Tag: police state

Federal Ban on Home Whiskey Distilleries Now Heading to Supreme Court

When I was a young man, roaming around the woods and hills of northeast Iowa, two old guys had a still tucked away somewhere in the woods near Highlandville. I know that moonshining is something generally associated with the South, but nobody seems to have told these two old fellows, and from them you could buy a Mason jar of what they called “corn squeezings” for $10. It wasn’t bad, although if you had any left after a night’s revelry, you could always use it to strip paint and blast stumps.

Now, selling homemade hooch is one thing, I admit. But honestly, this is a free country; one should be able to set up a small still and make your own booze for personal use. And now, a case with that as a possible result, is headed to the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to legalize home whiskey distilleries in the United States by a conservative-leaning think tank in Ohio.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that the federal ban against home whiskey distilleries is unconstitutional. However, the 6th Circuit upheld the federal ban.

The federal government said the law is constitutional because it was enacted to prevent tax evasion and that it would be easier for a distiller working out of their home to conceal the business and therefore avoid paying taxes.

That last bit seems a bit of a trite argument; it’s certainly possible now for a person to do this, just as it would be if home use were legalized, as it is now for wine and beer. And, if anyone can point out to us in the Constitution where the government is authorized to regulate booze, I’d love to see it. 

As evidence of the ambiguity of all this, we might note that two different courts of appeals issued conflicting rulings in this matter, which is why the case is going to the Supreme Court.

On Monday, the Buckeye Institute filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to decide between the two conflicting appeals-court rulings.

“Two courts of appeals considered the same provisions, against the same constitutional challenge, on materially identical facts, within 11 days of each other, and issued opposite judgments,” Buckeye’s Monday petition to the Supreme Court states.

That seems a pretty clear-cut argument for the escalation.

Keep reading

U.K. government could remotely disable home heating or cooling

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that by the end of next year, British energy suppliers will be able to remotely turn down household heat pumps to help manage grid demand during winter cold snaps. Ezra Levant walked through what giving the government that ability means on Monday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, warning viewers where net-zero policy is actually headed.

Heat pumps, Ezra explained, are not furnaces. They move heat rather than generate it, which makes them energy-efficient in mild climates. But when temperatures drop below -20°C, they become effectively useless, something even the Weather Network has acknowledged.

An advertisement for heat pumps from BC Hydro came across more like a piece of Liberal Party propaganda rather than displaying a product, Ezra said.

“There’s a reason governments have to pay people thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to take one,” he said. “I’ve never heard of a popular product in history that needed a subsidy to sell.”

The United Kingdom’s problem is now more acute than just product performance, however. Under a scheme being developed by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero — Ezra noted the irony of that name — licensed energy suppliers including Octopus Energy and British Gas will be able to remotely restrict heat pumps via internet connection during periods of peak demand.

Over 223,000 heat pumps are already installed in British homes, and all installations since April 2025 must be internet-connected. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has set a target of 450,000 installations per year by 2030.

“They won’t just have the ability to turn off the heat to your home,” Ezra cautioned. “They could turn off your car if it’s electric.”

Giving the government this ability is akin to a Chinese Communist Party-style social credit system — only by another name. “Do you think Ed Miliband would ever have his car turned off? Or just the little people?”

In the European Union, a Politico headline details how EU Commission headquarters was forced to shut down air conditioning amid a heatwave.

Reading further, Ezra found that only floors one through seven lost cooling — while Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the 13th floor and her commissioners on floors eight and above kept full air conditioning throughout.

“The important people had air conditioning,” he said. “They literally made the junior staff sweat it out in the heatwave.”

Keep reading

Everyone Is a Foreign Agent Now

In a corner of the Saarland, a man ran a blog. It carried no advertising and charged nothing to read. It was funded the way a busker is funded, by whoever chose to drop something in the hat – €60,038.65 in voluntary donations over sixteen months. On four occasions in 2023 the blog embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the European Union had banned. That is the entire factual basis of a case that climbed to the Court of Justice of the European Union and produced, on 2 July 2026, a judgment that should frighten anyone in Europe who publishes anything.

The blog belonged to a writer who works under the name Traugott Ickeroth. German prosecutors in Saarbrücken charged him and two others under the country’s Foreign Trade Act, which turns a breach of EU sanctions into a criminal offence carrying three months to five years in prison. The regional court, to its credit, hesitated. The law bans “operators” from broadcasting listed Russian content. Was a private individual with a donation button an “operator”? The judges in Saarbrücken were not sure, and referred the question upward.

The Court’s answer removed every doubt, and with it every limit. An “operator,” the Fourth Chamber held, is any natural person who makes the banned content available to the public. Not a company. Not a professional. Not someone turning a profit. The word appears in thirteen language versions of the regulation without the adjective “economic” attached, and the Court seized on that absence to rule that commercial character is irrelevant. So is scale. So is duration. Four videos or one, for money or for nothing – the act of publishing is the crime.

There is a detail here worth pausing on, because it tells you which way the wind is blowing. The European Commission’s own guidance had said the ban applied only to those exercising a “commercial or professional” activity. The Court overruled the Commission – and overruled it against the citizen. The executive branch had read its own prohibition more narrowly than the judges were prepared to. Brussels asked for less reach than Luxembourg delivered. When a court strains to be harsher on the individual than the government that wrote the rule, the machine has acquired a momentum of its own.

The penalty is not theoretical. Under Germany’s Außenwirtschaftsgesetz the sentence runs from three months to five years, and a further amendment has added an aggravated tier reaching up to ten. Poland’s implementing statute prescribes a minimum of three years. And here the trap folds back on itself: the very donations that keep an independent site alive are what a court can treat as a “professional” income stream – which lifts the offender into the aggravated bracket. The reader-funded writer, the one with no corporate backing and no advertiser to please, draws the longer sentence precisely because he is independent. Independence is reclassified as aggravation.

Understand what this ruling plugs into, because the ruling alone is only half the apparatus. The European Union now runs two mechanisms against disfavoured speech, and this judgment welds them together. The first is a list. Under the hybrid-threats sanctions regime the Council of the European Union adds names by administrative decision – no trial, no charge, unanimity reached behind closed doors, with judicial review available only after the asset freeze has already bitten. The second is the criminal prohibition this case just widened, which reaches anyone who relays listed content whether or not they themselves are listed. The Council controls who goes on the list. The Court has now ruled that anyone who touches what the listed outlets produce is a criminal. The net expands every time the list does, and no further judgment is required to make it happen.

The reassuring official story is that all of this is aimed at the Kremlin. It is worth testing that story against the record, because the “Russia” label has already proven to be a wrapper rather than a wall.

Keep reading

French Lawmakers Approve Ban on Social Media for Under 15s

French lawmakers on Tuesday adopted a bill banning children under 15 from using social media, making France the first country in the European Union to approve a blanket ban on the platforms as concerns grow worldwide over the harmful effects of digital content on kids.

Both chambers of the Parliament voted in favor of the measure, a flagship initiative of French president Emmanuel Macron’s second term. The bill also bans the use of mobile phones in high schools.

Several families in France have sued TikTok over teen suicides they say are linked to harmful content. Children’s advocates and parents applauded the vote.

“We’ve been campaigning for this bill from the start because, frankly, we have no other option, no other way to counter tech giants,” said Gaëlle Berbonde, a 52-year-old who lives in the Paris region. “The only thing we can do is protect our children, just as we protect our children from drinking alcohol.”

Berbonde told The Associated Press that her daughter was in seventh grade when she got her first smartphone. A parental control app helped monitor what she did online, but Berbonde had no idea what TikTok really was. After a few months, the family realized that the daughter was cutting herself and was suffering from anorexia and depression. She spent a year and a half in hospital but is now 16 and well.

The legislation is one of the final major measures adopted under Macron’s presidency before he leaves office next year. Macron wants the law to take effect at the start of the new school year in September. However, a review to determine whether the bill complies with the French Constitution is likely to take place and could delay its implementation.

The ban won’t cover online encyclopedias, educational or scientific directories.

Keep reading

Flock Safety’s Billion-Dollar Surveillance Machine Caught Sharing Your Data With The Feds

The Orange traffic barrel on the side of Arizona State Route 60 looked like any other piece of construction equipment. It had the same yellow-and-white striping, the same tapered shape.

It also had a camera lens carved into both sides, a solar panel, and a cellular transmitter feeding data to a private company’s servers.

License plate readers disguised as traffic barrels. Orange traffic cones with cameras inside. Speed trap signs with AI-powered sensors. This is how Flock Safety operates — a $7.5 billion surveillance company that has deployed more than 100,000 cameras across the United States, more than any law enforcement agency has ever controlled.

The company says it solves crimes. The court filings say it does something else.

1.6 Million Illegal Searches in 7 Months

Keep reading

Andy Burnham Scrapped Digital ID. His Internet Plans Say Otherwise.

The new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is in Downing Street, and he has spent twenty years telling you exactly what he wants to do to the internet. He won the Makerfield by-election on June 18 2026. He then collected the backing of roughly 349 Labour MPs, more than 85 percent of the parliamentary party. By the time he walked through the black door, the job had been settled for weeks.

His first big announcement was the one privacy campaigners had been hoping for. Starmer’s digital ID scheme for all adults is dead, scrapped before Burnham had finished unpacking, the money moved to the cost of living. The applause came quickly. Perhaps it should not have.

This is a read on a government barely a day old. On speech and privacy, the early signals point one way, and it is not the way that loosens the state’s grip. He is not about to tear up the settlement he inherits from Keir Starmer. The open question is how much further he carries it.

Burnham arrives with a long record on all this. He is one of the few senior British politicians with a documented, two-decade appetite for putting the government closer to what you can see, say and read online.

His first ministerial job, at the Home Office in 2005 and 2006, was pushing Tony Blair’s Identity Cards Bill through Parliament. He told the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be a major breakthrough. Twenty years later, asked about it again, he was unembarrassed about the principle: “I’m not kind of arguing against the principle. I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real clear case for it.”

Two decades of hindsight, and the case is still clear to him. What that case rests on is a claim about the relationship between a person and the state, and it is the same claim underneath every age check and identity gate now being built. The Identity Cards Act reached the statute book on 30 March 2006 and was repealed on 21 January 2011.

Then came 2008, and Culture Secretary Burnham produced a plan that looks like a blueprint for everything running today. The organizing idea was that online content should meet the same regulatory standards as television. He wanted taste and decency rules applied to the web, cinema-style age certificates and warning signs on anything featuring sex, violence or strong language, alerts bolted onto viral content, and ISP-level “child-safe” packages.

He floated making YouTube and Facebook delete offensive material within a set time once alerted, and changing libel law so suing an online publisher got easier. He even wanted to sound out the incoming Obama administration about international rules for English-language websites. Age gating, takedown clocks, regulator muscle aimed at platforms, it is all sitting there in 2008, waiting for the technology to catch up.

The plans died, and the body that killed them was Ofcom, which called them undesirable and unworkable online. This was back when the speech regulator was more levelheaded. The regulator that told Burnham in 2008 that broadcast rules could not be stretched over the internet is the regulator now enforcing the Online Safety Act. The intellectual weight at Ofcom has obviously severely declined.

Keep reading

ICE agents resume nationwide traffic stops, now required to wear body cameras

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now requiring its officers to wear at least one body camera during vehicle stops, according to White House Border Czar Tom Homan.

The requirement follows the White House’s confirmation on Thursday that ICE vehicle stops will continue after ICE temporarily suspended their most non-urgent vehicle stops, which President Donald Trump overruled the next day.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin are fully aligned on using traffic stops as a key tool for ICE deportation operations.

“They exonerate more law enforcement than they convict, and I want officers to wear body cameras because I want the American people to see what the ⁠officers saw when they took that action,” Homan said on a Sunday episode of Fox & Friends.

“Vehicle stops are a necessary tool that ICE agents need in order to continue their deportation campaign of the worst of the worst illegal alien criminals from our country,” Leavitt said. “With respect to body cameras, I know there’s been some questions about that in recent days. Over half of all ICE field offices now do have body cameras.”

Leavitt attributed delays in equipping ICE agents with body cameras to the earlier Democrat-led DHS funding shutdown.

Keep reading

Arkansas GOP Governor And Democratic Challenger Agree On Opposing Marijuana Legalization

Medical marijuana has generated more than $1 billion in Arkansas since voters legalized it in 2016.

After the state opened its first dispensary in 2019, thousands of Arkansans joined the program and spent a record $291.1 million on medical marijuana in 2025, according to the state’s Department of Finance and Administration.

Tax revenue from those sales now supports free breakfast for public school students, following approval of legislation by lawmakers last year.

Medical marijuana programs have expanded across the country, as has recreational marijuana. Two dozen states, including neighboring Missouri, permit recreational marijuana use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Arkansas voters in 2022 rejected an effort to expand legalization to recreational marijuana, despite national groups spending millions in support of the measure.

Restrictions on marijuana have relaxed at the federal level, with the U.S. Department of Justice downgrading the drug classification for medical cannabis earlier this year.

Here’s what Arkansas’s gubernatorial candidates—Democratic state Sen. Fred Love, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Libertarian Colt Shelby—say about legalizing recreational marijuana.

Keep reading

Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Plymouth, Minnesota – Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

According to Feder’s detailed account in The Drive, officers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl’s parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock’s network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car’s legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as “34 DTM.” Flock’s AI system matched Feder’s plate – ignoring the smaller middle digits – and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock’s own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were – it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency’s custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert “does not equal probable cause,” comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month – arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department’s Flock transparency portal, the city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits – one of which was Feder.

Keep reading

DOJ seeks to invoke the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for first time since its creation

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has submitted an application to the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC) to initiate the never-before-used legal process to deport foreign nationals deemed to be terrorists.

The application was submitted on Thursday, July 16th, and its contents remained sealed. The document’s cover sheet indicates that the information inside is classified. The person the application intends to process has not been publicly identified.

The ATRC was established in 1996 by Congress, which authorized the Chief Justice of the United States to designate five U.S. district court judges to review applications for illegal immigrant terrorists to be quickly removed from the country. However, until this week, the court has not received an application from the Attorney General in 30 years and has not conducted deportation proceedings.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) was signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1996 in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. At the time, American extremist Timothy McVeigh, aided by Terry Nichols, detonated a makeshift bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

If an application is approved, the court will need to hold a public removal hearing where the government bears the burden of proving that the individual is an “alien terrorist.”

8 U.S. Code defines an alien terrorist as any non-citizen who has engaged or is reasonably likely to engage in any terrorist activity.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines terrorist activity as any unlawful act including:

  • Hijacking or sabotaging an aircraft, vessel or vehicle;
  • Seizing, detaining, or threatening to kill or injure another person to compel a third person or government to an action;
  • Assassination;
  • A violent act upon an internationally protected person;
  • Using biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons with intent to harm;
  • Material support to a certified Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) or to any individuals the actor reasonably should know has committed or plans to commit terrorist acts.

The DOJ’s filing may indicate an escalation in President Donald Trump’s administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Keep reading