Tag: government overreach

Canadian Govt to Kill 400 Ostriches to Prevent COVID Research

The owners of Universal Ostrich Farm in B.C., Canada, has a contract signed with a Japanese research firm to study treatments for COVID-19. Biomedical research of this nature would ruin the plan-demic powers Canada enjoyed, and as such, the government plans to kill all 400 ostriches at this farm after an extensive legal battle.

Those outside Canada likely do not understand the national outrage. This is more than a case of animal cruelty or government overreach. The Canadian government is blatantly attempting to prevent researchers from finding an alternative cure to the very virus that was used as a premise to shut down the world. A Universal Ostrich Farm spokesperson, Katie Pasitney, has explained “inoculating ostriches by injecting them with antigens or particles of a dead virus” created an immune response to create egg antibodies.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency ordered to cull the entire flock due to two ostriches dying of the H5N1 virus. The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) maintains that all birds among an infected flock must be killed to prevent health issues. Yet, these birds were not for meat or simply pets. These birds potentially contained the capacity to product antibodies to COVID-19. Remember when the government cared about nothing aside from COVID? The headlines touted that the world would suffer a medieval plague unless everyone stayed home, masked up, and willingly accepted an experimental mRNA unstudied vaccine. The government can simply do anything under the pretext of “public health.”

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Vicious FBI Agents Accused of Terrorizing Innocent J6 Families and Harassing Children Sue to Keep Their Identities Hidden

In 2023 The Gateway Pundit published the shocking story of Chris and In Annette Kuehne.

Chris Kuehne is a 22-year veteran who received numerous medals and awards, including the Purple Heart, a Navy Commendation Medal with Valor, and a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Valor for actions in combat.

On January 6, 2021, Chris went inside the Capitol but did not cause any harm or damage – in fact he cleaned trash off the floor, helped to stop theft of government property, asked people to leave the building, and went up to Capitol Police Officers to ask how he could help. Chris was also set-up by an FBI operative that day. Chris committed no violence and did nothing wrong.

One month later, in the early morning of February 11, 2021 Chris, his four-year-old child, and his wife Annette, who was pregnant at the time were awakened to sirens, cell phone rings, and bursts of colorful lights reflecting through our windows.

Annette later went public about the raid, “The FBI instructed Chris to come outside immediately. Our 4-year-old was awakened from the chaos, and I picked him up and ran downstairs to open the front door. Our house, street and neighboring streets were completely surrounded by armed FBI and law enforcement. It was a scene that we see so many times in the movies, but now it was here at my house! There were three large armored tactical vehicles parked on my front, side and back yard, and police vehicles that extended throughout the entire community. I open the door, and for a second, I didn’t realize that there were about twenty FBI SWAT Team members with semi-automatic rifles pointed at my son and I. We were covered by the bright red lasers pointed at our faces, chests, and various points on our bodies.”

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Trump’s Latest Order Could Keep You Out Of Prison For Crimes You Didn’t Even Know You Committed

On May 9, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations,” addressing one of the most insidious threats to American liberty: the unchecked expansion of criminal penalties through regulatory sprawl. For decades, this trend has eroded the separation of powers, undermined due process, and transformed the federal legal system into a maze where ordinary Americans risk criminal liability for unknowable infractions.

While largely ignored by the corporate press, civil liberties advocates should see this order as a long-overdue corrective. It tackles the explosion of hidden criminal penalties, reaffirms the necessity of criminal intent, and forces long-overdue accountability onto the administrative state.

The order accomplishes two key reforms. First, it limits criminal enforcement to cases in which a person knowingly violates a regulation, discouraging the use of “strict liability,” which bypasses the traditional requirement of criminal intent. Second, it compels federal agencies to publicly identify every regulation they enforce with criminal penalties, along with the statutory authority and mental state required for conviction. That such basic transparency has never been required is an indictment of how far the system has drifted from constitutional norms.

To appreciate how far we’ve strayed, consider the founding era. Originally, Congress held exclusive authority to define federal crimes, and those crimes were few in number, targeting only existential threats to the republic, such as treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. These laws were clear, deliberate, and rooted in the principle that punishment required both wrongful conduct and a guilty mind.

Today, by contrast, legal scholars cannot even agree on how many federal crimes exist. The Code of Federal Regulations spans more than 175,000 pages, burying countless criminal provisions deep within bureaucratic text. A 2022 algorithmic study estimated that the U.S. Code alone contains more than 5,000 federal crimes, and when regulatory offenses are included, the number may reach into the hundreds of thousands. As law professor Jonathan Turley recently testified before Congress, we may now need artificial intelligence just to identify all the crimes on the books. That is not hyperbole — it is a measure of how disconnected federal criminal law has become from the rule of law.

The result is a dystopia in which nearly every American adult is a potential felon. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” retired law professor John Baker once observed. “That is not an exaggeration.” If everything is a crime, everyone becomes a criminal, empowering prosecutors to target individuals first and search for crimes later. This selective enforcement invites abuse, especially when legal ambiguities intersect with political incentives.

The longstanding legal principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” only makes sense if the law is reasonably knowable. Everyone understands murder is wrong. But when it comes to regulatory offenses buried in obscure agency publications, fair notice disappears. As Justice Neil Gorsuch and legal scholar Janie Nitze recently wrote, the Roman emperor Caligula would post laws in tiny print and in inaccessible locations so no one could read them. “The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear — the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons.” America’s current regulatory state, with its thousands of hidden crimes, mirrors this tyranny of uncertainty.

Many of these crimes defy common sense. The A Crime a Day account on X and its companion book, How to Become a Federal Criminal, document the absurdities: It’s a federal crime to mail a mongoose or to leave the country with more than $5 in nickels or pennies. These aren’t just punchlines; real Americans have been prosecuted under similarly obscure statutes, often for conduct no reasonable person would recognize as criminal. Mislabeling imported goods, disturbing protected wildlife by accident, or violating esoteric shipping rules has led to life-altering penalties.

In principle, the criminal justice system is supposed to require mens rea, meaning “a guilty mind.” Strict liability, where no proof of intent is needed, might be defensible for minor infractions like parking tickets. But where liberty is at stake, intent matters. Prosecuting someone for conduct they didn’t know was illegal, and that no reasonable person would assume was criminal, violates our most basic notions of justice.

Trump’s executive order strikes a blow to this Kafkaesque regime. It mandates that federal agencies publish clear, accessible lists of all criminally enforceable regulations, identify the legal authority for each, and define the mental state required for conviction. This reasserts a fundamental truth: Criminal punishment should apply only to knowing wrongdoing, not bureaucratic mistakes or obscure technicalities.

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Court Order Blocking Trump From Targeting Perkins Coie Is Overreach

Federal District Court Judge Beryl Howell’s injunction prohibiting the implementation of Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the Perkins Coie law firm spoils a righteous core with judicial activism.

On March 6, Trump issued an executive order asserting that “the dishonest and dangerous activity of…Perkins Coie has affected this country for decades. Notably, in 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false “dossier” designed to steal an election…. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws….”

The order also accused Perkins Coie of racial discrimination, citing its “publicly announced percentage quotas in 2019 for hiring and promotion on the basis of race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws.”

The order suspended security clearances for the firm’s lawyers and barred them from federal buildings, prohibited the government from engaging the firm, directed federal contractors to disclose if they use the firm’s services, and referred the firm to be investigated for violating civil rights laws. The order was one of several similar orders issued, or contemplated, against leading law firms.

Howell, an Obama appointee, previously served as chief judge for the District of Columbia, in which capacity she was a strong supporter of Jack Smith’s Trump prosecution. Her 120-page opinion excoriated the administration for disregarding the First Amendment and failing to comply with her orders. She criticized the content and formatting of the Justice Department’s memoranda, averred that the government had no credible evidence of racial discrimination or other wrongdoing by Perkins Coie, and rejected all of its arguments.

Howell is right that the First Amendment and principles of American justice mandate that lawyers be able to deliver candid advice and zealous advocacy to their clients. But, she goes too far by ignoring the compelling case that Perkins Coie conspired with Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS to improperly influence the 2016 election and destabilize the Trump presidency by developing the fraudulent Steele dossier (which falsely accused Trump of being a Russian agent), and then misleading government investigators about its provenance.

She began her decision by quoting Shakespeare’s admonition to “kill all the lawyers” to make it easier to seize power, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote that the legal profession “is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.” Howell then held that “using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints…, is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with tolerance, not coercion…. Simply put, government officials cannot… use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”

Access to unvarnished legal advice is sacrosanct, but Howell goes off the rails. She never acknowledges that much of Perkins Coie’s wrongdoing had nothing to do with its legal advice, but came in its capacity as a political kingpin. She bewilderingly asserts that using the firm’s admissions of racial discrimination violates its First Amendment rights. Her related attack on the administration’s opposition to diversity programs reveals her motives for this bizarre conclusion.

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Mother Arrested, Held In Police Cell In UK, For Confiscating Her Own Daughters’ iPads

A mother was arrested and jailed for seven hours after she confiscated iPads from her own children because she wanted them to concentrate on their homework.

It’s the latest insane story of police overreach from the backwards UK, where stabbings are just an everyday occurrence and robberies are not even investigated, but people saying mean words about the ‘wrong’ things are thrown in prison.

Now responsible parenting is the target.

The LBC report notes:

History teacher Vanessa Brown, 50, spent seven-and-a-half hours in a custody cell on March 26 this year, following a claim she had stolen two iPads which were traced to her mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey.

Yet it transpired that the two devices belonged to her daughters, and Ms Brown had merely confiscated them to encourage them to focus on their schoolwork, a fact Surrey Police has now acknowledged.

“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Ms Brown recalled.

“At no point did they [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.

It isn’t made exactly clear who reported the iPads stolen, but it seems to have been the ex-partner of the woman.

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Here Are The WhatsApp Messages Those British Parents Were ARRESTED For…

A British couple who were arrested for complaining about their child’s school in a WhatsApp group have revealed the messages that led to their insane incarceration.

As we highlighted earlier this week, Police arrested Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levin in front of their daughter on suspicion of malicious communications, harassment, and causing a nuisance on school property.

Mr Allen noted “we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”

Now the messages have come to light, and they are completely innocuous.

The couple complained about the process school governors were undertaking to appoint a new headteacher, and were sent a letter by the school warning them to stop discussing it.

Following this, Levine texted the group saying “they think they have a right to control everyone” adding that parents are free to “discuss anything they like”.

She further ironically joked that the school would have them arrested, writing “Can you imagine what the ‘action’ is? Hello, 999, one of the school mums said something mean about me in a school mum WhatsApp group. Please can you arrest them?”

Allen added that “No public body has the power to control what people say about it.”

The Daily Mail noted that other parents in the group supported that sentiment.

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Lawn Gone Liberty: The Update

It’s finally spring.

Better mow your lawn.

If you don’t, your town government may fine you thousands of dollars a day. 

Worse, if you can’t pay the fine, they may confiscate your home.

Six years ago, in Dunedin, Florida, Jim Ficken let his grass grow. 

His mom had died, and he’d left town to take care of her estate. He asked a friend to cut his grass, but that friend died, too!

In the two months Ficken was away, his grass grew taller than 10 inches.

City bureaucrats started fining him.

But they didn’t tell Ficken that. When he finally got back, there was no notice of the $500-a-day fine. Only when he ran into a “code enforcement officer” did he learn he’d be getting “a big bill.”

When the bill came, it was for $24,454.

Ficken quickly mowed his lawn. Then the city tacked on another $5,000 for “non-compliance.”

Ficken didn’t have that much money, so city officials told him they would take his home.

Fortunately, Ficken discovered the libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice, which fights government abuse.

IJ lawyer Ari Bargil took on Ficken’s case, arguing that the $30,000 fine violates the Constitution’s limits on “excessive bail, fines, and cruel punishments.”

But a judge ruled that the fine was “not excessive.” 

Of course, judges are just lawyers with robes. Often they are lawyer/bureaucrats who’ve become very comfortable with big government.

I call a $30K penalty for not cutting your lawn absurdly excessive, 

IJ attorney Bargil told local news stations, “If $30,000 for tall grass in Florida is not excessive, it is hard to imagine what is.”

Dunedin’s politicians often impose heavy fines for minor transgressions.

One resident told us, “They fined me $32,000 for a hole the size of a quarter in my stucco … For a lawn mower in my yard … They fine people they can pick on … and they keep picking on them.” 

It happens elsewhere, too.

Charlotte, North Carolina, fined a church for “excessive pruning.”

Danbury, Connecticut, charged a resident $200,000 for leaving his yard messy.

Bargil notes, “It’s pretty apparent that code enforcement is a major cash cow.”

In just five-and-a-half years, Dunedin collected $3.6 million in fines. 

But by then, I and others had noticed. We were reporting on Dunedin’s heavy fines. 

So did the politicians sheepishly acknowledge that they had milked citizens with excessive fines and give the money back?

Of course not. They hired a PR firm. That cost taxpayers another $25,000 a month.

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‘Blesses the Government’s overreach’: Clarence Thomas swipes at fellow justices over ‘series of errors’ in ‘ghost gun’ regulations ruling, and includes his own evidence

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Wednesday to uphold a federal agency’s rule regulating so-called “ghost guns,” with the conservatives breaking ranks as Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from a majority opinion penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“Ghost guns” and “weapons”

The case, Bondi v. Vanderstok, stems from a 2022 Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) regulatory revision of the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) that defines firearm, firearm frame, and receiver. The GCA authorizes the ATF to regulate “any weapon … which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.”

That revision followed a 2021 statement from Merrick Garland in which the then-attorney general said: “Criminals and others barred from owning a gun should not be able to exploit a loophole to evade background checks and to escape detection by law enforcement.”

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Pensioner, 93, who has dementia has been convicted of not insuring her car… despite her living in a care home and no longer having a driving licence

An elderly woman with dementia has been convicted of failing to insure her car – despite her living in a nursing home and no longer having a driving licence. 

The pensioner, 93, from Dudley in the West Midlands, was prosecuted by DVLA in September last year when they found out that the insurance on her Ford had expired.

In a handwritten letter the woman explained that due to her diagnosis she had not driven since November 10, 2023, but the vehicle had been ‘kept on the drive’ during this period, the Evening Standard reports.

She admitted to having ‘overlooked’ making a Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN) for the motor, but said her disease had caused her to hide mail – leaving her family unable to access her letters.

The woman also revealed she had been recovering from a stroke in a care home since November.

As prosecutor DVLA could have decided to withdraw the prosecution on the grounds it wasn’t in the public interest.

But, due to the fast-track design of the Single Justice Procedure, this was not considered.

The pensioner was convicted on a guilty plea at Taunton magistrates court last month. 

She was given a six-month conditional discharge, meaning no financial penalty, but still has a criminal conviction.

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It Didn’t Take Long for Free Speech to Prevail in Mississippi

Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.

“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”

In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.

“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”

The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.

“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”

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