Welcome to the UK where it’s now official government policy that you CAN’T publish “misinformation”, but The Guardian, the BBC, Disney and Netflix CAN.
Yes, it’s true – the recently signed “Online Safety Act” brands the publication of “false information” a criminal offense punishable by up to a year in prison…
…unless you’re an MSM outlet, when it’s totally fine.
Think even the corrupt & bloated criminal class that rules over us would never dare be that blatant?
Tyler Harrington and his wife were asleep in their beds when four Harris County, Texas, Constable Officers burst into their home and held the terrified couple at gunpoint. While the cops eventually realized they were in the wrong house, they didn’t leave without admonishing the couple for keeping their door unlocked.
Harrington has now filed a lawsuit, arguing that the officers’ invasion of his home was an unconstitutional breach of his Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
On September 24, 2022, Officer James Lancaster responded to a call from a woman, named “Mrs. H” in the complaint, who said that she heard a knock at her back door. Lancaster spoke to Mrs. H and examined the outside of her property, finding nothing suspicious.
Mrs. H also told Lancaster that her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend would arrive to check out the house themselves. Mrs. H then decided to “get in her car and drive around until others came home.” When Mrs. H’s daughter and her boyfriend arrived, another neighbor, named “Mr. S,” called the police to report their truck as suspicious. When talking to dispatchers, Mr. S accidentally gave the wrong address for Mrs. H’s house, reporting Harrington’s address instead.
Soon, two more officers arrived. According to the complaint, Lancaster clearly should have known that dispatch had been given the wrong address. While pointing to Mrs. H’s house, he told the other officers, “That’s the house with the person knocking on the back door, that was the house earlier….I checked the one across the street.” In reference to Harrington’s address, he said he had “never been to this house.”
But the officers decided to enter the Harrington’s home anyway, testing both the front and back doors and finding them unlocked. A fourth officer arrived, and according to the suit, Lancaster told him that they were “waiting on the owner,” despite knowing that it was a different house than the one owned by Mrs. H, where the owner had left and was to return shortly.
Around midnight, two of the officers burst into the Harrington’s home with their guns drawn, shouting “Constable’s Office, come up with your hands out!” Harrington’s wife, whose full name wasn’t identified in the suit, was woken up by the officer’s shouting. She confirmed that she lived at the house, and one of the officers, Jared Lindsay ordered her to get her ID and come to the door.
Around the same time, Lancaster entered the home with his gun drawn, shouting the Spanish phrase for “hands up,” and began searching the home. As the officers held his wife at gunpoint, Tyler Harrington woke up and walked out of the bedroom, at which point the officers began pointing their guns at him as well, shouting questions at the couple.
Eventually, the officers realized they were at the wrong house but still led the couple back into their own home at gunpoint. After releasing the couple, Lindsay told them that “someone had reported people searching the front and back doors of this house,” adding that the caller had told them the owner was gone.
A journalist asked the police a few questions and was arrested by that same agency for publishing the answers.
That this happened not in China or Russia but in the U.S. may raise some eyebrows. Yet that’s the conduct a federal court greenlit last week when it ruled that law enforcement in Laredo, Texas, did not obviously violate the Constitution when officers allegedly misled a magistrate judge and arrested Priscilla Villarreal for doing basic reporting, adding another twist to a case that in some sense asks the following: Exactly who is a journalist?
In April 2017, Villarreal reported the identity of a Border Patrol agent who killed himself by jumping off of a local overpass. A few weeks later, she published the last name of a family involved in a fatal traffic accident. She confirmed both of those identities with an officer in the Laredo Police Department (LPD). In response, that department set in motion a criminal investigation—complete with subpoenas for various people’s cellphone records—that saw Villarreal arrested months later for violating an obscure Texas law, § 39.06(c), that prohibits soliciting “nonpublic information” if done “with intent to obtain a benefit.”
The supposed benefit, the government said, was followers on her Facebook page.
Villarreal’s Facebook is indeed central to her story. She is known almost ubiquitously in Laredo, where she gained popularity by livestreaming local crime scenes and traffic accidents, infusing her videos with provocative, and often-profane, commentary. Some of that reporting has been critical of law enforcement, attracting their ire and culminating, she says, in their attempt to shut her up via the criminal justice system.
It didn’t work. But it did kick off a multiyear debate over whether or not her arrest violated the Constitution, and, if so, if those officers should be shielded by qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that prevents alleged victims of abuse from bringing civil suits against state and local government actors if the way in which those employees violated the law has not yet been spelled out precisely in a prior court ruling.
After years of a legal back-and-forth, Villarreal got her answer last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit: It was not clear that officers had violated the Constitution when they charged her criminally for her journalism, the majority ruled 9-7. But the decision, which was challenged forcefully by several dissenting judges, raises further questions about what qualifies as journalism and if those who adhere to a more traditional approach are entitled to a different set of rights.
“Villarreal and others portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism. That is inappropriate,” wrote Judge Edith Jones. “Mainstream, legitimate media outlets routinely withhold the identity of accident victims or those who committed suicide until public officials or family members release that information publicly.”
According to Jones and the majority, a reasonable officer could not be expected to know that it is unconstitutional to bring charges against someone for asking the government questions. That obscure Texas law, Jones said, understandably supplied law enforcement with the notion that Villarreal was indeed a criminal, despite that the statute appears to have been written to discourage corruption in government, not boilerplate journalism.
The way Villarreal communicates information, however, is anything but boilerplate. She is not employed by a publication, and her livestreams are raw and unfiltered. That general spirit is summed up well in what she named her page: Lagordiloca, or “the crazy, fat lady.”
In that vein, the 5th Circuit’s decision is dripping with contempt for Villarreal’s enterprise; Jones makes little attempt to hide it. Lagordiloca’s rough-around-the-edges, muckraker approach can certainly be jarring. But one wonders if the court would have ruled the same way if Villarreal had been employed by, say, the Laredo Morning Times, where her alleged “benefit” for seeking information would arguably be more significant: a salary. It is also unclear if the police would have had the gumption to arrest her had she fit a more conventional mold.
Axon, maker of Tasers and police body cameras, has acquired a surveillance company that allows police to tap into camera networks in schools, retail stores, and other locations in cities and towns across America and apply AI technology to the footage. The move comes as Axon is trying to expand its cameras into retail and healthcare settings.
Axon acquired Fusus for an undisclosed sum, according to a news release posted on Thursday. The acquisition “expands and deepens” the companies’ so-called real time capabilities. Fusus operates what it calls “real time crime centers (RTCC)” which allow police and other public agencies to analyze a wide array of video sources at a single point and apply AI that detects objects and people. These centers are reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s Fusion Centers—where intelligence from a diverse number of sources is collected and shared among agencies—and have already expanded to over 250 cities and counties.
“With Fusus, hospitals, schools, retail stores, houses of worship, event venues and residential communities—whole cities and towns—are better protected and, importantly, can contribute to greater safety for everyone,” an Axon blog on the Fusus acquisition states.
On a Friday in March 2020, a dozen or so sheriff’s deputies wearing bulletproof vests descended upon Waylon Bailey’s garage at his home in Forest Hill, Louisiana, with their guns drawn, ordered him onto his knees with his hands “on your fucking head,” and arrested him for a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The SWAT-style raid was provoked by a Facebook post in which Bailey had made a zombie-themed joke about COVID-19. Recognizing the harm inflicted by that flagrantly unconstitutional arrest, a federal jury last week awarded Bailey $205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.
“I feel vindicated that the jury agreed that my post was satire and that no reasonable police officer should have arrested me for my speech,” Bailey said in a press release from the Institute for Justice, which helped represent him in his lawsuit against the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office and Detective Randell Iles, who led the investigation that tarred Bailey as a terrorist based on constitutionally protected speech. “This verdict is a clear signal that the government can’t just arrest someone because the officers didn’t like what they said.”
On March 20, 2020, four days after several California counties issued the nation’s first “stay-at-home” orders in response to an emerging pandemic, Bailey let off some steam with a Facebook post that alluded to the Brad Pitt movie World War Z. “RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE ISSUED THE ORDER,” he wrote, that “IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH ‘THE INFECTED,'” they should “SHOOT ON SIGHT.” He added: “Lord have mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt.”
The Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office snapped into action, assigning Iles to investigate what he perceived as “an attempt to get someone hurt.” According to a local press report, the authorities were alarmed by “a social media post that promoted false information related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” In response, “detectives immediately initiated an investigation,” and as a result, Bailey, then 27, was “arrested for terrorism.”
Another news story reported that Bailey “was booked into the Rapides Parish Detention Center on one count of terrorizing.” William Earl Hilton, the sheriff at the time, explained why, saying he wanted to “impress upon everyone that we are all in this together, as well as remind everyone that communicating false information to alarm or cause other serious disruptions to the general public will not be tolerated.”
Bailey’s joke was deemed to pose such a grave and imminent threat that Iles did not bother to obtain an arrest warrant before nabbing him, just a few hours after Bailey’s facetious appeal to Brad Pitt. But in a probable cause affidavit that Iles completed after the arrest, the detective claimed that Bailey had violated a state law against “terrorizing,” defined as “the intentional communication of information that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist, with the intent of causing members of the general public to be in sustained fear for their safety; or causing evacuation of a building, a public structure, or a facility of transportation; or causing other serious disruption to the general public.”
A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.
Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”
“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.
“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.
Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”
“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.
Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years’ imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.
Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole.”
The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his “torture cage” at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz,” and “something only the SS could come up with.”
Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.
On January 22, 2024, amendments to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations (21 CFR 50) covering Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) were finalized and implemented. The amendments added a new section 50.22 that allows for exceptions to informed consent requirements for minimal risk research.
While the addition of section 50.22 harmonizes FDA IRB regulations with the Dept of Health and Human Services (DHHS) IRB regulations (known as the Common Rule: 45 CFR 46) that are administered by the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), the handling of the Covid shots over the past 3-4 years should raise red flags.
Currently, I am chair of an IRB at a private-not-for-profit outpatient healthcare agency that does research in which vulnerable populations are recruited. As such, I’m well aware that the foundational documents from which the OHRP developed the regulatory framework under which IRBs operate are the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report.
Back in October 2023, my first Brownstone post, Where is the Office for Human Research Protections, asked the question as to how the approval of a Phase 3 research pharmaceutical product (mRNA vaccines) could be done without the formal involvement of IRBs. Specifically, the Nuremberg Code, covering informed consent, and the Belmont Report, covering among other elements, bodily autonomy, which are foundational to oversight of human subject research, and the requirement for a data and safety monitoring plan were completely discarded. Was the OHRP consulted for its input, and if not, did anyone from OHRP express concern? Given that these protections were put in place in response to medical atrocities (the Holocaust and the Tuskegee experiments), you’d think that they’d be sacrosanct. Think again!
While not providing a direct answer to the question I posed, Debbie Lerman’s posts, Covid mRNA Vaccines Required No Safety Oversight and Covid mRNA Vaccines Required No Safety Oversight: Part Two, and Sasha Latypova’s post, EUA Countermeasures Are Neither Investigational nor Experimental, provided a detailed roadmap as to the actions that were actually taken in implementing Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid shot. To me, the most significant finding was that the legality of using EUA in civilian populations is rather tenuous, at best.
With the foregoing as a backdrop, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of the new FDA regulations, noting that in addition to being chair of an IRB, I am also a retired physician, who has been in the healthcare field for 50 years. This includes 19 years of direct patient care in a rural setting as a Board Certified Internist, 17 years of clinical research at a private-not-for-profit outpatient healthcare agency, and over 35 years of involvement in public health, and health systems infrastructure and administration. As such, I bring a breadth of training, knowledge, and experience to this matter that is fairly unique.
If we’ve learned one thing over the last three years, it’s that abiding by centuries-old medical ethics, like asking questions, is what White Supremacists™ and domestic terrorists do.
Via the soon-to-be-memory-holed American Medical Association webpage on informed consent:
“Informed consent to medical treatment is fundamental in both ethics and law. Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care. Successful communication in the patient-physician relationship fosters trust and supports shared decision making.
The process of informed consent occurs when communication between a patient and physician results in the patient’s authorization or agreement to undergo a specific medical intervention.”
That was then.
This is now, when respecting the Science™ requires that you shut your filthy masked mouth and do whatever corporate media news actors and Public Health™ technocrats tell you to do.
Via Federal Register:
“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA, the Agency, or we) is issuing a final rule to amend its regulations to implement a provision of the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act). This final rule allows an exception from the requirement to obtain informed consent when a clinical investigation poses no more than minimal risk to the human subject and includes appropriate safeguards to protect the rights, safety, and welfare of human subjects. The final rule permits an institutional review board (IRB) to waive or alter certain informed consent elements or to waive the requirement to obtain informed consent, under limited conditions, for certain FDA-regulated minimal risk clinical investigations.”
Branch COVIDians surely don’t care about any of this, as they gave up long ago exercising their former right to be fully informed of medical experimentation risks anyway. In fact, they brag about their ignorance and apathy and doglike obedience as if they are virtues.
Listen to the New York NAACP lady explain:
“We must take the vaccine. Now, I’m going to tell you a personal story off script. So, today right after this I am going to have an infusion, and I’m going to have an infusion because I want to make sure that the cancer that was in my body does not return. I’m not asking what’s in the infusion, I’m not looking up all of the ingredients in the infusion, I am sticking out my arm and I am taking the infusion, and that’s what we have to do.” [seal-like clapping from the masked retards behind her]
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is suing five Texas cities over their decriminalization of marijuana.
In a Wednesday press release, the office of the attorney general (OAG) said it was suing the cities for “instructing police not to enforce Texas drug laws concerning possession and distribution of marijuana.
The drug, the OAG added, is one that “psychologists have increasingly linked to psychosis and other negative consequences.”
Paxton’s suit comes amid a broader push by the conservative state government to exert authority over its left-leaning cities.
The five cities targeted in Wednesday’s suit are Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin and Denton, each of which enacted laws decriminalizing marijuana one to three years ago. Paxton did not clarify why he chose to bring the lawsuit now.
Although none of the cities has legalized the drug — which would allow it to be bought and sold openly — each has passed ordinances directing police and prosecutors to deprioritize pressing charges against people holding small amounts of cannabis.
In Austin, for example, a 2020 city council resolution directed police not to press charges against those caught with less than 4 ounces of marijuana.
In November 2022, voters in the other cities now being sued by Paxton resoundingly approved ballot measures that decriminalized up to the same limit — though these reforms have drawn resistance from local law enforcement.
In what could very clearly become the slipperiest of slopes, a bill introduced in the Florida Senate would make calling someone ‘transphobic’ , ‘homophobic’ , racist, or sexist a form of defamation.
Introduced on Friday, SB 1780 “Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorized Publication of Name or Likeness,” would make it easier for people to sue each other for defamation.
According to the bill, “an allegation that the plaintiff has discriminated against another person or group because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity constitutes defamation per se,” which means that even when said allegations are false, they are automatically defamatory – meaning that anyone accused of said ‘isms’ wouldn’t have to prove “actual malice,” a higher standard set for defamation suits following a 1964 Supreme Court case, New York Times vs. Sullivan.
In instances where someone is accused of homophobia or transphobia, defendants charged with defamation wouldn’t be allowed to use the plaintiff’s religious or scientific beliefs as part of their defense, and could face fines of at least $35,000.
The bill, which has a counterpart in the Florida House (HB 757), would also significantly narrow the definition of “public figure” in defamation lawsuits to exclude non-elected or appointed public employees, as well as individuals who became publicly known for defending themselves against accusations – either by giving interviews or being the subject of a viral “video, image, or statement uploaded on the Internet,” CBS News reports.
The bill also weakens protections for anonymous sources for journalists – and classifies their statements as “presumptively false,” making journalists vulnerable to lawsuits.
Hellbound and Down 
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