Tag: police state

Here’s FBI Glossary for Flagging ‘Violent Extremism’

The FBI uses a “glossary of terms” to look for online that could indicate someone is involved with “violent extremism,” according to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. 

The flagged terms include “redpilled,” first popularized by the 1999 film “The Matrix,” “based,” “looksmaxxing,” and the names “Chad” and “Stacey.”

The FBI also flags phrases that include “it’s over” and “just be first.” 

The documents were obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through a Freedom of Information Act request. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Such words and phrases have come to be code for certain extremists who communicate online with others like them, according to the FBI’s glossary of words indicating “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” and a list of “key terms” about “involuntary celibate violent extremism.”

According to the FBI document, the word “cell” is short for incel, which in turn is short for “involuntary celibate,” or an online community of men who  think they can’t attract women even though they want to be in a relationship. 

“Docs we obtained show how @FBI equates protected online speech to violence,” the Oversight Project says in a tweet. “According to @FBI using the terms ‘based’ or ‘red pilled’ are signs of ‘Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.’”

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FBI documents associate internet slang like ‘based’ and ‘red pill’ with ‘extremism’

New documents released Monday warned that common internet lingo is being associated with “Violent Extremism” by the FBI.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project said it used a Freedom of Information Act request to expose FBI documents that include glossaries showing that common internet slang has been flagged as an indication of “Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism” or “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.”

Part of the document refers specifically to “incels,” or those “involuntary celibate,” whom the “threat overview” describes as possibly seeking to “commit violence in support of their beliefs that society unjustly denies them sexual or romantic attention, to which they believe they are entitled.”

The assessment notes, “While most incels do not engage in violence,” some have been involved in “at least five lethal attacks in the United States and Canada.”

Many of the terms mentioned in the FBI’s list of incel terminology are either widely used across the internet or innocuous in nature.

The one term in the glossary is “Red Pill,” which comes from the 1999 film “The Matrix” and has been used a metaphor for seeing hidden or politically incorrect truths about the modern world, particularly when it comes to politics or dating.

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7 Black People Killed After Cops Falsely Discover a Gun That was Never There

In a number of police brutality cases, the actions of a police officer are justified if the person is holding or reaching for a firearm, even when it is found later that the cop made a mistake. Recently, a Missouri Prosecutor has decided not to criminally charge two Independence Police Department officers who shot and killed 39-year-old Tyrea Pryor after a car crash after mistaking him for holding a gun.

Pryor’s case is one of many examples of police brutality but here are seven examples of cops pulling the “they had a gun” card.

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IRS to Prioritize Enforcement Including Criminal Investigation for Certain Assets

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it would increase enforcement in the area of digital asset transactions and listed transactions.

The federal agency identified certain transactions to have high-risk issues in noncompliance and vowed to ramp up enforcement in those transactions.

“The IRS tracks many known, high-risk issues in noncompliance, such as digital asset transactions, listed transactions and certain international issues. These issues arise in multiple taxpayer segments, and data analysis shows a higher potential for noncompliance,” the tax agency wrote in its newly-released funding plan (pdf).

“We will prioritize resources to increase enforcement activities, including criminal investigation as appropriate,” the agency added.

According to the plan, the IRS will develop the information platform to support digital asset reporting and analytics tools to increase digital asset compliance in the fiscal year 2024, which is between April 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024.

Digital assets include convertible virtual currency, cryptocurrency, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other digital representations of value, according to the IRS website.

The IRS treats digital assets as property and requires taxpayers to report taxable gains or losses from digital asset transactions.

As it’s difficult to identify the owners of digital assets, U.S. judges allow the IRS to use “John Doe summons” to seek the identities of taxpayers of interest.

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In California, Parents May Soon Effectively Lose Custody of Kids 12 and Older 

In California, “stranger danger” may be about to acquire a whole new meaning. 

Forget warning kids. It’s the parents in California who will need to be terrified of strangers if a new bill passes. 

Snuck into AB 665, legislation ostensibly about extending mental health care to lower-income California youths, is a provision that effectively would terminate parents’ rights over their kids as soon as they turn 12. 

The California Family Council warns that this bill “would allow children as young as 12 years old to consent to being placed into state funded group homes without parental permission or knowledge.”  

As long as a mental health professional signs off on it, the kids can go to such a group home—and it doesn’t matter what their parents think. 

“This bill gives a stranger, a school psychologist, power to decide whether a sixth or seventh grader comes home from school that day, and that’s terrifying,” Erin Friday, a California mom of two teens, tells The Daily Signal. 

“This bill is essentially stating that parents are criminals that have to prove their innocence to get their child back,” adds Friday, who is a leader of the parent advocacy group Our Duty. 

Seriously? 

AB 665, which passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee last week, builds on a 2010 measure signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. That law, the Mental Health Services for At-Risk Youth Act, allowed California children 12 and older to receive mental health care without their parents’ knowledge if a mental health provider determined it was best not to involve the parents.  

That provision was no accident. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, celebrated the California law in a 2010 report as a “useful model for state or federal legislation to address mental illness among LGBT youth.”  

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Why water rationing is coming down the pipeline

Body odour could soon be making a comeback. Why? Because the UK government is looking to impose stringent reductions on home water usage. The media have suggested that this might mean the end of power showers, but the limits being mooted in Whitehall will bear down on water use as a whole. This will affect showering, taking baths, hand washing, cleaning clothes, and more.

The plan is spelled out in a new 81-page report put out this week by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Titled Our Integrated Plan for Delivering Clean and Plentiful Water (or Our Plan for Water, for short), the document details how the government intends to plug what it believes will be a shortage of four billion litres per day in the public water supply by 2050. In part, this will be done, under the Environment Act 2021, by cutting household water use from an average of 144 litres per person per day to 122 per person per day in 2038, and then to just 110 litres per person per day by 2050.

Make no mistake, this is a positively draconian policy. Worst of all, it places most of the blame and responsibility for water management on to the consumer – letting the water companies, regulators and the government itself off the hook.

Last month, a House of Lords select committee reported that no new reservoirs will be built before 2029. It also said that water regulator Ofwat has ‘historically given more focus to a short-term desire to keep water bills low at the expense of long-term environmental and security-of-supply considerations’. In other words, the regulator has fallen asleep at the wheel, letting leaks multiply, sewage pile up and reservoirs fall into disrepair. Yet the implication of Our Water Plan is that we consumers are mostly at fault for the water shortages of the future. It is we who must tighten our belts, and we who must install smart meters to ration our use.

Water companies have escaped censure entirely. For instance, environment secretary Thérèse Coffey proclaimed last week that companies guilty of water pollution ‘could’ face unlimited penalties. But, after more than 300,000 sewage spills in 2022, she also concedes that she cannot stop such incidents ‘overnight’.

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FDR’s Other ‘Day of Infamy’: When the US Government Seized All Citizens’ Gold

December 7, 1941 will forever be remembered as, in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “a date that will live in infamy.” Another infamous date is April 5, 1933—the day that FDR ordered the seizure of the private gold holdings of the American people. By attacking innocent citizens, he bombed the country’s gold standard just as surely as Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

On this 90th anniversary of the seizure, it behooves us to recall the details of it, for multiple reasons: It ranks as one of the most notorious abuses of power in a decade when there were almost too many to count. It’s an example of bad policy imposed on the guiltless by the government that created the conditions it used to justify it. And the very fact of compliance, however minimal, is a scary testimony to how fragile freedom is in the middle of a crisis.

Suddenly on April 5, 1933, FDR told Americans—in the form of Executive Order 6102—that they had less than a month to hand over their gold coins, bullion and gold certificates or face up to ten years in prison or a fine of $10,000, or both. After May 1, private ownership and possession of these things would be as illegal as Demon Rum. After Prohibition was repealed later the same year, the sober man with gold in his pocket was the criminal while the staggering drunk was no more than a nuisance.

Hoarding gold was preventing recovery from the Great Depression, FDR declared. Government (which caused the Depression in the first place) had no choice, if you can follow the logic, but to seize the gold and do the hoarding itself. But of course, the big difference was this: In the hands of the government, huge new gold supplies could be used by the Federal Reserve as the basis for expanding the paper money supply. The President who had promised a 25 percent reduction in federal spending during his 1932 campaign, could now double spending in his first term.

What evidence suggested Americans were “hoarding” gold? Roosevelt pointed to a run on banks that immediately preceded his April 5 seizure decree. Indeed, people were showing up at tellers’ windows with paper dollars demanding the gold that the paper notes promised. But Roosevelt had prompted the bank run himself!

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Trump Commuted His Sentence. Now the Justice Department Is Going To Prosecute Him Again.

When Philip Esformes walked out of prison in December 2020, he’d spent four and a half years behind bars, the majority of which were in solitary confinement. He reportedly weighed about 130 pounds. He was, in many ways, a broken man. But Esformes’ luck was changing: He had recently received clemency from former President Donald Trump, giving him the chance to rebuild his life after paying a debt to the country.

That fortune has quickly soured.

In a move that defies historical precedent, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden is using a legal loophole to reprosecute Esformes’ case—raising grave questions about double jeopardy, the absolute power of the clemency process, and the weaponization of the criminal legal system against politically expedient targets. 

A former executive overseeing a network of skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, Esformes was arrested in 2016. The prosecutors, who were found to have committed substantial misconduct throughout the case, alleged he paid doctors under the table to send patients his way and subsequently charged Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary treatments. The government held him without bond in the years leading up to his trial, placing him in solitary. He was ultimately found guilty of money laundering and related charges, as well as bribing regulators to give him notice of upcoming inspections so he could attempt to obscure shoddy conditions at those facilities. 

But Esformes was not convicted of the most serious charges leveled against him. The government failed to convince a jury, for example, that he committed conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. So his 20-year sentence—handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola of the Southern District of Florida—may appear grossly disproportionate to his convictions. 

Until you realize the judge explicitly punished Esformes for charges on which the jury hung.

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