Tag: police state

From Woke to Law: Realigning the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to Correct Decades of Judicial Overreach

The Justice Department under the next Trump administration has a duty to remove protected classes for groups that have exploited civil rights laws to garner extra privileges and rights, over and above the rights of American citizens. Of note include illegal aliens and LGBT persons. Neither of these groups should have ever enjoyed the privileges of heightened scrutiny analysis within the purview of Title VII or Civil Rights law generally. These laws were never intended for such persons, however, over years they have been misapplied and misinterpreted, resulting in very real harms to society. In fact, heightened scrutiny analysis has no basis whatsoever in the text of the Constitution itself and can be rightly deemed anathema with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, though that is a separate topic worthy of its own discussion.

For decades, America’s civil rights jurisprudence has clouded and distorted the Constitutions’ original meaning and purpose. Activist judges, under the pretext of “judicial review,” have perverted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and other laws and constitutional provisions in service to a liberal ideology, now recognizably termed as “woke.” New standards of review were manifested into existence, such as “intermediate scrutiny,” which is used to adjudicate cases of alleged sex or gender-based discrimination. None of these developments have a relationship, directly or indirectly, to the text or original intent of the Constitution itself.

Instead, they have been weaponized in many cases against businesses, schools, and legacy American citizens, creating hostile work environments that actively prioritize non-Americans while at the same time discriminating against men and native-born people in many cases. The result has been to establish and legitimize a new form of institutionalized racism, directed primarily at whites – who themselves increasingly are a numerical minority in many states. All of this has been made in service to an ideology born out of the civil rights movement that is oriented around a fundamentally Marxist view of history. This ideology perceives all historically disenfranchised and “wronged” minorities as needing legal recourse, in the form of extra-constitutional remedies that ultimately seek to establish absolute equality – now commonly described as “equity” – in real world outcomes.

This is in sharp contrast with the far more limited goal of legal equality enumerated under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Whereas the former is ordered towards achieving equal outcomes, the latter establishes a baseline of generally applicable standards like fairness and justice for all parties regardless of background that courts must adhere to.

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Witches, Covid, and Our Dictatorial Democracy

On December 1, President Joe Biden announced that he was pardoning his son Hunter for all the crimes he committed from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. Biden’s sweeping pardon of all of his son’s abuses epitomizes how presidents and their families are now above the law. It also illustrates how the “King James Test for American Democracy” could become the death of the Constitution.

The American Revolution was heavily influenced by a political backlash that began across the ocean in the early 1600s. King James I claimed a “divine right” to unlimited power in England, sparking fierce clashes with Parliament. Since the 9/11 attacks, some of the same moral and legal principles have been advanced in this nation, but few people recognize the historical roots.

Before he became king of England in 1604, James was king of Scotland. He cemented his claims to absolute power thereby launching witch panics and burning hundreds of Scottish women alive to sanctify his power. Harsh methods were not a problem because James insisted that God would never allow an innocent person to be accused of witchcraft.

“While James’s assertion of his [Scottish] royal authority is evident in his highly unorthodox act of taking control of the pre-trial examinations, it is his absolutism which is most apparent in his advocating the use of torture to force confessions during the investigations,” according to the University of Texas’s Allegra Geller, author of Daemonologie and Divine Right: The Politics of Witchcraft in Late Sixteenth-Century Scotland. Torture produced “confessions” that spurred further panic and the destruction of far more victims. England did not have similar witch panics because officials were almost entirely prevented from using torture to generate false confessions. James justified the illicit torture, “asserting his belief that as an anointed king, he was above the law.”

After Queen Elizabeth died and James became king, he vowed that he had no obligation to respect the rights of the English people: “A good king will frame his actions according to the law, yet he is not bound thereto but of his own goodwill.” And “law” was whatever James decreed. Nor did he flatter the men elected to the House of Commons: “In the Parliament (which is nothing else but the head court of the king and his vassals) the laws are but craved by his subjects and only made by him at their rogation.”

James proclaimed that God intended for the English to live at his mercy: “It is certain that patience, earnest prayers to God, and amendment of their lives are the only lawful means to move God to relieve them of their heavy curse” of oppression. And there was no way for Parliament to subpoena God to confirm his blanket endorsement of King James.

James reminded his subjects that “even by God himself [kings] are called Gods.” Seventeenth-century Englishmen recognized the grave peril in the king’s words. A 1621 Parliament report eloquently warned: “If [the king] founds his authority on arbitrary and dangerous principles, it is requisite to watch him with the same care, and to oppose him with the same vigor, as if he indulged himself in all the excesses of cruelty and tyranny.” Historian Thomas Macaulay observed in 1831, “The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms. James was always obtruding his despotic theories on his subjects without the slightest necessity. His foolish talk exasperated them infinitely more than forced loans would have done.”

Macaulay scoffed that James was “in his own opinion, the greatest master of kingcraft that ever lived, but who was, in truth, one of those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions.” After James’s son, Charles I, relied on the same dogmas and ravaged much of the nation, he was beheaded. Charles I’s son ascended to the English throne in 1660, but his abuses spurred the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and sweeping reforms that sought to forever curb the power of monarchs.

A century and a half after King James denigrated Parliament, a similar declaration of absolute power spurred the American Revolution. The Stamp Act of 1765 compelled Americans to purchase British stamps for all legal papers, newspapers, cards, advertisements, and even dice. After violent protests erupted, Parliament rescinded the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act, which decreed that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” The Declaratory Act canonized Parliament’s right to use and abuse Americans as it pleased.

The Declaratory Act ignited an intellectual powder keg among colonists determined not to live under the heel of either monarchs or parliaments. Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 that “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” The Founding Fathers, having endured oppression, sought to build a “government of laws, not of men.” That meant that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers,” as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek noted in 1944.

For generations, American politicians spoke reverently of the Constitution as America’s highest law. But in recent years, the Constitution has fallen into disrepute. The rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret memos of the commander-in-chief.

We now have the “King James Test for American Democracy.” As long as the president does not formally proclaim himself a tyrant, we are obliged to pretend he is obeying the Constitution. Government is not lawless regardless of how many laws it violates — unless and until the president formally announces he is above the law.

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Women Allegedly Raped in Prison by Trans-Identifying Inmate Will Have To Refer to Attacker as ‘She/Her’

Women who allege they were raped in a California prison by a biological male claiming to be transgender will be compelled to refer to the defendant using she/her pronouns, a Madera County judge ruled last week, further complicating a case centered on a crime that was emboldened from the outset by the government.

Tremaine Carroll allegedly raped multiple inmates while at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla after securing placement there by self-identifying as transgender. The Transgender Respect, Agency and Dignity Act, which took effect in January 2021, allows California inmates to be placed in a facility corresponding with the sex they say they are. Under the law, a prisoner need not be on hormones, have had surgery, or undergo a psychological evaluation to be approved. The government considers their testimony sufficient.

In 1990, Carroll was charged with three counts of kidnapping for ransom, two counts of robbery, and three counts of oral copulation in concert by force, ultimately pleading guilty to two counts of kidnapping. Several years later, Carroll was sentenced to 25 years to life under California’s three-strike law after acting as a getaway driver in a robbery.

“After his first cellmate became pregnant and was moved to Los Angeles, two other cellmates of his had complained that he had raped them,” Madera County District Attorney Sally Moreno told the local ABC affiliate. One of those cellmates says Carroll attacked her while she was in the shower. “This is a particular issue in this case because it’s confusing to the jury,” Moreno added. “In California, rape is a crime that has to be accomplished by a man.”

It may be disorienting to the alleged victims, as well, who will be vulnerable to speech policing from the judge—or directly from Carroll, their alleged rapist, who has opted for self-representation. Charged with two counts of rape and one count of dissuading a witness from testifying, Carroll has since been transferred to Salinas Valley State Prison, a men’s facility.

Prison rape is sadly a problem that attracts limited public outrage and is by no means constrained to women’s prisons. Though precise statistics are hard to track, as such assaults sometimes go unreported, a 2012 report from the Justice Department estimated that over 200,000 inmates were sexually abused behind bars in one year alone. Many of those occur in men’s prisons or happen to women at the hands of government employees. Those cases matter just as much.

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Alabama Teen Killed During ‘No-Knock’ Drug Raid Had His Hands Raised, Lawsuit Says

A 16-year-old teenager had his hands raised when he was fatally shot by police during an unauthorized “no-knock” drug raid in Mobile, Alabama, last year, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by his mother in federal court earlier this month.

The lawsuit against the City of Mobile and several anonymous Mobile police officers says Randall Adjessom came out of his room holding a gun when he heard someone break down the front door of the house where he lived with his mother, grandmother, aunt, and sisters. When he realized the intruders were police, he put his hands in the air and stepped back, but a Mobile Police Department (MPD) SWAT officer shot him four times.

“The complaint is replete with revelations from our pre-suit investigation,” civil rights attorneys representing Adjessom’s mother said in a press release accompanying the suit, “perhaps none more repulsive than the fact that MPD body-worn camera (BWC) video of the shooting clearly shows Randall begin to retreat after realizing the intruders into his family home were members of the police force when he was repeatedly shot and killed in cold blood.”

And after he was shot, the suit says, police left Adjessom to bleed out on the floor for four minutes before half-heartedly rendering medical aid.

If true, the lawsuit’s narrative—which purports to be backed by video evidence, internal affairs reviews, and a recent independent audit of the Mobile Police Department—is another tragic example of what happens when the drug war, unregulated SWAT teams, and the Second Amendment right to self-defense mix.

An MPD SWAT team executed a “no-knock” search warrant on November 18, 2023, as part of an investigation into Adjessom’s older adult brother for suspected marijuana sales. However, the lawsuit says Adjessom’s brother did not live at the residence the MPD acquired a search warrant for—only Adjessom, who was a minor, and several women in his family.  

The lawsuit says there were numerous problems with the raid besides the absence of its only articulated target: MPD officers intentionally didn’t evaluate the risk to civilians in its pre-warrant threat assessment or note the presence of civilians in its search warrant affidavit; didn’t obtain authorization for a nighttime raid from a judge, supervisor, or prosecutor; and failed to announce themselves until after they had breached the front door and entered the house. 

All those errors became a force that swept together—like a malevolent current—the MPD SWAT officers and Randall Adjessom, who came out of his bedroom and turned into the hallway holding a gun with a laser sight.

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U.K.’s Advanced Censorship Laws Force Small Websites To Shut Down!

The United Kingdom’s rulers created an online censorship law that has now advanced to the point where small websites are being shut down. The authoritarians who authored the U.K.’s “Online Safety Act” are citing disproportionate liability and risk under the new law when it comes to these smaller web pages.

The new legislative landscape in the country, which is supposed to go into effect in full force in March is already claiming victims, according to a report by Reclaim the Net. The law is not providing any kind of safety for hundreds of small websites, including non-profit forums, that will be forced to shut down because they are unable to comply with the act.  Specifically, the websites are faced with what reports refer to as “disproportionate personal liability.”

The massive global censorship campaign has not slowed down as we inch our way to 2025. Much of it is still done, but it’s become a behind-the-scenes issue as those reporting on it have been more focused on who will rule over the United States for the next four years instead.

The fines for not complying with the U.K.’s new law go up to the equivalent of $25 million U.S. dollars, while the law also introduces new criminal offenses.

Ofcom, who is responsible for enforcing this act, has published dozens of measures that online services are supposed to implement by March 16th, 2025. Some of these measures include naming a person responsible and accountable for making sure a website or an online platform complies with the ruling class’s edicts.

The law is presented as a new way to efficiently tackle illegal content, and in particular, provide new ways to ensure the safety of children online, including by age verification (“age checking”), but many have pointed out it is just another way to censor things that those in charge don’t want others focused on.

Microcosm has already fallen victim to this new law, as it will be unable to comply by monitoring encrypted messages on the site. U.K. press reports have already been declaring this as one of the first examples of the harm this law will cause. The non-profit free hosting service Microcosm and its 300 sites, among them community hubs and forums dedicated to topics like cycling and tech, will all go down in March, unable to live up to the “disproportionately high personal liability.”

“It’s too vague and too broad and I don’t want to take that personal risk,” Microcosm’s Dee Kitchen is quoted. The fines alone just for disobeying could be enough to destroy the life of one single person who is to be “accountable” to the ruling class.

Ofcom has made it clear that “very small micro businesses” are also subject to the legislation, according to Reclaim the Net. 

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UN General Assembly Adopts Controversial Cybercrime Treaty Amid Criticism Over Censorship and Surveillance Risks

As we expected, even though opponents have been warning that the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime needed to have a narrower scope, strong human rights safeguard and be more clearly defined in order to avoid abuse – the UN General Assembly has just adopted the documents, after five years of wrangling between various stakeholders.

It is now up to UN-member states to first sign, and then ratify the treaty that will come into force three months after the 40th country does that.

The UN bureaucracy is pleased with the development, hailing the convention as a “landmark” and “historic” global treaty that will improve cross-border cooperation against cybercrime and digital threats.

But critics have been saying that speech and human rights might fall victim to the treaty since various UN members treat human rights and privacy in vastly different ways – while the treaty now in a way “standardizes” law enforcement agencies’ investigative powers across borders.

Considerable emphasis has been put by some on how “authoritarian” countries might abuse this new tool meant to tackle online crime – but in reality, this concern applies to any country that ends up ratifying the treaty.

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Tennessee Officials Will Pay $735,000 To Settle Lawsuit Over Seizure Of Legal Hemp Products

The state of Tennessee and the city of Spring Hill will jointly pay two businesses $735,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging state and local law enforcement wrongfully seized 231 pounds of legal hemp products earlier this year, according to a statement from an attorney representing the businesses.

The settlement follows the Spring Hill police department’s seizure of legal hemp products from Old School Vapor and SAK Wholesale in Columbia, Tennessee last May.

Days later, the businesses filed a federal suit seeking the return of products they said were valued at $1.35 million. The lawsuit named Spring Hill Police Chief Don Brit and 11 other officers and employees of the local district attorney’s office, including District Attorney Brent Cooper, whom—the lawsuit claims—articulated the position that legal hemp was “the same damn thing” as marijuana.

Hemp is distinguished from marijuana under federal and state law based on the concentration of a compound known as delta-9 THC. Hemp products with a concentration of less than .3 percent delta-9 THC are legal to sell, buy and consume in Tennessee—and federally. Cannabis with concentrations greater than .3 percent is classified as marijuana and is illegal in Tennessee.

The appearance of hemp flowers and marijuana are virtually indistinguishable, requiring laboratory testing to differentiate legal from illegal substances.

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The Spies Who Hate Us

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. 

And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning. 

More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day. 

The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing. 

What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing. 

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The National Guard and the Militarization of D.C.

Fox News recently published a story entitled “Defense Secretary Austin overruled National Guard chief on keeping troops at the Capitol: memo.” To many readers, this may have appeared to be a sensationalized article throwing fuel on the embers of an already charred military issue in our nation’s capital. But the story captures a troubling divide between the new defense secretary and the chief of the National Guard Bureau over the appropriate use of the Guard. Yet, amid this break in ranks, the story suggests a much larger and more concerning dilemma. And it is what the Founding Fathers feared most.

The article references a defense memo or coordination sheet normally used to “concur” or “non-concur” on issues within the Defense Department. In this instance, a policy memo from the defense secretary’s office requested an “Extension of NG [National Guard] support to U.S. Capitol Police” with an additional 2,280 guardsmen to support the U.S. Capitol Police security detail beyond March 12. However, there are several issues with the request.

From my experience in the Pentagon, this type of appeal is not easily granted. It usually requires a stringent justifying rationale and reason that explains the request’s urgency. Each submission is officially petitioned through a formal request-for-assistance and sent to the DoD’s executive secretary, where it is staffed for coordination — an arduous process involving rigorous approval criteria that can take weeks.

Here is where the problem begins.

The latest Capitol Police request to extend Guard support was coordinated in two days and failed to give a convincing case for approval. Laying out its rationale, the Capitol Police referenced the Department of Homeland Security’s National Terrorism Advisory System, particularly the Jan.  27, 2021, threat bulletin, as the chief reason for the augmented security support.

The bulletin summary describes a “heightened threat environment” using words like “believes” or “suggests” that “ideologically-motivated violent extremists [domestic violent extremists] …could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence” – a somewhat anemic threat assessment to justify the continued military presence in our Capitol.

Also, federal statutes and defense directives come into play when the military is used in direct support of law enforcement, which is the case here. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, and other federal laws limit the powers of the government to use U.S. troops to “execute the laws,” including “search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity” — a concerning legal quandary.

What is more, the defense department’s support of civil authority’s directive provides ruling guidance for any assistance in missions normally carried out by civil authorities. The defense regulation has six approval criteria to “examine” and “assess” the need for support. If we use the regulation’s six criteria — legality, lethality, risk, cost, appropriateness, and readiness — an argument can be made that any one of them would disqualify the Capitol Police application.

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The Return of Free Speech

Lying, exaggerating, or just being stupid is not new. These sins existed before the internet, and they will always exist. No one deemed them a national security threat until recently.

As a point of comparison, 9/11 was the deadliest attack in the history of our country, exceeding the death toll of Pearl Harbor. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives. The event led to a mobilization of military and government power that rivaled the Cold War buildup.

Public opinion largely supported a campaign of retaliation, but there were some disagreements and dissenters.

No One Censored the 9/11 Truthers

Among the critics, there was an enormous proliferation of “9/11 Truthers.” These were generally conspiracy theorists of middling intelligence who opined about structural engineering and other things they didn’t understand. They said it was an inside job or was known in advance, and some denied that commercial airliners were used in the attacks at all, even though there were millions of eyewitnesses and hours of footage showing exactly that.

Most people ignored the 9/11 Truthers because most of what they said was ridiculous. There was almost no effort to censor these people. No one said they should be “deplatformed” from the internet, removed from Google search results, or banished from college campuses. The idea that “platforming” meant tacit endorsement or that “deplatforming” was the right solution to bad thoughts had not been invented yet.

There was significant controversy when dyed-in-the-wool leftists like Ward Churchill said the victims deserved it, but even he was allowed to speak on campus.

Obama and the Public-Private Censorship Complex

The supposed scourge of misinformation appeared later, during the latter part of the Obama administration. It was made out to be a big national problem in order to justify hand-in-glove coordination between government agencies and private institutions in order to manipulate public opinion. Without acting directly to avoid violating the First Amendment, government officers persuaded and pressured tech monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to censor materials that officials did not want to be distributed.

They did all of this to advance a very narrow set of approved beliefs. The architects of this censorship regime labeled the system’s consensus Our Democracy™. Simultaneously, critics and skeptics of that consensus were defamed as election deniers, anti-vaxxers, bigots, terrorists, Nazis, Russian “assets,” and otherwise declared anathema.

This strategy did not come out of nowhere. We saw signs of coordinated messaging involving the mainstream media as early as 2008 when they did almost nothing to look into Barack Obama’s background as a radical, left-wing activist during his first presidential run.

Things then kicked into high gear in 2016. By that time, social media had eclipsed the importance of legacy media, the Brexit vote demonstrated a trend of populist rejection of elite opinion, and, in the United States, Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. These events worried the various players in the censorship game, and they correctly recognized Trump as a threat to business as usual.

Intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement worked closely with both legacy and social media companies to stop him. In the process, the media companies abandoned any pretense of neutrality, and this coordination continues through the present.

Fundamentally, all of this activity is premised on the idea that ordinary people need to be saved from themselves because they are too gullible, prejudiced, or prone to mass hysteria. The establishment believes it has the right to manipulate public opinion—through spying, censorship, criminal prosecutions, and lawfare—to counterbalance the populace’s self-destructive tendencies.

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