Tag: police state

Federal Court Upholds Arkansas Hemp Restrictions, Contradicting Texas Governor’s Stance In Vetoing Proposed Ban In His State

Several of the reasons Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) made for vetoing a statewide THC ban, SB 3, were rejected Tuesday by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Texas legislature overwhelmingly passed SB 3 with bipartisan support during the regular legislative session. Late Sunday night, Abbott vetoed it.

In his proclamation explaining the veto, he said SB 3 was “well-intentioned. But it would never go into effect because of valid constitutional challenges.” If it were enacted, “its enforcement would be enjoined for years, leaving existing abuses unaddressed,” he said, adding that “Texas cannot afford to wait.”

He pointed to Arkansas enacting a THC ban in 2023, Act 629, which was challenged in court. A lower court halted it from going into effect, arguing it would “likely [be] preempted by federal statutes and that its criminal provisions were likely unconstitutionally vague,” Abbott said. “The result in Arkansas? Their law has sat dormant, meaningless, having no effect for nearly two years while further legal proceedings play out. That result must be avoided in Texas,” Abbott said.

Instead, he proposed regulating THC similar to how alcohol is regulated.

On Monday, Patrick challenged each of Abbott’s arguments, saying they were flawed and factually inaccurate. Federal law expressly permits states to impose their own restrictions, including banning THC, Patrick said. He also said the Fourth and Seventh circuits have ruled as much and California and Colorado banned THC with no problems, The Center Square reported.

He said he believed the 8th Circuit would rule in favor of Arkansas.

One day later, it did.

On Tuesday, a panel of judges on the Eighth Circuit, including the chief judge, reversed the lower court’s injunction.

The judges also confirmed Patrick’s argument, stating in their 16-page ruling that nothing in the 2018 Farm Bill “preempts or limits any law of a State or Indian tribe that…regulates production of hemp and is more stringent than this subchapter.”

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Free Speech Travesty: German Pensioner Who Called Green Economic Minister Habeck an ‘Idiot’ Has Been Convicted

The case of German pensioner Stefan Niehoff became a major international story after police raided his home for calling Robert Habeck an “idiot” while Habeck was serving as Germany’s economy minister at the time.

Now that Niehoff has been convicted — for sepearte offneses — it has become clear how far the German media has gone to create the perception that Niehoff is a Nazi to smear his name, when the exact opposite was true all along.

Elon Musk tweeted about the case. The Economist included the incident in a long list of items showing Germany was walking all over free speech, and Niehoff was publicly outspoken over what happened to him.

Niehoff suffered a house raid early in the morning at his home in Burgpreppach, while his disabled daughter was home, all because Habeck filed a complaint against him for Niehoff calling him an “idiot” in an internet post.

The case looked exceedingly bad, so the German establishment went into damage control.

Numerous news outlets started publishing articles that the main focus of the investigation against Niehoff — the “idiot” comment — had quietly been sidelined. Now, the courts were focusing on “unconstitutional” symbols that Niehoff shared. In other words, after the Niehoff case blew up in their faces, they needed to find an ad hoc justification after the fact to justify their witch hunt against him.

In Germany, any kind of “unconstitutional symbol” basically means you were sharing swastikas or other symbols associated with the Nazi regime. Most people suddenly thought Niehoff was some kind pro-Nazi activist.

The reality is that he was comparing the left-liberal traffic light government, which was in power at the time, to the era of National Socialism. In other words, he was criticizing the Nazis, not praising them.

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Former Baltimore Deputy Charged with Sexual Abuse of a Minor: Investigation Uncovers Disturbing Evidence

A former deputy of the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office is now behind bars, facing charges of sexual abuse of a minor. According to WBAL-TV, Jonathan Koritzer, 35, was apprehended on Friday by the Baltimore County Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit following an investigation into allegations about his conduct.

Detectives launched an investigation after receiving tips about an inappropriate relationship between Koritzer and a minor, spanning from May 2022 until November 2024. During this period, the victim was between 14 and 17 years old. Evidence secured from Koritzer’s phone, which included photographs and text messages, corroborated the allegations.

In one of the more disturbing details to emerge, charging documents allege that photos found on Koritzer’s phone depicted the victim dressed in his police uniform, complete with duty gun. Currently, Koritzer is being held without bond at the Baltimore County Detention Center.

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Norwegian tourist, 21, is barred from entering the US after ICE guards find meme showing JD Vance with a bald head on his phone

A Norwegian tourist claims he was harassed and refused entry to the US after immigration officers found a meme of JD Vance on his phone.

Mads Mikkelsen, 21, arrived at New Jersey‘s Newark Airport on June 11, excited about his holiday.

But, his plans were thrown into disarray when he was reportedly pulled aside by border control and put in a cell.

The tourist was then subjected to what he described to Norwegian outlet Nordlys as an ‘abuse, of power and harassment’.

‘They asked questions about drug trafficking, terrorist plots and right-wing extremism totally without reason,’ he told the outlet.

Mr Mikkelsen, claimed the officers then threatened him with a $5,000 fine or five years in prison if he refused to give the password to his mobile phone.

The guards reportedly found a meme on the device’s camera roll showing US vice president JD Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head.

Mikkelsen said after discovering the image the authorities sent him home to Norway the same day.

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Nicholls Police Chief arrested on child sex crime charges

The Nicholls Police Department’s (NPD) Chief was arrested June 19 on charges including enticing a child for indecent purposes and criminal attempt to commit child molestation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced on June 20.

NPD Chief Ashley Wilson, a 40-year-old from Broxton, is in custody at the Coffee County Jail, the GBI said.

Through their investigation, the GBI said they found that Wilson sent messages to a 15-year-old girl telling her he wanted to have a sexual relationship with her. Many of the messages were sent while Wilson was on duty as Chief of Police, the GBI said.

Now, Wilson is charged with the following, officials said:

  • Three counts of enticing a child
  • One count of violation of oath of office
  • One count of conspiracy to commit child molestation

Investigators said that the girl’s mother discovered text messages between her daughter and Wilson, so she reported the incident to NPD.

Wilson’s arrest comes after the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) got a report late June 18 alleging that an NPD officer was involved in an inappropriate relationship with a minor, according to the sheriff’s office. CCSO said they immediately dispatched a deputy to evaluate the situation, and they found that the allegations warranted a comprehensive investigation. CCSO then requested that the GBI investigate this case.

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Green agenda is killing Europe’s ancestry

Western Europe’s new green regime reorders the continent through policies of territorial cleansing and restriction, replacing the lifeways of rooted peoples with a managed wilderness shaped by remote technocrats and mandated compliance. What arrives with the language of environmental deliverance advances as a mechanism of control, engineered to dissolve ancestral bonds.

In the soft light of the northern dawn, when the fog rests over fields once furrowed by hands and prayers, a quiet force spreads, cloaked in green, speaking in the language of “sustainability,” offered with the glow of planetary care. Across Europe, policymakers, consultants, and unelected “visionaries” enforce a grand design of regulation and restraint. The new dogma wears the trappings of salvation. It promises healing, stability, and ecological redemption. Yet beneath the surface lies a different pattern: one of compression, centralization, and engineered transformation. This green wave comes through offices aglow with LED light and carbon dashboards, distant from the oak groves and shepherd chants that once shaped Europe through destiny and devotion. Traditional Europe lived through the pulse of the land, its customs drawn from meadows, its laws mirrored in trees, its faith carried by the wind over tilled soil and cathedral towers.

The terms arrive prepackaged: “rewilding,” “net zero,” “decarbonization,” and “climate justice.” These sound pure, ringing with the cadence of science and morality. Their syllables shimmer with precision, yet behind their clarity stands an apparatus of control, drawn from abstract algorithms rather than ancestral experience. They conceal a deeper impulse: to dissolve density, to steer the population from the scattered villages of memory into the smart cities of control. The forest returns, yet the shepherd departs. The wolves are celebrated, while the farmer disappears from policy. Across the hills of France, the valleys of Italy, and the plains of Germany, the primordial cadence falls silent. Where once rose smoke from chimneys, now rise sensors tracking deer. Where once stood barns, now appear habitats for reintroduced apex predators. Rural life, the fundament of Europe’s civilizational ascent, receives accolades in speeches, even as its arteries are quietly severed.

The continent reshapes itself according to new models, conceived in simulation and consecrated in policy. Entire regions are earmarked for rewilding, which means exclusion, which means transformation through absence. The human imprint recedes, and in its place rises a curated silence: measured, observed, and sanctified by distance. The bond between man and land, established over centuries of cultivation, ritual, and kinship, gives way to managed wilderness.

Yet this wilderness unfolds without its own rhythm, shaped and maintained through remote observation and coded intention. It remains indexed and administered. Every creature bears a tracking chip. Every tree falls under statistical oversight. Drones scan the canopies. Bureaucrats speak of ecosystems the way accountants speak of balance sheets. The sacred space, once alive with sacrifice and harvest, turns into a green exhibit in the managerial museum of Europe.

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Utah Passed a Religious Freedom Law. Then Cops Went After This Psychedelic Church.

When Bridger Lee Jensen opened a spiritual center in Provo, Utah, he contacted city officials to let them know the religious group he had founded, Singularism, would be conducting ceremonies involving a tea made from psilocybin mushrooms. “Singularism is optimistic that through partnership and dialogue, it can foster an environment that respects diversity and upholds individual rights,” Jensen wrote in a September 2023 letter to the Provo City Council and Mayor Michelle Kaufusi. Seeking to “establish an open line of communication” with local officials, Jensen invited them to ask questions and visit the center.

Jensen’s optimism proved to be unfounded. The city did not respond to his overture until more than a year later, when Provo police searched the Singularism center and seized the group’s sacrament: about 450 grams of psilocybin mushrooms from Oregon. The seizure resulted from an investigation in which an undercover officer posed as a would-be Singularism facilitator.

That raid happened in November 2024, less than eight months after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, had signed the state’s version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The state law likely protects Singularism’s psychedelic rituals, a federal judge ruled in February. U.S. District Judge Jill Parrish granted Jensen’s request for a preliminary injunction against city and county officials, ordering them to return the mushrooms and refrain from further interference with the group’s “sincere religious use of psilocybin” while the case is pending.

“In this litigation, the religious-exercise claims of a minority entheogenic religion put the State of Utah’s commitment to religious freedom to the test,” Parrish wrote in Jensen v. Utah County. If such a commitment “is to mean anything,” she said, it must protect “unpopular or unfamiliar religious groups” as well as “popular or familiar ones.”

Parrish noted that “the very founding of the State of Utah reflects the lived experience of that truth by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” In light of that history, she suggested, “it is ironic” that “not long after enacting its RFRA to provide special protections for religious exercise, the State of Utah should so vigorously deploy its resources, particularly the coercive power of its criminal-justice system, to harass and shut down a new religion it finds offensive practically without any evidence that [the] religion’s practices have imposed any harms on its own practitioners or anyone else.”

Under the federal RFRA, which Congress enacted in 1993, the government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it shows that the burden is “the least restrictive means” of furthering a “compelling governmental interest.” In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that RFRA protected the American branch of a syncretic Brazil-based church from federal interference with its rituals, even though the group’s sacramental tea, ayahuasca, contained the otherwise illegal psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine.

The Supreme Court has said RFRA cannot be applied to state and local governments. Laws like Utah’s, which 29 states have enacted, aim to fill that gap.

The defendants in Jensen’s case—Utah County Attorney Jeffrey Gray, the county, and the city of Provo—argued that Utah’s RFRA did not apply to Singularism, which they portrayed as a drug trafficking operation disguised as a religion. Parrish rejected that characterization. “Based on all the evidence in the record,” she wrote, “the court has no difficulty concluding that Plaintiffs are sincere in their beliefs and that those beliefs are religious in nature.”

Parrish also concluded that “preventing Singularism’s adherents from pursuing their spiritual voyages” imposed a substantial burden on their religious freedom that was not “the least restrictive means” of addressing the government’s public safety concerns. She noted that Utah allows religious use of peyote and has authorized “behavioral health treatment programs” in which patients can receive psilocybin.

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City of Sydney BANS gas appliances for all  new homes: ‘Dirty fossil fuel that has no place in homes’

The City of Sydney council has banned gas appliances for all new homes and businesses built from January 2026. 

Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s council on Monday night unanimously adopted the motion banning gas from all new residential builds from December 31 to wean homes and businesses off the fossil fuel.

The council said the move would save each household up to $626 on their power bills every year. 

The change would see an update to development control rules for the use of electric stoves, ovens, heaters and coolers in all newly built apartments and houses. 

Gas hot water systems will still be permitted under the current regulations. 

‘We remain in a climate crisis, which means we need to pull every lever we have in order to keep reducing our emissions,’ Clover Moore said. 

‘To rely on gas means a continued cost for our hip pocket, a continued cost for our health and a continued cost for our planet. It is a price that we simply cannot afford to pay.’

It joins six other NSW councils which have already banned indoor gas appliances in new builds, while seven other councils are also working towards the same regulations.

The City of Sydney also proposed a ban on gas appliances in other developments including serviced apartments, new offices and hotels. 

Councillors voted on gathering public feedback on a plan which would ‘require’ the use of renewable energy in the developments if a ban on gas is passed. 

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DEA Judge Sides With Agency On Proposal To Ban Two Psychedelics Despite Challenge From Scientific Researchers

A Drug Enforcement Administration judge has formally sided with the agency in its attempt to ban two psychedelic compounds that researchers say hold significant therapeutic potential, recommending that they be placed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

In a ruling on Friday, DEA Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Paul Soeffing said he advised the agency to move forward with its plan to place the psychedelics—2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC)—in Schedule I.

This follows administrative hearings where researchers and advocates, including Panacea Plant Sciences (PPS) and Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), have fought against DEA to ensure that the psychedelics can continue to be utilized in research.

But in the 118-page ruling, Soeffing ultimately said that “the record contains substantial evidence regarding the eight factors required for consideration under 21 U.S.C. § 811(c) to support recommending the scheduling of DOI and DOC,” referring to an administrative standard for determining the health risks and benefits of substances before when placing them in the CSA.

“Furthermore, I find that the record contains substantial evidence regarding the three factors required for consideration under 21 U.S.C. § 812(b)(1) to support recommending the placement of DOI and DOC in Schedule I,” he said, adding that the fact that the United Nations put DOC specifically on its own controlled substances list justifies its prohibition.

The bulk of the recommendation, which must be approved by the DEA administrator before potentially being codified, recounts the competing arguments between DEA and organizations opposing the scheduling action. But this ruling could reignite an ongoing legal challenge that PPS levied against the agency, challenging the fundamental constitutionality of the ALJ proceedings in drug scheduling rulemaking.

“It’s not a surprise that a DEA employee would side with the DEA,” PPS CEO David Heldreth told Marijuana Moment on Friday. “We find that the supposed impartiality of the judge is highly questionable due to that, and we plan to appeal this ruling and continue our lawsuit against the DEA.”

SSDP was among stakeholders who requested the psychedelics hearing in the first place, in hopes of challenging what they view as a lack of evidence justifying DEA’s proposed ban. Researchers have pointed out that DOI and DOC, as currently unscheduled substances, have been key components in psychedelics research that show potential in the treatment of anxiety and depression, for example.

Researchers have also argued that DEA has failed to meet the statutory burden of demonstrating that either psychedelic compound has high abuse potential. There are no documented cases in medical literature of “distressing responses or death” related to human consumption of DOI, nor has there been any established evidence of a high risk of dependence, SSDP said in a pre-hearing filing in July.

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Rhode Island Democrats Ban Sale, Manufacture of ‘Assault Weapons’

Rhode Island’s Democrat-run legislature passed a bill Friday banning the instate sale and manufacture of “assault weapons.”

The measure now heads to Gov. Dan McKee’s (D) desk.

The Associated Press reported that state Rep. Rebecca Kislak (D) contended for the ban, suggesting it is “an incremental move that brings Rhode Island in line with neighboring states.”

The ban “only applies to the sale and manufacturing of assault weapons and not possession.”

Gov. McKee reacted to Friday’s passage of the ban with an X post, saying: I’m proud that Rhode Island took an important step forward in protecting our communities from gun violence. I included an assault weapons ban in my budget for this very reason — and as a result, tonight we saw progress.

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