Tag: police state

North Carolina Goes Drug War on Prostitution

North Carolina has made it a felony crime to patronize a sex worker. Under a law that took effect December 1, “any person who solicits another for the purpose of prostitution is guilty of a Class I felony for a first offense”—a crime that comes with a minimum of four months in prison, up to two years. Second and subsequent offenses are now Class H felonies, punishable by up to 39 months in prison.

“In the past, many first offenses under either classification have received house arrest or probation in lieu of prison time. Prior to this revision, the maximum penalty for purchasing sex from a consenting adult was a misdemeanor,” according to Yes Weekly.

Soliciting sex—like selling sex—has typically been categorized by states across the country as a misdemeanor. But in recent years, we’ve seen a disturbing trend of states starting to classify attempts to pay for sexual activity as a felony.

It’s a trend that’s bad for not only sex buyers but also, and perhaps especially, for sex workers. And it mirrors the misguided and detrimental path we saw people take with the war on drugs.

Three States Now Make Paying for Sex a Felony

Three states now make it a felony crime to pay for sex or attempt to pay for sex, even on a first offense and in situations where the person being paid is a consenting adult or a cop posting as a consenting adult. (Many states make it a felony to pay or attempt to pay a minor for sex, but that is not what we’re talking about today.)

Felony crimes not only tend to come with more harsh prison sentence but other conditions, such as loss of voting rights for some period of time, restrictions on the kinds of jobs one can hold, and restrictions on one’s right to own firearms.

“In 2021, Texas became the first state to make buying sex a felony, when Governor Greg Abbott signed a law increasing the maximum penalty to two years in prison for a first offense,” notes Yes Weekly. “State Representative Senfronia Thompson (D–Houston), the author of the bill, said ‘We know the demand is the driving force behind human sex trafficking. If we can curb or stamp out the demand end of it, then we can save the lives of numerous persons.'”

Last May, Oklahoma made “engaging in prostitution or soliciting, inducing, enticing, or procuring another to commit an act of prostitution” felony crimes.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE)—the conservative group formerly known as Morality in Media that has spent the past decade trying to rebrand itself as a feminist organization—is a major driver of these laws and, more generally, the idea that we can “end demand” for prostitution.

NCOSE tends to focus on salacious stories of people violently forced into prostitution and portray all sex buyers as people complicit in committing “atrocities.” The group and its allies make it very hard for politicians or anyone to speak out against harsher penalties for sex buyers, even though the vast majority of sex buying situations look nothing like the horror stories they blast out in support of them.

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Podcaster in UK Faces Prison For Saying “Young White Girls Are Being Raped by These Grooming Gangs”

A podcaster in the UK faces potential prison time after being charged for making “grossly offensive comments” in a YouTube video in which he stated, “Young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs.”

Yes, really.

Carlisle Crown Court heard that 41-year-old Derek Heggie made the comments in two YouTube videos in early August during the rioting and unrest that took place across numerous cities in the aftermath of the Southport murders.

Heggie had been set to stand trial on a charge under the Malicious Communications Act, but instead “pleaded guilty to sending communication of an offensive nature.”

Prosecutors said Heggie’s comments were “particularly inflammatory” in the context of the riots and he is still being remanded in custody as he awaits sentencing later this month.

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Bombshell US House investigative report confirms that almost everything the alternative media said about COVID origins, lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government overreach was TRUE

So four years after the COVID pandemic nightmare was unleashed upon America by a cabal of junk science tyrants and power-hungry vax-o-crats, the US House has just released a damning, detailed investigative report that reveals the independent media was right all along.

COVID was engineered in a lab.

Mask demands and vaccine mandates were based on junk science.

Lockdowns were completely made up by self-appointed scientism authoritarians.

The government covered up the truth and pushed disinformation propaganda on purpose.

Dr. Fauci and others were guilty as hell.

So all the censorship by Big Tech turns out to be truly malicious and even harmful to the public. And the entire corporate media was nothing but an organized cabal of liars and profiteers… brought to you by Pfizer.

This investigative report reveals that COVID was a crime scene, and the government conspired with Big Tech and mainstream media to commit numerous crimes of cognitive assault (psyops), medial violence (vaccines) and hospital homicide against the American people.

So when do the mass arrests begin? (Don’t hold your breath.)

Unfortunately, no one can bring back the estimated 1.2 million Americans who were killed by the jabs because they “believed the science.”

Fortunately for you and I, we never believed the plandemic hype in the first place, and we most certainly didn’t follow the herd into getting jabbed, masked and locked down.

It turns out that was a tremendously valuable choice of actions on our part.

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Police Raid Pro-Palestine Students’ Home in FBI-Led Graffiti Investigation

In the early morning hours of November 7, more than 12 police officers showed up outside at an address in Springfield, Virginia, knocked, broke down the door, and raided the family home of two Palestinian American students at George Mason University.

University and Fairfax County police refused to show the family the warrant. One Fairfax County detective with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force — cross-designated as a local and federal agent — was also present. The family and Mason faculty supporting them, however, believe they know what the FBI-led investigation was about: the young family members’ pro-Palestine activism.

Two of the Palestinian American family’s daughters attend George Mason. One is an undergraduate student and the co-president of Mason’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The other is in a master’s program at Mason and a former president of the school’s SJP chapter.

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South Korea’s 6-Hour Martial Law

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law, suspended the South Korean legislature and banned elected representatives from accessing the National Assembly building using massive police presence.

And then six hours later he rescinded the order.

President Yoon had declared in a public address to the Korean people that the move was to protect a “liberal South Korea from the threats posed by North Korea’s communist forces and to eliminate anti-state elements.”  He said:

“I will restore the country to normalcy by getting rid of anti-state forces as soon as possible.”

But all the members of South Korea’s Parliament voted to reverse Yoon’s edict Tuesday and he then heeded the call. 

The action and rhetoric had evoked the days of the country’s military dictatorships; the language and justification was exactly the same. 

There had been repeated signals that Yoon could declare martial law because the public momentum to impeach him in South Korea was gaining ground.

Yoon is despised by South Koreans for his abuse of power, his wife’s corruption and his vitiation of South Korea’s sovereignty and economic wellbeing to serve U.S. geopolitical interests.

Particularly triggering and enraging for South Koreans has been his enmeshing of South Korea’s military with that of its former colonizer, Japan, through a formal military alliance designed to wage war against China.  This has also entailed engaging in radical historical revisionism and erasure to facilitate this extraordinary coalition. 

Last week 100,000 citizens protested in the streets demanding his immediate resignation — something that received absolutely zero coverage in Western media.  There was still little mention of this in current mainstream Western coverage as a factor  for the short-lived declaration of martial law.

Yoon does not want to lose power, but more importantly the U.S. cannot allow Yoon to lose power: He is essential to shore up alliances, agreements, and an Asian force posture to wage war against China.

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South Korea Avoids a Return to the Bad Old Days

North Korea is a dictatorship, and South Korea is a democracy. That’s one of the most basic pieces of conventional wisdom about modern geopolitics. But it wasn’t always so. From its independence in 1945 to its final democratization in 1987, South Korea suffered from a series of coups d’état and military dictatorships.

On Tuesday night, the ghosts of the bad old days came back. President Yoon Suk Yeol, facing corruption investigations and gridlock in the National Assembly, declared martial law, banning all political activities and independent media. Soldiers stormed the Assembly building as protesters attacked them with fire extinguishers.

A few hours later, Yoon lifted martial law after his own party and the National Assembly unanimously voted to stop military rule. It was the latest in a series of cartoonish, ham-handed coup attempts that failed over the past few years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia, Peru, Russia, Brazil, and elsewhere.

The attempt at a military takeover fell apart soon after it started. In defiance of military orders, 190 members of the National Assembly managed to get into the building. All of them voted to end martial law—under South Korean law, the president must respect such a vote—and soldiers retreated from the building.

Yoon justified military rule by smearing his opponents as North Korean stooges. “I am declaring a state of emergency in order to protect the constitutional order based on freedom and eradicate shameful pro-North Korea anti-state groups that are stealing freedom and happiness of our people,” Yoon said on the YTN television station.

The opposition called Yoon’s move an obviously unconstitutional coup attempt. “Tanks, armoured personnel carriers and soldiers with guns and knives will rule the country. The economy of the Republic of Korea will collapse irretrievably,” opposition leader Lee Jae-myung said in a livestream. “My fellow citizens, please come to the National Assembly.”

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the second largest workers association in the country, declared “an indefinite general strike until the Yoon administration steps down.” In its statement, the confederation invoked past military coups in 1961 and 1979.

After decades of strongman rule violent transitions of power, South Korea finally became a democracy following the June Democratic Struggle, a mass uprising in June 1987 that forced military dictator Chun Doo-hwan to accept direct presidential elections and a new constitution.

Over the past few months, power in South Korea has been divided between Yoon, member of the right-wing People Power Party, and the left-wing Democratic Party, which controls the National Assembly. The day before the military takeover, Democratic Party lawmakers voted to reduce the government budget by 4 trillion won ($2.82 billion) against Yoon’s will.

The declaration of martial law seems to have been a long shot attempt by Yoon to break the gridlock. But it may have backfired badly. The attempted takeover “may very well serve against Yoon’s presumed intention to safeguard his rule, by potentially driving South Korean public opinion toward greater support of impeachment,” writes James Park in Responsible Statecraft, where I used to be a reporter.

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Fascism comes to New Zealand

It’s the abuser’s Swiss army knife for the empty-headed. Multipurpose, its meaning has near-infinite elasticity. You can be labelled ‘fascist’ if you say that there are only two biological sexes, or that women should not have to undress in front of men, or that men should be excluded from women’s sports, or that men can’t get pregnant, or even if you voted for Trump.

Such is the ignorance of the 1930s and 1940s that in contemporary discourse, ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning.

Yet, in a very real sense, New Zealand is now Fascist. If this seems an extraordinary statement, consider Mussolini’s widely reported (though not documented), definition [Emphasis added]:

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

This definition may not be to everyone’s liking, but has the virtue of simplicity and clarity. Moreover, it is an accurate description of what is happening in America, Europe, Australia and – as I shall show – New Zealand.

There can be no clearer illustration of the corporate rule of New Zealand than the stranglehold the pharmaceutical industry has on government and media.

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Food and Drug Administration Defends Refusal To Approve Flavored E-Cigarettes Before the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court heard the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) appeal in Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments, LLC on Monday. The case concerns the FDA’s requirement for scientific studies to approve premarket tobacco applications (PMTAs) for flavored electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) manufacturers and distributors. The FDA’s requirement contradicts data and years of its own guidance for the end of reducing an exaggerated epidemic of underage nicotine use.

Concerns about rampant teen nicotine use are common. They are also commonly exaggerated. NPR originally claimed that “the percentage of high school kids who reported daily vaping of e-cigarettes jumped from 9.7% in 2014 to 30% in 2023.” (The outlet has since printed a correction.) What the FDA and CDC’s 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey actually said was that 29.9 percent of high schoolers currently using e-cigarette were daily users; only 10 percent of all high schoolers were current users, (down from 14.1 percent in 2022), 90.3 percent of whom used flavored products. If “e-cigarettes have filled the vacuum” left by smoking, as former FDA deputy commissioner William Schultz says to NPR, the vacuum is not as large as people are led to believe.

The 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey shows that this figure has fallen even further: from 10 percent to 7.8 percent. E-cigarettes have become increasingly unpopular with middle school and high school students despite sales increasing 47 percent from 2019 to 2023. More than 80 percent of this is attributable to flavored products, according to data from the CDC Foundation and Truth, a nonprofit public health organization committed to preventing youth nicotine addiction.

E-cigarettes are not the only product inappropriate for consumption by middle schoolers and high schoolers, alcohol is too. Despite the popularity of Pink Whitney, Fireball, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and other sugary, colorful alcoholic drinks among high schoolers, federal regulators allow these products to be manufactured and distributed. The prohibition of such goods to adults would be unwarranted, not to mention infeasible. Nonetheless, the paternalistic Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which grants the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco and nicotine products, restricts what kinds of tobacco products adults may consume.

The Act explicitly “prohibits a cigarette or any of its components from containing…any artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or any herb or spice (including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, and vanilla.” The law also directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the FDA to establish the Center for Tobacco Products and to, among various responsibilities, “develop an action plan to enforce restrictions on the promotion and advertising of menthol and other cigarettes to youth.”

But the Act also “prohibits the secretary from: imposing unduly burdensome requirements” on manufacturers and importers. This provision is problematic for the FDA’s wholesale denial of PMTAs to flavored nicotine products. In the Fifth Circuit’s January 2024 opinion, Judge Andrew Oldham explains that the FDA “sent manufacturers of flavored e-cigarette products on a wild goose chase” by imposing new testing requirements after “promulgat[ing] hundreds of pages of guidance documents” between 2018 and 2020.

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Nebraska AG Prepares To Ask Supreme Court To Overturn Voter-Approved Medical Marijuana Measures

The Nebraska Attorney General’s Office filed a second “amended cross-claim” Friday on behalf of Secretary of State Bob Evnen (R) in a lawsuit against two successful medical cannabis measures.

The brief formally adds allegations of circulator fraud and widespread malfeasance to Evnen’s complaint. However, Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong anticipated those arguments already last Tuesday when she dismissed the case and ruled in favor of the ballot sponsors behind Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana.

The AG’s Office has not formally filed an appeal to the Nebraska Supreme Court, but Attorney General Mike Hilgers (R) told the Nebraska Examiner on Monday that his office was “taking advantage” of court rules that allow a party to formally amend a cross-claim, even after a verdict, to conform to the evidence presented at trial.

“It’s just a post-trial motion,” Hilgers said Monday. “We want to make sure our case is fully prepared for an appeal.”

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South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol Declares Emergency Martial Law

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has declared emergency martial law in the country after accusing the opposition party of “sympathizing with North Korea and of anti-state activities.”

“Through this martial law, I will rebuild and protect the free Republic of Korea, which is falling into the depths of national ruin,” he said during a late-night TV address on Tuesday

“I will eliminate anti-state forces as quickly as possible and normalize the country.”

He also asked people to believe him and tolerate “some inconveniences.”

Per CNN:

Yoon did not say what specific measures would be taken. He cited a motion by the opposition Democratic Party, which has a majority in parliament, to impeach top prosecutors and reject a government budget proposal.

Yoon labeled the opposition’s actions as “clear anti-state behavior aimed at inciting rebellion.” He further claimed these acts have “paralyzed state affairs and turned the National Assembly into a den of criminals.”

He describing martial law as a necessary measure to eradicate these “shameless pro-North anti-state forces.” He justified the decision as essential to protect the freedoms and safety of the people, ensure the country’s sustainability, and pass on a stable nation to future generations.

The parliament speaker is traveling to parliament and plans to convene a session, according to local broadcaster YTN TV. Yonhap news agency reported though that the entrance to parliament is blocked and lawmakers are unable to enter.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has declared emergency martial law, accusing the opposition of treason and collusion with North Korea.

Under the sweeping measures, violators can be arrested without warrants, and habeas corpus has been suspended.

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