Tag: police state

The Government Wants to Play God. What Does That Mean for Our Freedoms?

The government wants to play god.

It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.

Abortion may still be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual freedom, the rights of the unborn, and property interests in one’s body, but there’s so much more at play.

In the 50-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to believe that it not only has the power to determine who is deserving of constitutional rights in the eyes of the law but it also has the authority to deny those rights to an American citizen.

This is how the abortion debate has played into the police state’s hands: by laying the groundwork for discussions about who else may or may not be deserving of rights.

Despite the Supreme Court having overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry all along the spectrum of life.

Take a good, hard look at the many ways in which Americans are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American families killed by errant SWAT team raids in the middle of the night are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Disabled individuals who are being strip searched, handcuffed, arrested and “diagnosed” by police as dangerous or mentally unstable merely because they stutter and walk unevenly are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Unarmed citizens who are tasered or shot by police for daring to hesitate, stutter, move a muscle, flee or disagree in any way with a police order are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

American citizens subjected to government surveillance whereby their phone calls are being listened in on, their mail and text messages read, their movements tracked and their transactions monitored are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Individuals whose DNA has been forcibly collected and entered into federal and state law enforcement databases whether or not they have been convicted of any crime are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Drivers whose license plates are being scanned, uploaded to a police database and used to map their movements, whether or not they are suspected of any crime, are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Protesters and activists who are being labeled domestic terrorists and extremists and accused of hate crimes for speaking freely are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

Hard-working Americans whose bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash are seized by police (operating according to asset forfeiture schemes that provide profit incentives for highway robbery) are being denied their rights under the Constitution.

So, what is the common denominator here?

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South LA Man Is 13th To Be Exonerated For Murder In LA County Since 2020

It took only a single eyewitness testimony to convince a jury to wrongfully convict Stephen Patterson to a 50-year life sentence for shooting and killing 16-year-old Yair Oliva in 2005. That witness was 200 yards away, inside her home in South Los Angeles and peering through closed blinds.

Other witnesses contradicted that testimony or could not identify Patterson, who was only 19 at the time. Investigators also ignored that the gun used in Oliva’s killing showed up at another crime scene six weeks later.

But on Wednesday, Patterson was declared innocent after spending nearly half his life behind bars. His exoneration marks the 13th under Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s tenure. According to his office, those 13 people collectively add up to nearly 300 years of wrongful incarceration.

Gascón is running for reelection and touting his work on criminal justice reform that his competitors have criticized as being soft on crime.

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Statewide Emergency Declared in Indiana Ahead of Solar Eclipse

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb issued a statewide emergency due to a large influx of visitors to his state to view the total solar eclipse on April 8.

The Republican official said that the number of visitors to Indiana may strain the state’s communications, transportation, and emergency response systems, warranting the need for the declaration. Indiana includes some of the best locations in the United States to see the eclipse, according to a map of the path of totality.

“The massive number of people viewing this event in our state may well stress and/or interfere with first responder and public safety communications and emergency response systems such that a technological or other emergency may occur,” Mr. Holcomb said in a statement last week, adding that the declaration was issued as a precaution to bring in emergency resources from other states.

His order noted that the eclipse “will pass directly over the state of Indiana, giving everyone in our state an incredible view of this extremely rare event.” The order stated that the last time a total solar eclipse passed over the state was in 1869. After the event on April 8, the next one is not expected to occur for about another 75 years.

“It is of primary importance to the state of Indiana to be prepared to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public during this event and to be prepared to swiftly and effectively respond to any emergency that may arise,” the order continued.

The state’s capital and largest city, Indianapolis, is located in the eclipse’s path of totality, local media reported.

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Police Scotland Deluged With Nearly 4,000 Complaints As New Hate Crime Law is Weaponized

As predicted, Police Scotland was deluged with nearly 4,000 complaints in the first day alone after the passage of an absurd new hate crime law, proving the legislation is being weaponized by activists.

Under the new legislation, anyone deemed to have been verbally ‘abusive’, in person or online, to a transgender person, including “insulting” them could be hit with a prison sentence of up to seven years.

Transgender activists have been busy making lists of people they are waiting on to make such comments, including Harry Potter author JK Rowling herself.

Although it was announced yesterday by police that Rowling wouldn’t be investigated, the mere fact that she has been reported could create a ‘hate incident’ file on her that will remain in perpetuity.

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Head of Controversial Global Engagement Center Admits Europe’s Regulatory Power Over Social Media Censorship Enforcement

The head of the US State Department’s highly controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, appears to be on a “press tour” to promote more stringent regulation around social media, and more censorship.

Rubin is doing this seemingly oblivious of the “elephant in the room” – that GEC is at the center of scandals involving government/Big Tech collusion (this bureau engaged in flagging posts on social media) and even lawsuits stemming from these accusations.

Many of Rubin’s comments made on a recent Politico podcast episode compare and contrast the degree to which the EU and the US are able to regulate social media (and stifle speech).

He also seeks to reinforce the perception of GEC not as a government workaround for carrying out censorship on privately-owned platforms (which would be illegal in the US), but as an entity that is vital in combating “disinformation.”

In this case, AI is considered as a “force for good,” as Rubin revealed GEC would start using it to counter what it decides to consider as “disinformation,” and the policy is also to make sure as many other countries as possible fall in line with the US on this issue.

Regarding what the US could learn from others, Rubin singled out the EU where regulatory frameworks allow the authorities to carry out control and censorship of online information more aggressively, but also praised the work his country, the UK, and Canada are doing together to impose the use of AI watermarks.

Asked to what degree GEC “engages directly” with social platforms, Rubin first deflected by lamenting about how much better equipped the EU is to combat “misinformation” thanks to greater regulatory powers, and then claimed that GEC “does not work with them (platforms) – we meet with them.”

As for what “not working” with someone means according to Rubin, it goes like this: “We try to discuss the trends and the tactics that are used by manipulative countries or non-state actors. We work on that with them. We consult with them. They tell us what they’re seeing. We tell them what we’re seeing.”

He also asserted, “We do not ask them to take things down.”

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DARE Didn’t Make Kids ‘Say No’ to Drugs. It Normalized Police in Schools.

There’s no such thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close.

Starting in 1983, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program sent police officers into classrooms to teach fifth- and sixth-graders about the dangers of drugs and the need, as Nancy Reagan famously put it, to “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model in which any use of alcohol or drugs qualified as abuse and the only acceptable tactic was to abstain. Upon completing the 17-week program, students received a certificate and a T-shirt.

At its height, over 75 percent of American schools participated in the program, costing taxpayers as much as $750 million per year. Historian Max Felker-Kantor revisits DARE and its legacy in DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, a new history of the program.

As a DARE graduate myself who wore the T-shirt long after it was fashionable (look, I liked the austere black-and-red color scheme), I vaguely recall presentations given by someone from the local police department. On one occasion, he told a student to act drunk and pretend to offer the class beer, while the rest of us screamed at her in reply. Another time, our officer-instructor went on a tangent about how “girls are just tougher these days,” before presumably tying it back to why it was imperative that we 10- and 11-year-olds resist any entreaties to shoot up heroin in our rural Georgia schoolyard. I recently learned to my horror that my wife won a poetry contest in her DARE program in Alaska—a poem that she then, mortified, had to read aloud during the DARE graduation ceremony.

In hindsight, DARE is primarily remembered as a joke, a bunch of cops acting out hokey anti-drug skits. By 1994, a decade after the program’s founding, studies clearly indicated that the DARE curriculum had little to no effect on rates of youth drug use. By the 2010s, it had become a popular source of irony and parody: When then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the program’s effectiveness in 2017, DARE graduates noted on social media how they still smoke pot in their black-and-red shirts.

But while DARE didn’t “work” in the sense of keeping many kids from using drugs, Felker-Kantor argues the program was wildly successful at normalizing the presence of police, and the war on drugs, in people’s everyday lives.

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Hate crime law: Glasgow LGBT+ sex shop designated official reporting centre for controversial new laws

Police Scotland has been urged to drop an LGBT+ sex shop as an official reporting centre for Scotland’s new hate crime legislation after the outlet’s designation was described as “ill-thought” out.

The controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which was passed back in March 2021, will come into force on April 1.

This legislation makes it illegal to stir up hatred against protected characteristics, such as age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

To help members of the public report incidents of hate crime, Police Scotland has designated numerous sites as ‘third party reporting centres’, with most being based in community buildings such as citizens’ advice bureaux, housing associations, libraries and council buildings.

However, Police Scotland is coming under fire for listing an LGBT+ sex shop called Luke and Jack in Glasgow’s Merchant City as one of these sites.

Other venues listed as third party reporting centres include a mushroom farm in North Berwick, a demolished office block in West Dunbartonshire, and a salmon and trout wholesalers in Duns.

Scottish Conservative MSP Annie Wells said: “Serious questions must be asked as to who thought a sex shop was an appropriate setting to report a hate crime. The SNP’s act is flawed enough without asking people to relay their experiences in this sort of outlet in the heart of the city centre.

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The War on Drugs Is Also a War on Pain Patients

In a March 22 opinion column in the New York Times entitled “The DEA Needs to Stay Out of Medicine,” Vanderbilt University Medical Center associate professor of anesthesiology and pain management Shravani Durbhakula, MD, documents powerfully how patients suffering from severe pain—many of them terminal cancer patients—have become collateral casualties in the government’s war on drugs.

Decrying the Drug Enforcement Administration’s progressive tightening of opioid manufacturing quotas, Dr. Durbhakula writes:

In theory, fewer opioids sold means fewer inappropriate scripts filled, which should curb the diversion of prescription opioids for illicit purposes and decrease overdose deaths — right?

I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter.

Dr. Durbhakula provides stories of patients having to travel long distances to see their doctors in person due to DEA requirements about opioid prescriptions. However, despite their efforts, they find that many of the pharmacies do not have the opioids they require because of quotas. She writes:

Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad‐​stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities.

In the essay, Dr.Durbhakula does not question or challenge the false narrative that the overdose crisis originated with doctors “overprescribing” opioids to their pain patients.

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DEA Agrees To Hold Hearing On Proposed Ban Of Two Psychedelics Amid Pushback From Researchers

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has scheduled an administrative hearing to get additional feedback from experts about its renewed push to ban two psychedelics after abandoning its original scheduling proposal in 2022.

More than a year after DEA announced its intent to classify 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC) as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the agency has agreed to hold a hearing before issuing a final rule.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram signed off on the hearing notice on Thursday. It says that the agency’s administrative law judge will convene the meeting on June 10, at the request of three interested parties, including Panacea Plant Sciences, which had filed a motion contesting the proposed scheduling action last year.

Panacea Plant Sciences founder and CEO David Heldreth told Marijuana Moment on Monday that the company is “prepared to fight the DEA attempt to schedule DOI & DOC.”

“Beyond the scheduling attempt, we believe the DEA administrative law judges and system are unconstitutional,” he said, arguing that there’s legal precedent based on prior Supreme Court rulings. “We expect to file federal challenges to the ALJ prior to the hearing.”

In its notice about the psychedelics ban last year, DEA said its arguments about the merits of the scheduling action remained the same as in its prior abandoned ban attempt. It is maintaining that DOI and DOC hold high abuse potential with no established medical value. But it also notably described a change in the process to request an administrative hearing, which left some with the impression that the agency was deliberately complicating the procedure in the face of likely challenges from the psychedelics research community.

But, ultimately, DEA accepted the multiple requests for a hearing.

“Upon review of the requests for hearings, I have authorized a hearing, and direct the Chief Administrative Law Judge to assign the matter to an Administrative Law Judge who will complete all prehearing procedures, conduct a due process hearing…and issue a recommended decision for the Agency’s review and action,” Milgram said.

A DEA spokesperson told Marijuana Moment on Monday that they expect the notice to be posted on the online docket on Tuesday.

DEA backed down off its original proposed ban of the psychedelics following challenges from Panacea and researchers from Emory University. It remains to be seen how the agency will navigate the scheduling issue following the hearing with experts.

DEA separately withdrew from a proposal to ban five different tryptamine psychedelics in 2022 amid sizable pushback from the research and advocacy communities.

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New video shows teen kidnapping victim gunned down by cops as she ran toward them for help

Newly released video from law enforcement shows the moment California cops fatally shot an unarmed 15-year-old girl who was reported missing.

The harrowing footage released Monday shows Savannah Graziano slowly approaching officers along the 15 Freeway in Hesperia, Calif. on Sept. 27, 2022, one day after witnessing her father, Anthony John Graziano, 45, murder her mother, Tracy Martinez, ABC7 reported.

Moments later, gunfire erupts and Savannah is shot down in the crossfire.

“Stop shooting her! He’s in the car! Stop! She’s OK! He’s in the car! … Stop!” the deputy can be heard yelling.

The footage was released after reporters requested it under the California Public Records Act.

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