Tag: police state

Ukraine’s Attacks on Freedom of Expression Continue

U.S. officials routinely portray Ukraine as a democratic ally and the symbol of an existential fight between freedom and authoritarianism. That simplistic portrayal has intensified since Russia launched its large-scale attack in February 2022. The reality is that Ukraine is a corrupt authoritarian state similar to Russia. Not only does Volodymyr Zelensky’s government not respect civil liberties at home, but also it has tried to impinge on such liberties in the United States.

On three separate occasions since the Russia-Ukraine war began, Kyiv published an “enemies list” of critics with implicitly threatening overtones.   Zelensky and his colleagues clearly have no tolerance for critics, domestic or foreign. Their willingness to target and attempt to intimidate foreign critics became abundantly clear in the summer of 2022, when Zelensky’s government’s Center for Countering Disinformation (partly funded by U.S. taxpayers) published a “blacklist” of such opponents.  Numerous prominent Americans were on that list including University of Chicago professor (and the dean of foreign policy realists) John Mearsheimer, journalist Tucker Carlson, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow. The ominous, threatening nature of the blacklist became even clearer later in 2022, when the CCD issued a revised roster (including addresses) of the top 35 targets. That narrower, high-priority list denounced those critics as “disinformation terrorists” and “war criminals.” Such conduct definitely is not that of a liberal democracy. Yet official Washington and its media echo chamber continue to ignore Kyiv’s contempt for democratic norms.

The latest attack takes the form of a report “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the U.S. impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.” That report’s author was the U.S. government-supported Ukraine’s “Data Journalism Agency, (TEXTY),” which is listed as an “implementing partner” of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services/TPAS Project.

A devastating analysis by the Spectator’s Ella Johnson noted that the new report listed Americans who were accused of nothing more than “impeding aid to Ukraine.” There were 391 individuals and 76 organizations on the list, including members of the conservative media and even several members of Congress.

The title of the report “oversells the product: it is a substantively thin piece, largely an excuse to smear a large group of Americans who have been skeptical of aid to Ukraine in one form or another,” Senator J.D. Vance and Representative Matt Gaetz wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “The accusations are laughable on their face,” Nation journalist James Carden, who is included on the list, told the Spectator. “And they should be treated with absolute contempt.

The Spectator reached out to several other people named on Ukraine’s TEXTY site. “All I can say is that I am proud to be on the list,” said Dr. Sumatra Maitra, senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.  “It’s clarifying to see the State Department-funded Ukrainian NGO’s showing their true colors and creating blacklists, demonstrating how utterly Soviet they still are.”

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Woman spent a MONTH in jail because police mistook dried SpaghettiO’s residue on a spoon for meth before crime lab tests finally realized their error

A Florida woman is free to eat pasta in her car once again after serving a month in jail because cops confused a crusty spoon in her possession with SpaghettiO’s residue as being the drug methamphetamine.

  • Ashley Gabrielle Huff, 23, was arrested on July 2 by police after they suspected her of having meth residue on a spoon that was actually sauce
  • Huff served one month in jail because she could not make court dates or pay bond and even considered admitting to a crime she did not commit
  •  The Crime Lab report showed no controlled substances on the spoon submitted for testing,’ said Judicial Circuit District Attorney Lee Darragh

Ashley Gabrielle Huff, 23, was arrested on July 2 by the Gainesville police department after they suspected her of having meth residue on a spoon in her car that she hard pressed was SpaghettiO’s residue.

She was released from Hall County Jail on Thursday after a crime lab analysis confirmed that the spoon had sauce residue instead of drugs, reports The Gainesville Times.

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Assange To Be Freed: DoJ Agrees ‘Time Served’ Plea Deal With WikiLeaks Founder

In a shocking turn of events, Julian Assange will plead guilty to leaking US national security secrets and return to his native Australia, under a deal with Biden’s DoJ that ends a nearly 15-year battle nightmare for the WikiLeaks founder.

After spending more than a decade holed up and imprisoned in London – mainly to avoid being sent to the US – Assange, 52, is expected to be sentenced to time served (62 months in a London prison) during a court appearance Wednesday in Saipan, in the US Northern Mariana Islands, avoiding a potentially lengthy sentence in an American prison.

Prosecutors had been in talks with Assange to resolve the 2019 case, The Wall Street Journal reported in March, with one sticking point being Assange’s desire to never set foot in the United States.

To enter a felony plea, defendants generally have to show up in person in court. 

Assange’s team had floated the possibility of pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, the Journal reported, which would mean Assange could enter the plea remotely.

The Justice Department and Assange’s legal team reached a compromise under which Assange wouldn’t have to travel to suburban Virginia, where the original case is filed, and prosecutors could still get a felony plea, the people said.  

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Police are Using Drones More and Spending More For Them

Police in Minnesota are buying and flying more drones than ever before, according to an annual report recently released by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Minnesotan law enforcement flew their drones without a warrant 4,326 times in 2023, racking up a state-wide expense of over $1 million. This marks a large, 41 percent increase from 2022, when departments across the state used drones 3,076 times and spent $646,531.24 on using them. The data show that more was spent on drones last year than in the previous two years combined. Minneapolis Police Department, the state’s largest police department, implemented a new drone program at the end of 2022 and reported that its 63 warrantless flights in 2023 cost nearly $100,000.

Since 2020, the state of Minnesota has been obligated to put out a yearly report documenting every time and reason law enforcement agencies in the state — local, county, or state-wide — used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones, without a warrant. This is partly because Minnesota law requires a warrant for law enforcement to use drones except for specific situations listed in the statute. The State Court Administrator is also required to provide a public report of the number of warrants issued for the use of UAVs, and the data gathered by them. These regular reports give us a glimpse into how police are actually using these devices and how often. As more and more police departments around the country use drones or experiment with drones as first responders, it offers an example of how transparency around drone adoption can be done.

You can read our blog about the 2021 Minnesota report here.

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UK Technocrats Sharpen The Knives Of Manipulation

My recently published research into the UK Government’s deployment of behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – leads to a startling conclusion: in every sphere of daily life, our thoughts and actions are being psychologically manipulated so as to align them with what the state’s technocrats have deemed to be in our best interests.

It seems that open, transparent debate is no longer considered necessary.

How did my nation, a purported beacon of freedom and democracy, descend to such a position? While there have been multiple participants in this journey into behavioural science-fueled authoritarianism, a historical review of the key players indicates that American scholars have contributed in crucial ways to this trajectory. 

The Ubiquity of UK Behavioural Science

The research to which I refer sought to reveal the actors responsible for strategically frightening and shaming the British people during the Covid event. Focusing on the controversial ‘Look them in the eyes’ messaging campaign – involving a series of close-up images of patients on the cusp of death and a voice-over saying, ‘Look them in the eyes and tell them you are doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus’ – my critical analysis uncovered a series of disturbing findings in regard to the UK government’s deployment of often-covert behavioural science strategies during times of ‘crisis.’ These revelations included:

  1. State-sponsored nudging is ubiquitous in the UK, seeping into almost every aspect of day-to-day life. Whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama, or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by state-funded technocrats.
  2. The rapid expansion of UK behavioural science has not occurred by chance; it has been a strategic goal. For example, a 2018 document by Public Health England (the forerunner to the UK Health Security Agency) announced that ‘The behavioural and social sciences are the future of public health,’ and one of their priority goals was to make the skills of these disciplines ‘mainstream in all our organisations.’
  3. Throughout the Covid event, UK government communications – as guided by their behavioural science advisors – routinely resorted to fear inflation, shaming, and scapegoating (‘affect,’ ‘ego,’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges) to lever compliance with restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.
  4. The UK government’s bar for legitimising the terrorising of its own people has been set incredibly low. For instance, one official justification for inflicting further fear inflation onto an already scared population was that, in January 2021, the populace was not as frightened as at the start of the Covid event in March 2020: ‘Fearful but much less panic this time around.’  

As things currently stand, the UK Government can draw on several providers of behavioural science expertise to sharpen their official communications with the British public. In addition to the multiple nudgers embedded in transient pandemic advisory groups, since 2010 our policymakers have been guided by ‘The world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy:’ the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) – informally referred to as the ‘Nudge Unit.’

Conceived in the Cabinet Office of the then Prime Minister David Cameron, and led by the prominent behavioural scientist Professor David Halpern, the BIT functioned as a blueprint for other nations, rapidly expanding into a ‘social purpose company’ operating in many countries around the world (including the US). Further behavioural science input to the UK government is routinely provided by in-house departmental personnel – for instance, 24 nudgers in the UK Health Security Agency, 54 in the Tax Office, and 6 in the Department of Transport – and via the Government Communication Service, that comprises ‘over 7,000 professional communicators’ and incorporates its own ‘Behavioural Science Team’ located in the Cabinet Office. 

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SCOTUS Makes It Easier for Victims of Retaliatory Arrests To Vindicate Their First Amendment Rights

When someone claims to have been arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech, what sort of evidence is necessary to make that case? Five years ago in Nieves v. Bartlett, the Supreme Court held that an arrest can violate the First Amendment even if it was based on probable cause, provided the claimant can present “objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.” Today in Gonzalez v. Trevino, the Court said that showing does not require “very specific comparator evidence” indicating that “identifiable people” engaged in very similar conduct but were not arrested.

“This is a great day for the First Amendment and Sylvia Gonzalez, who has courageously fought against retaliatory actions by government officials,” says Anya Bidwell, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents Gonzalez, a former Castle Hills, Texas, city council member who says her political opponents engineered her arrest on a trumped-up charge of tampering with a government document. The document in question was a petition that Gonzalez herself had spearheaded, calling for the replacement of City Manager Ryan Rapelye. Gonzalez had run for office on a promise to seek Rapelye’s removal, and she claimed his allies were determined to punish her for that position.

During a May 2019 city council meeting that addressed complaints about Rapelye’s performance, Gonzalez picked up the petition, which had been presented to the council, and placed it in her personal folder. She says she did that accidentally. But Mayor Edward Trevino, Police Chief John Siemens, and Alexander Wright, a “special detective” assigned to investigate Gonzalez, accused her of deliberately removing the document to avoid scrutiny of alleged improprieties in collecting signatures for the petition.

As a result, Gonzalez was briefly jailed and suffered the attendant damage to her reputation. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, according to Gonzalez’s Supreme Court petition, “dropped the charges as soon as he learned about them.” Trevino et al. nevertheless achieved what Gonzalez says was their goal all along. “Gonzalez was so hurt by the experience and so embarrassed by the media coverage of her arrest,” the petition says, that “she gave up her council seat and swore off organizing petitions or criticizing her government.”

In July 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected Gonzalez’s First Amendment claim against Trevino, Siemens, and Wright, saying it was doomed by her failure to cite other cases in which people had not been arrested for conduct like hers. “Were we writing on a blank slate,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote in the majority opinion, “we may well agree” that “the Constitution ought to provide a claim here, particularly given that Gonzalez’s arrest was allegedly in response to her exercise of her right to petition.” But “Nieves requires comparative evidence,” he said, “because it required ‘objective evidence’ of ‘otherwise similarly situated individuals’ who engaged in the ‘same’ criminal conduct but were not arrested. The evidence Gonzalez provides here comes up short.”

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Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

It’s happening already.

Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

What exactly is going on?

Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

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Wales Moves Forward With Plan To Punish Politicians For Telling Lies

Will Rogers once said that “if you ever injected truth into politics, you’d have no politics.” In Wales, it appears that the government is challenging that assessment. However, if the new legislation criminalizing political lies is successful, the Welsh are likely to find themselves with the same abundance of lies but little free speech.

A proposal in the Welsh parliament (or the Senedd) would make it the first country in the world to impose criminal sanctions for lying politicians. Adam Price, the former leader of the liberal Plaid Cymru Party is pushing for the criminalization, citing a “credibility gap” in UK politics.

Astonishingly, this uniquely bad idea has received support from a key committee. Once on track for adoption, this is the type of law that can become self-propelling through the legislature. Few politicians want to go on record voting against a law banning political lies. The free speech implications are easily lost in the coverage.

The new law would make it a criminal offense for a member of the Senedd, or a candidate for election to the Senedd, to wilfully, or with intent to mislead, make or publish a statement that is known to be false or deceptive. There is a six-month period for challenges to be brought.

The law allows a defense that a statement could be “reasonably inferred” to be a statement of opinion, or if it were retracted with an apology within 14 days. If guilty, the politician would be disqualified from being a Senedd member.

The defense is hardly helpful.

It creates an uncertainty as to which statements would be deemed an opinion and which would be treated as a statement of fact. It invites selective and biased prosecutions. After all, what does it mean to accuse a politician of trying to “mislead” the public?

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Here’s Why the World is Falling Apart (and What You Can Do About It!)

Do you ever get the feeling that everything is breaking down all at once?

Forget about starting a family or buying a house. It’s becoming harder and harder for young men and women just to put food on the table.

And those lucky ones who defy the odds and manage to start a family sure aren’t spending their time at neighbourhood barbecues while the kids play a game of pick-up street hockey. Today, they’d be lucky to pry the kids away from their device long enough for them to notice that there are other kids in their neighbourhood. Not that the parents are any better at living life.

What’s everyone doing on those devices? Scrolling through their never-ending social media feeds of doom porn and ragebait, of course! They’re busy watching Israel holocaust Palestine and NATO inch closer to nuclear war with Russia and people at home engaging in public freakouts as society disintegrates and the world devolves into madness.

That faith in the ability of hard work and determination to help us all improve the planet and leave a better place for our children? Gone. Replaced by a sinking feeling that the world is heading to hell in a handbasket and that maybe it isn’t worth saving anyway.

Yes, from the macrocosm of geopolitical crises and financial trickery to the microcosm of economic disintegration and spiritual malaise, it seems like everything that could go wrong is going wrong. Increasingly, it feels like we’re just bystanders watching the messy spectacle play out on our screens, digital drivers rubbernecking at the car crash of chaos unfolding on the information superhighway.

But did you know that there’s a name for this phenomenon? And that it’s part of a years-long plan by the powers-that-shouldn’t-be to destabilize the world and move their agenda forward? And did you also know that by merely watching this disaster taking place, we’re actually helping that plan along?

No? Well, you’re about to learn all about it! Let’s dig in.

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What Can You Do While Waiting for a FOIA Response?

The government is slow, especially at answering questions about itself. In theory, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets Americans ask any federal agency for any public record and get a response back within 20 days. All 50 states have similar records laws. After all, government documents are the property of the taxpayer.

In practice, almost no government agency meets its own deadlines. FOIA requests can take weeks, months, or even years longer than the legal deadline. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are notorious for sitting on requests for ages before handing back pages that are almost entirely censored with a black highlighter.

Using data from the public records site MuckRock, Reason calculated the average response times for several agencies. It turns out that you can do a lot of fun (and not so fun) things while waiting for bureaucrats to give you the documents that your taxes paid for.

The averages only include cases where the agency actually managed to turn up documents. It doesn’t count requests that are still pending or cases where an agency straight-up ghosted the requester.

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