Tag: police state

You Now Need a Government ID to Access Pornhub in Louisiana

A new law makes porn sites liable for content deemed “harmful to minors” if it doesn’t install age verification technology for anyone accessing them in Louisiana—and it’s already affecting how people in the state access Pornhub. 

The law, which was signed by Louisiana’s Democratic governor John Bel Edwards in June, became effective on January 1, 2023. 

The law, passed as Act 440, states: 

“Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors.” 

Material that’s harmful to minors, according to the act, is defined as appealing to prurient interests, and that consists of “pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or nipple of the female breast; Touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation; flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act,” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” for someone under 18 years of age. 

It also states that any commercial entity in violation will be liable “to an individual for damages resulting from a minor’s accessing the material.” 

Motherboard confirmed, through a virtual private network, that Pornhub is showing people visiting the site from a Louisiana-based IP address a page that requires identity verification before entering. “Louisiana law now requires us to put in place a process for verifying the age of users who connect to our site from Louisiana,” the page says.

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State Power and Covid Crimes

The three major controversies over pandemic management for the past three years have been lockdown measures, universal masking recommendations and mandates, and Covid vaccines. 

The last was a pharmaceutical intervention using revolutionary new technology. The first two were radical departures from the existing scientific and policy consensus as encapsulated in official documents from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and in several national pandemic preparedness plans. They established the willingness of the state to dictate every aspect of people’s lives, down to the most ridiculous and absurd details. 

For example, people were told when they could shop, the hours during which they could shop, what they could purchase, how close they could get to others and which direction they could move in by following arrows on the floor. Governments also stepped into nations’ bedrooms at home to dictate with whom people could and could not be intimate: a ukase that notoriously turned Professor Neil ‘Lockdown’ Ferguson himself into Professor Pantsdown.

Lockdowns thus proved the extent to which people would comply with state directives without deploying independent critical thinking and, like frogs in boiling water, their almost total lack of concern about the gradually increasing degree of infringements of civil liberties and personal freedoms. 

Compliance with often idiotic rules was ratcheted up to another level still with mask recommendations-cum-mandates, with one additional notable feature. Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. 

In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.

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10 Scandals To Keep Your Eye On In 2023

The new year is upon us and with it a fresh start for more corruption. But 2023 also offers the opportunity to bring closure to some long-running scandals. Here are 10 to track in the upcoming year.

1. Government’s Puppeteering of Big Tech and Media

The ongoing release of the “Twitter Files” closed 2022 with a new scandal, as the internal communications of the tech giant exposed extensive coordination between the government and Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other big players controlling the flow of information. While conservatives have known — and complained — for years of Big Tech’s censorship and shadowbanning, by purchasing Twitter and giving independent journalists access to corporate emails, Elon Musk provided indisputable confirmation that Twitter both censored and blacklisted conservatives.

The censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the silencing of scientific criticism of the government’s heavy-handed Covid regime, both at the prompting of federal agents, proved the most appalling. 

As Musk continues to provide access to internal communications, a watchful eye is warranted in 2023.

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Guns for Me but Not for Thee

It’s 2023, and two of America’s deep-blue governors are still having conniptions over the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen that threw out the need for a justifiable reason to receive a permit to carry a concealed weapon (CCW). While bound to follow the Bruen decision, both are doing everything they can to sidestep the ruling through legislative and executive fiat.

New Jersey, New York, and California are America’s triumvirate of extremely gun unfriendly states.  They are led by Democrat governors and legislatures that march to a progressive drumbeat, promote economic and social policies onerous to businesses large and small, and force their overtaxed, working residents to subsidize sanctuary policies that have turned their states into strongholds for illegal immigrants and vagrants.

All three governors have retained their emergency powers into the post-pandemic era, reviving them as needed to invoke programs and policies that regulate many aspects of their constituents’ lives.  Above all, they harbor an intense hatred for a citizenry under arms, in keeping with their dim view of the Founding Fathers who understood in framing the Second Amendment that to “disarm the people was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

One month after the Bruen decision, New York acting Governor Kathy Hochul thumbed her nose at the Court by signing a gun law that designated when and where you could carry a concealed weapon.  The new rules created a list of “sensitive locations,” prohibiting weapons at government facilities, parks, churches, schools, public transportation, and entertainment venues.  Intruding on private property rights, Hochul banned weapons in all establishments serving alcohol and ordered that commercial businesses of all shapes and sizes must post signage in plain view giving explicit approval to carry weapons on the premises, going so far as to provide a downloadable sign for posting on a government website.  Absence of a storefront notice would be taken as a presumptive gun prohibition lacking the proprietor’s express consent.  In the stroke of a pen, all of New York City had become a gun-free zone, as well as anywhere else in the Empire State where constituents go about their social and professional lives.  Legal challenges immediately followed, as the law is patently unconstitutional in its scope and severity, but a federal judge refused an injunctive stay pending an appeal.

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy is a garden-variety progressive Democrat of privilege who has freely admitted to his ignorance of the Bill of Rights and has often adopted the disastrous policies of his New York counterparts rather than think through the consequences to his own state; for example, the COVID nursing-home scandal, emptying jails, and free money and welfare programs for illegal immigrants. In December, Murphy latched on to Hochul’s post-Bruen CCW restrictions, enacting the same list of barred locations that add on to an already existing regulatory burden of multiple background investigations and approvals, mandatory training, ammunition limits, waiting periods, and storage requirements for home and transport that puts locked and unloaded weapons out of an owner’s reach during a critical need for self-defense.  Permit fees are now skyrocketing in the Garden State, and new liability insurance requirements will have a disparate impact upon low-income residents, creating for them an economic deprivation of their Second Amendment rights in populated areas and urban settings where self-defense against violent crime sees its most acute need.

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America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

[T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

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Cops Killed More People in 2022 than Any Year on Record — Here’s How to Stop It from Happening Again

As 2023 begins, American police polish off another deadly year, ending 1,176 lives in 2022. This number is a new record for police killings in America and yet still, it is set to increase by one, on average, every 8 hours.

Since 2018, cops in America have killed 5,668 citizens. And most people are not saying anything about it.

While it may be easy for some to write off police killings as a problem of American gun culture, this is not major factor. According to a report by the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), Finland has one the highest gun-ownership rates in Europe, with around 32 civilian firearms per 100 people – but incidents of police shooting civilians are extremely rare. We could only find 9 examples of police killings in Finland in the last two decades, one of which was an accidental shooting of a prison guard.

What’s more, as TFTP reported in 2021, the majority of police killings involve calls in which there was no crime or the suspect is only suspected of a non-violent offense.

“Most killings began with police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported,” according to a report from PoliceViolenceReport.org

It gets worse.

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Twitter Files Reveal Politicians, Officials Evading the Constitution’s Restrictions

In recent years, social media firms, financial institutions, and hosting platforms have denied services to disfavored customers, sometimes for political reasons. The response from many quarters (myself included) has been that people have free association rights and can generally do business as they please.

But what if these outfits are private-ish, enacting policy on behalf of politicians to spare them pushback or allow for end-runs around constitutional protections? They do so out of ideological agreement, fear of government retaliation, or a mix of both. That messy scenario is what the Twitter Files reveal of the relationship between the social media giant and federal officials. It’s a glimpse of a bigger problem.

“The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19 and the pandemic,” wrote David Zweig of The Free Press, who joined Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Free Press founder Bari Weiss in revealing Twitter’s collaboration with the state at the request of new owner Elon Musk. “Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.”

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also leaned on the platform to suppress what officials considered election-related “misinformation.” The files revealed internal disputes over what crossed the line, with decisions based on judgment calls. The employment of former feds and what The Dispatch‘s David French terms “an ideological monoculture” ensured that such decisions generally deferred to authority, especially after the Biden administration took office.

But Twitter isn’t a special case. In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing discussion of government-disfavored ideas about COVID-19 response. “White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki singled out a dozen specific anti-vaccine Facebook accounts and called on the platform to ban them,” Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time.

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Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech

Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”

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The hypocrisy of ‘those braying the loudest about misinformation’

We live in a time when U.S. politics is not only hyper-partisan, but toxic. Party activists on both sides of the divide assign a higher value to slurring those on the other side – and covering up for those on their side – than to telling the unvarnished truth.

In this hothouse environment, some well-meaning people assert that misinformation and “disinformation” threaten the very pillars of self-government.

The most obvious and immediate problem with this approach is hypocrisy: Many of those braying the loudest about misinformation have made wildly untrue assertions and statements themselves. The long-term problem is that freedom is and always will be utterly incompatible with a society in which the government or private media monopolies control the right of people to speak or write or broadcast without being censored.

In the waning days of December 1793, Thomas Paine was arrested in Paris. This was the height of the “Reign of Terror,” and the result of being detained on political charges, as Paine was, usually meant the guillotine. Paine certainly thought that was to be his fate.

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