Tag: police state

Every GOP Senate Majority Leader Candidate Opposes Marijuana Legalization

With Republicans winning control of the U.S. Senate in last week’s elections, a key question for marijuana reform advocates and stakeholders is what the selection of a new GOP majority leader will mean for cannabis reform.

There are three names currently at the top of the list of potential majority leaders who will set the legislative agenda: Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Rick Scott (R-FL) and John Thune (R-SD). None have embraced ending prohibition, and each has a track record of expressing concerns about cannabis use or even moderate policy reforms such as those endorsed by President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) having already announced he will not be seeking to return to the leadership position, this will the first time since 2007 that the GOP caucus will be selecting a new majority leader. Republican senators are set to meet on Wednesday to make that determination.

Trump hasn’t endorsed a specific candidate to assume the top Senate role, but while Thune is generally considered a front-runner, certain of the president-elect’s allies such as Elon Musk have been pushing for Scott to become the chamber’s leader.

However it shakes out, the current contenders are united in their opposition to legalizing marijuana.

There are some in the industry who remain hopeful that Trump’s embrace of an unsuccessful Florida legalization measure, cannabis banking reform and rescheduling could move the party to fall in line. But the extent to which the incoming president cares enough about the issue to forcefully push for, or even occasionally mention, it from the White House remains to be seen.

After announcing his support for the policy change, Trump became relatively quiet on the issue ahead of the election—which may partly explain why his supporters evidently did not adopt his position, according to a recent poll.

And based on the records of the top contenders for Senate majority leader, it seems highly unlikely they would proactively try to enact reform legislation without a major push from the president.

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Leaked documents from Germany’s RKI prove that they knew every aspect of the covid pandemic response was NOT SCIENCE, it was POLITICAL

A whistle-blower obtained 10GB of information from the Robert Koch Institute. This so-called RKI Leak reveals that covid was a scam from start to finish. Professor Stefan Homberg presented the evidence on 2 November 2024 in the second largest room of the German Bundestag, which is intended for committees of inquiry.

The Robert Koch Institute (“RKI”) is a German federal government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention. Located in Berlin and Wernigerode, it advises the specialist public and government on preventing and tackling infectious disease outbreaks.

The trove of documents reveals that RKI knew the covid response was not based on science but were political decisions to spread fear, control the population and promote the experimental “vaccines.”

In 2023, documents were obtained through legal action under the Freedom of Information Act. The files show that politicians ordered the experts to make up stories and narratives so as to support the government’s preconceived measures.  These documents are referred to as the RKI Files.  You can find the RKI Files HERE.

“Internally, RKI experts thought FFP2 masks were useless and believed that vaccines would not stop the virus spread. In the public, however, RKI vigorously advocated mask and vaccine mandates and discrimination of the unvaccinated,” Dr. Homberg said in the description of an April 2024 video explaining what the RKI Files revealed.

Earlier this month, Prof. Homberg presented what is being referred to as the RKI Leaks in the Bundestag.  “The RKI Leaks encompasses much more [than the RKI Files], he said. “Namely, all protocols, not just some of them.”

“All of them are completely unredacted.  And we obtained a lot of additional material such as letters, for example, a letter from President Macron to Germany, suggesting both countries conduct lockdowns in a similar fashion.  We also got Excel sheets, emails, PowerPoint presentations and so on,” he said.

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A License to Censor? The Fierce Fight Over the GEC’s Renewal

What happens when an agency meant to protect Americans from foreign propaganda starts tiptoeing over the line into the realm of domestic censorship? Enter the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a charming creation of the US State Department that was originally tasked with combating foreign disinformation. It sounds like something out of a spy novel: shadowy entities sowing chaos through whisper campaigns and disinformation dumps. But now, the real drama lies in how this agency has extended its reach beyond foreign threats and into the murky waters of the internet’s free speech landscape.

Of course, the GEC would prefer to be seen as a benevolent referee, helping social media giants like Facebook and YouTube play the good guys in the battle against digital deception. In theory, this agency is all about countering Russian bots and Iranian trolls. But somehow, along the way, its mission stretched to a point where the average American scrolling through a feed can almost feel the government’s fingers tapping on their shoulder, cautioning them about what’s “trustworthy.” It’s no wonder people are starting to worry.

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Marijuana Legalization Faces A ‘Red Wall’ In Remaining Conservative States That Still Criminalize Consumers

November 5, 2024, was a tough day for cannabis legalization supporters.

Recreational legalization ballot questions in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota all failed.

Two medical measures passed in Nebraska but face legal challenges over the validity of the signatures required to get the measures on the ballot. Why two measures? One legalizes the medical use of cannabis, and the second regulates it.

A medical use measure also appeared on the ballot in Arkansas, but the state Supreme Court ruled before the election that the votes can’t be counted because the title and name were “misleading.”

These failures raise questions about where the movement to legalize cannabis goes from here.

The red wall holds

I’ve been researching cannabis legalization in the U.S. since 2014. I’ve previously written about how the cannabis legalization movement’s primary obstacle is the “red wall,” a term I use to refer to the 20 states where Republicans have total control of state government and recreational cannabis remains illegal.

Another four states without recreational legalization—Kansas, Wisconsin, Kentucky and North Carolina—could be described as “red wall adjacent.” These states have Democratic governors, but Republicans control the state legislatures.

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All States Are Empires Of Lies

“Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists,” wrote Doug Casey in one of his columns.

“They prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for power.”

Moreover, wrote Casey, “The field of economics has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”

This of course is not a new development. Ludwig von Mises was calling the universities of his day “nurseries of socialism” but, thankfully, there is always a remnant of students who resist the statist brainwashing. The above quote about concocted “scientific” justifications for interventionism and socialism, by the way, sounds like a precise definition of Keynes’s General Theory.

Casey’s sound advice is that to be a good citizen one needs to “become your own economist.” Don’t rely on the state’s mouthpieces in the “media” or even academe for your economic knowledge. Educate yourself to some degree; it doesn’t take a university degree. Indeed, everything we do at the Mises Institute is geared toward helping anyone anywhere to become their own economist (preferably Austrian School and not Keynesian or Post Keynesian!) and avoid being bamboozled by the state and its court historian economists.

Mises never joined the American Economic Association, the association of academic economists founded in the 1880s. The association’s founding document provides a clue as to why. “The state is an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress,” the document purred. “The doctrine of laissez faire,” on the other hand, “is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals,” said the statist moral scolds who founded the American Economic Association.

There are exceptions, the Austrian School economists being the most prominent, but the majority of academic economists view themselves as advisors or potential advisors to the state. They are Rothbard’s “court historians” with degrees in economics instead of history. The role that they serve is the same as all “intellectuals” in our almost 100 percent state-funded universities. As Rothbard put it: “The majority [of the electorate] must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at least inevitable. Promoting this ideology . . . is the vital task of the ‘intellectuals.’” In return, the “intellectuals” are given government jobs, grants, placement at prestigious universities, book deals, and myriad other political payoffs. (Mises wrote that history, law, and economics are the disciplines most widely used to bamboozle the public about the supposedly good, wise, and inevitable state).

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The FBI’s Disturbing Treatment of Political Nominees

The FBI’s background investigation (B.I.) process for political nominees has allegedly been corrupted with “improper handling” of sensitive information, according to an investigation by America First Legal (AFL).  AFL’s November 7 press release asserts that the mishandling of private information is a “critical” matter” that must be addressed because of the potential to use the B.I. process as a “weapon against future nominees.”

It also appears that select staff from the Senate Judiciary Committee “appear to have shared FBI background reports and personal financial information in a breach of Senate security protocols.”  AFL rightly asserts that Americans, including administration nominees, have a right to privacy “to the greatest extent possible,” as cited in the Privacy Act of 1974.

AFL alleges that it has found “explosive new discoveries about the FBI’s flawed and unlawful background investigation process for nominees to positions that require Senate confirmation.”  The investigation goes back to late June 2021, when AFL submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the DOJ.

The June 24, 2021 FOIA request included but was not limited to requests for records related to consent from nominees to be investigated by the FBI and all communications between the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee members and staff.  In addition, AFL asked the DOJ to respond with “all laws, regulations, guidance and documents” that would apply to the “disclosure of judicial nominee background information files to Congress.”  Those requested documents would also include any “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) between the Biden White House and the Senate Judiciary Committee and any MOU between the White House and the DOJ related to the “background investigations of potential judicial nominees.”

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A Psychedelic Ban Would Disrupt Important Research

You have probably never heard of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI), much less worried about its possible abuse. Yet the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) wants to ban this synthetic psychedelic, a promising research chemical used in more than 900 published studies, by placing it in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), which defeated a previous DEA attempt to ban DOI in 2022, is determined to stop the agency’s interference with science again.

A DEA administrative law judge has scheduled a 10-day hearing on the proposed ban, beginning on November 12. SSDP, which filed a prehearing statement on behalf of more than 20 scientists, argues that placing DOI in Schedule I would impose “onerous financial and bureaucratic obstacles on researchers.” SSDP also opposes the scheduling of another psychedelic, 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC), under the same proposed rule, which the DEA published last December.

“DOI and DOC are important research chemicals with basically no evidence of abuse,” says SSDP alum and legal counsel Brett Phelps. Phelps is working with Denver attorney Robert Rush, who represents 
University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientist Raul Ramos.

“The DEA’s attempt to classify DOI, a compound of great significance to both psychedelic and fundamental serotonin research, as a Schedule I substance exemplifies an administrative agency overstepping its bounds,” Rush says. “The government admits DOI is not being diverted for use outside of scientific research yet insists on placing this substance in such a restricted class that it will disrupt virtually all current research.”

SSDP describes the two compounds as “essential research chemicals in pre-clinical psychiatry and neurobiology,” noting that their unscheduled status has made them accessible as tools for studying serotonin receptors. It says DOI, in particular, has been “a cornerstone in neuroscience research” due to its selectivity for the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, crucial for understanding the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. Scientists have used DOI to “map the localization of an important serotonin receptor in the brain critical in learning, memory, and psychiatric disease,” SSDP notes, and DOI studies “have shown encouraging results in managing pain and reducing opioid cravings.”

The DEA argues that DOI and DOC “have a high potential for abuse.” While the two compounds “are available for purchase from legitimate chemical synthesis companies,” the DEA concedes, “there is no evidence of diversion from these companies.” But it notes that both drugs “have been encountered by law enforcement in the United States,” indicating their “availability for abuse.” Because “DOI and DOC are not found in FDA-approved drug products,” the DEA says, people who use them must be doing so “on their own initiative, rather than based on medical advice.”

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Florida Sen. Rick Scott says he’ll vote against recreational pot after brother’s death

Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida says he’ll be voting in November against a ballot amendment to legalize recreational marijuana in his state, a deeply personal decision based on his brother’s long history of addiction.

The senator and former Florida governor said he watched his brother Roger Scott begin smoking marijuana as a teenager and then struggle with substance use for the rest of life.

“People end up with addictive personalities, and so he did,” Scott said in an interview. “It messes up your life, and so that’s why I’ve never supported legalization of drugs.”

When Roger Scott died in April at 67, the cause wasn’t substance abuse, but rather “a life of drugs and alcohol” catching up with him, the senator said. He had lived in an apartment in Dallas, Texas, where he served jail time in 1990 on a misdemeanor conviction of possessing dangerous drugs, court records show.

Rick Scott became wealthy as a lawyer and health care industry executive before entering politics. Now running for reelection, he lamented that his brother had a “tough life” and says it all began with marijuana.

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From transgenderism to transhumanism, the agenda to redefine reality for mass compliance

Western civilisation, that grand experiment of reason and Enlightenment values, now finds itself grappling with an identity crisis. From the philosophy that brought us democracy, the scientific method, and even good wine pairings, we’ve somehow arrived at a peculiar era where society is encouraged to believe that reality is less a fixed landscape and more of a political Rubik’s cube. Specifically, the landscape of gender has become a battleground of biological, cultural, and political ideals—dominating headlines, monopolising discourse, and, oddly, managing to ignore the statistical insignificance of its demographic audience. Transgender individuals constitute roughly 0.3% of the West population, and yet the world seems to revolve around their pronouns, identities, and access to public bathrooms, all in the name of progress.

Our intellectual elite, decked in designer ideology, assures us that distinguishing between biological sex and gender is sophisticated; it’s the in thing, the thinking person’s new orthodoxy. To question this, to state something as blatantly archaic as “biology is real,” is to expose oneself as backward, uninformed—a blight upon the socially conscious. But it’s hard not to wonder if we’re all just playing a grand game of ideological dress-up, where we pretend we’re making leaps forward in human understanding while, in reality, we’re toeing a line many people can’t quite bring themselves to believe. Accommodating and encouraging children that identify as animals, stigmatising other children as bullies for calling out this absurdity, and giving credence to what was once accepted as make-believe, imagination, and play. Still, most people seem to mumble along with it, lest they be the odd one out, clinging to common sense like a moth to a guttering flame.

Transgender news coverage has increased by over 1600% in the past 10 years, while the tone of these stories has gone from sensationary to militantly positive and supportive, guiding discussions toward an unprecedented level of scrutiny over the nature of identity itself. Our cognitive maps are being redrawn by the universities, media, and big business DEI with all the precision of a drunk darts player, influencing society’s concept of reality. These implications reach far beyond gender identity and into the potential future of humanity—one where human limitations and even natural family structures are increasingly questioned and redefined through technology. It appears to be clearly by design and yet another baby step towards an insidious, transhumanist control agenda.

Such blurring of reality and ideology has an unsettling historical precedent. Where other empires rewrote the annals of history, modern movements seem intent on rewriting the basics of human biology. Consider the USSR, Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge, all of which did their best to erode the sanctity of the family unit, that most fundamental societal structure. Even the Nazis, despite pushing traditional values, encouraged loyalty not to family but to the state, with children trained to report on their parents’ non-conformist views. Today’s West doesn’t seem far off—except that the disintegration of kinship is wrapped in softer packaging. Tradition and generational wisdom are rebuffed as vestiges of oppression, and the notion of family as a guiding principle of society is branded a relic, an artifact better suited for history museums than modern culture.

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Stopping Usurpation: The Forgotten Power of Non-Compliance

You can’t comply your way out of tyranny.

This principle – central to the American Revolution – has been almost totally forgotten and ignored. And it was also forcefully repeated and reiterated a century later by Lysander Spooner.

The following are the top quotes and principles that make up this essential foundation.

VOID

To start, it was widely understood that the people are the source of all power, and government only acts as their agent. So it logically flowed from that principle that any act beyond powers delegated or authorized to government was a usurpation of power – and thus, void.

The 3rd Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, put it like this:

“If they make a law which the constitution does not authorize, it is void.”

This wasn’t anything new. As James Otis Jr, in his 1761 speech against the Writs of Assistance, made the same case – the same principle even under the unwritten British constitution.

“An act against the constitution is void.”

Reiterating this principle nearly a century later, Lysander Spooner wrote, “An unconstitutional statute is no law, in the view of the constitution. It is void, and confers no authority on any one”

PRECEDENT

The old revolutionaries understood that government always grows, and even the smallest steps beyond the constitution were a precedent for even more usurpations of power in the future.

John Dickinson made this case in his influential 1765 broadside urging non-compliance with the Stamp Act.

“IF you comply with the Act by using Stamped Papers, you fix, you rivet perpetual Chains upon your unhappy Country. You unnecessarily, voluntarily establish the detestable Precedent, which those who have forged your Fetters ardently wish for, to varnish the future Exercise of this new claimed Authority.” [emphasis added]

Dickinson continued with this same warning two years later in response to the Townshend Acts.

“When an act injurious to freedom has been once done, and the people bear it, the repetition of it is most likely to meet with submission. For as the mischief of the one was found to be tolerable, they will hope that of the second will prove so too; and they will not regard the infamy of the last, because they are stained with that of the first.”

Thomas Paine warned that we should treat precedent not as law – but instead, as a warning.

“In numerous instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and for law.”

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