Tag: michigan

Election 2024: Arizona and Michigan Train Clerks To Report AI Deepfakes To Law Enforcement

The AI (and specifically, deepfakes) panic is playing a prominent role in this US election campaign, with the states of Arizona and Michigan introducing a scheme to train election clerks in identifying content branded as such.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Michigan and Minnesota counterparts Jocelyn Benson and Steve Simon, all three Democrats, are among those pushing an initiative called the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, launched by the NewDEAL Forum.

NewDEAL Forum is a Washington-based NGO whose board is populated by Democrat-associated figures, and which states it set out to “defend democracy” by developing tools and methods to help election officials and voters not only identify but also flag “malicious AI-generated activity” like deepfakes and “misinformation.”

Arizona and Michigan are considered to be swing states and there this effort is happening in the form of tabletop exercises that teach participants how to inform law enforcement and first responders about flagged content.

That’s not the only recently launched “project:” there’s liberal voting rights and media Democracy Docket platform, which is quoting Jocelyn Benson as saying that Michigan now has a law making “knowingly distributing materially-deceptive deep fakes” a felony.

But this applies only if this activity is seen as intending to harm a candidate’s reputation or chance at success, the Michigan secretary of state explained. However, it wasn’t immediately clear how transparent and precise the rules around determining the intent behind a deep fake are.

If applied arbitrarily, such legislation could catch a lot of things in its net – like satire and parody.

And it’s not an insignificant distinction when talking about AI, and deepfakes for that matter, since both have been around for a while, the latter notably in the entertainment industry.

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MI AG Dana Nessel Appears To Have LIED About Who Owned the Semi-Automatic Rifles With Suppressors Found In Raid of Dem-Funded GBI Strategies Voter Registration Headquarters

MI AG Dana Nessel appears to have lied about the owner of 4 semi-automatic rifles with suppressors and modified pistols that were found stored in a Pelican case during a raid of the Democrat-funded GBI Strategies headquarters in Southfield, MI.

On October 16, 2020, the Muskegon Police Department was called to the Muskegon City Clerk’s office to investigate what appeared to be a mass voter registration fraud effort targeting urban communities across the state of Michigan. Between 8,000-10,000 voter registrations (many of which, according to the police reports, were fake) were being mailed from a hotel in Auburn Hills, MI. and from the GBI Strategies/Empower Michigan headquarters in Southfield, MI to the Muskegon Clerk’s office.

Later in our investigation, we discovered that clerks across the state of MI were receiving similar packages from GBI Strategies.

According to publicly available information, Muskegon Clerk Ann Meisch appears to have been the only clerk to have reported the bogus voter registrations. When the scheme was uncovered, only one month before the hotly contested 2020 election, MI SOS Jocelyn Benson (D) and MI AG Dana Nessel (D), kept the large scale voter fraud investigation a secret from the public and even worse, they never told MI clerks to be on the lookout for fake registrations that if successfully added to the MI voter rolls, could shift the outcome of the election.

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Muskegon Michigan, Voter Registration Fraud Capital, Caught Sending Double Ballots to City Voters

Muskegon, Michigan, the same Michigan city where GBI Strategies tried to register 8,000 fake voters in a day, an investigation into which the corrupt FBI has been sitting on for years even though it involved explicit criminality, admitted Thursday that they sent out two absentee ballots to every voter in three precincts.

Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch wrote to residents, ” Please destroy or return the original ballot.”

The City of Muskegon, population 38,220, only has nine precincts, meaning that a third of the city’s voters are going to receive a double-set of ballots. Under Michigan law a precinct has less than 2,999 active voters.

The Elections Department does not work on Fridays, but the Gateway Pundit was able to reach Lori Hayes, who works at the County of Muskegon and works with the City to administer and oversee the election process.

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Michigan and Penn. Capitol Sent Bomb Threats, Staffers Blame the FBI

The Michigan and Pennsylvania state capitols were both evacuated on Sunday after receiving bomb threats, “in the name of Palestine,” but some doubt the threats were genuine, blaming the FBI instead.

The Gateway Pundit spoke to Michigan State Rep. Steve Carra, who said that the threat, if genuine, demonstrates the left’s commitment to political violence. The Michigan capitol has been the scene of angry pro-Palestine demonstrations in recent months.

“The radical left threatens death and destruction in an attempt to get their way and plants operatives at conservative rallies to incite violence, making it look like conservatives are extremists. Then government and the mainstream media pushes their narrative over the truth,” he said.

Rep. Carra continued that the threat could just as easily have been another operation led by the FBI, like the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping” plot, to sow confusion and political division.

He described such behaviour as “treasonous activity” and added, “quite frankly it’s repulsive that mainstream media aids and abets this dangerous behavior by peddling disinformation narratives instead of reporting on facts.”

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Rep. Neil Friske released from jail amid investigation into sexual assault, gun charges

State Rep. Neil Friske, R-Charlevoix, who was arrested early Thursday morning following a disturbance in Lansing that involved a firearm and a possible sexual assault, was released from the Lansing police lockup late Friday morning as Ingham County prosecutors continue to investigate possible charges against him.

Friske, 62, declined comment as he left the Lansing police station with his attorney, Edwar Zeineh of Lansing. Friske then drove away as a passenger in a red pickup truck.

“This is a case that is getting our full attention to show actual innocence,” Zeineh told the Free Press.

Records the Free Press obtained Friday through the online Michigan State Police criminal background service, the Internet Criminal History Access Tool, show Lansing police requested felony charges of sexual assault, assault, and a weapons-related offense against Friske. The lawmaker has not been charged or arraigned and it is not clear those are the charges he will ultimately face.

In a Friday news release, Ingham County Prosecutor John Dewane’s Office said it has requested Lansing police to continue its investigation, and prosecutors are coordinating with law enforcement on the matter.

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Waste Not, Want Not: The Costly Aftermath of Michigan’s Raid on Nourish Cooperative

This is a follow-up report from the government raid at Nourish Cooperative (which is a farm cooperative that provides farm-fresh food) on May 28, 2024. Link to full story posted last week, here.

Briefly, on May 28, 2024 (the beginning of the nationwide fearmongering around avian influenza in raw milk), Nourish Cooperative was raided, and over $90,000 worth of raw dairy products were put under “cease and desist” order by the state of Michigan.

Meaning, all of that nutrient-dense food was “under seizure,” just sitting in our fridge and freezers. For over two weeks.

It is pretty expensive to just pay energy bills to keep products in fridges and freezers that we can’t sell. Plus, we do not have endless fridge and freezer space to put new product in (that we are able to sell like raw aged cheese and meat).

So, on June 8, after it was pretty clear the government was not going to let us sell this product, we emailed MDARD (Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development) asking if we can please remove this product from the fridge. We needed the space, and well, product was starting to sour, and kefir glass bottles were starting to explode. (That is to be expected as kefir continues to ferment, more and more gas is created). The fridge needed to be cleaned out ASAP!

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320,000 GHOST VOTERS Identified in MUST-WIN State of MI — Are Democrats Resorting to Dirty Tricks Reportedly Used by a Third-World Country to Win in 2024?

When it comes to voter fraud in America, Michigan leads the way.

With the Soros-backed Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson at the helm, who is arguably the dirtiest Secretary of State in the nation, Michigan could easily become the blueprint for other states on how to steal elections effectively.

While Democrats used every dirty trick in the book to prevent their opponents from watching them steal the election in 2020, the GOP and Independent poll challengers were able to identify the biggest fraud taking place in plain sight—dirty voter rolls, courtesy of MI SOS Jocelyn Benson.

Votes were being processed at the TCF Center by election workers, even though the voter’s names didn’t appear in the electronic poll books or supplemental poll books. Poll challengers had no way of knowing if they were watching votes being cast by dead or imaginary voters, as the voter rolls were so over-bloated that it was impossible for them to check for the legitimacy of the so-called 150,000 “voters” who pushed Biden to an alleged victory in the must-win state of Michigan.

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Viral Story About Bogus Viral Story Was Also Bogus

Corey Harris attracted widespread news coverage—including from Reason—when a video showed him behind the wheel during a court hearing about a suspended license. Except he never had a license at all.

The topsy-turvy legal odyssey concerning a Michigan man’s driving privileges, which has captivated the nation, took another turn yesterday when he reappeared in court not long after a video showed him behind the wheel of a car while he Zoomed into a hearing that was allegedly for driving with a suspended license charge.

“This is for driving on a license suspended,” said Judge J. Cedric Simpson of the 14A District Court in Washtenaw County on May 15. “That is correct, your honor,” a public defender replied.

It turns out that was not, in fact, correct. At least not in the literal sense, because the defendant, Corey Harris, apparently never had a license to begin with.

“He has never had a license, ever,” Simpson said Wednesday. “And has never had a license in any of the other 49 states or commonwealths that make up this country.”

That revelation is just the latest twist in a story that has attracted massive national coverage and had more loops than a Six Flags death wish. The initial viral narrative—that Harris had a suspended license—was covered in outlets from USA Today to The Washington Post to Fox News, CNN, NBC, and on.

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The Viral Story About a Defendant Driving With a Suspended License Was Fake News

A Michigan man swept the internet last week after a viral video showed him attending a court hearing via Zoom after he appeared to park his car. That quickly became a national story.

Should it have been?

The footage, which first made the rounds on social media, showed Corey Harris calling into a hearing before Judge J. Cedric Simpson of the Washtenaw County District Court. “I’m looking at his record. He doesn’t have a license,” Simpson says about a minute into the hearing. “He’s suspended and he’s just driving….I don’t even know why he would do that.” Harris’ bond was promptly revoked and he was ordered to turn himself in to the local jail.

Neither of those repercussions would have anywhere near the lasting impact that the forthcoming news cycle did, which was deemed a significant enough event to merit coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, NBC, BBC, USA Today, and the New York Post, among other outlets. 

It turns out all those stories, however, were based on a falsehood. Harris’ license had been reinstated years prior and was only registering as suspended due to a clerical error. As of this writing, there has been no spate of additional articles, corrections, or a reinvigorated news cycle based around this information, because the truth here doesn’t lend itself to virality and engagement.

That’s a good indication that this never should have been a national story to begin with, which would be true even if Harris had been driving on a suspended license. A man in Michigan driving allegedly when he wasn’t supposed to is not newsworthy enough to deserve coverage in the most influential outlets in the U.S. (and beyond). Good for a social media laugh? Sure. Justifying its own news cycle? No.

That idea may seem weird in a media landscape where social media virality has for several years been seen as a metric for measuring newsworthiness. What that means in practice, though, is that some of the largest publications in the world—across the political spectrum—routinely blow up small stories that are of no import to society, simply because they may be good for clicks and shares. But while those stories may offer little to no benefit to readers, they do have real impacts on the people at the center of them, like Harris, because the internet never dies.

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Michigan Supreme Court Allows Evidence Collected by Drone, Without a Warrant

Last week, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled unanimously that evidence collected illegally could still be used to enforce civil penalties.

Todd and Heather Maxon keep cars on their five-acre property in Long Lake Township. The township sued in 2007, alleging that the Maxons were violating a zoning ordinance by keeping “junk” on the property. When the Maxons fought back, the township agreed to drop the charges and reimburse attorney fees, and in exchange, the Maxons would not expand the number of cars on the property.

Township officials heard that the Maxons’ collection was growing, but the cars were hidden from the road, so they had no way to verify it without a warrant—or so you would think. Instead, officials hired a company to surveil the property with aerial drones on three different occasions. Finding that the collection had indeed expanded, the township sued the Maxons for violating the agreement.

The Maxons filed to suppress the drone evidence as a Fourth Amendment violation, since the township never obtained a warrant. The case made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in October. The court had previously remanded the case back to the Michigan Court of Appeals to determine “whether the exclusionary rule applies to this dispute.” The exclusionary rule holds that evidence obtained illegally cannot be introduced at trial.

Last week, in a unanimous decision, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with the township. “The exclusionary rule may not be applied to civil enforcement proceedings that effectuate local zoning and nuisance ordinances,” wrote Justice Brian Zahra, adding that “the costs of excluding the drone evidence outweighed the benefits of suppressing it.”

“Generally, the exclusionary rule operates to exclude or suppress evidence in certain legal
proceedings if the evidence is obtained in violation of a person’s constitutional rights,” Zahra wrote. “Caselaw, however, has never suggested that the exclusionary rule bars the introduction of illegally seized evidence in all proceedings or against all persons. Given the history of the rule, it is only applicable when the objective of deterring wrongful law enforcement conduct is most effectively met.”

The court of appeals originally determined that the search had violated the Fourth Amendment before the higher court sent it back for further consideration. “Because the Supreme Court limited our review to the exclusionary rule’s role in this dispute, we proceed by assuming that a Fourth Amendment violation occurred,” wrote Chief Judge Elizabeth Gleicher of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

But the state supreme court punted on that issue: “Because the exclusionary rule did not apply in this civil proceeding to enforce zoning and nuisance ordinances,” Zahra wrote, “the Court declined to address whether the use of an aerial drone under the circumstances of this case was an unreasonable search or seizure for purposes of the United States or Michigan Constitutions.”

In other words, the state’s highest court decided that it was irrelevant whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment because the evidence would not be excluded either way, so long as the search was conducted to investigate civil and not criminal violations.

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