Tag: police state

We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

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Louisiana Man Arrested By SWAT Team For Facebook Joke About COVID-19 Wins Case

In a pivotal defense of free speech and online expression, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has rendered a verdict upholding Waylon Bailey’s right to jest about COVID-19 and zombies on social media. The Louisiana resident, previously arrested under the cloud of an anti-terrorism law for his humorous Facebook post, now sees the tide of justice turn in his favor.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Waylon Bailey’s playful jab at the pandemic combined with a cinematic reference to the Brad Pitt-led movie “World War Z,” whimsically warning that the local sheriff’s office was tasked with shooting the “infected.”

Instead of discerning the evident satire, the local sheriff’s deputies responded with a disproportionate use of force. Without obtaining a warrant, the authorities dispatched a SWAT team to Bailey’s residence, arresting him with guns drawn in his own garage.

While the ludicrous charge against Bailey was soon dismissed upon a prosecutor’s intervention, the subsequent civil-rights lawsuit encountered unexpected setbacks. Astonishingly, the district court not only granted the arresting deputy qualified immunity but also dismissed Bailey’s First Amendment right to jest.

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States That Legalized Medical Marijuana Saw Nearly 20 Percent Drop In Foster Care Cases For Parental Drug Misuse, Study Finds

States that legalized medical marijuana saw a nearly 20 percent drop in the number of children entering foster care due to parental drug misuse after three years of the reform, a new study found. Legalizing for adult use, meanwhile, was not associated with any statistically significant change in foster care entries.

Researchers at Georgia College and State University set out to learn whether legalization would “lessen stigma, permit proper use, and reduce the chance that a child will be removed” or, conversely, if foster care cases would increase due to expanded access to legal cannabis.

The study looked at national data involving 3.4 million foster care cases from 2007 to 2019. Using difference-in-differences analyses, researchers examined rate changes in foster case placements related to drug misuse, comparing states that enacted legalization to those that maintained prohibition. They controlled for factors such as state unemployment rate and per capita income.

“Our estimates suggest that when states permitted recreational marijuana use, there was no corresponding change in the number of foster care entries related to parental or teenage drug abuse relative to control states,” the study says.

But for states that legalize medical cannabis, there was a discernible shift. In the first two years of implementation, states saw an average eight percent to 10 percent decrease in foster care cases connected to drug misuse. By the third year, cases dropped 18 percent, which amounted to “approximately 700 fewer entries to foster care [that] were related to parental drug abuse when a state legalized medical marijuana.”

That’s an especially important finding given that 90 percent of foster case entries due to drug misuse happen in states where medical cannabis is legal, says the study, which is pending peer review. Drug misuse is the second most common reason that a child is placed into foster care.

The study also compared states that have restrictive versus comprehensive medical cannabis programs, but researchers said they are “hesitant to draw conclusions” about the differences because of conflicting data using two analytic models.

For limited medical marijuana states, there was a “sizable decrease” in foster care drug misuse cases in the third and fourth year after implementation based on one difference-in-difference model, but that effect was less pronounced in the other model.

States with less restrictive medical cannabis legalization laws, in contrast, showed a “statistically and economically significant decrease in the number of entries” in one model, but data from the other model was less clear.

“Our findings suggest that states which legalized medical marijuana experienced a decrease in parental drug abuse-related entries into foster care in the initial years following the legalization compared to states that did not legalize medical marijuana,” the study says. “Estimates exploiting variation in state-level limitations on medical marijuana are mixed.”

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Do not heat your homes in the evenings, net zero quango tells public

Millions of families will be urged by a green quango not to heat their homes in the evening to help the Government hit its net zero target.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) said people should turn off their radiators at peak times as part of a wider drive to deliver “emissions savings”.

In a document on “behaviour change” the body recommended Britons “pre-heat” their houses in the afternoon when electricity usage is lower.

It said the move would save families money, but critics suggested the real reason was that renewables will not be able to provide enough energy to cope with peak demand.

The advice is contained in the CCC’s sixth “carbon budget” paper, which sets out how the UK should reduce its emissions between 2033-37.

In it the quango suggests people with electrically powered heating systems, such as heat pumps, should switch off their radiators in the evening.

“There is significant potential to deliver emissions savings, just by changing the way we use our homes,” the dossier states.

“Where homes are sufficiently well insulated, it is possible to pre-heat ahead of peak times, enabling access to cheaper tariffs which reflect the reduced costs associated with running networks and producing power during off-peak times.”

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Man killed by Aurora officer was being robbed: police

A man killed by Aurora Police this week was being robbed when he pulled a gun on another man, triggering the police encounter that led to this death, the department said on Friday.

Police have said officers, who observed the bus-stop dispute on surveillance cameras, went to the scene early Wednesday morning after seeing the man pull a gun on someone. But in a Friday update, the department said someone was trying to steal the man’s backpack.

It was around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday at a bus stop in the Del Mar Parkway neighborhood. Officers were watching a camera overlooking the area near East Colfax Avenue and Havana Street when they spotted the dispute, police said.

“Officers immediately responded when they observed one of those men produce a firearm and point it at the other man. Officers arrived at the intersection and aired they were in contact with the armed man. Moments later, the officers aired shots had been fired. Only one officer discharged his firearm,” the Friday release reads.

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Grieving Mother Desperate For Answers After FBI Busts Down Door, Fatally Shoots Her Disabled Veteran Son in Pre-Dawn Raid

A family is desperately seeking answers after FBI agents busted down the door and killed their relative in a pre-dawn raid last week.

The FBI is refusing to tell a grieving mother why they showed up in armored vehicles at 6 am last Wednesday and fatally shot her son.

According to WBBJ, FBI agents showed up at a residence in Henderson, Tennessee to serve a man named Theodore Deschler an arrest warrant when things turned deadly.

A neighbor told WBBJ he woke up at 6 am after he heard a loud bang.

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To Tackle Highest Housing Costs in the Country, Hawaii’s Governor Declares YIMBY Martial Law

The loss of life from the deadly wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui has been made even worse by the loss of shelter. Some 2,000 homes have been destroyed so far, leaving thousands more homeless or displaced.

The fire has only worsened an insufficiency of homes on the island and in the state more broadly. In Hawaii, median home prices are close to $1 million and regulations on adding new supply are incredibly strict.

Weeks before the fires, Democratic Gov. Josh Green had already proclaimed a statewide housing emergency with the purpose of slashing through all that regulation to get thousands of new homes built.

“We don’t have enough houses for our people. It’s really that simple,” said the governor at a press conference last month, where he promised “bold action to streamline processes for creating thousands of affordable housing units.”

Green is in fact taking bold action by suspending whole sections of state and local laws and regulations that relate to homebuilding.

Local governments are given far more flexibility to expedite housing approvals, while developers will have the chance to route around basically all existing regulations on home building to get housing projects approved.

It’s a radically deregulatory approach that’s received praise from across the political spectrum.

“This is probably the single most significant state-level action on accelerating housing production maybe in the whole country, maybe ever,” Sen. Stanley Chang (D–Honolulu) tells Reason.

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From Covid To Climate Change: Vehicles For Global Authoritarianism

As I have noted in the past, the Western world came within a knife’s edge of being completely subjugated and placed under perpetual medical tyranny by a coalition of government officials, globalist interests and corporate partners. Liberty movement analysts have talked often of “open conspiracy,” but it was not until the pandemic response that we truly witnessed the mask come off and the greater agenda revealed.

Not more than five years ago the most common retort from skeptics was that such a conspiracy was “impossible” because it was “too elaborate to organize.” Today these people look rather foolish. It is undeniable – there is a cabal of power elites, they are highly organized around the globalist ideology and they want total centralized control of society. It is an immutable fact supported by endless proof. The debate is over. The covid response ended it.

The list of crimes against civil liberties is long. The establishment and the political left (with the help of a handful of Neocons) tried to implement unprecedented authoritarian measures from business and church shutdowns to forced masking (studies show the masks are useless) to forced vaccination using experimental mRNA products with no long-term safety testing. In some countries (including New Zealand and Australia) covid camps were actually built to imprison not just citizens traveling overseas, but non-traveling citizens as well. Legislation to build such camps was pushed in the US.

A large percentage of Democrats in polls supported even more extreme policies, including:

55% of Democrats wanted fines for unvaxxed Americans.
59% of Democrats wanted the unvaccinated forcefully confined to their homes.
48% of Democrats wanted prison time for anyone that questioned the vaccines.
47% of Democrats were in favor of government tracking of the unvaxxed.
29% of Democrats were in favor or taking children away from the unvaxxed.

So, if someone tells you there “are no sides” and that the conflict is an illusion created by the “false left/right paradigm,” you know they are full of manure. There are definitely sides and the globalists are not our only concern. And though there are always nuances to take into consideration, exceptions to the rule do not change the rule.

As many leftists openly admitted during the mandates, the goal was to make life so miserable for the unvaccinated that they would eventually comply in order to survive. In this way, establishment elites and leftists could claim that people “volunteered” for the vaccines and no one was forced. What they really meant was, no one was forced at gunpoint, but we all knew that threat was coming next.

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Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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Fleeing Bronx drug suspect dies when cop knocks him off scooter with cooler; sergeant suspended by NYPD

A scooter-riding suspect fleeing a Bronx buy-and-bust drug sting was killed when an NYPD sergeant smacked him with a cooler grabbed from a local family’s outing, sending the victim tumbling to his death, an eyewitness and police sources said Thursday.

NYPD Sgt. Erik Duran, an NYPD Bronx narcotics veteran who joined the force in 2010, was suspended without pay just hours after the lethal encounter, police said.

An eyewitness, a 25-year local resident, was with relatives when the clash began on Aqueduct Ave. near W. 190th St. about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Kingsbridge Heights.

The 30-year-old suspect, Eric Duprey, “was on the bike, moving north when the cops started chasing him,” said the 42-year-old witness, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Then he took a U-turn and was riding on the sidewalk… The cop then took my cooler, which was filled with soda cans, water bottles, and hit him.”

The victim’s wife Orlyanis Velez said police were providing her with no details of the deadly encounter.

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