Tag: police state

French Government Proves JD Vance Right After Silencing Conservative Broadcaster

In a recent speech at the Security Conference in Munich, Vice President JD Vance warned European leaders that the real threat to the sanctity of the west is not foreign enemies but the enemies within.  EU governments have been destroying the very values of “democracy” that they claim to defend and cherish, all in a bid to keep power in the hands of an extremist leftist oligarchy.

European officials attending the Munich conference did so with the expectation that the focus of the event would be on the Ukraine war.  Specifically, the event was supposed to be another rally party in the name of continuing the war in the name of “protecting democracy”.  Vance flipped the conference upside-down, pointing out that Europe doesn’t actually believe in democracy, not even in the way they define it. 

European officials were indignant after Vance called them out on their own stage, claiming his accusations of authoritarianism had no basis in reality.  France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot defended European policies following the criticism by Vance stating:

“Freedom of expression is guaranteed in Europe…Nobody is obliged to adopt our model, but nobody can impose theirs on us…”

This, of course, is a lie.  The French government went on to prove JD Vance right this week after they finalized a move to shut down conservative French TV station C8.  The outlet will cease broadcasting on February 28th after the Council of State, France’s top court, rejected their appeal against the removal of their frequency.

Arcom, France’s audiovisual regulator, excluded the channel in July from the shortlist of selected candidates for the reallocation of digital terrestrial television frequencies which expire at the end of the month. Arcom confirmed its decision on December 12th.

Arcom pulled up C8 for a lack of editorial control over its programming following a series of incidents on the conservative “Touche pas à mon poste” show hosted by Cyril Hanouna, who regularly criticized the progressive establishment.  The show racked up fines of over 7.5 million euros.

The closure of C8 has caused uproar among conservatives in France. The station is owned by Vincent Bolloré, a media tycoon whose conservatism and Catholicism has long made him a hate figure among the progressive left.  French officials claim that Bolloré was trying to “take over the media”, conveniently overlooking the fact that France’s state-run broadcaster (like the BBC) is staffed overwhelmingly by people who lean leftist.  C8 was one of the few broadcasters in France presenting a conservative viewpoint. 

French journalists are often fined and even fired for stepping outside the boundaries of acceptable political opinion.  There is no freedom of speech in France, just as there is no freedom of speech in most of Europe and the UK.  JD Vance was absolutely correct in his assessment in Munich. 

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Dozens Of New Jersey Marijuana Businesses Push To Legalize Home Cultivation, Despite Resistance From Governor And Legislative Leaders

Dozens of New Jersey small marijuana businesses and advocacy groups are calling on the state legislature to allow adults to cultivate their own cannabis at home—seemingly contradicting repeated claims from the governor and legislative leaders that the reform could undermine the evolving legal marketplace.

And as Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is set to term out at the end of the year, activists are drawing attention where his potential successors stand on the issue as well.

The more than 50 businesses and advocates, which formed a collective known as the New Jersey Home Grow Coalition last year, signed an open letter to Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D), rejecting the idea that the market needs more time to mature before people can be permitted to grow their own plants for personal use.

Unlike most other states that have enacted cannabis legalization, New Jersey continues to prohibit home cultivation for adults or medical marijuana patients.

“Even with our growing industry there’s no hope of access to the clean, consistent, strain-specific medicine that I need for my epilepsy,” Andrea Raible, co-founder of the NJ Homegrow Coalition, said in a press release. “Politicians are concerned with adult use profits while we are concerned with life threatening health conditions and facing prison for plants.”

In the open letter to Scutari, who has broadly championed cannabis reform but has recently resisted calls for home cultivation, the members of the New Jersey marijuana community said “discussions on home cultivation in New Jersey have stalled, attributed to allowing the industry ‘time to mature.’”

“As licensed cannabis operators, stakeholders in the industry, and relevant organizations, we respectfully disagree with this statement. The legalization of medical home cultivation will not negatively impact the legal state cannabis industry,” they said. “We firmly support the immediate legalization of medical home cultivation for patients and caregivers. We also endorse additional legislation to be introduced that allows for the legalization of personal use home cultivation safely and equitably.”

The advocates and stakeholders are voicing support for an amendment to expand a pair of bills seeking to provide for medical cannabis home cultivation, making it so the plant limit would be replaced with an allowance to “allow up to 100 square feet of mature cannabis plant grow canopy area.”

“This would allow patients and caretakers to have the ability to properly pheno-hunt and cultivate an amount that meets individual needs,” they said. “Additionally, this change would mitigate the potential for exploiting the law through the cultivation of massive cannabis plants.”

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The DEA’s Official Museum Is An ‘Embarrassment Of Reefer Madness Misinformation’

Why would anyone visit the DEA Museum? My excuse was to see all the lies and misinformation in one place. And I wanted to understand how the curators sold and sanitized the war on drugs. I was not disappointed.

On the museum website, I got a preview of how brazen it would be. An online exhibition about Harry Anslinger is called, “A Life of Service.”  For three decades, Anslinger was the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It would be hard to overstate the destructive influence the diehard prohibitionist had on national and international drug policy. He was the father of the drug war.

The exhibition introduces him as a son of immigrants who made good in America. Then we learn about his fight to stop drug use and trafficking through the Roaring ‘20s, 1940s Hollywood and the Cold War. Anslinger unleashed his agents against bootleggers, cannabis smokers, cocaine sniffers, heroin injectors and even trainers who “doped” their horses. He’s described as a fiscally responsible, no-nonsense boss who just wanted a safe, drug-free world.

In truth, Anslinger was a racist monster responsible for incalculable suffering, deaths and imprisonment. His legacy is one of targeting Black and Brown communities for draconian prison sentences over unjust drug laws. Anslinger had a perverse hatred for jazz music, and harassed the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday to her death.

His bald-faced falsehoods are legendary. “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death,” he once said. Of course, none of this made it into the exhibition.

The DEA Museum is in Arlington, Virginia, on Army Navy Drive. The location is odd; it’s at the end of a desolate pedestrian walkway on the first floor of a nondescript federal building.

Visitors are greeted by guards and a security checkpoint. I put my bag and coat through the metal detector and showed ID—a perfect way to enter a museum that celebrates drug enforcement.

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Google to be hit with EU charges of breaching Big Tech rules, sources say

Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google is set to be charged with breaching EU rules aimed at checking the power of Big Tech after proposed changes to its search results failed to address the EU antitrust regulator’s concerns and those of its rivals, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The move by the European Commission comes amid tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump who has sided with U.S. tech giants lobbying against EU regulations and criticising fines as a form of tariff. That has in turn triggered concerns that the EU watchdog may ease up on Big Tech.

The European Commission has been investigating Google for potential breaches of the Digital Markets Act since March last year.

One probe focuses on whether Google favours its vertical search engines such as Google Shopping, Google Flights and Google Hotels over rivals, and whether it discriminates against third-party services on Google search results.

The imminent charges concerned this issue, the people said.

The EU competition watchdog declined to comment. Google referred to a December blog post by its director, EMEA competition, Oliver Bethell, who said the company is working to find a balanced solution with the Commission.

Bethell said more changes in Google’s search result format to appease rivals could result in the removal of certain helpful features.

The U.S. tech giant has in recent months announced a series of changes to search result formats in a bid to address conflicting demands from price-comparison sites, hotels, airlines and small retailers. The majority of them have dismissed the proposals as not DMA-compliant.

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New Hampshire’s ‘first black sheriff’ pleads guilty to a laundry list of felonies…

Here’s another big win for DEI hiring—Mark Brave, New Hampshire’s first black sheriff, just pled guilty to a laundry list of felonies. Shocking? No, not one bit. This is what happens when you focus on checking diversity boxes instead of hiring the best person for the job. Sadly, we see this happening everywhere these days.

Brave’s fall from grace is nothing new. Sadly, it follows a very familiar pattern if you’ve been paying attention to the left’s DEI circus. Back in August 2023, Brave was arrested for stealing nearly $19,000 in county funds. This “stand-up guy” used taxpayer money to fund his extramarital affair and bankroll romantic trips to Boston and Florida.

Mark filed bogus claims for airfare, hotels, and meals—all while conveniently covering up the fact that he wasn’t exactly traveling solo… or with his wife. He actually doctored receipts to hide the identity of his mistress.

But don’t worry—it gets worse…

Sheriff Brave flat-out lied to a grand jury. He spun stories about attending official events, meeting a US congressman, and, of course, denied his mistress was anywhere near those trips. All lies. One Boston getaway, supposedly for a “charity fundraiser,” turned out to be nothing more than a romantic dinner cruise with his side piece.

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Supreme Ct. Filing Exposes How Charlottesville Officials Enabled 2017 Violence to Suppress Speech

A new Supreme Court petition filed by political activist Warren Balogh sheds light on what he calls the ‘intentional dereliction of duty’ by Charlottesville officials during the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. The petition, appealing a lower court decision from the Fourth Circuit, raises serious constitutional questions about whether local governments can deliberately allow chaos and violence as a means of suppressing speech they dislike.

Balogh is a self-described ‘pro-white’ activist. Far-left groups use a variety of labels to describe him as a ‘white nationalist’ and other such defamatory terms. Balogh says he was at the Charlottesville rally for only one purpose: to oppose the destruction of a historical monument. The Lee monument was destroyed in 2023, despite promises by officials it would be relocated.

Balogh is appealing the Fourth Circuit’s dismissal of his claims, as part of Balogh v. Virginia, 120 F.4th 127. That appeal was decided by Chief Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee. That court said that because the participants engaged in violence, they were not entitled to protection from the police, a ruling at odds with the evidence in the case.

You can read the request for Supreme Court review here.

Charlottesville’s supposed right-wing violence is the reason Joe Biden gave for running against Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

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Apple Pulls Privacy Protections For UK Citizens After The UK Is the First Country to Demand a Backdoor Into Your Private Data

Apple has effectively told the UK government to get lost when it comes to inserting a worldwide surveillance backdoor into its iCloud encryption. Instead of playing along with Britain’s ever-expanding digital police state, the tech giant has chosen to pull its most secure data protection feature — Advanced Data Protection (ADP) — for users in the UK. Because nothing says “we respect your privacy” like stripping away the very feature designed to protect it.

The whole mess started when the British government, wielding the notoriously invasive Investigatory Powers Act (a law that might as well be named the “We Own Your Data Act”), demanded that Apple sabotage its own encryption. The UK’s authorities wanted a golden key to every citizen’s iCloud storage, under the guise of “public safety.” But here’s the wider issue: the directive wouldn’t only affect Brits — it would have compromised Apple’s encryption system worldwide.

This was an attempt to strong-arm one of the world’s most powerful tech companies into submission, setting a precedent that could crack open user privacy like an egg.

Rather than comply, Apple responded with a very diplomatic version of hell no. Instead of weakening encryption for everyone, the company opted to remove ADP from the UK entirely. In a statement that practically oozed frustration, Apple declared:

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by Advanced Data Protection will not be available to our customers in the United Kingdom, given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.”

They continued, insisting that they remain committed to offering users “the highest level of security” and expressing “hope” that they’ll be able to restore ADP in the UK at some point in the future. That’s corporate-speak for, maybe when your current government stops acting like the digital arm of Big Brother.

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Kansas Republicans Reject Amendment To Grant Terminally Ill Patients The Right To Try Medical Marijuana

A Senate Democrat unsuccessfully attempted to insert “medicinal cannabis” among treatments allowed under a bill meant to broaden Kansans’ access to experimental drugs.

Democratic Sen. Cindy Holscher, who introduced Wednesday the amendment that would have legalized medicinal cannabis for terminally ill patients, later emphasized her intention was not to create a public medical marijuana program.

“I think most of you realize I would not bring something of that magnitude to an important bill like SB 250,” said Holscher, of Overland Park, Wednesday evening. “That amendment, rather, was to mirror what was approved by President Trump in the Right to Try Act, which is a very defined, narrow scope only for terminally ill patients.”

Senate Bill 250, introduced and carried on the Senate floor by Eudora Republican Sen. Beverly Gossage, would create the Right to Try for Individualized Investigative Treatments Act. Investigational treatments can also be referred to as experimental drugs, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The bill would permit people who are unable to find relief from rare, life-threatening or debilitating conditions to access individualized, genetics-based medical treatment. The drug trial evaluation system in the U.S. is designed to evaluate medications meant to help larger populations, leaving behind drugs that can be individually tailored to a patient’s unique genetic makeup, Gossage said.

“Individualized treatments are being pioneered in the U.S. and abroad, but often patients in the U.S. travel thousands of miles,” she said.

The bill passed the Senate and is awaiting approval in the House.

Holscher supported the bill as a whole but voiced concerns.

“I don’t want to give people false hope,” she said, “yet I certainly would not stand in the way of a parent or individual trying to get medical help for a family member.”

Her amendment added medicinal cannabis to the list of treatments allowed under the definition of individualized investigative treatment.

Cannabis “has been found to have proven benefits for those with life-threatening or debilitating diseases,” Holscher said.

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FEMA Allocated $2.6M for “War on Misinformation” Contract in 2023

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – an incorporated agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – earmarked $2.6 million to fund a “war on misinformation” contract in 2023, according to data on the usaspending.gov website.

The blanket purchase agreement note lists “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation analysis” as the subjects of the order, with $1.2 million spent, and as much currently listed as the obligated amount.

As noticed by Foundation For Freedom Online, the recipient is the consultancy firm Guildehouse, a government contractor owned by Bain Capital. A post on the company’s website that has since been deleted spoke about Guildehouse engaging with social media platforms to report misinformation (including flagging posts for removal).

Guildehouse also “maintained a proprietary internal database” to track content designated as “misinformation,” and a list of “higher risks” sites that might have published such content.

The case looks like another piece in the puzzle that has been the Big Government-Big Tech collusion to suppress speech in the US, unfolding over the last four years.

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VP Vance Vindicated, Scottish Police Arrest Woman For Silent Vigil Outside Abortion Clinic

Vice President J.D. Vance drew criticism from European leaders and press following his speech last week at the Munich Security Conference in Germany where he openly chastised  European authorities over their suppression of free speech.

Now, just days after Vance’s warning to European official about censorship, a woman has been confronted by police and arrested for holding a sign that read “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want” outside of a Scottish abortion clinic.

In his remarks in Munich, Vance gave examples of Germany arresting people criticizing feminism, Sweden arresting individuals for criticizing religion and Scottish police arresting a man for silently praying for his aborted son outside of an abortion clinic.

European leaders were called to task by Vance for abandoning what he called their “most fundamental values” while insisting that the U.S. should continue helping defend Europe.

Vance told the assembled leaders, “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people … If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”

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