t tell you for sure what they do, but they’re not supposed to!”

Though the employees might not be aware of the practice, an investigation by WRTV found that the Indiana BMV does sell personal information and the practice is legal. The BMV can sell personal information like your name, date of birth, past and current addresses, license plate number, make and model of your vehicle, VIN, date of purchase, license type, and your driver’s record.

In the past decade (2012 to 2022) the BMV made over $237 million from selling drivers’ personal information. It sells the personal information to lawyers, bail bond companies, insurance companies, private investigators, debt collection companies, recovery agents, law enforcement agencies, security guards, auto dealers, tow companies, school corporations, and mobile home parks.

The BMV refused an on-camera interview. However, in an emailed statement, a spokesperson said: “Data is only available to qualified entities who meet the eligibility and use requirements in Indiana Code § 9-14-13-7 or § 9-14-13-8.

“Consumers do not have the option to opt out at this time,” they added.

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