Tag: activism

The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists

On a chilly, early morning in January 2019, a group of animal rights activists descended upon a poultry farm in central Texas. Donning plastic gloves, medical masks, hazmat suits, and T-shirts emblazoned with “Meat the Victims,” they slipped through the unlocked door of a massive, windowless barn. 

Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”

Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.

The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. 

The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.

Keep reading

Failure of U.S. Leaders Should Precipitate More Efforts at People’s Diplomacy—Like in the Vietnam War Era

On September 19, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a webinar focused on the significant impact of women in the Vietnam era anti-war movement.

The first speaker, Vivian Rothstein, who was drawn to anti-war activism after participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, spoke about her participation in a conference in 1967 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, with 40 other American peace activists who met with members of the resistance in North and South Vietnam, including Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a top official with the southern-based National Liberation Front (NLF).

The Bratislava conference was co-organized by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and provided an opportunity for U.S. peace activists to learn directly from Vietnamese about what the U.S. government was doing.

Rothstein said that the Vietnamese women asked to meet separately with the American women who were part of the delegation. They told them about horrific rapes being carried out by U.S. soldiers, bombing of villages, and parachuting of Vietnamese women onto U.S. military bases to serve as sexual playthings for U.S. GIs.

The Vietnamese women hoped that the American women would go back to their communities to tell people what was really going on, with the belief that they would pressure the U.S. government to end the war.

Rothstein said that the Bratislava conference was very meaningful for everyone who participated in it and a good example of people’s diplomacy—citizens getting together, independent of their government, to build ties and work toward peace.

Keep reading

The Israeli task force deporting foreign activists from the West Bank

Israel has intensified its efforts to disrupt the work of international solidarity activists in the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, especially those supporting Palestinians during the olive harvest. Since the start of October, eight foreign activists have been detained; five of them were subsequently either deported or pressured to leave the country, while the other three were banned from the West Bank for varying lengths of time.

The detentions represent an escalation in Israel’s restrictions on international access to the occupied territory, a policy now facilitated by a special “task force” created in April by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. Specifically targeting foreign activists in the West Bank, it operates under Israel’s Shai (West Bank) Central Police Unit and coordinates with the Population and Immigration Authority to expedite detentions and deportations.

The task force was set up shortly after the Biden administration and other foreign governments began imposing sanctions on violent Israeli settlers and settler organizations, and appears to be a direct response to it. According to data from the Human Rights Defenders Fund, 15 foreign human rights activists have been detained and then deported or coerced into leaving the country under the task force’s authority.

Keep reading

Unhinged Transgender Activist Caught on Camera Throwing Tomato Juice on Conservative Students at UC Berkeley

An unhinged transgender activist was caught on camera throwing tomato juice on conservative students with Turning Point USA during a tabling event at UC Berkeley.

The table was being manned by parental rights advocate Harrison Tinsley and former “trans kid” Chloe Cole, who has since detransitioned and become a fierce advocate against child sex changes.

Cole posted images of the activist on X and wrote, “You still can’t change your gender, and you can’t expect me to believe someone like this is mature enough to make life-changing decisions.”

According to Cole, the activist “drenched a chapter member and his MacBook.”

She later added, “The perpetrator was detained. I will do my best to press charges.”

Keep reading

Founder of Surrey Pride, 40, who was patron of controversial LGBT+ education charity that encouraged toddlers to question their gender faces 37 child sex abuse charges including rape and voyeurism

The patron of an LGBT+ charity that encouraged toddlers to question their gender has been charged child sex abuse offences including rape.

Stephen Ireland is accused of raping a child, multiple sexual assaults, voyeurism, making indecent photographs of youngsters as well as plotting to kidnap a child.

The 40-year-old, who was listed as a director of Pride in Surrey until June, appeared in court on Thursday accused of committing the offences over a two-year period from August 2022 to last month.

He was joined in court by David Sutton, 26,  a fellow former Pride in Surrey volunteer who is accused of voyeurism, possession of extreme pornography, conspiracy to sexually assault a child and plotting to kidnap a youngster.

The pair, both from Addlestone in Surrey, were arrested on Wednesday and have since remanded into custody to appear in court again on September 12.

Ireland claims on his social media to be a patron of Educate and Celebrate, a LGBT+ charity which caused controversy after encouraging toddlers to question their gender.

The non-profit, which was set up by Dr Elly Cannon, said it had hoped to ’embed gender, gender identity and sexual orientation into the fabric’ of organisations including primary schools.

However, it mysteriously shut down at the start of 2024 after a series of controversies including pushing to replace ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’ with gender-neutral terms and one of its other patrons – trans comic Jordan Gray – stripping off and exposing their penis during a TV skit.

When it closed in January, the charity’s chair of trustees Julie Bremner told MailOnline they would ‘continue our much-needed work through new projects’. There is no suggestion its closure was related to the charges faced by Ireland.

Ireland had been listed as a founder and director of Pride and Surrey, a charity which organises annual Pride marches and LGBT+ events in the county. Sutton is believed to have been a volunteer for the non-profit.

The organisation said it had suspended the pair after being made aware of a police probe into them in June, adding it was not aware what they were being investigated for until they were charged.

A spokesperson for Pride in Surrey told Surrey Live: ‘[We] have been made aware of an investigation that has been conducted by involving two former volunteers, both of whom have now been charged.

Keep reading

How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on. Recently, the Times published a devastating exposé revealing how GLAAD succumbed to this temptation, enabling Ellis to live luxuriously at the expense of the group’s donors.

The trouble at GLAAD, however, is more than just a story of individual or organizational corruption. It’s also a story about how—in the years since LGBTQ people earned the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, get married, and not be discriminated against in housing and employment—an entire movement has gone tragically adrift.

According to documents obtained by the Times reporter Emily Steel, Ellis signed a contract two years ago enabling her to earn up to $1.3 million a year, far higher than the salaries of CEOs at charitable organizations of comparable size. She racked up nights at a Waldorf Astoria and other posh hotels and took 30 first-class flights in 18 months. A trip with a colleague to the Cannes Lions advertising festival, the purpose of which, according to GLAAD’s spokesman, was to “speak directly to companies about not turning their backs on the LGBTQ community,” cost $60,000. GLAAD also gave Ellis an annual $25,000 allowance to rent a summer house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and $20,000 to remodel her home office.

Keep reading

How Green Activists Destroyed America’s Most Intense Beauty, Lothlórien, the Valley of Singing Gold

It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.

It rained all night last night which means this morning the sun is not occluded by the forest fires which rage now every summer, blocking the sun, leaving us breathing smoke. The next three pieces are a deep dive on why this is happening. It is an easy fix, return to the 150 years of German silvaculture that managed forests all over the world. Forestry is an exact science. It knows when and how to burn, when to thin, and importantly how to manage. All over the world, courtesy of the cursed U.N., forests are not-managed deliberately. And so they burn and burn and burn.

Why are people all over the world so angry? Because the regime described below is being forced everywhere and it is destroying people, economy and land. Why is the economy in such a treacherous dangerous position? Why do we teeter at the edge of collapse? This. It started right here. Let the lady sheep-farmer describe just how surreptitiously screwed we have been. All of us. Everywhere.

It’s Not About the Spotted Owl

I am standing on the flatbed of a three-quarter-ton pickup with Kathy McKay of the K Diamond K Ranch in Republic, Washington, hanging on to a bale of straw as the truck rocks its way down a steep incline into a vast field. It is snowing and the snow is already two feet deep. As we lurch and grind, about a hundred horses spot us, turn, and as if animated by a single puppet master, start to run toward us. They are backlit by snow-covered trees ranked up the snow-covered mountain.

For the next ninety minutes, we peel six-inch layers of hay off the bales and kick them in pieces into a gaggle of horses, then jerk on to the next stomping, nickering group. A slip on the mud and slush and I’d be under the feet of six or seven dancing hungry horses. But the exhilaration is inexpressible, and not for the first time I envy the people who live out here, who live like this, working outside every day no matter the weather, using their muscles and sinew for a purpose other than “health” or longevity. There is a sense here that there is no place else. For me, Ferry County, Washington, has a kind of limerence—I’ve known about its drama for years, and seeing its beauty, I understand the dedication of those who are so beaten, so thoroughly thrashed, outmatched, and ruined. It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.

“We’re dying here,” says Republic Mayor Shirley Couse, whose life has been lived so hard, she looks twenty years older than she is. She has a cold today, so she sniffles through our meeting. She is a volunteer mayor. At first she stepped into the post when someone fell sick, and since then no one has run against her. There’s nothing fun about managing decline. She ticks off her problems, then adds, “The only thing that’s saving us is the gold mine that was recently reopened.

And even with it, we are a welfare county.”

Ferry County is the poorest rural county in the state and is the U.S. county most affected by the actions of environmental activists. Once rich, with a high median income, now desperate, still it shimmers with gold, and an occasional fantasist like me can see the glitter underneath the snow and trees, the narrow valleys, the wide flat rivers and strip malls, junkyards, and gas stations. Gold founded Ferry County, and surveyors claim the region holds all twenty-nine minerals named in the Bible. Ferry and its neighbors—Stevens, Colville, Okanagan, all the counties in the Columbia basin—together form a lost fairyland of dense forest, white-capped mountains, narrow valleys, rivers, creeks, and wetlands—like Lothlórien, the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold from The Lord of the Rings.

The action that started the ruination of Ferry County is the most stunning success of the modern environmental movement, the northern spotted-owl campaign in the 1990s, which shut down 90 percent of the productive forests of the American West. It required only a few months of marching, political pressure, direct actions (sometimes called ecoterrorism), and a typical Clintonesque deal, which drew off some of the Left’s fire for his ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but embedded in that campaign lies the corruption at the heart of the modern movement. Andy Stahl, then resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, declared: “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”

Keep reading

The Rockefellers Created 990 “Climate Change” Institutions, Foundations, And Activist Groups

In the climate change arena, the Rockefellers call the shots. The whole thing was their idea, they took a silly but interesting theory and amped it up with hundreds and hundreds of million of dollars. They founded institutions and linked the survival of those institutions to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.

The Rockefellers have created 990 Climate Change activist organizations. They give them directions, financing, and launch them on the world. The Green Movement was started, financed, organized, and militarized by the Rockefellers. By the late 40’s the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50’s they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea…

Let’s just pause here and recognize that the United States and Canada are 5% developed. If it were 50%, then maybe we would have reason to worry about the effects of trace gas that takes up .04% of the atmosphere, of which 3% is currently contributed to by humans. But were we to have that level of development, our science would have long ago solved the problem. Our sense of proportion, size and consequence has been twisted, propagandized via hundreds of billions of purposed dollars. And all of it is exaggerated science done by scientists compromised by Rockefeller money.

By 1998, the Rockefeller family had swept the table clean of any opposition to this one idea. Any scientist not on board with the agenda was imperiled. Any university department not working towards this one artificial goal, was in danger of being marginalized. Infiltration had begun into every media organization, every entertainment division of every major corporation. This, as stated below, would be a generational goal. For everyone. Or get off the bus.

Keep reading

Ukrainian Anti-War Activist Jailed on Dubious Charges

Zelenskyy’s Ukraine has had a long and egregious history of jailing political dissenters, particularly those opposed to the current “forever war”. From banning opposing political parties to censoring media critical of Zelenskyy’s leadership, it seems indisputable that Ukraine has increasingly resorted to despotic measures to control public opinion.

In a more recent attack on freedom of speech in Ukraine, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Trotskyist and anti-war activist, was arrested on April 25, 2024. News of the arrest was made public via an article and online petition by the World Socialist Web Site, a website affiliated with the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. Syrotiuk was imprisoned by the Security Service of Ukraine and accused of treason due to his writings for the World Socialist Web Site, which the Ukrainian government considers a spreader of pro-Russian propaganda. This is largely due to its criticism of NATO’s actions in the region which was a major reason why Russia undertook its invasion in the first place.

Nevertheless, criticism of any government does not automatically equate with support for that government’s geopolitical opponents. In fact, the International Committee of the Fourth International made it extremely clear in its “Two years of war: Statement on Ukraine” that it opposes the “logic” of Putin’s invasion and supports a withdrawal of Russian troops.

Keep reading

PETA Tried to Guilt People on International Sushi Day, But Community Notes Sliced and Diced It Instead

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is one of the most vocal opponents of humans adopting a carnivorous — or even omnivorous — diet, if not the most vocal opponent.

Part of PETA’s aggressive campaign is an all-out social media attack that typically follows one of two strategies:

1. “Look at how great it is to eat leaves/roots/bugs.”
2. An all-out attack on your conscience and emotions.

A recent example of Strategy No. 2 came on Tuesday when a social media post from the nonprofit organization took a stab at International Sushi Day, which is June 18.

“He doesn’t belong on your plate,” the post said.

Accompanying it was an image of a sad cartoon crab thinking about a sushi maki roll.

“Please, don’t make me die for your sushi,” the crab appeared to be saying or thinking.

Keep reading