Tag: police state

British Man Convicted of Criminal Charges for Praying Silently Near Abortion Clinic

In Britain, it can be a crime to think the wrong thoughts in the wrong place. It sounds absurd—not to mention Orwellian—but a handful of people have been arrested or charged in the country simply for praying silently near abortion clinics. 

This month, a British man was convicted of criminal charges for praying silently near an abortion clinic. The man, Adam Smith-Connor did not attempt to harass, intimidate, or interact in any way with those entering the clinic. Instead, he wordlessly prayed with his head bowed slightly. He wasn’t even on clinic property—he was outside the sightline of the clinic itself, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a religious freedom group.

As a result, Smith-Connor was questioned by police and later charged with violating a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO), a broad censorship order enabled by the 2014 Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act. Under this law, local authorities can obtain special status for some public places, allowing them to ban a huge range of conduct. In the name of limiting “anti-social behavior,” British towns have obtained PSPOs to ban the homeless from sleeping outside or to ban swearing.

Several cities have used this law to place “buffer zones” around local abortion clinics. The PSPO in Smith-Connor’s case not only banned “intimidating or harassing” those working at or seeking services from the clinic but also barred individuals from engaging in “prayer,” “[sprinkling] holy water on the ground,” and “[crossing] themselves.”

Smith-Connor violated this order in November 2022. He was convicted, and sentenced earlier this month to a “conditional discharge”—similar to probation—and ordered to pay approximately $11,709 in prosecution fees, according to the ADF.

The court’s reasoning betrayed the absurdly censorious nature of the local law. “In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to ‘disapproval of abortion’ because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped,” according to the ADF.

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Pennsylvania Angler Fights Back Against Warrantless Property Searches by Fish & Boat Commission

In a bold move to defend his constitutional rights, Tim Thomas, a resident of Susquehanna County, has filed a federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

The case challenges a state law that allows waterways conservation officers (WCOs) to enter private property without a warrant. Thomas, with the support of the Institute for Justice (IJ), hopes to strike down this law and restore the Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches.

Thomas and his late wife, Stephanie, bought their peaceful lakeside cabin on Butler Lake in 2014, but their sanctuary was soon disrupted. In 2023, Officer Ty Moon of the Fish and Boat Commission entered their property on two occasions without a warrant based on unfounded fishing violations.

Moon ignored multiple “No Trespassing” signs, walked around their home, and even confiscated fishing rods from Thomas’ dock. Both citations were later dismissed in court.

When WCO Moon entered the Thomases’ side yard, Stephanie (Tim Thomas’ wife) was taking a bath in the cabin, which has an uncovered window facing the yard; WCO Moon walked within 3 feet of that window as he walked through the side yard and into the backyard.

What troubles Thomas most is the sense of invasion. “We bought this cabin for peace and privacy,” he said, recalling how Moon passed by his windows, even as his wife, battling stage four cancer, was inside. “The first time was bad enough, but the second time felt even more intrusive.”

Thomas’ lawsuit, filed in September 2024, highlights the conflict between Pennsylvania law and the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches.

The law in question grants WCOs sweeping authority to enter private land and conduct searches without a warrant, a power far beyond what is granted to typical law enforcement officers.

John Wrench, an attorney with IJ, emphasized the gravity of the case. “You don’t lose your constitutional rights because you live near a lake,” he said. “If the government wants to search your property, they need a warrant. That’s a fundamental right in this country.”

The lawsuit follows other similar legal battles challenging the so-called “Open Fields Doctrine,” which permits law enforcement to search rural lands without warrants under certain conditions. Recent victories, like one in Tennessee earlier this year challenging warrantless trespassing and surveillance on private land, suggest a growing push to restore Fourth Amendment protections against such overreach.

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FBI Fudges Violent Crime Stats To Hide 55 Percent Rise Under Biden-Harris Administration

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1 percent. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau — which has been at the center of partisan storms — made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” 

It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William and Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.

The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.

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Logging Into a Brave New World: How Facial Recognition Just Got Personal

Surprising exactly no one paying attention to the slow erosion of privacy, the US General Services Administration (GSA) has rolled out its shiny new toy: facial recognition technology for accessing login.gov. Yes, that beloved single sign-in service, connecting Americans to federal and state agencies, now wants your face—literally. This gateway, clicked into over 300 million times a year by citizens has decided the most efficient way to keep us all “safe” is by scanning our mugs. How very 2024.

But of course, this little “upgrade” didn’t just appear overnight. Oh no, it dragged itself through bureaucratic purgatory, complete with false starts, delays, and some spicy critique from the Inspector General. Apparently, login.gov had been fibbing about its compliance with Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2)—a fancy label for a government-mandated security standard that requires real-deal verification of who you are. Up until now, that “verification” meant having someone eyeball your ID card photo and say, “Yep, that looks about right,” rather than dipping into the biometric surveillance toolkit.

Facial recognition was supposed to make its grand debut last year, but things got complicated when it turned out login.gov wasn’t actually playing by the rules it claimed to follow. The Inspector General, ever the fun police, caught them misrepresenting their tech’s adherence to the IAL2 standard, causing the rollout to stall while everyone scrambled to figure out if they could get away with this. Now, after enough piloting to give a nervous airline passenger a heart attack, login.gov has finally reached compliance, but not without leaving a greasy trail of unanswered questions in its wake.

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Start Paying Attention America, Full Scale Totalitarianism Is Becoming Normalized

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

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Will Politicians Toxify Freedom Forever?

The official theme song of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign is “Freedom” by Beyonce. But a more accurate theme would be the Rolling Stones classic, Under my Thumb. Vice President Harris is seeking the presidency as the greatest champion of freedom in modern times. But Kamala-style freedom will only unleash the government, not private citizens.

The original Bill of Rights created a row of bulwarks for citizens to prevent government oppression. In the era of the American Revolution, it was a common saying: “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People.” But Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are offering a “freedom,” seemingly inspired by Yugoslavian communist dictator Tito: “The more powerful the State, the more freedom.”

Harris begins by tacitly presuming that politicians must forcibly save humanity. Harris seeks to vastly expand government intervention to supposedly give people true freedom in daily life. Harris’s “freedom” presumes government is irrevocably benevolent—unless you are a bad person who deserves punishment or subjugation or overtaxing. But the definition of “bad” can be endlessly expanded to include anyone who howls about being fleeced, locked down, or muzzled.

Harris-Walz Freedom requires maximum government interference in daily life. Harris called for a merciless crackdown on misinformation, including punishing social media companies that fail to kowtow to Washington. Walz is emphatic that there is no freedom of speech for “misinformation”—a vague notion which can include any statement disapproved by officialdom. When did America’s most distrusted occupation—politicians—become entitled to define truth and to forcibly suppress and punish what they label “misinformation”?

Under the Harris-Walz standard, Americans will only have the freedom to say anything that the government approves. Walz endorsed a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld imprisoning anyone who criticized military conscription during World War One. The Biden administration was condemned by federal judges for suppressing millions of comments and jokes by Americans about Covid mandates and shutdowns. But according to liberals, that wasn’t censorship because only reactionaries or deplorables complained about pandemic policies. Plus, Fauci is still a saint. 

Mindy Kaling, an actress and emcee for the third night of the Democratic National Convention, invoked “the freedom to work one job and afford your rent.” The Biden administration floated proposals for nationwide rent control and Harris is championing proposals to stop “price gouging.” To achieve true freedom, bureaucrats would commandeer veto power over any contract dealing with housing or food. And when federal price controls caused devastating shortages, that would simply prove that politicians need even more power over daily life. 
At the Democratic National Convention, a Harris campaign video pledged that she would deliver “freedom from extremism.” But that would provide a blank check to suppress any ideas of which politicians disapprove. Newsweek reported last year that the FBI created “a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.” To permit politicians to define extremism is to let them preemptively vilify their most dangerous critics. Two years ago, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” This is a definition of extremism that could put the federal crosshairs on most people who visit this website.

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The Biden Regime Has Just Issued a Very Suspicious Directive Permitting Military Intervention in US Domestic Affairs

The Department of Homeland Security has flagged individuals questioning COVID-19 origins, vaccine efficacy, and election integrity as potential domestic terrorism threats.

Is a coup being set in place?

A new Department of Defense directive 5240.01 issued September 27, 2024, just prior to the November presidential election allows the US military to use lethal force against American citizens in assisting police authorities in domestic disturbances.

A report on this development lists these civil liberties concerns:

Right to protest: There are fears that expanded authority could suppress legitimate protests.

Privacy rights: Increased military involvement in domestic intelligence gathering could infringe on privacy.

Due process: The military’s role in law enforcement could bypass standard due process protections.

Freedom of speech: The broad definition of “national security threats” could target individuals for their political beliefs.

Civilian control: The expanded military role could erode civilian oversight of the military.

Here are some Constitutional concerns:

Challenging the Posse Comitatus Act: This Act traditionally limits the powers of the federal government in using military personnel for domestic law enforcement. The new DoD directive, by permitting the use of lethal force through military assistance in civilian law enforcement, may push the boundaries of these limitations.

Potential First Amendment Concerns: Natural health advocates and others exercising their First Amendment rights, such as questioning the government’s response to COVID-19 or the integrity of elections, have been labeled as potential domestic extremists and/or terrorists by some agencies. This directive could expand those classifications into scenarios involving lethal force interventions, potentially chilling free speech under the guise of national security.

Fourth Amendment Considerations: This directive also allows intelligence sharing between military and law enforcement under emergency conditions, raising questions about the right to privacy and the potential for expanded surveillance.

Due Process Implications (Fifth Amendment): The possibility of military use of lethal force in domestic scenarios introduces concerns about how due process protections might be maintained before potentially life-altering decisions are made.

Why these ominous changes one month before the election? Is something in the works? Why is there no reporting and no debate on this change in policy?

Here is the Directive: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodd/524001p.PDF?ver=UpTwJ66AyyBgvy7wFyTGbA%3d%3d

Here is the report: https://stateofthenation.co/?p=256688

Ever since the CIA used the Washington Post and the media to cover up the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the term, “conspiracy theory,” introduced by the CIA, has been used by the presstitutes and government to demonize truth and those who speak truth, and to protect official narratives, such as “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Unless Trump cuts a deal with Democrats not to hold them accountable and also a deal with the Ruling Elite not to interfere with their control, I can see no way that either will permit Trump to be President.

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Why the Government Won’t Protect You: The Shocking Truth Behind Their Inaction

Our country is in serious trouble. The government is supposed to protect its citizens, defend our borders, and ensure our prosperity. But what we see today is a government that seems to be doing the exact opposite. Critical issues like illegal immigration, foreign ownership of our land, the national debt, and international conflicts are being ignored—or worse, allowed to fester while the American people are left to pay the price.

It’s hard to look at what’s happening and not feel betrayed by those who claim to represent us. We deserve better, but if we don’t act soon, it might be too late.

Why Is China Buying Our Farmland?

Here’s a major red flag: foreign entities—especially those with ties to the Chinese government—are buying up U.S. farmland. And it’s not just about farmland. It’s the strategic locations of these purchases that should concern every American.

Why is this allowed to happen? Why isn’t the government stepping in to stop foreign adversaries from buying pieces of America? The answer is simple: profit. Politicians and their allies benefit financially from these deals. This isn’t about national security for them—it’s about money and power.

If our leaders truly cared about safeguarding the country, they would put a stop to this immediately. Instead, they’re letting it happen, knowing full well the long-term risks this poses to our national security and food supply. The government has been compromised by its own greed.

The National Debt: A Crisis That Can’t Be Ignored

As of 2024, the U.S. national debt has soared past $35 trillion. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s more than $100,000 of debt for every single American citizen. The government is spending money it doesn’t have, and future generations will be the ones forced to pay the price.

But here’s the part that really should get your attention: a significant portion of this debt is owned by foreign countries, including China. The same nation that’s buying our farmland also holds a large part of our financial future. Every dollar we borrow is another step closer to losing control of our own destiny.

So why isn’t the government tackling this problem? Why do politicians keep borrowing and spending like there’s no tomorrow? It’s because they don’t care about the long-term consequences. They’ll be out of office by the time the bill comes due, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. Meanwhile, they get to look good by funding expensive programs and racking up political points, all at your expense.

This reckless spending has to stop. The national debt isn’t just a number on a page; it’s a ticking time bomb. And when it goes off, it won’t be the politicians who suffer—it will be everyday Americans.

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Swedish Police Want to Fight Crime with Live Facial Recognition

The Swedish police want to use facial recognition in real time to crack down on serious crimes.

Government investigators have already drafted a bill that will make it possible to use the technology. The regulation, however, still needs to be completed before it can be tabled, National Police Chief Petra Lundh told publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio last week.

Lundh also noted that the legislation must comply with the EU AI Act and could potentially be temporary until crime rates settle down.

Sweden has been experiencing a flood of gang-related attacks, including firearms and explosives, leading the Scandinavian country to crown itself with the title of highest per capita gun violence rate in the European Union. Police Chief Lundh believes law enforcement agencies could use cameras to find suspects.

“It is not unusual that we have a picture of the likely perpetrator, but then we cannot find him or her,” Lundh says.

The suggestion has already been met with criticism. The technology could make incorrect matches for people with dark skin leading to perceptions that the AI is racist, says lawyer Kristofer Stahre.

“I am worried about what consequences it may have for the Swedish people,” he says.

The Swedish government has been working on expanding the use of biometric data in policing on other fronts.

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Crown cover-up? When the state turned on its victims

It was a short statement, uttered in the dry atmosphere of an international legal forum in Geneva 10 years ago. It passed unnoticed at the time. To many New Zealanders the statement would appear uncontroversial, even self-evident. But the statement was wrong. Badly wrong. And the person who uttered those words should have known better. If she’d briefed herself properly she quite likely would have.

The statement was made by the Minister of Justice at the time, Judith Collins, on behalf of New Zealand. She was appearing before the United Nations as part of New Zealand’s regular obligation to give an account of itself and its adherence to various UN conventions. Usually New Zealand takes an approach of nothing-to-see-here nonchalance.

But in 2014 a delegate from Iran had the temerity to challenge New Zealand’s casual attitude.

“We would like to express our concern over a number of human rights issues in the country as follows.

“Ensuring safeguards to protect the rights of minorities from discrimination and marginalisation which pose them a higher risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

The Iranian delegate continued to rattle off a bunch of other concerns, such as discrimination in the justice system.

After other countries gave their views, Collins gave a response for New Zealand, which she read from prepared notes. However, she paused for emphasis and looked up from her notes when responding to Iran, singling out the allegation of torture.

“In response to Iran, I can advise that there is no state torture in New Zealand.” 

The problem with this statement is that it wasn’t true.

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