Tag: police state

Expanding censorship European Style –– arrests, dire warning ‘Face the Consequences’

It’s not just happening in the U.S. Europe is also seeing shocking battles over censorship of speech.

In August, the government of the United Kingdom issued an ominous “Think before you post” statement, saying social media posts that some consider hateful are harmful could get you arrested. 

“Remind those close to you to share responsibly or face the consequences,” the government warned. 

A new documentary titled “We Will Not Be Silenced” tells the true story of censorship of a UK-based podcast titled “London Real.” Brian Rose hosts the podcast and he tells me what happened when a widely-viewed episode was deleted and banned by YouTube. 

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Under Kamala Harris, Americans Can Say ‘Good-Bye’ To Their Sacred Rights To Speak Freely, Worship, Assemble, Bear Arms, and Vote

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have made a penchant for chastising “hate speech” and “misinformation” on the campaign trail this election season.  While those words might not seem like much to those less familiar with how our constitutional form of government, and specifically the First Amendment, is supposed to work, they are offensive to those of us who understand a thing or two about the Constitution – particularly, the notable omission of a so-called “hate speech” clause.

In truth, liberals like Kamala and Walz are merely playing with words (and not particularly well) doing their best to not tell people what they truly believe.  However, Kamala and Walz are so incompetent that it should be plainly obvious to any attentive listener of what they mean by “hate speech”: they abhor – and, insidiously, think should be unlawful –any criticism personally directed at them or their woke policies.  Kamala’s leftist ideology thrives in the dark; it cannot sustain under the piercing bright light of truth.  That is why the Left – and the Democratic Party – is hellbent on silencing their critics, especially Donald Trump, by any means necessary.  The old adage is that when the ballot fails, the bullet becomes the last option.  So far, the Left has managed to rig a presidential election and install a dummy president, as well as twice attempt to kill Donald Trump. And yet, despite the titanic forces of opposition against him, is as of this writing now leading in every single one of the seven key battleground states on Real Clear Politics (he only needs to win 3 or 4 to take the electoral college).

The problem with establishing artificial barriers on speech – devised not out of reason, but emotion – is that it limits the great possibilities for a nation, economically, culturally, and technologically, stymying progress and setting the country back decades, if not centuries.  “The closing of the American mind” is a real and present danger, and it is readily manifested in the policies and persona of Kamala Harris, who, in addition to being a diehard liberal, certainly lacks the mental powers to fathom the ideas that spawned the great innovations of our country’s past and are required to – in a phrase – “build back better.”  Part of this has to do with the decades-long assault on speech, which only appeases the dregs of society, who lack the reasoning faculties to contribute anything of substance.  By pandering to the lowest common denominator (which is the only advantage of regulating free speech at all in modern societies), it allows those less intellectually and naturally gifted to receive an artificial leg up, because on an otherwise level platform, they would easily be stampeded by their natural superiors.

But the downside of this, particularly over an extended period of time, is that all of society ossifies – we become paralyzed in this constant and false belief to cater to those who contribute, relatively speaking, nothing meaningful to the collective good.  In turn, those who are the most gifted – the innovators, creative geniuses, and visionary statesmen – are forced into playing along with this ridiculous charade.  The dregs of society manipulate mass opinion, and particularly Christian sentimentality, by exploiting feelings of guilt or self-righteous envy, admonishing those who do not invest everything in the dregs in the vilest of terms – racist, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe.  The more gullible of the productive group are duped into believing their pandering is moral or virtuous, when in fact it simply is accommodating to the malignant dictates of communists, spiritual if not actual, who should be spurned wholesale for the cancerous blight they thrust onto the rest of us

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Facebook Faces Heat for Blocking Report on Arrest of US Journalist in Israel

Facebook has come under scrutiny for censoring an article by Matt Orfalea that reported on the arrest of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel. Loffredo was arrested shortly after publishing a detailed investigative report on Iranian missile strikes near significant Israeli military and intelligence locations, including an Israeli Air Force base and Mossad headquarters.

Loffredo has since been released pending an investigation and is not allowed to leave the country.

Orfalea’s article highlighted the circumstances surrounding Loffredo’s arrest and his findings that reportedly contradicted some official Israeli statements about the missile attacks.

According to the Times of Israel, as noted by Orfaela, “The exact locations of such impacts and damage are barred from publication by the IDF censor.”

Facebook’s censorship of Orfalea’s piece raises significant concerns about freedom of the press and the role of social media platforms in moderating content related to sensitive geopolitical issues. Orfalea questioned the transparency and fairness of Facebook’s content moderation processes, especially given the public interest in Loffredo’s arrest and the broader implications for press freedom.

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Chinese Hackers Used U.S. Government-Mandated Wiretap Systems

For as long as law enforcement has sought a way to monitor people’s conversations—though they’d only do so with a court order, we’re supposed to believe—privacy experts have warned that building backdoors into communications systems to ease government snooping is dangerous. A recent Chinese incursion into U.S. internet providers using infrastructure created to allow police easy wiretap access offers evidence, and not for the first time, that weakening security for anybody weakens it for everybody.

“A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data.”

Among the companies breached by the hacker group, dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, are Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies. The group is just one of several linked to the Chinese government that has targeted data and communications systems in the West.

While the Journal report doesn’t specify, Joe Mullin and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believe the wiretap-ready systems penetrated by the Chinese hackers were “likely created to facilitate smooth compliance with wrong-headed laws like CALEA.” CALEA, known in full as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, dates back to 1994 and “forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone calls,” according to an EFF guide to the law. A decade later it was expanded to encompass internet service providers, who were targeted by Salt Typhoon.

“That’s right,” comment Mullin and Cohn. “The path for law enforcement access set up by these companies was apparently compromised and used by China-backed hackers.”

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San Francisco Bay Area Reinstates Mask Mandates as Flu Season Approaches

As COVID-19 cases increase, mask mandates are being reinstated in several counties around California.

Residents in the San Francisco Bay Area will be required to wear masks in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and other healthcare facilities as flu and cold season begin, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The mandate will take effect from Nov. 1 to either Mar. 31 or April 30, 2025, the outlet reports.

Health officials are implementing the mandate as an attempt to decrease the risk of spreading COVID, the flu and other respiratory viruses during the winter and early spring in medical settings.

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What Happens When FEMA Buys Your House?

It’s been a rough hurricane season. Between them, Hurricanes Helene and Milton have devastated many communities throughout the southeast. Rebuilding what was lost will take years. 

But as devastating as these storms have been, they are sadly not unique. Property damage from storms and flooding is on the rise. Storms resulting in over a billion dollars in damages have become more frequent in recent years. 

The prospect of repeatedly having to rebuild properties in storm-prone areas has led some governments to pursue an unusual solution to the problem: buy the properties themselves. Some local governments, in partnership with federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), have developed programs that use disaster relief funds to purchase homes in flood- or storm-prone areas. This isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to reduce the destruction from increasingly severe natural catastrophes. But the idea is that keeping such vulnerable properties vacant will save money in the long run because they won’t need to be continually rebuilt after storms.

Such buyouts are hardly ideal and can lead to some perverse situations. In 2021, an NPR investigation revealed that HUD was selling homes in flood-prone areas to unsuspecting buyers even as it was buying out homes in the same neighborhoods under a flood mitigation program. While not ideal, in a world where government disaster relief is a given, a voluntary buyout program could make fiscal sense in some circumstances. Voluntary buyout programs have been implemented in over a thousand counties and have been used to relocate almost 50,000 households throughout the country. 

The situation is very different when the buyout ceases to be voluntary. A little-known provision in the Hazard Mitigation and Relocation Assistance Act of 1993 authorizes local governments to implement a mandatory buyout program for flood-prone areas. So far, just three localities—Cedar Rapids in Iowa, Minot in North Dakota, and Harris County in Texas—have adopted a mandatory buyout program. The Harris County program is the largest of the three and is expected to forcibly purchase 585 households and 390 businesses by 2026 and turn the land into green space.  

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Israeli jails Grayzone’s Jeremy Loffredo, releases him pending investigation

The criminal case against the American reporter fell apart after an Israeli journalist testified that his own article containing Loffredo’s full video report had cleared military censorship. Yet Israel refuses to let Loffredo leave the country.

On October 11, journalist Jeremy Loffredo was ordered released from Israeli jail.

Israeli soldiers had arrested the Jewish-American reporter and three other journalists at a checkpoint in the West Bank on October 8. According to one of the jailed reporters, the soldiers blindfolded them tightly, roughed them up and hauled them off to detention in Jerusalem. While Loffredo’s colleagues were released after 11 hours, the “Judea and Samaria” division of the Israeli police opened an investigation into Loffredo for supposedly “aiding the enemy in a time of war.”

The Israeli police’s accusation related to Loffredo’s video report for The Grayzone covering the aftermath of Iranian missile strikes aimed at Israeli military installations. According to the police, Jeremy had revealed “the locations of missile drops near or inside sensitive security facilities, with the aim of bringing this to the notice of the enemy, and thereby assisting them in their future attacks.”

Watch Jeremy Loffredo’s report, “On the ground investigating Iran’s strikes on Israel” here.

On October 9, an Israeli court declared it had “reasonable suspicion” to extend the journalist’s imprisonment. At a hearing the next day, the police insisted to Magistrate’s Court Judge Zion Sahrai that Loffredo was not an actual journalist, but did not present any evidence that he was pursuing a hostile ulterior agenda.

A journalist from the Israeli publication YNet countered the innuendo from the police by pointing out that the military censor approved his own article in which a tweet containing Loffredo’s full video report for The Grayzone was embedded. 

Judge Sahrai ordered Loffredo’s release, stating that since Israeli military censors agreed to allow Ynet to publish both “word of [Jeremy’s] arrest and the publications that led to his arrest,” Israel could “no longer justify his continued detention.”

However, the police appealed Sahrai’s decision, protesting that the censor only approved the YNet article retroactively, and would have never done so if it had been submitted in advance.

That police also complained that Loffredo had refused to unlock his phone for them, insisting they needed more time to crack the device. “We believe that we will find things on the phone and we will be able to link him [to the alleged crime],” a police representative stated.

That argument did not hold water with Jerusalem District Court Judge Hana Miriam Lomp, however. “The Court of First Instance did not err when it ordered the release of the respondent,” Judge Lomp stated during the October 11 appeal. “From the detailed investigative actions there is no fear of disruption [from Jeremy], and in light of the reasons stated above, the cause of the danger is also not clear.”

Though Lomp ordered the journalist be released, she gave police until October 20 to continue their digital strip search. Until then, Loffredo will remain without his passport and will not be permitted to return home to his family in the US.

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Senators Demand Answers on CISA’s Role in 2024 Election Oversight

US Senators Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Eric Schmitt have sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), regarding its involvement in flagging online content.

CISA is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the three Republicans want to know how it is preparing for the November elections – given, as they spell it out in the letter, CISA’s “past mistakes that put the agency in direct conflict with the First Amendment.”

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The senators specifically want to know how CISA is organizing and working now, to avoid repeating those same mistakes – namely, monitoring, flagging, and censoring political speech.

Even more specifically – the point is to make sure that there is acknowledgment from CISA that it will not engage in the same kind of activities, this electoral cycle around.

The letter cites the House Judiciary Committee reports as the basis for the senators’ belief this type of censorship was happening back in 2020.

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American Author Could Face Prison in Germany Over Satirical Swastika

A German court has found CJ Hopkins, an American writer living in that country, guilty of hate speech, which is treated as an unconstitutional activity. This overturned a previous acquittal by the Tiergarten District Court.

“Hate speech” in the case amounts to Hopkins using Nazi imagery to express his protest about Germany’s Covid-era policies, including what he called “New Normal Germany” – a satirical take on how that compares to Nazi Germany.

The imagery that caught the authorities’ attention was posted on X, including an illustration showing a white face mask with a white swastika superimposed on it.

Even though a lower court in January found this did not represent “hate speech,” on the last day of September, the Berlin Appellate Court disagreed. In a blog post, Hopkins, who has been residing in Germany since 2004, says that “the New Normal German authorities (…) were determined to punish me.”

To highlight the absurdity of the situation, Hopkins told the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that the second trial went with anti-terrorism measures in the courtroom. This meant a small number of people were allowed to attend, behind a glass panel, while journalists could not bring in laptops or even notebooks and pens.

Now, the case is back at the Tiergarten Court which is supposed to sentence him – the author is looking at up to three years in prison. And while the Berlin court’s decision itself can’t be appealed, Hopkins told FIRE he would go to the highest legal instance in Germany – the Federal Constitutional Court (ostensibly after the district court rules again).

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Biden-Harris DOJ Aggressively Goes After Landlords That Use Criminal Background Checks to Screen Renters, Accuses Them of Race Discrimination

The Biden-Harris DOJ is aggressively pursuing landlords that use criminal background checks to screen renters.

“To keep with an Obama era housing rule that prohibits landlords from banning tenants with criminal records, the Biden administration is going after property owners that use background checks to screen perspective renters. Under the civil rights law known as the Fair Housing Act, housing discrimination is prohibited based on race or color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status or disability but Obama’s U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued an order in 2016 adding criminals to the protected class,” Judicial Watch reported.

Federal prosecutors argued in a lawsuit filed this month against the owners and managers of Suburban Heights Apartments in Kinloch, Missouri, that their criminal background checks discriminate against blacks because of racial disparities in incarceration rates.

The owners and managers of Suburban Heights Apartments, a residential property within proximity to UMSL, described itself as a “student village” and implemented criminal background checks to make living in the building safer for young renters.

However, the Biden-Harris DOJ is going after the landlord and accusing them of racial discrimination.

“The lawsuit seeks monetary damages to remedy the harms caused by the defendants’ policy, a civil penalty to vindicate the public interest and a court order barring future discrimination,” the DOJ said.

“It is well documented and known that there are statistical Black-White racial disparities in conviction and incarceration rates,” the DOJ lawsuit says.

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