Tag: police state

New Idaho Bill Would Apply $420 Mandatory Minimum Fine For Marijuana Possession

Anyone convicted of possessing less than three ounces of marijuana in Idaho would receive a mandatory minimum fine of $420 if a new bill introduced in the Idaho Legislature becomes law.

House Bill 606 is Rep. Bruce Skaug’s second attempt to pass a bill creating a mandatory minimum fine for possession of less than three ounces of marijuana, after House Bill 559 was introduced on February 13.

On Tuesday, Skaug, R-Nampa, told members of the House State Affairs Committee that House Bill 606 replaces House Bill 559 and makes a technical correction. The difference is the newest bill adds language that basically says any other penalties specified in state law can also be applied, in addition to the $420 fine.

If passed into law, the new bill would amend the existing penalties in Idaho law for manufacturing, delivery or possession of controlled substances. Idaho law already specifies that anyone possessing more than three ounces of marijuana can be punished with a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000, or both. The new bill simply adds a fine of not less than $420 for possession of less than three ounces of marijuana. State law describes marijuana as “all parts of the plants of the genus cannabis, including the extract or any preparation of cannabis which contains tetrahydrocannabinol.”

The $420 fine is a known reference to slang for getting high on marijuana. During Tuesday’s short introductory hearing, Skaug also dropped several marijuana-related puns when he told committee he “smoked out” the problem in his last bill and ran the changes by his assistant, “Mary Jane.”

Other than Wyoming, Idaho’s neighboring states have legalized medical or recreational marijuana. Utah allows for the possession and use of medical marijuana for qualified patients who have a medical cannabis card. Washington, Oregon, Montana and Nevada allow recreational marijuana.

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Montana State Attorney Moves to Drop Case Against Kolstad Family Amidst Public Outcry and Media Storm

The Valley County Attorney, Dylan Jensen, filed a motion on February 16th to dismiss the contentious case involving the state of Montana and the Kolstad family. The legal maneuver comes after weeks of intense media scrutiny and public pressure, with the state now seeking to terminate its involvement in the family dispute.

The case, which has captured national attention, centers around the Kolstad family’s disagreement with the state’s handling of their daughter’s gender identity and associated mental health issues. The state previously sent the daughter to Canada to live with her mother as a punitive measure against the father, Todd Kolstad, for a separate civil lawsuit.

For context, The Gateway Pundit previously reported that their daughter was transported to Wyoming, a state with different laws regarding the medical transition of minors, by the Montana CPS for treatment of her sudden onset “gender dysphoria,” despite the parents’ express disapproval.

In August 2023, police informed the Kolstads of a text message from their daughter claiming she was suicidal. They were notified by police that their daughter had allegedly ingested drain cleaner and taken an overdose of ibuprofen.

The hospital found no evidence of drain cleaner and ibuprofen, which was later confirmed by a negative toxicology report. Despite this, Jennifer was admitted for observation.

A hospital aide discussed “top surgery” (elective double mastectomy) with the girl, leading to a complaint from Krista Kolstad.

Following her transport to Wyoming, the Kolstad’s daughter was subjected to social transition measures like chest binding and is now under consultation for birth control to halt her menses, actions that align with a model criticized as a fast track from social to medical transition.

The Montana Child and Family Services (CFS) petitioned the court to fully revoke their custody of Jennifer and arrange for her transfer to her biological mother in Canada, who has been an absent parent for the past seven years.

On January 19, 2024, a judge completely revoked the Kolstads’ custody rights for refusing to support their child’s transition, further instructing them to remove an online video detailing their plight.

Todd and Krista are now under a gag order with the threat of contempt of court for even speaking.

The Kolstad defied the court order, reposted the video, and communicated with the media, driven by worries about their family’s situation. Although a contempt of court hearing was scheduled for January 29, the Kolstads requested a postponement so they could travel out of state and care for a gravely sick relative in Ohio, according to Reduxx.

The attorney for the Kolstad family submitted a legal filing to the Montana Supreme Court to remove the gag order placed on them and to avoid their detention.

While the Kolstads are presently in Ohio tending to an ill relative, they have been informed that they face arrest upon their return to Montana, seemingly as retribution for their public criticism of the state’s Child and Family Services Division.

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As war drums beat louder, the Regime will revel in crushing its internal enemies in the name of frustrating its external enemies

Previous waves of censorship have hit the “Online Right” particularly hard such as the 2017 backlash to the Trump presidency and the covid saga.

As the war drum beats ever louder, we must remember that war and threats to national security are permanent states of exception that a regime can use to ram through all manner of draconian laws and limits to free expression. So, it’s important to prepare for what comes next instead of only reacting after the fact.

Previous episodes of censorship may have acted as a filtering process.  Thanks in large part to covid, “the Regime” has the technical and regulatory frameworks to cancel people. We can also thank the pandemic for allowing the Regime to know who is and is not susceptible to trusting their narrative.  Rest assured, the list of dissenters has already been drafted and names noted of the rotten apples that must be tossed out of the barrel. 

In an essay, Morgoth explores a hypothetical scenario where “the Regime” can claim that those naysaying the “war effort” are a danger to national security and can therefore be dealt with accordingly.  The essay explores the options facing the Online Right, dissenters who speak out online, in an era of heightened geopolitical tension and national security risks.

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CNN Calls for Limits on How Often Americans Can Travel Abroad: “Carbon Passports May be the Answer”

Ordinary folks like you and I are still doing too many things and going to too many places for the globalists’ liking, so CNN‘s Ross Bennett-Cook, a lecturer at the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster in London, has a solution: “carbon passports” that limit each person to no more than X-amount of travel in a given year.

According to Bennett-Cook, the end of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic” has brought with it a resurgence in public travel that he feels is generating too many so-called greenhouse gases, which he believes “are driving the climate crisis.”

Tourism, Bennett-Cook insists, “is part of the problem” because of all those jet fumes that allegedly “warm” the planet and create fictitious problems like “boiling oceans.” The only apparent solution, he says, is carbon passports that restrict travel for the world’s non-elite.

Taylor Swift and other celebrities will still be allowed to travel on their multiple private jets everywhere they go, but middle-class families will have to stay home for the rest of the year once they reach their carbon limit.

(Related: This is not the first time that CNN has called for implementing “carbon passports” to stop Americans from traveling.)

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Did the Leak of Alleged Russia National Security Threat Kill The Bill To Reform Warrantless Surveillance?

The contentious US surveillance program’s reauthorization faced a major setback over the last week. The United States House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) played a pivotal role in derailing the process, leading to a stalemate that hindered any progress before Congress’s focus shifts to the impending government shutdown in March.

Negotiations between opposing House committees unraveled on Wednesday when HPSCI members, instead of participating in a key meeting, chose to derail a pre-agreed plan for a “compromise” bill. This development came as a blow to months of efforts aimed at renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial intelligence tool that has, despite promises not to, has allowed the warrantless surveillance of US citizens.

This deadlock in Congress has left the intelligence community in disarray and pushed security advocates to defend surveillance practices, despite their acknowledged susceptibility to misuse.

Key insiders reveal that HPSCI leaders reneged on a privately negotiated deal after lengthy discussions. As reported by Wired, these sources, who requested anonymity, indicated that the collapse of the deal was due to an amendment proposal. This amendment aimed to stop the government from buying information from US companies without a warrant, focusing particularly on cell phone location data often used for tracking individuals.

HPSCI Chair Mike Turner was at the center of this upheaval. He skipped a critical hearing that took place on Wednesday, where lawmakers were to set the voting rules. His absence, coupled with HPSCI’s failure to file necessary amendments, signaled a lack of commitment to the process. Concurrently, Turner was reportedly involved in private discussions with House Speaker Mike Johnson, threatening to torpedo the bill he had previously endorsed.

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TECHNO-HELL: GERMANY ANNOUNCES ‘PRE-CRIME’ POLICE UNIT TO TARGET ‘FAR-RIGHT’

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
-George Orwell, 1984

In a classic case of “life imitating dystopian sci-fi pulp fiction,” the German Fourth Reich has announced big plans for so-called “far-right extremist” (which now means “anyone not blindly obedient to government”) elements of the population it oversees.

This will evoke in many connoisseurs of pop culture remembrance of a little ditty from 2002 titled “Minority Report,” the plot of which is that the state has devised a convoluted method of detecting crime before it happens and therefore eliminated all murders in Washington, D.C. by 2054.

“Germany’s top security official said Tuesday that she aims to make it easier to trace right-wing extremists’ financing and plans to set up an ‘early recognition unit’ to detect far-right and foreign disinformation campaigns as early as possible.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s proposals follow large protests against the far right in Germany in recent weeks. They reflect growing concern after a report said extremists met to discuss deporting millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, and that some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, whose support has doubled since the country’s 2021 election, were present.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says the number of far-right extremists has been rising*. In 2022, it reached 38,800, with 14,000 of them considered potentially violent. The agency’s head, Thomas Haldenwang, said the numbers are believed to have risen again last year.”

*Note that the governing authorities never seem to bother to investigate why so-called “far-right extremism” (again, a misnomer designed to smear, not describe) might be attractive to a growing swathe of Western populations — as if, apropos of nothing, the previously well-heeled, domesticated, cosmopolitan, thoroughly liberalized German population suddenly decided to return to its Nazi roots because…

Something, something… probably Russia, definitionally “disinformation,” or maybe the sleazy “malinformation” reared its ugly head. 

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The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

As Forbes reports, “US foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

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Biden Is Overseeing the Silent Death of the First Amendment

In early 2024, a new, grim chapter may be written in the annals of journalistic history. Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, could board a plane for extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges for the crime of publishing newsworthy information.

The persecution of Assange is clear evidence that the Biden administration is overseeing the silent death of the First Amendment—with global consequences.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé during the Watergate scandal is seen as a triumph of truth over power. Their investigative reporting led to the downfall of President Nixon, cementing their status as champions of press freedom. However, what if this tale had taken a dark turn, with the journalists prosecuted for espionage and silenced under the guise of national security? While this is mere fiction, Assange’s plight is all too real.

Assange, the standard-bearer of our era’s investigative journalism, awaits extradition in a British cell in Belmarsh Prison, a fate that could stifle the beacon of transparency he represents. At a time when the world grapples with the erosion of press freedom, with journalists imprisoned and killed, Assange’s case raises profound questions about the consequences of challenging power and unveiling uncomfortable realities.

The legacy of WikiLeaks goes beyond exposing government misconduct; it pierces the veil of secrecy shrouding global affairs. The release of Collateral Murder, the haunting camera footage from a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad showing the murder of several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, shocked the world. As we’ve seen in the past two months, the killing of civilians and journalists in war continues. In the last two months, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed dozens of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Thursday, human rights groups determined that Israel had deliberately fired on a Reuters journalist in southern Lebanon—a blatant war crime.

The aim of targeting journalists is to keep information where governments want it—under lock and key. That is why Wikileaks is such a threat—because, since its founding, it has fearlessly worked to wrest that information out of the hands of the powerful and put it in the hands of the people.

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Prosecutor Fani Willis Touts the Value of Cash, But What About the Rest of Us?

It’s quite a turn when a prosecutor defends the use of cash for financial transactions. After years of authorities treating mere possession of physical money as sketchy and grounds for seizure, this week a law enforcement official claimed there’s nothing to see in her alleged cash reimbursements to her boyfriend for an enviable lifestyle arguably funded by the taxpayers. Either Fani Willis and company were right in the past and she should be subject to scrutiny for anonymous transactions, or she’s right today and she and her colleagues owe the rest of us a pass on our taste for financial anonymity.

If you haven’t kept up on the details, Fani Willis is the Fulton County district attorney overseeing the Georgia election interference case, which has been described as potentially the strongest and most consequential case against former (and maybe future) president Donald Trump. At least, it was described that way until defense attorneys revealed that Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in the case, is unqualified for the job, was romantically involved with Willis, and is being paid much more than any of his colleagues (around $654,000 in all)—money from which Willis seemingly benefited in the form of expensive vacations and other pleasures of life with Wade.

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