Tag: police state

Our women’s rights billboard truck triggered a ‘hate crime’ investigation

Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: police investigate our billboard truck over a hate crime complaint after it displayed a message defending women’s rights.

When a political message on a billboard truck is enough to trigger a hate-crime investigation, it raises serious questions about where public debate is heading.

In downtown Toronto, our Rebel News billboard truck carrying a message from the Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) became the subject of a police investigation after a passerby complained about the advertisement.

The message was simple: women and girls deserve safety on the field, privacy and dignity in the locker room, and fairness on the podium.

The truck had been driving around Toronto for days, including during a busy downtown soccer event where the message was widely seen by passersby. But after driver Mark parked legally near St. Clair Avenue and briefly stepped away, everything changed.

When he returned and attempted to leave, an officer approached and told him the truck had to remain in place because it was being investigated for a hate crime.

Mark had not been parked illegally. He had not been accused of causing any disturbance. He was not asked for his licence or ID. He was simply told police needed to investigate a complaint about the message displayed on the truck.

A second and then third police vehicle arrived as officers dealt with the complainant, who had objected to the advertisement and claimed he felt “unsafe.”

When Rebel News reporters arrived and began filming, the complainant turned his camera toward them, questioned why they were recording him, and again told police he felt unsafe. Officers ultimately confirmed the journalists had every right to film in public.

After speaking with the complainant, police determined the billboard was a political statement, not a hate crime. No charges were laid, no ticket was issued, and Mark was allowed to drive away.

That is the real story: not just the complaint, but how quickly a political disagreement escalated into a police response.

The officers ultimately handled the situation properly. But the fact that a message about women’s safety and fairness was enough for someone to call police and trigger a hate-crime investigation should concern anyone who values free expression.

The truck will keep rolling. In fact, we will keep it on the road even longer as a reminder that free speech cannot depend on whether everyone agrees with the message.

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America’s newest jail has no walls

Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

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The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

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Metaphysical Shop Owner’s Lawsuit Over Pennsylvania Fortune Telling Ban Moves Ahead

Following a legal victory earlier this summer, a metaphysical shop owner’s lawsuit over Pennsylvania’s ban on fortune telling could go to trial next year. The compelling case dates back to October of 2023 when the Serpent’s Key Shoppe and Sanctuary in the community of Hanover received an unexpected visit from the borough’s police chief, Chad Martin. Rather than picking up some occult supplies, the lawman instead offered a rather worrisome warning to owner Beck Ravenswood about the possibility of legal trouble should they violate the state’s 165-year-old law against divination. “He informed me basically he is not here to arrest me or press charges,” the shop owner recounted at the time, “however, if he ever gets a report from anyone, he will be back on my doorstep.”

The incident understandably did not sit well with Ravenswood, who filed a civil rights lawsuit against Martin and the town of Hanover in August of 2024. Nearly two years later, the case is still winding its way through the legal system, with the shop owner recently securing a significant legal victory. “The DA’s office had been trying to dismiss my case,” Ravenswood explained to a local media outlet, “saying it wasn’t important enough for the court to rule on.” However, they received word in June that the request had been rejected. “Judge Wilson finally looked at the evidence and said there’s a compelling argument here, and we need to determine what is really at the heart of this lawsuit,” Ravenswood said, “is it about witchcraft, or is it about freedom of speech? That’s really what it is.”

In a conference call between the parties on Wednesday, a discovery deadline was set for November 30th, and what the shop owner has cleverly taken to calling the ‘Hanover Witch Trial’ was added to the court’s calendar for June of 2027. That said, Ravenswood’s attorney reportedly indicated that they intend to request a summary judgment on the constitutionality of the law, which could eliminate the soothsaying ban once and for all without the need for any further court proceedings. Meanwhile, regardless of how the case ultimately unfolds, the antiquated restriction may not be on the books for much longer, as a state legislator introduced a still-in-committee bill that would repeal the restriction last June.

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Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot’s challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

“I’m thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn’t just about me or my airplane anymore,” Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. “I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach.”

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi’s case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi’s case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant’s specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. “As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach. We’re confident that it will do so here.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

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Canadians contacted at home by gov officials over social media posts after hate speech law passes: JCCF

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms says it is receiving reports that some Canadians have been contacted at their homes by government officials over social media posts made months or even years earlier, following the passage of Canada’s new hate speech legislation.

The organization said the reports come after Parliament passed Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which expands Canada’s hate speech laws by creating new offences, increasing penalties, and removing certain legal safeguards that previously limited prosecutions for hate-related expression. The group said Canadians who are contacted by government officials over online posts should consider recording the interaction.

“If you believe your rights have been infringed or that you have been unfairly targeted, we encourage you to submit a case application through the Justice Centre’s online portal,” the organization said.

The Justice Centre provides legal representation to Canadians who believe their constitutional rights or freedoms have been violated by federal, provincial, or municipal governments or government entities, including universities, human rights commissions, professional associations, and public school boards. It said applications for legal assistance must be submitted online.

Canada would not be the first country to begin arrests for social media posts. The Times in the UK which used freedom of information requests to examine arrests in England and Wales under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. The laws prohibit communications that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,” as well as messages that are “threatening, or knowingly false.”

According to The Times, there were 12,183 arrests in 2023 and 1,119 people were sentenced. The newspaper also reported that more than 65,000 arrests have been made since 2017.

Jake Hurfurt, head of research investigations at Big Brother Watch, told The Times the trend is “seriously concerning.” “Police look to be wasting countless hours on arresting people for posting things online that, while offensive, are not illegal. Heavy-handed use of vague communications offences is a threat to everyone’s freedom to express themselves online,” Hurfurt said.

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UK’s Ofcom Seeks Wider Powers After American Forum Fine Fails

Ofcom wasted months chasing a website it cannot reach, came up empty, and has decided the fix is more power.

Britain’s speech regulator closed its investigation into an American suicide discussion forum this week, admitted it has hit the outer wall of what the Online Safety Act censorship law allows, and used the same announcement to ask the government for tools that reach further.

The forum, which Ofcom will only call an “online suicide forum,” has allegedly been linked with more than 130 deaths in the UK and named in coroners’ reports.

Ofcom fined it £950,000, roughly $1.3 million, under the Act. The forum is based in the United States, holds no assets in Britain, is protected by the First Amendment, and has not paid. So the regulator is holding a penalty against a company it has no clear way to bill.

Ofcom thinks there’s a chance the money is still coming. It says it has “initiated work regarding the pursuit of this debt, as we have done with all companies that have not paid their fines by their deadlines.”

A separate post, cheerfully titled “What happens when a company doesn’t pay a fine,” lays out the plan. For a company with no UK assets, obtaining a judgment debt “is more complex and challenging,” and Ofcom says “it is often necessary to engage with law enforcement agencies and private specialists in other countries to identify individuals and assets against which Ofcom can take action.”

Whether Ofcom recovers a penny “can also depend on whether a court in that country will recognise a UK court judgment, and whether we can identify individuals on whom we can serve proceedings.”

That means, a British regulator wants American help to collect a British censorship fine from Americans, and even Ofcom concedes an American court might throw it straight out.

Ofcom has tried this before. It floated the same approach while chasing a fine against 4chan, a strategy that Preston Byrne, the US lawyer representing both sites, called “legally illiterate.” Byrne was just telling it like it is about the forum case. “Censorship fines are anathema to our Constitution,” he said, adding that “if Ofcom attempts to enforce the fine in a US court, which we do not expect, American law is on our side. As far as we can tell, however, this enforcement action is functionally over.”

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Canadian court throws out Freedom Convoy leader’s partial acquittal

A Canadian appeals court overturned an earlier acquittal of intimidation against prominent Freedom Convoy protester and leader Pat King, saying that his earlier sentence was a “lenient penalty” and has thus ordered him to appear for new sentencing.

In a July 17 ruling, the Ontario Court of Appeal convicted King after prosecutors appealed one of his acquittals. They argued that King’s sentence given in early 2025 wasn’t severe enough.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, in February of 2025, King was handed a three-month conditional sentence for his role in the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates of all forms. He was found guilty of a total of five offences in 2024, which included mischief, counselling mischief, as well as breaching a court order.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland had ruled that King must serve three additional months of house arrest and dedicate 100 hours to community service for his role in the Freedom Convoy. His original sentence would have been 12 months, but the court gave him credit for time served in jail before his trial.

King had used social media to organize protests of truckers in Ottawa in early 2022, in protest of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s COVID dictates.

While he was acquitted of three intimidation charges, the government Crown lawyers appealed one of the acquittals, which found King innocent of intimidation after he had obstructed a highway. The appeals court agreed with the Crown’s ask.

“The freedom to protest does not include the right to engage in illegal conduct, and this protest evolved into what can fairly be described as an illegal occupation of a significant tract of downtown Ottawa,” wrote the three-judge panel.

“Put simply, criminal conduct is not less criminal because it occurs during a lawful protest.”

The appeals court added that his original 2024 sentence was a “lenient penalty” and a stronger penalty was needed to send a message.

In 2022, King was granted bail after spending five months in jail for his involvement with the protests. He had to pay a $25,000 fine and was banned from speaking to other Freedom Convoy members and was placed under curfew.

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Federal appeals court upholds controversial Illinois ban on semiautomatic guns

A federal appeals court upheld a controversial Illinois gun control law that largely bans assault weapons.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit decision issued on Thursday slapped down a district court decision that declared the ban unconstitutional.

“Among other things, the Act criminalizes the manufacture, sale, delivery, purchase, and possession of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. A grandfather clause permits preexisting lawful owners of the regulated items to continue possessing them,” the Thursday decision noted.

“For reasons that follow, we focus on the Act’s application to AR-15s and thirty-round rifle magazines. The Act’s restrictions on these items, we hold, are consistent with the principles that underpin our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation. Whether to adopt them is thus a decision reposed in our elected representatives, and we reverse,” the decision declared.

Chief Judge Michael Brennan dissented from the panel’s decision.

“Our Nation’s enduring traditions forbid governments from prohibiting firearms commonly owned for self-defense. Because the people have overwhelmingly chosen the AR-15 rifle and its magazine as their weapon of choice, they are protected by the Second Amendment,” Brennan wrote.

“Illinois’s ban goes too far and should be enjoined as unconstitutional. I respectfully dissent,” he noted.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who signed the controversial law in early 2023, hailed the court’s decision.

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Communist Tyrant Daniel Ortega Announces There Will Be No More Elections in Nicaragua

Communist tyrant Daniel Ortega announced this weekend that there will no longer be national elections in Nicaragua.

Ortega has been in power since 2007.

Daniel Ortega: “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition] can try to seize the government and seize power.” He added that “never again” would parties backed by the United States or “Somocistas” return to power.”

The pro-Cuban communist made the announcement during an official speech in Managua commemorating the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, that is traditionally observed on July 19th.

Ortega has jailed many of the potential rival candidates. US Democrats are following in his footsteps as they continue to persecute Trump and his supporters including supporters in the media.

According to Grok, this announcement effectively cancels or rules out Nicaragua’s next scheduled general elections (originally set for November 2027, after earlier term extensions). It represents a further consolidation of power by Ortega (in office continuously since 2007) and his wife, Rosario Murillo (co-president).

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