Tag: police state

NYC law used to shutter unlicensed weed bodegas is unconstitutional, judge rules

A Queens judge ruled Tuesday that the local law that let New York City rapidly shut down more than 1,000 businesses accused of selling cannabis without licenses is unconstitutional because it denies shop owners their rights to due process.

The decision calls the legality of the closures into question and has the potential to halt the city’s enforcement effort, known as Operation Padlock to Protect, which Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly hailed as a success.

Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for the mayor, said Tuesday the city will appeal the ruling.

“Illegal smoke shops and their dangerous products endanger young New Yorkers and our quality of life, and we continue to padlock illicit storefronts and protect communities from the health and safety dangers posed by illegal operators,” she said.

The city updated its administrative code earlier this year to make it easier to shut down stores suspected of selling cannabis without licenses. But New York Supreme Court Justice Kevin Kerrigan has ruled that the portions of the city’s law that allow the sheriff to unilaterally decide whether to keep a store closed for up to a year are unconstitutional.

Under the law, the owner of a business that has been padlocked for allegedly selling cannabis without a license is entitled to a hearing with the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH. After listening to the facts of the case, the hearing officer makes a recommendation as to whether the store should remain closed.

But the ultimate decision is up to the sheriff — and lawyers representing businesses that have been shut down say it’s not uncommon for the sheriff to ignore OATH’s recommendations.

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White House Security Adviser’s “Information Czar” Idea Triggers Free Speech Concerns

Amid escalating assertions over foreign influence in US elections, the White House is exploring a controversial proposal that some warn could threaten free speech and open debate. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently confirmed that the administration has been “grappling with and thinking about” the potential creation of an “information czar,” sparking concern over the government’s expanding role in controlling narratives under the guise of national security.

Speaking at the National War College, Sullivan responded to a question about the potential for a centralized figure to oversee and counter foreign disinformation efforts by suggesting that while the idea has been under consideration, it could raise issues in a free society. “Questions around information operations, around public diplomacy, around the voice that America uses to speak to the world, bleed over into questions of propaganda or politics,” he said, implicitly acknowledging that such a role could have far-reaching consequences on public discourse.

The proposal for an “information czar” raises immediate concerns over whether any centralized control over information could be used to restrict speech and stifle dissenting opinions. Sullivan recognized this risk, questioning whether such a role should be linked to the White House itself or to a more removed agency in order to “insulate this from the twos and fros of politics.” Still, the idea of government officials controlling “information resiliency” remains contentious, especially when directed at speech in the US rather than strictly addressing threats abroad.

In defending the proposal, Sullivan argued that foreign election interference, particularly by Russia and other state actors, poses a national security issue and “an attack on our country” that needs a robust response. However, critics argue that efforts to counter disinformation could easily expand into broader content censorship efforts, a slippery slope that could ultimately see the government interfering with free speech in the name of “resilience.”

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Are Vaccine Passports Just Around the Corner? U.S., Canada, Mexico Launch Pandemic Preparedness Initiative

The U.S., Canada and Mexico launched a joint pandemic preparedness initiative they said will unite the countries’ public health agencies around a “One Health” approach to addressing future pandemics.

A critic of the new initiative warned the plan may empower the World Health Organization (WHO) — the architect of the original One Health Initiative — to impose global control measures like vaccine passports and new policies targeting the “infodemic.”

“Because this is an initiative from the WHO, I am deeply concerned,” said Nicholas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and fellow at the McCullough Foundation. “They appear to be seeking domain over plants, animals, and humans — globalized, central control over public health policies in all participating countries.”

The WHO defines One Health as “an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment.”

Public Health Canada says One Health “considers the relationships between the health of humans, animals, and the environment” — suggesting future pandemics or public health threats may cross from animals to humans.

Hulscher suggested bird flu could become the source of the next pandemic — and the basis for imposing global control. He said:

“The biopharmaceutical complex wishes for H5N1 bird flu to become a human pandemic, as it will give them another opportunity to implement draconian control measures and mandate mRNA injections.

“Their obsession with zoonotic diseases may be due to their potential for high mortality rates, which increases the probability of high vaccine uptake and adherence to strict countermeasures like lockdowns.”

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Brace Yourselves: 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.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

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Legalizing Natural Marijuana Is The Pathway To Protect Public Health, Not Pretending Synthetic THC Products Are Hemp

In a recent op-ed by the Reason Foundation titled “Banning Hemp Products Isn’t The Way to Protect Public Health,” the author correctly makes the case that bans are often ineffective and can push consumers toward more dangerous, unregulated markets. However, the Reason Foundation overlooks a crucial distinction in this case: that most “hemp products” referred to in the piece are in fact synthetic THC products, and they are sold as substitutes for natural—but federally illegal—marijuana.

The change in federal law has led to an explosion of unregulated intoxicating products in the marketplace that masquerade as “hemp” products.

Synthetically converted THC such as delta-8, HHC, THC-O, THC-P etc. are lab-created and do not exist naturally in large enough quantities for mass production. Yet, these molecules are being commercialized at scale in labs and sold outside the purview of regulation as “hemp.”

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EU President Likens Free Speech To Infectious Disease

Ursula von der Leyen advocates “pre-bunking” in the public forum to “vaccinate” people against “disinformation”…

EU President Ursula von der Leyen just joined the ranks of former Senator John Kerry and other globalist ghouls in declaring war on free speech by perversely proclaiming that the EU citizenry needs to be “vaccinated against disinformation.”

Like every censor in history, she characterizes her censorship program as a means of expunging erroneous information and ideas from public discourse. By using the word “disinformation,” she implies that she and her clique are already the sole possessors of the truth about everything, and that everyone who has and shares heterodox ideas is necessarily in error.

Her entire premise is FALSE for the following reasons:

1). Knowledge about the world is constantly evolving through constant inquiry, discussion, and dissemination. Knowledge is NOT a static thing. This is why countries with stifling censorship regimes have experienced intellectual, scientific, and artistic stagnation. Their rulers try to freeze the human mind in its state at their moment in history.

2). NO state, university, or ecclesiastical committee has ever been in possession of the full truth of any matter. Official orthodoxies have always been challenged by heterodox thinkers. Indeed, virtually every major advance in human insight has been performed by heterodox thinkers.

3). As John Milton observed in his 1644 pamphlet, Areopagitica, contending with error is an intrinsic part of learning and discovery. We literally learn by making mistakes and correcting them. If free speech is suppressed for the objective of preventing the propagation of erroneous thought—or “vaccinating against it”—it will become extremely difficult if not impossible for people to learn and discover.

4). Without a single exception in history, the people who hold power always advocate the orthodoxy that sustains and extends their power and that of their friends and supporters.

Ursula von der Leyen is the quintessence of this principle.

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‘Objectively outrageous’: Judge tosses criminal case against mom arrested for criticizing city official at public meeting

A state judge in Arizona this week tossed a criminal case against a woman who was arrested at a city council meeting for criticizing the pay raise and professional competence of a city attorney.

Justice of the Peace Gerald Williams on Wednesday had dismissed the trespassing charge filed against Rebekah Massie two months ago as unconstitutional, saying it was “objectively outrageous” for the government to attempt to control the content of her political speech.

“For more than two months I’ve been living with the threat of punishment and jail time — being taken away from my kids, even — for doing nothing more than criticizing the government,” Massie said in a statement following the ruling. “Free speech still matters in America, and I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have people on my side standing up for our rights with me.”

Against the request of prosecutors, the charge was dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning the case against Massie cannot be refiled at a later date.

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Montana’s Porn Age Verification Law Is Headed to Court

It seems that a puritanical wave is sweeping the country as state governments increasingly try to make it more difficult to access pornography from within their borders. A lawsuit is challenging one of those laws, and this week, a federal judge allowed it to continue.

Montana is one of multiple states in recent years to pass a law requiring pornographic websites to verify users’ ages. Under Senate Bill 544, any website that “knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors” must “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material,” so long as the site in question “contains a substantial portion of the material.”

The statute defines “material harmful to minors” as, essentially, the depiction of any sexual acts, covering everything from straightforward pornography all the way up to and including “bestiality.” It further notes that “reasonable age verification methods” can take the form of “a digitized identification card” or some other system that either checks a user’s “government-issued identification” or otherwise “relies on public or private transactional data.”

While perhaps well-intended, the law is a civil liberties nightmare: First of all, as a general rule, pornography is free speech protected by the First Amendment. And as Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in the April 2024 issue of Reason, the sort of age verification law that some states now favor “creates a record, permanently attaching real identities to online activity that many people would prefer stay private,” and “even the best verification methods would leave people vulnerable to hackers and snoops.”

The law also stipulates that it applies when the material in question constitutes “more than 33 1/3% of total material on a website,” meaning a site could be forced to enact an onerous age-verification scheme even if well over half of its hosted content does not meet the state’s definition of disallowed material. One imagines that porn sites could simply load up their servers with enough inoffensive content to stay on the right side of that ratio, but instead, sites like Pornhub have simply blocked access in Montana, as they have in many other states that have passed these laws.

In May 2024, a group of organizations and individuals led by the Free Speech Coalition filed a federal lawsuit seeking an injunction against the enforcement of the law. Per the lawsuit, S.B. 544 “operates as a presumptively-unconstitutional prior restraint on speech” since it requires “the use of some particularized approval method as a condition to providing protected expression.”

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“Black Ops” – How a US-UK Censorship Group Targeted RFK Jr. To Stifle Dissent

Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, now X, and doing that amid the unprecedented censorship carried out on all major US social networks – and carried out uniformly and successfully up until that point – seems to have really ruffled some feathers, and continues to do so to this day.

More insight into how events were unfolding has been provided by investigative journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi, earlier this week.

At the center of this is – the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a UK-based group that at this point has a long record of accusations it worked to put out in order to stifle free speech on platforms, including in the US, a notable one being the fabrication about “The Disinformation Dozen.”

The documents Thacker and Taibbi worked with now came from CCDH whistleblowers, insiders who had access to and provided minutes from the group’s meetings, from the beginning of 2024 until early October.

The Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-affiliated US non-profit, spoke with Thacker, to learn that information from CCDH insiders revealed the group was planning to launch “black ops”-style efforts against not only Kennedy, but also X (“Kill Musk’s Twitter”), and beyond, to other platforms, like Substack, where the deplatforming targets would have been Covid vaccine skeptics Dr. Joseph Mercola and Alex Berenson.

“Black ops” is a pretty heavy term to use – it involves secret campaigns that the government, military, and similar, launch to then deny any involvement.

But, the term shows up in CCDH’s own minutes, this one from early January mentioning Robert Kennedy Jr. to state, “RFK — black ops being set up to look at RFK. Nervousness about the impact of him on the election. We (CCDH) may be asked to comment, particularly from antivaxx.”

Not for nothing, Kennedy was one of the “Disinformation Dozen” in the past maligned by the CCDH.

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Western governments despise their own citizens

Increasingly, Western governments want their subjects citizens to be utterly compliant—and pliant—little state-loving automatons. Or they will threaten to incarcerate you in favor of illegal aliens, who they know are indebted to them…and ergo almost certain to vote for them in the next election.

This is certainly the case in formerly jolly old England. It is what Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are now, as well. And America is racing in the same direction. This will be America, too, after November 5th—or seventh—or ninth—or 20th—or whenever Democrats have conjured up enough votes to steal a second consecutive election from Donald Trump. And, at that moment, it will be game over, evil wins.

Thank God our founders were much less tolerant than we are or the past 248 years would have been much different for everyone on earth. They refused to put up with what they considered an excessive tax on tea, and taxation without representation in general. We are yet putting up with the forced genital mutilation of our children, the denial of objective truths, the attack on Christianity and tradition, the massive influx of illegal aliens who are “granted” more rights than citizens are, and the attempted incarceration and assassinations of our current government’s political enemies. Oh, and we also have taxation without representation, as most citizens are vehemently opposed to the aforementioned agenda and “policies.”

As conservatives, we have no logical alternative but to accept that our own governments detest us. Like many other truths, this is not an easy pill to swallow. But it is the truth, and it is therefore necessary that we do so.

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