Tag: police state

California working on denying gun permits based on “ideological viewpoints”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen on Thursday didn’t simply shoot down New York’s onerous “good-cause requirement” in the gun permit application process. It set up similar laws in other states for likely revocation. One of those states is California, where they have their own requirement that applicants must show a “good cause” or “special need” before a carry permit is issued. State Attorney General Rob Bonta sent out a letter on Friday to law enforcement and government attorneys noting the change and saying that the state’s current “may issue” regime should be able to be converted to a “shall issue” regime with few modifications. So that’s good news, right?

Not so fast. As Eugene Volokh points out at Reason, Bonta pivoted from signaling compliance with the new SCOTUS ruling to identifying another way to deny permits to people with no criminal record. He claims that the ruling will not impact the existing requirement for applicants to be able to demonstrate that they are “of good moral character.” On that basis, the state can start snooping around to see if you hold any unauthorized opinions or are prone to demonstrate “hatred and racism.” And how would they know that? Well, by going through your social media accounts, of course.

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Is THIS where NYPD’s subway resources are going, Mayor Eric? Outrage as beloved busker with his dancing toy cats is taken down by six cops while serious crime soars and terrified commuters REFUSE to take train

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he was stunned by how bad Big Apple subway riders had it until he rode the subway himself last week and realized how poorly cops were being used to crack down on crime underground.

As subway crime continues to spike – rising nearly 40 percent from the first half of last year – Adams, in an exclusive interview with the New York Post, said he patrolled the transit system himself late at night for three hours and didn’t care for what he saw. 

‘Let me tell you something: When I started looking into this, I was shocked at how bad this place is,’ Adams told the Post.

Days before the mayor touted his awakening on the hazards of subway travel, a video emerged of at least six NYPD officers arresting busker John Ajilo, a saxophone player with the catch phrase ‘Dancing is Happiness.’

‘I was shut down, handcuffed and taken to the police station for performing in the same spot 34th Herald Square I have been performing [in] on and off for about five years,’ he said on his GoFundMe page, which has already collected over $30,000. 

Mayor Adams said he first knew he had to do something about subway crime about three weeks in office.

‘It was probably, the third — third or fourth week in January. I spent a lot of time in the office,’ he said.  ‘And I started peeling back layers and what it started to unveil to me is how we just had this good shell, but underneath — it’s bad.’

The New York City subway is run by the New York City Transit Authority, which falls under the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, controlled by the chairman, Janno Lieber, who was appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and confirmed by the state Senate in January.

The mayor appoints several members of the MTA board, but has little control over the operation and maintenance of the system.

Ridership on the subway is just under 60 percent of what it was pre-pandemic, with roughly 3.4 million daily commuters using the system.

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Police State Madness — Man Given Traffic Ticket for Not Having a Seatbelt ON HIS DOG

In the land of the free, if law enforcement witnesses you driving your personally owned vehicle with dark window tint or without your seatbelt on, they will pull you over and issue a citation, otherwise known as extortion. If you refuse to acknowledge this extortion, or attempt to resist it, you will be kidnapped and caged. If you refuse to be kidnapped and caged, you can and will have violence brought upon you, and can and will be killed. The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous traffic citations over the years, which started over victimless crimes and ended with someone getting beaten or killed.

While there is no shortage of videos of people being killed over seatbelt violations — or even dogs being killed by cops — we’ve never seen an incident in which someone was given a ticket for their dog not wearing a seatbelt. 

All that has changed this week, however, as the infamously ticket-happy police department in Washington, Louisiana has made news once again for issuing a ticket to a resident because his dog wasn’t buckled up. Seriously.

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Testimony from Lois Lerner in IRS targeting scandal to be released

Judicial Watch announced today that a federal court ordered the release of testimony of Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Holly Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements. 

Both IRS officials played key roles in the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and individuals opposed to Obama policies in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.

The ruling in the U.S. District Court Southern District of Ohio Western Division unsealing the case records comes in the lawsuit (NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341)).

Lerner’s and Paz’s depositions were sealed by Judge Barrett in April 2017, after Lerner’s and Paz’s lawyers claimed the two officials were receiving threats. The court finally ordered the unsealing of the depositions four years after plaintiffs requested the depositions be unsealed and only after plaintiffs filed for a writ of mandamus to force action in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

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FBI Raids Home of Retired Texas Couple Who Attended Jan. 6 Capitol Rally

A retired Texas couple said FBI agents busted through the gate of their rural home, threw flashbangs, handcuffed them, and trained lasers on them before searching their home for evidence connected to the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol.

Lora DeWolfe and Darrel Kennemer, who live on seven acres near San Marcos, Texas, told The Epoch Times they attended the Jan. 6 rally at the Capitol but did nothing wrong. They believe the FBI mistakenly identified Kennemer as someone else.

The FBI didn’t arrest them, they said. Agents eventually produced a search warrant saying Kennemer was suspected of “assaulting, resisting or impeding” officers and “entering restricted building or grounds.”

Both said they went no further than the Capitol steps on Jan. 6 and did not harm anyone or damage anything. They said the allegation of assault was false, and the FBI kept showing Kennemer a blurry photo of a man who looked similar but wasn’t Kennemer.

“I vacillate between feeling mad and helpless,” DeWolfe said. “I was really sad. We just wanted an honest election.”

“They’re corrupt, and they’re trying to scare us,” Kennemer said, adding he feels the FBI targeted him for just being at the rally.

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Everybody’s Guilty: To The Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

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Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements

All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.

Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you’ve ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I’m talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you’re effectively influencing someone’s experience of reality.

The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they’re all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They’re all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire’s narrative control system.

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Rand Paul Says Gun Control Bill Was Kept ‘Secret’ And Senators Not Allowed Time To Read It

As the Senate passed a gun control bill this week with fifteen Republicans siding with Democrats, Senator Rand Paul noted that no one had time to even read the legislation because it was “assembled in secret.”

“Unfortunately, this legislation was assembled as many are — in secret, absent well-placed leaks to journalists,” Paul tweeted, adding “There doesn’t appear to be a willingness or time provided to read, understand, debate or amend this bill.”

The Senator further vowed to try to introduce amendments to the bill to “correct the constitutional deficiencies.”

The Senate voted 64-34 Tuesday night to advance the bill. 

How can any elected official sincerely decide on legislation without reading it or debating it?

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BRITISH “WATCHDOG” JOURNALISTS UNMASKED AS LAP DOGS FOR THE SECURITY STATE

Events of the past few days suggest British journalism – the so-called Fourth Estate – is not what it purports to be: a watchdog monitoring the centers of state power. It is quite the opposite.

The pretensions of the establishment media took a severe battering this month as the defamation trial of Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr reached its conclusion and the hacked emails of Paul Mason, a long-time stalwart of the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, were published online.

Both of these celebrated journalists have found themselves outed as recruits – in their differing ways – to a covert information war being waged by Western intelligence agencies.

Had they been honest about it, that collusion might not matter so much. After all, few journalists are as neutral or as dispassionate as the profession likes to pretend. But as have many of their colleagues, Cadwalladr and Mason have broken what should be a core principle of journalism: transparency.

The role of serious journalists is to bring matters of import into the public space for debate and scrutiny. Journalists thinking critically aspire to hold those who wield power – primarily state agencies – to account on the principle that, without scrutiny, power quickly corrupts.

The purpose of real journalism – as opposed to the gossip, entertainment and national-security stenography that usually passes for journalism – is to hit up, not down.

And yet, each of these journalists, we now know, was actively colluding, or seeking to collude, with state actors who prefer to operate in the shadows, out of sight. Both journalists were coopted to advance the aims of the intelligence services.

And worse, each of them either sought to become a conduit for, or actively assist in, covert smear campaigns run by Western intelligence services against other journalists.

What they were doing – along with so many other establishment journalists – is the very antithesis of journalism. They were helping to conceal the operation of power to make it harder to scrutinize. And not only that. In the process, they were trying to weaken already marginalized journalists fighting to hold state power to account.

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