Tag: police state

British Professor Faces Government “Crackdown” For Questioning Ukraine War Narrative

A professor at the University of Edinburgh is facing trial by media and a government “crackdown,” merely because he shared an article questioning the narrative behind the bombing of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Professor Tim Hayward is currently being cancelled by the mob because he shared an article by left-wing news outlet Grayzone which suggested the theater bombing, blamed on Russia, may actually have been carried out by Ukrainian ‘Azov’ fighters.

The incident was immediately exploited by NATO powers to justify more military support for Ukraine and led to Joe Biden calling Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”.

However, the Neo-Nazi unit is accused of using civilians as human shields inside the building before blowing it up as Russian forces entered Mariupol.

Russia denies attacking the building, which was seemingly of no strategic importance, and no footage exists of the building being blown up.

Merely for highlighting these inconsistencies, Hayward was savagely attacked, accused of spreading Russian disinformation in a Times article and called a “useful idiot for President Putin’s atrocities” by Tory MP Robert Halfon.

The professor was also targeted by Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, who said universities that challenged the official narrative would be investigated and professors punished.

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As America Slips Deeper Into Authoritarianism, State Brings Back Executions Via Firing Squad

As TFTP reported, the Justice Department quietly amended its execution protocols in December 2020, no longer requiring federal death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection and clearing the way to use other methods like firing squads and poisonous gas. The following year Arizona followed suit and began preparing to execute death row inmates with the same gas used by the Nazis at Auschwitz — Zyklon B. This month, South Carolina raised their hand at the execution table and asked for firing squads and have approved just that.

According to a report from Reuters, the state Department of Corrections said it alerted the Attorney General’s office that it has developed protocols and completed renovations at a correctional facility in Columbia, the capital city, which allows for the execution of inmates via a three-man firing squad. According to the report:

A state law passed in May 2021 authorized the death penalty policy changes, giving condemned persons the option to choose death by rifles or lethal injection when available. It also made the electric chair the state’s primary mode of execution.

South Carolina joins Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah in allowing firing squad executions. Those states use lethal injection as their primary method. Three executions, all in Utah, have been carried out by firing squad since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Ronnie Lee Gardner, a 49-year-old convicted killer, was the last person in the United States to be executed by firing squad in 2010.

The move is touted by officials as a good thing because it now gives inmates a choice of three different ways to die but they are missing the elephant in the room.

While the various methods of death are certainly shocking, the idea of capital punishment seems to be taking a back seat to all of this. For the state to claim the responsibility of justly ending life, it means that the state must never be wrong. Even the most ardent of statists will have to concede that an infallible state is but a terribly written fiction.

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Man Told by an Officer That He Could Enter the Capitol on Jan. 6 Now Faces 20 Years in Prison

On Jan. 6, 2021, a protestor, 40-year-old Brady Knowlton, says that an officer at the Capitol told “You can go in, as long as you don’t break anything.” At 2:35 p.m., Knowlton did, entering through the Upper West Terrace doors. He looked around inside the building, walked through the Rotunda, lobby, and Senate chamber gallery, obeyed the officer’s injunction not to break anything, and left the building at 2:53 p.m. For that, Knowlton now faces twenty years in prison in Old Joe Biden’s vengeful banana republic.

On top of the possibility of being behind bars until 2042, Knowlton, a law student, has suffered numerous other consequences already. According to the Daily Wire, “his law degree has been withheld, his lawyers say, Airbnb has banned him and his wife, and, for reasons that remain undisclosed, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has stripped his Global Entry access.”

According to the charges filed against him in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Knowlton “did unlawfully and knowingly enter and remain in a restricted building and grounds.” He also “did knowingly, and with intent to impede and disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business and official functions, engage in disorderly and disruptive conduct in and within such proximity to, a restricted building and grounds, that is, any posted, cordoned-off, and otherwise restricted area within the United States Capitol and its grounds, where the Vice President and Vice President-elect were temporarily visiting.” He “willfully and knowingly engaged in disorderly and disruptive conduct within the United States Capitol Grounds. He “willfully and knowingly entered and remained in the gallery of either House of Congress, without authorization to do so.”

If Knowlton’s contention that a police officer said he could go in is true, it vitiates all these charges, and Knowlton’s claim is certainly corroborated by photographic and video evidence of cops at the Capitol opening gates, holding the doors open for protestors, and reports that police even posed for selfies with protestors. Also, when the FBI raided Knowlton’s home, they found no evidence whatsoever “concerning the breach and unlawful entry” of the Capitol, or “of any conspiracy, planning, or preparation,” or “maps or diagrams” of the Capitol, or of any “materials, devices, or tools” that Knowlton might have planned to use to get inside.

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65 Teens, Arrested, Shackled, Jailed Because Cops Found a Small Bag of Weed Outside of a Party

House parties among teenagers and young adults are a part of growing up. When kids experience freedom from their parents for the first time, they will often make poor choices and this is a part of experiencing life so one can learn. Poor choices that cause harm to others are certainly not acceptable but when young people are experimenting with substances and make choices which have no victims, they should never have to worry about their lives being ruined over it. Unfortunately, for 65 young people in Cartersville, Georgia, they had no say in the matter when cops arrested all of them — despite none of them making any poor choices.

The nightmare for these 65 teenagers and young folks started back in 2017 as they gathered at a home to celebrate the New Year. As is common on New Year’s Eve, firecrackers can be heard going off all around town. Thought none of the teens involved in this party were popping fireworks, police used it as a reason to enter the home, without a warrant, claiming they heard gun shots.

When police came to the door that night, they had no evidence of a crime being committed, nor did they have reasonable suspicion. Nevertheless, they barged into the legally rented Airbnb, paid for by 21-year-old Deja Heard, who was celebrating her 21st birthday that night.

Officers had no warrant as the shut down the entire party and searched everyone. The only evidence of a crime — which is not a crime at all — was claimed when police found a small bag of weed in the front yard.

Because no one wanted to go to jail over a plant, no one fessed up, or perhaps the person who dropped it, left the party. Regardless, the solution proposed by the officers that night was to arrest everyone and charge them all with possession of marijuana. And they did exactly that.

These teens and young adults were then hauled off to jail, booked into the Bartow County lockup and shackled — for a small bag of weed found outside on the ground.

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Sovereign ‘Democracy’ Ukraine: Zelenskyy Suspends 11 Opposition Parties Becoming Head Of A One-Party State

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the backing of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, declared that all opposition parties would be suspended indefinitely until martial law is declared over.

In a statement issued yesterday evening, President Zelenskyy announced the following decree: political parties who his party, “Servants of the People,” has identified as being pro-Russian would be suspended until the nation-wide martial law is lifted. The list essentially includes every opposition party.

With millions of their constituents now stripped of any political infrastructure, it’s safe to say that this is not the sort of action taken by a ‘democracy.’

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This Is the End of Free Speech Online

The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.

This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.

Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.

What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.

Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.

Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.

After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.

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Police Officer Kills Dog for Walking Toward Him With Tail Wagging

For Bradley Brock, his 3-year-old dog, a mastiff named Moose, was his family and his support after a serious motorcycle accident. In a span of seconds on a November night last year, a police officer in Inkster, Michigan, took all of that from Brock when the officer shot Moose multiple times as the dog approached him.

Brock says, and video appears to show, the dog wagging its tail as it trots toward the officer. Brock has now filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that the shooting was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

The shooting is another alleged instance of an officer misreading dog behavior and slaying a pet—a sadly common occurrence that continues to devastate families, generate public outrage, lead to officers being fired, and cost police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements.

Brock says he called 911 on November 15 of last year after a man at a gas station pulled a gun on him. Video of the incident shows an Inkster police officer talking to Brock while Moose sits on the sidewalk a short distance away, off leash. Moose then trots over to Brock, wagging his tail and stopping to sniff a passing pedestrian, before turning and moving toward the officer.

“He was very friendly, but if anybody was around me, he wanted to check ’em out and make sure they’re okay,” Brock says. “That’s all, like any dog.”

However, the officer begins quickly backpedaling, draws his gun, and within seconds shoots the dog multiple times.

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