Tag: police state

They Built a Hemp Business in Good Faith but Washington Is About To Crush It

As the Senate prepared to vote on the funding bill to reopen the federal government earlier this month, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) warned that passing the legislation would “regulate the hemp industry to death.” Buried deep inside the continuing resolution was a provision that would completely reverse nearly seven years of industry progress—and potentially wipe out small hemp-based businesses.

In 2019, after the 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act, cousins Jim Higdon and Eric Zipperle founded Cornbread Hemp. The Kentucky-based company manufactures and sells hemp-related products directly to consumers nationwide, and it stands out in a highly competitive market thanks to the quality of its organic hemp.

Cornbread pioneered a flower-only production model that uses only cannabis flowers in extraction, yielding higher-quality products. It also enforces a strict set of growing standards.

“We’re farming land that has not had pesticides on it for three years—verified. We’re using non-GMO seeds, no pesticides, and no synthetic fertilizers,” said Higdon. “The only fertilizer input we use is chicken litter…from a certified organic chicken farm.”

That quality has earned Cornbread a loyal and growing customer base, 60 percent of whom are over 66 years old and rely on these products to relieve chronic pain.

It is estimated that the number of licensed growers rose from about 3,500 in 2018 to over 21,000 in 2020. The rush subsided, and by 2021, the market steadied and licenses fell to about 9,700. Even with that correction, the economic impact of industrial hemp is undeniable. Industry estimates suggest the hemp market supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, with one model putting the number at roughly 325,000 workers in farming, biomass processing, product manufacturing, distribution, and retail nationwide. According to Department of Agriculture data, the value of U.S. industrial hemp production was about $824 million in 2021 and approximately $445 million in 2024.

And yet, even before the most recent move by Congress, many small companies, including Cornbread, have been hit by a wave of new state regulations threatening their survival. In 2025, Tennessee passed a law placing the hemp industry under the jurisdiction of the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The state’s longstanding three-tier system for policing liquor sales now extends to hemp products as well.

Beginning in January 2026, out-of-state hemp companies, such as Cornbread, wanting to do business in Tennessee must first sell their product to a Tennessee-licensed wholesaler, which must then sell it to a Tennessee retail shop. Only then can customers visit the physical store and purchase the product.

While Cornbread can set up its own wholesaler and retail facilities in Tennessee, doing so would be impractical and prohibitively expensive.

Beyond its practical business burdens, Tennessee’s law infringes on Cornbread and other companies’ fundamental right to earn a living. The law also violates the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause by discriminating against out-of-state businesses and shielding in-state interests from legitimate competition. 

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IT consultant arrested after posing with gun on LinkedIn

An IT consultant was arrested by police in Britain after he posted a picture online of himself posing with a gun in the US.

Jon Richelieu-Booth said he was shocked by the “Orwellian” decision by West Yorkshire Police (WYP) to prosecute him over the social media post.

The 50-year-old said that on Aug 13 he had posted a picture of himself on LinkedIn holding a shotgun while on a private homestead with friends during a holiday in Florida.

Mr Richelieu-Booth claims the LinkedIn message contained nothing he considered threatening, with the picture attached to a lengthy post about his day and work activities.

However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.

“I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel,” he said.

Mr Richelieu-Booth said he offered to provide officers with proof that the picture of the firearm had been taken while he was in the US but the officers said that was not necessary.

Mr Richelieu-Booth said two officers then returned to his home shortly after 10pm on Aug 24 and arrested him.

A bail document seen by The Telegraph refers to an allegation of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and a further allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.

He said he was held overnight in a cell before being interviewed.

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Canadian Muslims Take to Streets in Anger After Quebec Pushes Forward With Ban on Public Prayer

The Canadian province of Quebec is planning to ban all public prayer as part of an aggressive push toward secularization.

Quebec’s secularism minister, Jean-François Roberge, said the laws were designed to accelerate his push toward secularization.

The Guardian reports:

Quebec says it will intensify its crackdown on public displays of religion in a sweeping new law that critics say pushes Canadian provinces into private spaces and disproportionately affects Muslims.

Bill 9, introduced by the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on Thursday, bans prayer in public institutions, including in colleges and universities.

It also bans communal prayer on public roads and in parks, with the threat of fines of C$1,125 for groups in contravention of the prohibition. Short public events with prior approval are exempt.

CAQ has made secularism a key legislative priority, passing the controversial Bill 21 – which bans some public sector employees from wearing religious symbol – in 2019.

It plans to extend that prohibition to anyone working in daycares, colleges, universities and private schools. Full face coverings would be banned for anyone in those institutions, including students.

Quebec’s secularism minister, Jean-François Roberge, said the laws were designed to accelerate his push toward secularization.

“It’s shocking to see people blocking traffic, taking possession of the public space without a permit, without warning, and then turning our streets, our parks, our public squares into places of worship,” he explained.

He added that schools are “are not temples or churches or those kinds of places.”

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Substack Introduces ID Checks to Comply with UK Censorship Law

By now, you’ve probably realized the internet is being slowly fitted into a digital checkpoint.

Everything is being scrubbed down, sanitized, and locked behind a digital turnstile with a flashing sign that says: Show us your ID.

Substack, that cozy digital home where newsletter authors rant, muse, and argue about everything from politics to fan fiction of 19th-century philosophers, is the latest to be roped into the bureaucratic puppet show known as the UK’s Online Safety Act.

And the British government has decided that if you’re reading a mildly spicy newsletter, you must first present identification. No, really.

To access some of the platform’s content, you may soon have to upload a selfie and a government-issued ID.

What this means for readers in the UK is simple: prepare to be interrupted. You’re sitting down to read your favorite newsletter. Maybe it’s political commentary, maybe it’s a writer who occasionally uses words like “orgasmic” while referring to cake.

Either way, you click. And boom. Content blurred, comment section blocked, and your feed now behind a velvet rope manned by an algorithm with a clipboard.

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We Must Resist The Rise Of A Global Censorship Regime

The ordeal of Finnish Parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen, who just stood trial a third time – after being acquitted twice – for a 2019 tweet in which she simply shared a Scripture verse and her faith-based views on marriage and sexuality, is a warning to all who value the right to speak freely across the world.

When governments claim the power to police opinions, even peaceful expressions of faith can be dragged through the courts.

And now this promises to be a much more pervasive reality in Europe as a result of the 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA). Ahead of the European Union’s review of the DSA, 113 international experts committed to free speech wrote to the European Commission highlighting the law’s incompatibility with free expression, citing the possibility of worldwide takedown orders. Räsänen was a signatory to the letter, alongside a former vice president of Yahoo Europe, a former U.S. senator, and politicians, academics, lawyers, and journalists from around the globe.

The DSA gives the E.U. authority to enforce moderation of “illegal content” on platforms and search engines with over 45 million monthly users. It enables bureaucrats to control online speech at scale under the guise of “safety” and “protecting democracy.”

However, E.U. member states may have different definitions of illegal content. Thus, under the law, anything deemed illegal under the speech laws of any one E.U. member state could potentially be removed across all of Europe. That means the harshest censorship laws in Europe could soon govern the entire continent, and possibly the internet worldwide. And if platforms fail to comply, they face billions in fines, thus providing clear incentive to censor and none to promote free speech.

Late last month, the E.U. announced that Meta and TikTok will face fines of up to 6 percent of their global sales for accusations of violating the DSA on matters related to transparency. But the well-founded fear is that this law—which grants sweeping authority to European regulators to control online speech across such platforms—including X, YouTube, and Facebook—will enable the kind of censorship endured by Räsänen on a global scale.

Further, citizens in countries outside of the E.U., like the United States, are at risk of facing new levels of censorship, because the DSA applies to large online digital platforms and search engines accessed within the E.U. but that have a global presence. It explicitly states its extraterritorial applicability as it covers platforms used by people “that have their place of establishment or are located in the Union, irrespective of where the providers of those intermediary services [the platforms] have their place of establishment.”

Platforms are incentivized to adapt their international content moderation policies to E.U. censorship. If those platforms deem something “illegal” under E.U. rules, that content may be banned everywhere, even in countries with strong free speech protections.

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UK Ofcom Pushes Rules Targeting “Misogynistic” Content, Prompting (Even More) Free Speech Concerns

Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has unveiled a new framework urging social media and technology companies to censor so-called “misogynistic” content as part of its A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls campaign.

The initiative, framed as an effort to protect women from online abuse, further weakens the distinction between “harmful” conduct and lawful expression, a tension Ofcom itself acknowledges in its own documentation.

The regulator’s new guidance encourages platforms to adopt a wide range of “safety” measures, many of which would directly influence what users can post, see, and share.

These include inserting prompts that nudge users to “reconsider” certain comments, suppressing “misogynistic” material in recommendation feeds and search results, temporarily suspending users who post repeated “abuse,” and de-monetizing content flagged under this category.

Moderators would also receive special training on “gender-based harms,” while posting rates could be throttled to slow the spread of unwanted speech.

Ofcom’s document also endorses the use of automated scanning systems like “hash-matching” to locate and delete non-consensual intimate imagery.

While intended to prevent the circulation of explicit photos, such systems typically involve the mass analysis of user uploads and can wrongly flag legitimate material.

Additional proposals include “trusted flagger” partnerships with NGOs, identity verification options, and algorithmic “friction” mechanisms, small design barriers meant to deter impulsive posting.

Some of the ideas, such as warning prompts and educational links, are voluntary.

Yet several major advocacy groups, including Refuge and Internet Matters, are pressing for the government to make them binding on all platforms.

If adopted wholesale, these measures would effectively place Ofcom in a position to oversee the policing of legal speech, with tech firms acting as its enforcement arm.

In a letter announcing the guidance, Ofcom’s Chief Executive Melanie Dawes declared that “the digital world is not serving women and girls the way it should,” describing online misogyny and non-consensual deepfakes as pervasive problems that justify immediate “industry-wide action.”

She stated that Ofcom would “follow up to understand how you are applying this Guidance” and publish a progress report in 2027.

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EU Parliament Votes for Mandatory Digital ID and Age Verification, Threatening Online Privacy

The European Parliament has voted to push the European Union closer to a mandatory digital identification system for online activity, approving a non-binding resolution that endorses EU-wide age verification rules for social media, video platforms, and AI chatbots.

Though presented as a child protection measure, the text strongly promotes the infrastructure for universal digital ID, including the planned EU Digital Identity Wallet and an age verification app being developed by the European Commission.

Under the proposal, every user would have to re-identify themselves at least once every three months to continue using major platforms. Children under 13 would be banned entirely, and teenagers between 13 and 16 would require parental approval to participate online.

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An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”

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EU Council Approves New “Chat Control” Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

European governments have taken another step toward reviving the EU’s controversial Chat Control agenda, approving a new negotiating mandate for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation in a closed session of the Council of the European Union on November 26.

The measure, presented as a tool for child protection, is once again drawing heavy criticism for its surveillance implications and the way it reshapes private digital communication in Europe.

Unlike earlier drafts, this version drops the explicit obligation for companies to scan all private messages but quietly introduces what opponents describe as an indirect system of pressure.

It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.

Former MEP Patrick Breyer, a long-standing defender of digital freedom and one of the most vocal opponents of the plan, said the deal “paves the way for a permanent infrastructure of mass surveillance.”

According to him, the Council’s text replaces legal compulsion with financial and regulatory incentives that push major US technology firms toward indiscriminate scanning.

He warned that the framework also brings “anonymity-breaking age checks” that will turn ordinary online use into an exercise in identity verification.

The new proposal, brokered largely through Danish mediation, comes months after the original “Chat Control 1.0” regulation appeared to have been shelved following widespread backlash.

It reinstates many of the same principles, requiring providers to assess their potential “risk” for child abuse content and to apply “mitigation measures” approved by authorities. In practice, that could mean pressure to install scanning tools that probe both encrypted and unencrypted communications.

Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”

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The Money Behind the Muzzle: Germany’s Fivefold Surge in Speech Control

Government spending on digital speech regulation in Germany has surged over the past decade, increasing more than five times since 2020 and totaling around €105.6 million by 2025.

The findings come from The Censorship Network: Regulation and Repression in Germany Today, a detailed investigation by Liber-net, a digital civil liberties group that monitors speech restrictions and information control initiatives across Europe.

The report describes a sprawling alliance of ministries, publicly funded “fact-checkers,” academic consortia, and non-profit groups that now work together to regulate online communication.

It started as a handful of “anti-hate” programs and has evolved into a broad state-financed system of “content controls,” supported by both domestic and foreign grants.

Liber-net’s accompanying databases and map document more than 330 organizations and over 420 separate grants, rating each on a one-to-five scale according to its level of direct censorship involvement.

Between 2020 and 2021, public funding for these initiatives tripled, and by 2023 it had doubled again.

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