Tag: police state

The Shocking Damage Caused by Covid Policies

he Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we’re still dealing with today.

That’s the conclusion of a massive new body of research into the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health “expert” class, promoted by their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.

Mask mandates had been thoroughly discouraged by decades of pre-Covid pandemic planning. There was no body of research supporting the closing of certain businesses at different hours of the day, as many jurisdictions demanded.

No studies were conducted on the reduction of infection rates resulting from placing directional arrows on the floors of grocery stores to direct people through aisles in predetermined patterns.

There were no randomized controlled trials on closing skate parks and beaches, arresting people surfing alone in the ocean, restricting capacity to random percentages based on inaccurate assumptions of community spread.

We had no idea whether closing schools would be effective or “save lives,” but we did it anyway. We didn’t know if vaccine passports would actually have a meaningful impact on community spread, yet we were encouraged to push that too.

All these “interventions” started with little-to-no evidence. That’s bad enough. What makes it much worse? That we implemented them all with zero consideration of possible side effects resulting from those policies.

Lockdowns were an unprecedented incursion on freedom and liberty. What would that do to society, the economy, mental health, and so on? It appeared that no one involved gave those considerations a second thought, and now we’re paying the price.

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Florida vs. OpenAI: The Fight to ID Every ChatGPT User

Florida wants a court to force OpenAI to verify how old you are before ChatGPT will talk to you freely and the demand reaches far past the children the state says it wants to protect.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a civil suit on Monday against OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, calling it the first state-led case of its kind.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Most of the coverage has gone to the alleged harms. The complaint accuses the company of feeding content unsuitable for children to minors and states that “vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide.”

Uthmeier told reporters, “If this was a human being on the other side of the screen, we would be charging them with accessory to commit murder.” Those are heavy charges and a court will weigh them.

The part that touches everyone who opens ChatGPT is the remedy Florida is chasing. The state complains that the free product has “no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism,” and it claims the paid subscription has “no mechanism to verify the age of its users.” It wants a judge to close that gap by ordering verification into place.

There is a problem with the second claim. OpenAI announced its age estimation plans back in September and it began rolling out age prediction across consumer plans in January.

The system already runs as a form of mass surveillance. It works by watching how you behave, studying how long your account has existed, when you tend to log in, and how you use the product, then guessing whether you are under 18.

Anyone the model flags as a minor who is actually an adult has to prove it by handing a selfie or a government ID to a third-party firm called Persona.

So the supposed absence of verification is a verification system that runs on behavioral profiling backed by face scans and identity documents.

That changes what the lawsuit is actually pushing for. Age verification cannot work without identity verification.

To confirm you are not a child, a company has to learn enough about you to rule it out. That means collecting your government ID, scanning your face, or building a profile detailed enough to estimate your age from how you type and when you log in.

There is no version of “prove you are an adult” that does not involve handing over something you would otherwise keep to yourself.

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California’s ‘Wealth’ Tax Is Coming For Everyone

If you own property in California, you’re not safe. A new ballot measure will empower the state to confiscate a percentage of the assets of any resident, even though its initial provisions don’t communicate that intent. California’s “One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Healthcare, Education, and Food Assistance Programs Initiative,” which has already qualified for the November ballot, is even worse than it appears.

It’s not as if appearances aren’t bad enough. The explicit intent of the initiative already chased at least six billionaires out of the state in 2025. Moved to Florida are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Nevada is now home to billionaire Don Hankey, and Texas has welcomed former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Famed director Steven Spielberg has moved to New York, apparently concluding even that deep blue state is a safer bet than California. Just the departure of these six men has lowered the potential take from the wealth tax by an estimated $27 billion.

A Hoover Institution study claims that another 20 California billionaires have already made departure plans and will leave immediately if the initiative is approved by voters. One of the initiative’s many diabolical provisions is that it will apply retroactively to anyone living in the state after January 1, 2026, but unlike the six who got out in 2025, this next tranche of would-be exiles have been advised by their attorneys that the initiative’s retroactivity will not survive a constitutional challenge.

Other details of this initiative are likely to survive court challenges, and they reveal a stunning level of aggression toward wealth. If you live in California, and this bill is approved by voters, you will have to pay a “one-time” tax of 5 percent of your “covered assets” valued over $1 billion. “Covered assets” include unrealized gains in the value of stock owned by employees of private companies. It is unlikely the framers of this initiative didn’t understand the implications of this provision. Valuations of private companies are subjective, volatile, and illiquid. An employee with stock options valued at a few billion in the last private equity round could be assessed tens of millions of dollars in wealth tax on money they don’t actually have access to, based on a value that could plummet at any moment.

It gets worse. The language of the wealth act provides for what amounts to unrestricted escalation of its reach, something that will surely become necessary when high earners are driven away, taking their taxable assets with them. Built into the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act is the right of the state legislature to amend its provisions with a two-thirds vote. That would include lowering the $1 billion threshold, replacing “one-time” with an annual assessment, and eliminating the exemptions currently present for real estate and retirement accounts. The wording of this initiative is purposely designed to give the state legislature the authority to override the property tax protections afforded by Proposition 13, passed by voters in 1978 and one of the only obstacles left that prevents the state from stripping the state’s middle class of assets they’ve earned and stewarded over generations.

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DOJ Sought YouTube Subscriber Data

Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.

Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.

We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here.

Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.

On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.

The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.

Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream.

Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people.

What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over.

Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now.

The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push.

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“Dystopian” Police.AI Launches in UK Amid False Arrests

A new UK national center launches within days, promising to find suspects in minutes, except it costs £115 million ($155M) and occasionally arrests the wrong person.

Police.AI, the body charged with pushing dystopian artificial intelligence across all 43 forces in England and Wales, comes with a seductive sales pitch from its frontman. Catch your suspect in minutes. Turn a weeks-long manhunt into a coffee break.

Alex Murray, National Crime Agency director and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead, wants facial recognition to do exactly that. The catch, and it is a fairly significant one, is that the technology keeps flagging innocent people.

Murray’s whole pitch is speed. “What took days, weeks, sometimes months can potentially take hours,” he said, describing AI tools that span CCTV analysis, searches of seized phones and the flagging of fake images.

He likes to point to a Bedfordshire fraud case where the software chewed through Romanian-language phone data from four suspects and produced guilty pleas. Notice the shape of the pattern, though. It is always a list of what the police get to do. The part where the rest of us get scanned, sorted and occasionally pulled off the street tends to fall off the slide.

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Connecticut Governor’s Signature on Anti-Homeschool Bill ‘Marks First Regression of Homeschool Freedom In The Modern Homeschool Movement’

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed HB 5468 into law on May 26 – a day that national homeschooling advocacy organization HSLDA asserts now marks “a notable turning point in homeschool freedom.”

“HB 5468 profoundly transforms Connecticut from a state where parents had significant freedom, to the only state that imposes mandatory background checks by DCFS on every parent before they can homeschool,” HSLDA posted to Facebook to its members nationwide.

“Not after evidence of abuse. Not in response to a specific concern,” the group continued. “But as a condition of carrying out a basic responsibility of parenthood—choosing the best education for your child.”

The national legal advocate also warned that the effects of the alarming anti-freedom bill – passed by a Democratic supermajority even after thousands of parents of all political views demonstrated against it at the state capitol – could be felt in other states with like-minded lawmakers eager to flex their muscles against parental rights and add “layers of regulation, restriction and bureaucracy to homeschooling families.”

During debate on the bill, Education Committee Co-Chair State Sen. Douglas McCrory (D-Hartford) defended it by likening the requirement of a Department of Children and Families (DCF) background check on all parents who wish to homeschool to the background check required on all teachers in government schools.

If the parents are the teachers, the same standard should hold in order to “know that the adults who are responsible for educating these children do not have a history of harming children,” he said.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney (D-New Haven) dismissed parents’ concerns over the legislation.

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Homeowners furious after Ontario government threatens to seize portions of backyards

In sleepy Burlington, Ont., eight homeowners are fighting to save their backyards from the clutches of the Government of Ontario (the Ministry of Transportation to be precise.)

The homeowners face losing about two-thirds of their backyards. And they must also incur the costs of moving any infrastructure that stands in the way. This would include everything from backyard patios and storage sheds to even a swimming pool.

As to why the MTO is acting in such a fashion, this remains a mysterious question.

The crux of the matter is that the eight homes back onto the Queen Elizabeth Way highway. The current boundary is marked by a chain-link fence. As well, a few metres away from the chain-link fence stands a stone wall. One wouldn’t even realize there is a major highway on the other side of that stone wall unless this fact was brought to one’s attention.

By way of background, the eight homes in question were constructed some 70 years ago. And for seven decades the current boundary existed without controversy. But the MTO is now maintaining that the land in question has always belonged to the government and that the province is simply reclaiming land that has always been government property.

But again, what is the ostensible policy reason for this boundary extension? And why now?

This relatively little patch of land surely cannot be used to extend the highway, nor construct a railway line – the typical reasons for land expropriation by the government, or, in this case, land reclamation.

Rebel News ventured out to Burlington to interview the affected homeowners who have indeed lawyered up and are not bending the knee without a fight. They are also very concerned that in the expanded boundary area, homeless people might set up encampments, which would seriously impact their quality of life.

We also reached out to the media relations department of the MTO. Our queries included:

1. The existing boundary has been in place for some 70 years. Why is the MTO now wanting to extend the boundary?

2. What is the purpose given that there is not enough land in question for any sort of extension of the Queen Elizabeth Way (which is situated on the other side of the backyards)?

3. I understand the residents will not be compensated for the loss of this land. Why is that the case?

Our queries were not even acknowledged, which, alas, is standard business procedure when it comes to the communications strategy of the Doug “For the People” Ford Progressive Conservatives.

In the meantime, this baffling boundary dispute appears to be headed to a court of law. Stay tuned.

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Anti-Christian Bill C-9 amended to criminalize ‘residential school denialism’

The Canadian Senate’s Human Rights Committee voted Monday night to amend an anti-Christian “hate speech” bill to criminalize “residential school denialism.”

Only one senator on the committee voted against the change to Bill C-9, according to a report. The bill has not yet been voted on by the Senate body itself.

The sponsor of the amendment, Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell (Nunavut), claimed that residential school attendees such as herself faced harms.

“Every survivor experienced it in a different way,” she said. “We lost a lot of family time. We lost a chance to grow up in our culture, in our language. Yes, I did get education, but I also lost out on a parallel education that I would have gotten if I had been able to stay home.”

The new proposed amendment would change Canada’s Criminal Code to say that any person who willfully promotes hatred against indigenous peoples by “condoning, denying or downplaying” Canada’s residential school system outside of a private conversation could face prosecution or even a summary conviction, which could then lead to potential jail time.

The new amendment to Bill C-9 needs a House of Commons ratification, if the bill as it stands is passed by the Senate in the third reading.

Bill C-9 would criminalize religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible, including passages about homosexuality and gender. Specifically, it would remove Section 319(3)(b) of Canada’s Criminal Code, which provides protection to good-faith expression of a person’s religious views based on texts such as the Bible.

The bill has been  constitutional experts for empowering the police and government to  those deemed to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way. The bill was introduced by Justice Minister Sean Fraser last year.

In 2021 and 2022, the mainstream media ran with  that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some Canadian residential schools. The reality is that after four years there have been  at residential schools.

However, as the claims went unfounded, over 120 churches in Canada, most of them Catholic and many of them on indigenous lands that serve the local population,  to the ground, , or defiled.

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Louisiana Governor Is ‘Tired’ Of ‘Being Inundated With The Smell Of Marijuana’ At Football Games, So He Signed A Bill To Jail People For It

Louisiana’s governor says he signed a bill that threatens to send people to jail for up to one year if they smoke marijuana within 2,000 feet of a school property—including a college campus— because he is “tired” of smelling cannabis at football games.

“Like most of you, I’m tired of going to our college and high school campuses and being inundated with the smell of marijuana,” he said in a video posted to social media. “And I’m tired of seeing drugs littering our high school and college campuses, hurting our students.”

“These drugs take away from the family-friendly environments that our colleges are supposed to be, especially on game days,” the governor said.

The legislation from Rep. Gabe Firment (R) that Landry signed last month applies to people who violate drug laws “while smoking, vaping, or otherwise abusing such controlled dangerous substance while on any property used for school purposes by any school, within two thousand feet of any such property, or while on a school bus.”

The bill “takes a massive step toward protecting our families and children in Louisiana on those campuses,” the governor argued in his new video that was posted on Friday.

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Government unable to say if criminals are participating in gun confiscation program

The federal government says it cannot provide basic information about who is participating in its firearm confiscation compensation scheme, including whether any participants have criminal records or how many are members of the military, RCMP, federal public service or Indigenous communities.

The admission came in response to an Order Paper Question submitted by Conservative MP Alex Ruff, who asked for a breakdown of participants in the federal government’s so-called Assault-Style Firearms Compensation Program.

Ruff sought information on how many registered participants had criminal records, how many held restricted firearms licences, how many were first-time versus renewed licence holders, and how many participants were members of the Canadian Armed Forces, RCMP, veterans or federal public servants. He also asked how many participants were Indigenous and licensed under the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada Adaptations Regulations.

In its response, Public Safety Canada said the information is “not systematically tracked in a centralized database” and that producing a comprehensive answer would require a manual review that could not be completed within the time allotted for responding to parliamentary questions. Officials warned that attempting to do so could result in “incomplete and misleading information.”

The department used the same explanation when asked whether any participants in the compensation program had criminal records and when asked how many participants were members of the military, RCMP, veterans or federal public service.

The RCMP provided a similar response, stating that the information requested is split between Public Safety Canada’s compensation program and the Canadian Firearms Program’s licensing records. The force said producing a complete answer would require collecting data from Public Safety Canada and cross-referencing it with the Canadian Firearms Information System, a process it said could not be completed within the allotted time.

The RCMP also said it could not provide figures on how many participants were Indigenous firearm owners because the required information is not maintained in a single centralized database and would require extensive cross-referencing of records.

The response raises questions about the government’s ability to track who is participating in a program that is expected to cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Despite requiring participants to register firearms for compensation, federal officials say they are unable to readily determine whether participants have criminal records, belong to law enforcement agencies, serve in the military, are veterans, or qualify under Indigenous firearms licensing provisions.

The government’s response was tabled on May 29 by the Public Safety Minister’s office through Parliamentary Secretary Jacques Ramsay.

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