Tag: police state

Town Secretly Seizes Developers’ Property Then Threatens Them With Trespassing Citation

As readers might recall, in the Providence suburb of Johnston, the town government and its very outspoken mayor have been attempting to seize a family of developers’ land to prevent their construction of an unsubsidized affordable housing project.

Last week the developers sued to stop the seizure in federal court, alleging that the “municipal campus” Johnston was seizing the land for was merely a pretext to stop new affordable housing.

Already, Rhode Island law establishes a fairly elaborate process that local governments have to follow when using eminent domain to take land for public buildings.

The developers’ constitutional challenge to the town’s seizure would typically delay things even more.

But in a surprise turn of events late last week, the town is claiming to have already seized the developers’ plot without providing any advance notice to the owners and without following the processes laid down in Rhode Island law.

The owners first learned of the seizure via Johnston’s mayor’s X post. With the town now alleging that the seizure is complete, it’s telling the former owners of the land they have until Friday to get off it or else they’ll be cited for trespassing.

In response, the developers are now filing for a temporary restraining order to stop what they describe as the town’s unprecedented lawlessness in taking the land.

“In 40 years, I’ve seen some pretty outrageous exercises of eminent domain powers. Never anything like this,” says Robert Thomas, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public interest law firm, who is representing the developers.

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Europe Goes Full Totalitarian And Puts The Entire Western World At Risk

It’s happening again. Europe is once again going totalitarian and this time there’s a decidedly familiar communist stench. The outcome was predictable for many of us in the alternative media and the situation is only going to get worse in the next few years, but what does this mean for the rest of the world? With the European elites casting off their humanist masks and going outright Orwellian, what kind of chaos can we expect to unfold?

First and foremost I want to point out a key piece of irony here – For decades in the US we heard the tiresome argument that our 2nd Amendment gun rights are meaningless because they are “unnecessary in maintaining our freedoms”. Anti-gun rights activists and politicians commonly used Europe as their sterling example:

“If gun rights are so important for freedom, then what about the Europeans? They have strict gun laws and they’re not losing their rights…”

As Americans who understand what it means to fight a rebellion against tyranny and win, our response to this claim has always been the same: “Just give it time…”

Of course, we were right and they were wrong. I’m sure a large number of people among the 95% of EU and UK citizens that are disarmed are probably wishing desperately for firearms right about now. The reasons why are numerous and horrifying.

The Downward Spiral Into 1984

In the EU and UK there has been a slow burn on censorship the past ten years which has recently exploded into a California Palisades level inferno of speech restrictions. Door to door enforcement has increased as the public speaks out against multicultural polities. The excuse is always the same – Native Europeans are not allowed to criticize third world integration because it “might hurt people’s feelings”.  Any opposition to mass immigration is labeled “hate speech”.

Movements for national identity and border security are regularly attacked in the media. In France and Germany globalist officials are attempting to make it impossible for conservative leaning political parties to participate in elections.

In Romania they have succeeded in disrupting the normal voting process, arresting populist candidate Calin Georgescu after he won the first round of presidential elections. EU controlled authorities have ruled that he will not be allowed to run again.  And for those that think he was blocked due to Russian interference, well, they just blocked the candidacy of another conservative candidate simply because she criticized the EU.  Romania is also tightening rules for online speech in an effort to silence public dissent.

In true dystopian fashion, the powers-that-be call this “protecting democracy”.

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Texas Senate Passes Bill To Ban Hemp-Derived THC Products As New Poll Shows Voters Support Keeping Market Legal

The Texas Senate has approved a bill that cannabis advocates and stakeholders say would effectively eradicate the state’s hemp industry, prohibiting consumable products derived from the plant that contain any amount of THC.

This comes as a new poll shows overwhelming public support for keeping consumable hemp products legal, while strictly regulated.

With the backing of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R)—who held a press conference criticizing the hemp market on Wednesday after visiting stores that sell cannabinoid products—the hemp ban legislation from Sen. Charles Perry (R) passed the full chamber in a 24-7 vote.

Under the bill, only non-intoxicating CBD and CBG items could be sold, even though hemp with up to 0.3 percent THC by dry weight was legalized at the federal level in 2018. Supporters argue that re-criminalizing cannabis with any traces of THC is necessary to close a loophole in the state’s own hemp law that’s allowed for the proliferation of businesses selling intoxicating products.

“For those that argue that this should just be more regulation and tax, there’s not enough tax that we can collect that will deal with the behavioral health issues and the addictions that we currently face,” Perry said on the Senate floor. “It would be in the billions. It’s unenforceable because every day a new product hits the shelf that was at the whim of a chemist.”

“What they have created and what they’re doing is akin to K2 and Spice and bath salts of the past that we as a legislature voted out of existence as soon as possible,” he said. “The effect of what this drug is doing to the people that are involved in it—contrary to what you hear—is devastating lives. It’s generational. It is creating psychosis. It’s creating paranoia.”

Senators approved a series of amendments from the sponsor on the floor on Monday, including one that would require all consumable hemp products to be tested and federal Drug Enforcement Administration- (DEA) certified labs based in Texas.

Another Perry amendment that was adopted mandates that consumable hemp products be registered with the state Department of State Health Services (DSHS). Each product registration would carry a $500 fee, and they could not could not contain any non-cannabinoid mood-altering ingredients or additives. It would be a Class B misdemeanor to sell an unregistered product.

The body also passed an amendment to make it a felony offense for to operate a hemp manufacturing or retail business without a license or permit.

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Majority Of Utah Voters Support Legalizing Marijuana, Poll Finds As GOP Leader Downplays Reform Prospects

A majority of Utah voters support legalizing adult-use marijuana in the state, according to a new poll.

The survey from Noble Predictive Insights, which was commissioned by the nonprofit Keep Utah Medical, found that 52 percent of registered Utah voters would support a ballot initiative to end cannabis prohibition, while 38 percent would oppose it.

Support for legalization was highest among Democrats (76 percent), followed by independents (61 percent) and Republicans (41 percent).

“YES wins the left and the middle and divides the right. In a red state like Utah, that’s enough to get to a solid—though not overwhelming—margin of victory,” the polling firm said in a memo.

“Over the last decade, major political victories came from a populist-traditionalist coalition: The GOP’s wings would coalesce, form a majority together, and govern. If legalization were to win, the coalition would be built from left to right—a progressive minority joining with the center and Republican moderates. This is possible—but it requires careful execution.”

Alex Iorg, co-founder of Keep Utah Medical, told ABC4 that while the results of the poll indicate that an adult-use measure could also narrowly pass, the organization is not currently planning to lead such a proposal.

“I believe the majority now support recreational use because they see it as an easier option [than] Utah’s current medical program,” he said.

“We need to make the medical program easier to navigate. Rural, disabled, and other patients need telemedicine just like [they] can do for other medications,” he said. “Out-of-state recreational dispensaries have more advertising rights than Utah in-state medical pharmacies. We have to level the playfield.”

Here’s the text of the survey question posed to voters: 

“Currently, medical marijuana is legal in Utah, but some Utahns still obtain marijuana illegally for medical and recreational purposes. Would you support or oppose a ballot initiative that legalized marijuana for all purposes—including recreational use?”

The survey involved interviews with 609 registered Utah voters from March 11-13, with a +/- 3.97 percentage point margin of error.

Asked about the prospect of advancing adult-use legalization in Utah, House Speaker Mike Schultz (R) said he has a “huge problem with turning Utah into a recreational state.”

“It’s not going to happen,” he said.

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Blue Privilege: Courts Give Police The Right To Lie And Slander

To serve and protect, police are allowed to slander and destroy. Cops in many states and localities have acquired the right to lie about their shootings, searches, and practically anything else. Police have routinely planted drugs, guns, and other evidence to incriminate innocent people, while police labs have engaged in wholesale fraud blighting tens of thousands of lives.

From a trickle to a torrent

Supreme Court rulings turned a trickle of police perjury into a torrent. In 1967, the Supreme Court, in the case of McCray v. Illinois, gave policemen the right to keep secret the name of their “reliable informant” they used to get search warrants or target people for arrest. Law professor Irving Younger observed at the time: “The McCray case almost guarantees wholesale police perjury. When his conduct is challenged as constituting an unreasonable search and seizure … every policeman will have a genie-like informer to legalize his master’s arrests.” The Supreme Court created a judicial playing field on which police were the only witnesses who can safely lie.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits even when their brazen lies in court testimony resulted in the conviction of innocent people. The court fretted that “the alternative of limiting the official’s immunity would disserve the broader public interest.” Honest government was not one of the “broader public interests” the court recognized that day.

In 1992, Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and University of Minnesota law professor, conducted a confidential survey of Chicago judges, prosecutors, narcotics agents, and public defenders on Fourth Amendment issues. One Chicago prosecuting attorney observed that “in fifty percent of small drug cases [police] don’t accurately state what happens.” Twenty-two percent of Chicago judges surveyed reported that they believed that police are lying in court more than half of the time they testify in relation to Fourth Amendment issues; 92 percent of the judges said they believed that police lie at least “some of the time.” Thirty-eight percent of the Chicago judges said they believed that police superiors encourage policemen to lie in court. One judge did not even know how perjury was defined under the Illinois Criminal Code. After Orfield read him the technical definition, the judge replied: “Then there is sure a hell of a lot of perjury going on in this courtroom.”

In 1994, the Mollen Commission reported that “the practice of [NYPD] police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’” Federal appeals court chief judge Alex Kozinski observed in 1995: “It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers.” Former San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara observed that “hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.”

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Florida Lawmakers Approve Bills To Outlaw Psychedelic Mushroom Spores

Florida House and Senate panel have approved sweeping agriculture legislation that, among other changes, would explicitly outlaw the distribution of psychedelic mushroom spores and mycelium.

Members of the House Housing, Agriculture and Tourism Subcommittee voted at a hearing Tuesday to advance a bill, HB 651, from sponsor Rep. Kaylee Tuck (R). The nearly 150-page measure would make a variety of adjustments to Florida’s agricultural laws, including around agricultural lands, utilities and wildlife management.

With respect to psychedelics mushrooms, it would make it illegal “to transport, import, sell, offer for sale, furnish, or give away spores or mycelium capable of producing mushrooms or other material which will contain a controlled substance, including psilocybin or psilocyn, during its lifecycle.”

Violating the proposed law would be a first-degree misdemeanor, carrying a maximum of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

A companion bill, SB 700, which contains the same mushroom provisions, has been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Keith Truenow (R). It was amended and approved unanimously last week by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment and General Government.

Prior to reporting the bill favorably on Tuesday, the House panel adopted a striking amendment that made a number of changes to the underlying bill, though the amendment did not substantively affect the provision dealing with spores and mycelium.

Psilocybin and psilocin are the two leading psychoactive compounds in psychedelic mushrooms. Although spores typically do not contain psilocybin or psilocin themselves, they eventually produce fruiting bodies—mushrooms—that do contain the psychedelic compounds.

Because the spores don’t contain any controlled substances, the federal government deems them legal.

“If the mushroom spores (or any other material) do not contain psilocybin or psilocin (or any other controlled substance or listed chemical), the material is considered not controlled,” Terrence Boos, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Drug and Chemical Evaluation Section chief, said in a memo last year. (Using a similar rationale, Boos has said that marijuana seeds are considered federally legal hemp because they themselves don’t contain THC.)

In Florida, a legislative report for HB 651 similarly notes that “spores do not contain any psilocybin properties themselves and therefore could be considered legal under current law.”

To prevent that, the proposal would clarify as illegal any spores or mycelium that could produce psilocybin or psilocin at any time in their development.

Members of the House panel did not mention the broad agriculture legislation’s psilocybin provisions during Tuesday’s hearing.

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Court docs show US govt knew about – and used – Chicago ‘black site’

Scandals don’t get much more disturbing than that of Homan Square. In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility, a nondescript warehouse located in Chicago’s West-side Garfield Park neighborhood. Outraged and alarmed by these revelations, politicians and activists clamored for the US Department of Justice to investigate human rights abuses at the facility, which still operates today.

Despite the pleading, the DOJ elected not to investigate Homan Square, and instead conducted a broad investigation of Chicago Police Department use of force practices.

The DOJ’s failure to thoroughly examine the alleged abuses at Homan left onlookers confused. Investigating the CPD’s use of force was important, of course, but why wouldn’t the DOJ also investigate the Homan Square facility given the severity of the allegations?

One of the main figures pushing for a DOJ probe of Homan Square was then-Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, who sent letters to the Department asking them to investigate the facility. Asked whether he ever received an explanation as to why the DOJ didn’t investigate the facility, Boykin said: “I did not, which is surprising right?”

Noir News has examined an element of the Homan Square story that provides important context regarding the Department’s decision: the Department of Justice was inside Homan Square all along, well aware of its use for extrajudicial detention, conducted its own interrogations in the facility, and is implicated in at least one of its most egregious abuse cases, that of Angel Perez.

Perez alleged CPD officers took him to Homan Square and pressured him to act as a cooperating witness in an investigation of alleged drug dealer Dwayne Payne. Namely, the officers wanted Perez to set up a drug purchase with Payne. Perez said he was taken to a room on the second floor of Homan Square, handcuffed to a bar, and placed in ankle shackles for several hours. Officers allegedly threatened to plant evidence on Perez and send “him to the Cook County jail to be raped by gang members.”

After refusing to cooperate in the investigation, Perez alleges he was physically and verbally tortured by the officers for hours and that they refused to grant him access to a lawyer. One of the officers told Perez, “‘I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.’” Then an officer “inserted a cold metal object, believed to be one of [the] officer’s service revolvers, into the plaintiff’s rectum causing the plaintiff severe pain and humiliation.” Finally, Perez relented and agreed to buy heroin from Payne for the officers.

Importantly, Perez’s lawsuit and The Guardian’s reporting on the matter solely implicated the CPD. But as Noir News has discovered, a 2022 court order reveals the investigation that resulted in Perez’s detention and torture at Homan Square wasn’t just a CPD operation. Rather, the investigation of Payne, the alleged drug dealer, was a “joint investigation with the USAO [United States Attorneys’ Office].” The United States Attorneys’ Office is an arm of the Department of Justice.

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Study: Concealed Carriers Stop More Active Shooters Than Police Do

Data compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows that armed civilians stop more mass shootings than police do.

American Thinker pointed to the CPRC data last week week, noting not only that concealed carriers stop more mass shootings that do police, but that concealed carriers do so with “fewer mistakes.”

CPRC president John Lott Jr. observed that his group did a “deep dive into active shooter scenarios between 2014 and 2023” and found:

Not only do permit holders succeed in stopping active shooters at a higher rate, but law enforcement officers face significantly greater risks when intervening. Our research found police were nearly six times more likely to be killed and 17 percent more likely to be wounded than armed civilians.

Lott explained, “From 2014 to 2023, CPRC researchers found that armed civilians stopped 180 of 515 active shooting cases. Of the attacks in places where people were allowed to carry, we found that permit holders stopped 158 of the 307 instances.” In all those instances, an innocent bystander was shot only one time.

On the other hand, “In the 156 cases stopped by law enforcement, we found police accidentally shot the wrong person in four cases, killing fellow officers twice and civilians twice.”

Lott summarized, “These findings highlight a reality that is often ignored: responsible gun owners save lives. Concealed handgun permit holders aren’t reckless vigilantes, but they are law-abiding citizens who step up in moments of crisis when seconds matter and police are minutes away.”

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Australian Politician Admits ‘Free Speech’ is Incompatible With a ‘Multicultural’ Society

Australian politician Chris Minns inadvertently said the quiet part out loud when he admitted that the existence of true “free speech” is incompatible with a multicultural society.

The Premier of New South Wales tacitly admitted that in order to uphold the myth that ‘diversity is our greatest strength’, the freedom to say it isn’t must be censored.

“I recognize and I fully said from the beginning, we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace,” said Minns.

The politician made the comments in the context of new hate speech laws in Australia that were rushed through off the back of a hysterical moral panic based on a completely fraudulent narrative.

The new legislation was introduced in response to a supposed terror attack plot on a childcare center near a synagogue on the outskirts of Sydney.

However, it subsequently emerged that the attack was actually a “criminal con job,” according to police, and that wasn’t politically or racially motivated at all.

“The entire operation wasn’t about mass destruction. It was a scam,” reports Reclaim the Net. “The alleged mastermind, reportedly a figure nestled deep within Australia’s criminal underworld, was running a spectacular bluff. The plan? Create an artificial crisis, let the media and politicians whip themselves into a frenzy, and then swoop in as the “hero” with inside information — possibly to negotiate a reduced sentence, distract police from other crimes, or simply revel in the chaos.

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LRAD Cannon ‘Sonic Weapon’ Allegedly Deployed Against Protesters in Serbia

Footage out of Serbia over the weekend captured the moment a suspected military-grade sonic weapon was deployed to disrupt protests, reports claim.

Video from a peaceful anti-government demonstration in Belgrade on Saturday showed hundreds of thousands of attendees standing in the streets participating in a silent protest, as a loud jet engine-like noise roared through the streets prompting demonstrators to flee in panic, with some reporting hearing loss.

“Somewhere behind us it suddenly sounded like a building or a huge block of stone had fallen from the sky,” one of the demonstrators told Serbian news site Raskrikavanje. “Me and my friend immediately looked at each other and asked – what’s going on?”

They went on to describe: “You have the feeling that it is coming towards you, that something is going to step on you from behind, so you run from the side – and yet you have the feeling that you will die anyway because it is huge and it will cut us all down”.

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