Tag: police state

‘Really Scary’: FBI Asked Employee About Views on COVID Vaccine Mandates During Security Clearance Review

FBI officials asked a longtime employee if he opposed COVID-19 vaccination, supported former President Donald Trump or had ever attended a pro-Second Amendment rally, according to memos obtained by Just the News and published Monday.

Describing the incident as “The New McCarthyism” and a “shocking litmus test,” Just the News reported the memos “prompted a complaint to the Justice Department’s [DOJ] internal watchdog alleging political bias inside the bureau.”

The questions were asked during a spring 2022 security clearance — several months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for private employers and another federal court issued an injunction on the government’s vaccine mandate for federal employees.

The employee’s security clearance was subsequently revoked, Just the News reported, noting that the interviews “confirmed his support for Trump and gun rights and his concerns about the COVID vaccine.”

“I think it’s becoming more and more apparent that we have entered the new American McCarthyism era,” said journalist Kim Iversen on Wednesday’s edition of “The Kim Iversen Show.” Iversen said people are routinely and openly punished for their views and opinions.

She added:

“If you were any of those things that might red-flag you according to the FBI’s security clearance … if you were skeptical of Big Pharma vaccines and if you actually are pro-Second Amendment, a right that’s enshrined in our Constitution, then you potentially are un-American and you potentially need to be red-flagged … or you might just have the propensity to become a terrorist.”

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Fast-Tracked EU Vote Threatens Online Privacy with New “Chat Control” Law

Bad rules are only made better if they are also opt-in (that is, a user is not automatically included, but has to explicitly consent to them).

But the European Union (EU) looks like it’s “reinventing” the meaning and purpose of an opt-in: when it comes to its child sexual abuse regulation, CSAR, a vote is coming up that would block users who refuse to opt-in from sending photos, videos, and links.

According to a leak of minutes just published by the German site Netzpolitik, the vote on what opponents call “chat control” – and lambast as really a set of mass surveillance rules masquerading as a way to improve children’s safety online – is set to take place as soon as June 19.

That is apparently much sooner than those keeping a close eye on the process of adoption of the regulation would have expected.

Due to its nature, the EU is habitually a slow-moving, gargantuan bureaucracy, but it seems that when it comes to pushing censorship and mass surveillance, the bloc finds a way to expedite things.

Netzpolitik’s reporting suggests that the EU’s centralized Brussels institutions are succeeding in getting all their ducks in a row, i.e., breaking not only encryption (via “chat control”) – but also resistance from some member countries, like France.

The minutes from the meeting dedicated to the current version of the draft state that France is now “significantly more positive” where “chat-control is concerned.”

Others, like Poland, would still like to see the final regulation “limited to suspicious users only, and expressed concerns about the consent model,” says Netzpolitik.

But it seems the vote on a Belgian proposal, presented as a “compromise,” is now expected to happen much sooner than previously thought.

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The bureaucratic infrastructure that enables the implementation of the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) and the “de facto” ceding of national sovereignty

First a little context:

Adherence to the existing IHR’s with enforcement at the country, state, city and local level, resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world directly, and untold millions indirectly, via the second order effects of starvation and business failures. This genocide was paid for with trillions of dollars of debt that has been completely wasted on consuming scarce resources for all the paraphernalia and toxic injections used.

The changes to the WHO IHR now include the term “gene therapy” for treatment of pandemics.

Take a look at how the EU operates a similar system.

The European Union Commission uses “Directives” to implement the policy choices of the EU Council of Leaders which are then ratified by the EU Parliament.

The U has THREE presidents!

From here:

What are EU directives? – UK in a changing Europe (ukandeu.ac.uk)

“Directives are the most common form of EU legal act. In contrast to a regulation, a directive does not apply directly at the national level. Instead, an EU directive sets out an objective to be achieved, and it is then left to the individual countries to achieve this objective however they see fit.

This takes place through a process called ‘transposition’, which essentially translates an EU directive into national legislation.”

Pay particular attention to that last sentence.

You can compare and contrast that with mechanisms in other democracies and the second round impacts on “third” countries of compliance with the EU when engaging in trade and tourism.

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How the US government uses NGOs to corrupt ‘civil society’ around the world

In the West, and beyond, pressure groups operating under the banner of “human rights non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) have become key actors in disseminating war propaganda, intimidating academics, and corrupting civil society. These outfits act as gatekeepers determining which voices should be elevated and which should be censored and canceled.

Civil society is imperative to balance the power of the state, but governments are increasingly seeking to hijack it through NGOs they fund. They can enable a loud minority to override a silent majority.

In the 1980s, the Reagan doctrine exacerbated the problem as these “human rights NGOs” were financed by the government and staffed by people with ties to intelligence agencies, to ensure civil society won’t deviate significantly from government policies.

The ability of academics to speak openly and honestly is restricted by these gatekeepers. In a case in pointtoday, NGOs limit dissent in academic debates about the great power rivalry in Ukraine. Well-documented and proven facts that are imperative to understanding the conflict are simply not reported in the media, and any efforts to address these facts are confronted with vague accusations of being “controversial” or “pro-Russian,” a transgression that must be punished with intimidation, censorship, and cancellation.

I will outline here first my personal experiences with one of these NGOs, and how they are hijacking civil society.

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War On Nation’s Food Supply?: Idaho Restricts Water To 500,000 Acres Of Farmland 

In late May, Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Mathew Weaver issued a curtailment order requiring 6,400 junior groundwater rights holders who pump off the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer to shut off their spigots.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued a statement following the order on May 30, “Water curtailment is never desired, but the director must follow Idaho law and the Constitution in issuing this order.” 

Brian Murdock, an East Idaho farmer, said the water curtailment affects 500,000 acres, which equates to roughly 781 square miles of farmland. 

“Well, as you said, the state of Idaho and the Idaho Department of Water Resources has issued this curtailment of 500,000 acres. And to help put that in perspective, that’s basically 781 square miles of farm ground that is being taken out of production,” Murdock told the hosts of Fox News. 

The grain and potato farmer continued, “And, of course, the worst problem is this is happening during a very plentiful water year. We have the reservoirs [that] are completely full, and when I mean full, they’re dang near breaking. The rivers are running as high as they possibly can. Just trying to keep those dams from breaking.” 

In eastern Idaho, groundwater users with junior water rights breached the 2016 agreement in 2021 and 2022. Currently, Gov. Little, the lieutenant governor, the Director of Water Resources, and representatives from groundwater and surface water user groups are discussing a new deal. The plan is to strike a new agreement before the curtailment dries up the farmland. 

Murdock told co-hosts Dagen McDowell and Sean Duffy that his family’s century-old farm faces a $3 million loss due to the state-issued order. 

“This is the largest curtailment in the history of the United States as far as farm ground,” Murdock said in a video posted on X. 

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Fight Erupts When City Takes Private Property for ‘Park’

A fight has erupted over a decision by the Long Island town of Southold to take private property that the owners of a chain of hardware stores bought for a new location.

The problem is that the town took the land against the wishes of the owners using eminent domain, but it had no legitimate reason for doing that.

According to officials at the Institute for Justice, that’s known because the city insisted it needed the land for a “park,” but that turned out to be a “passive park” with no cleanup, no improvements, and the remnants of an old home and greenhouse left there.

The IJ explained, ‘When every legal effort to stop someone from using their property has failed, can the government simply take the land using eminent domain? That is the question at the heart of a new U.S. Supreme Court petition filed by a family-owned hardware store business whose property was taken by a small Long Island town.”

It is the Brinkmann family whose members already have five Long Island stores and obtained the Southold property for another.

“The town did everything it could to stop construction. After failing to drive the Brinkmanns away by attempting to interfere with the Brinkmanns’ land purchase, then imposing an exorbitant fee for a market impact study that the town never performed after being paid, and even deploying a selectively enforced moratorium on building permits to stifle the Brinkmanns’ permit application; the town voted to take the land by eminent domain for a park,” the IJ said.

At the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges said, “the government can take your property for almost any reason at all—including because it just doesn’t like you—so long as the government lies about why it is using eminent domain,” explained IJ lawyer Jeff Redfern.

“This is a dangerous precedent, and the Supreme Court should take this opportunity to clarify that it is unconstitutional to use eminent domain in bad faith, simply to stop someone from making a lawful use of their property.”

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“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”

The famous line “We have met the enemy and he is us” is from Walt Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo. Kelly adapted the line from a U.S. naval commandant who, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, reported to his superior, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Kelly did the parody for the first Earth Day in 1970, a pro-state, antimarket, antihuman occasion.

More constructively, we can apply Kelly’s slogan to a bigger matter, namely, who’s to blame for the bad policies that representative democracy turns out? Is the culprit an elite group of politicians, bureaucrats, and Big Business/Big Labor cronies, that is, a ruling class that conspires against the public interest? Or is the culprit ” us,” or, more precisely, the voters?

Most libertarians, like most progressives, would reply “ruling class,” although David D. Friedman, a leading libertarian free-market anarchist, has been a major exception. (See The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3rd ed., ch. 38, free online.) So too is economist and anarcho-capitalist Bryan Caplan.

Two important libertarian thinkers, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), also dissented from the common view that democracy is routinely hijacked. “One striking feature of the Bastiat-Mises view,” Caplan writes, “is that politicians are actually tightly constrained by public opinion. On their account, democratic competition keeps elected officials in line; if they deviate from majority preferences, they lose elections and their jobs.”

In his classic work The Law, Bastiat, the fantastic French classical-liberal political-economic essayist, pointed out that in a democracy with universal suffrage, the main potential threat to liberty and property would come not from a ruling elite but from the voters, who previously had no voice in the government.

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The UN Cybercrime Draft Convention is a Blank Check for Surveillance Abuses

The United Nations Ad Hoc Committee is just weeks away from finalizing a too-broad Cybercrime Draft Convention. This draft would normalize unchecked domestic surveillance and rampant government overreach, allowing serious human rights abuses around the world.

The latest draft of the convention—originally spearheaded by Russia but since then the subject of two and a half years of negotiations—still authorizes broad surveillance powers without robust safeguards and fails to spell out data protection principles essential to prevent government abuse of power.

As the August 9 finalization date approaches, Member States have a last chance to address the convention’s lack of safeguards: prior judicial authorization, transparency, user notification, independent oversight, and data protection principles such as transparency, minimization, notification to users, and purpose limitation. If left as is, it can and will be wielded as a tool for systemic rights violations.

Countries committed to human rights and the rule of law must unite to demand stronger data protection and human rights safeguards or reject the treaty altogether. These domestic surveillance powers are critical as they underpin international surveillance cooperation

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New York governor proposes face-mask ban to combat anti-Semitism

New York state’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed a legislative ban on face masks on the NYC subway system to combat acts of anti-Semitism, claiming criminals are concealing their identities using the face coverings.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, New York had a law banning face masks in public. However, that rule was suspended in 2020 in light of the pandemic and the city’s authorities made face coverings mandatory for all subway riders until September 2022.

Speaking to reporters during a news conference in Albany on Thursday, Hochul stated that she was in talks with lawmakers over details of a bill once again banning masks, noting that the policy has to be clearly defined to include “common-sense exemptions” for the use of face masks for health, cultural or religious purposes. 

“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Hochul said, adding that her team is “working on a solution.”

The Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, had also mentioned reviving some version of a mask ban and returning to the way things were before the pandemic, insisting that people should not be able to wear masks at protests.

Hochul explained that she was moved to propose the ban after receiving a report earlier this week about a group of people donning face masks that “took over a subway car, scaring riders and chanting things about Hitler and wiping out Jews.”

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The “Antisemitism Awareness Act” Poses A Real Danger To The First Amendment

Totalitarianism rarely shows its true face when it arises. Instead, it often pretends to stand for good and decent values. A new bill claims to fight antisemitism, something all decent people oppose. But antisemitism—that is, bias and discrimination against Jews because of their religion or ethnic identity—is already barred under civil rights law. The real goal of the so-called “Antisemitism Awareness Act” is to suppress free speech.

This dangerous bill was already passed by the House of Representatives and now awaits a Senate vote. It outsources some of our constitutional rights to an outside organization, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, whose arbitrary definition of antisemitism poses a threat to civil liberties. It could be used to crush legitimate debate about Israel, its policies, and American policies toward it—policies that have given rise to one of the greatest acts of genocide since the Holocaust.

This bill could suppress historical research and ban the mention of facts that have been verified by international organizations. It could initiate lawsuits, funding cuts, and disciplinary action across all American “education programs or activities, and for other purposes.” (Those “other purposes” are not defined.) Student protesters, professors, writers, and even elected officials could face political repression and become legal targets.

It turns the USA’s much-celebrated sense of liberty into a funhouse mirror, a grotesque and distorted reflection of everything this country claims to see in itself. Its passage would make a travesty of everything America’s leaders claim to believe in.

The implications are enormous. The federal government spends more than $100 billion per year on education, including $85.3 billion for kindergarten through high school, $24.6 billion in federal student aid assistance, and $1.3 billion in congressional earmarks for colleges (for projects that range from equipment purchases and airport runways to prison education programs). All these expenditures could be used as leverage to stifle legitimate debate.

Despite its “antisemitic” branding, the bill targets Jews as well as non-Jews. As literature professor Benjamin Balthasar writes, it would effectively ban the teaching of “much Jewish history and culture.” Balthasar observes that Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Ed Asner, and “countless other Jews would now be considered ‘antisemitic’ under the new law.”

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