Tag: police state

The Tyranny of One Man’s Opinion

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office — one of whom was St. Thomas More — and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of “the tyranny of one man’s opinion.”

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process — a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers’ money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration’s attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president’s characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker — or even a mass murderer — does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians — beyond the thousands he has already killed — if a peace agreement is not soon reached.

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump’s war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president’s personal assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department’s compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president’s personal belief — whether informed or uninformed — is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump’s vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power — and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man’s conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions — particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man’s opinion.

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Brazil Court Goes on Censorship Spree Days Before Presidential Election

Brazil’s top electoral authority, the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), issued new censorship rulings on Wednesday as the nation prepares to hold presidential elections this weekend.

The South American nation is hours away from holding its 2026 general elections, scheduled for Sunday, October 4, with all polls suggesting that a runoff election will be held on October 25 between current incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

In the past week, the 2026 Brazilian presidential campaign has seen two new controversies emerge surrounding Bolsonaro and Lula. The conservative senator denounced being the target of a fake news campaign accusing him of allegedly planning to remove the title of Brazil’s patron saint from Nossa Senhora do Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), a title of the Blessed Virgin Mary that holds 300 years’ worth of faith and veneration for Brazilian Catholics.

Sen. Bolsonaro — who is running for office after his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, was banned and imprisoned for “crimes against democracy” charges — is an Evangelical Christian. Globonews, which Bolsonaro accused of acting as a “central hub” to spread the fake news campaign against him, issued a public retraction and apology after the claim was confirmed to be false.

On Wednesday, a three-out-of-five majority of the TSE’s justices ordered the complete removal of any and all social media content involving the fake news campaign against Bolsonaro, upholding an initial ruling issued by Supreme Court Justice and TSE member André Mendoça in response to a request issued by the Bolsonaro presidential campaign team.

Wednesday’s ruling was preceded by a back-and-forth series of court orders on the matter. The state-owned news agency Agência Brasil detailed on Wednesday that Mendoça had originally ruled to censor the fake news campaign posts against Bolsonaro — but Supreme Court Flávio Dino overturned the censorship orders on the grounds that they infringed the free speech rights of a local comedian who lodged a complaint on the matter. Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fux later overturned Dino’s ruling. The impasse led to the head of the Supreme Court, Edson Fachin, bringing the matter to a vote.

Metrópoles detailed that Justice Mendoça had initially argued that removing social media posts pertaining to the fake news campaign did not constitute censorship, as the content had already been proven to be misinformation and therefore “does not constitute prior censorship, as it does not establish prior state control over future expressions, does not require judicial authorization for new publications, and does not suspend users’ profiles, accounts, or channels.”

Separate from the controversy surrounding the fake news campaign against Flávio Bolsonaro, President Lula has found himself at the center of a firestorm after he bizarrely claimed this week that Brazilian girls learn to “get touched” from a young age. According to Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party (PT), the Brazilian president was allegedly referring to cervical cancer screenings.

The TSE also issued censorship rulings on Wednesday against conservative lawmaker Nikolas Ferreira over his response to Lula’s controversial statements. Ferreira, a 30-year-old Congressman from Minas Gerais, published a video expressing his outrage about Lula’s remarks while questioning the “explanation” provided by his party. In the video, which remains publicly available at press time, Ferreira affirmed that there is the possibility that a pedophile “might be listening” to Lula’s remarks and stressed, “girls aren’t to be touched from an early age.”

TSE Justice Estela Aranha reportedly gave Ferreira a 24-hour deadline to remove a video, arguing that the lawmaker allegedly “took the president’s statement about medical exams out of context and attributed a sexual connotation to his words.” Arahna ordered Ferreira to abstain himself from both republishing the video and from producing any kind of content that is “substantially identical” to the original piece under penalty of a yet-to-be determined fine.

“The contested publication is not limited to political criticism or disagreement regarding the appropriateness of the language used,” Justice Aranha reportedly argued.

“In developing the line of reasoning set forth in the contested media report, the respondent introduces a connotation entirely different from that present in the original statement, shifting the discussion from the realm of public health to that of various criminal acts,” she continued.

Ferreira referred to the situation in a social media post, which reads, “Lula knows so much about what he lost that he only requested the removal of the video from my network, but not a right of reply, because he knows he would have to explain the inexplicable.” In a separate post, the lawmaker pointed out that it was Lula who appointed Justice Aranha to the TSE in 2025.

The contents of the conservative lawmaker’s video appear to have greatly infuriated Lula, who called Ferreira a “bastard” during a Tuesday night campaign rally. In the same event, Lula’s wife, First Lady Rosângela “Janja” Lula da Silva, referred to the lawmaker as a “little shit.”

Hours later, the Brazilian president once again insulted Ferreira in a Wednesday interview with Terra Brasil, referring to him as a “complete idiot” for allegedly spreading “misinformation” against him.

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Border Agents Are Randomly Seizing Phones of US Citizens Who Support Palestine

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.

He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.

Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.

Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.

She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.

Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.

“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”

The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.

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Officials Are Keeping A LIST Of Brits Who Question Government Policy

The British state is compiling a list of people who criticise its own counter-terror programme. Ordinary X and Reddit users who questioned Prevent training, flagged a one-sided focus on the “far Right,” or simply criticised it have had their posts logged, stored and “investigated” by a Home Office-linked unit most of them have never heard of.

Officials spent more than a year trying to keep that database secret. They only released it after an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The public was never told their feeds were being trawled.

The Standards and Compliance Unit, or StaCU, was set up in February 2024 as an “opaque” body to handle complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding scheme sold as a way to stop people becoming terrorists. Documents obtained by The Metro and released by Rights & Security International show StaCU did more than wait for formal complaints. 

Between March 2024 and February 2025 it made 77 “observations” of critical online comments, most of them from X, with others from Reddit and even articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Jacob Smith, Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader at Rights & Security International, fought for a year to force the Home Office to publish the material. 

“It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information,” he said. “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”

He added: “People should be able to express their views on social media without that being catalogued in government databases.” 

Many of those logged, he said, had posted without thinking “that the government might be looking at their feed and taking that data. It is in an almost private setting.” 

His conclusion was blunt: “It’s a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”

A large share of the logged posts accused Prevent training of treating the “far Right” as the main threat while skating over Islamist extremism. 

One X user was recorded after calling the training “complete bullshit.” They wrote: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”

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Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren

As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.

The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.

According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.

In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.

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Health Canada won’t answer contaminated COVID-19 vaccine questions

This month Ottawa tabled a stack of Order Paper Questions on COVID vaccines: Pfizer payments, residual DNA contamination known as Plasmidgate, approvals, VAERS death reports, and the science (or lack thereof) behind lockdowns.

As then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sold vaccination as a civic duty and implemented sweeping vaccine mandates, families who were never given proper informed consent recently brought their injuries to Ottawa.

“It really affects the whole family when one person’s injured,” said Carrie Sakamoto, a severely vaccine injured Canadian. She told me at the Allison Inquiry at the beginning of September that “it just devastates everybody.”

Veterans, former elite athletes and parents of children who died testified, and Health Canada stayed silent throughout. Then, a week later, the Public Health Agency of Canada posted a portal update and a backlog number. There was no apology.

As OPQ responses begin rolling in, one is from the MP who spearheaded the inquiry, Dean Allison himself. He asked Health Canada what science proves SV40 promoter fragments in Pfizer’s vaccine are inactive, and when officials first noticed the 2021-22 spike in U.S. VAERS death reports.

The department responded not with a study, but the blanket reassurance that the fragment is inactive, has no functional role and sits below limits. For context: SV40 sequences are used in molecular biology to drive gene expression. They can interact with host DNA, but it all begs the question that if the material is inert and irrelevant, why is it there?

Internal Health Canada emails from July 2023 show officials still asking Pfizer for characterization details while authorizing additional boosters – shots that were still contaminated.

Pfizer had not disclosed the sequence to Health Canada, the FDA or the EMA at the time of submissions, and it was only after genomics expert Kevin McKernan and I made the finding public in April, agencies compared notes.

“At Health Canada, we do not view this as an urgent risk topic,” one email said, as fall booster campaigns loomed. If regulators had already concluded the fragment was harmless and below limit, why were they still seeking basic measurement information from Pifzer?

The same pattern appears in questions on residual DNA bound to lipid nanoparticles, the tiny fat bubbles that carry the modified RNA of the vaccine into cells.

Officials once again offered broad safety assurances while leaving levels, fragment size, batch variability and manufacturing controls unanswered. On deaths, they said vital statistics showed no increase linked to mRNA vaccines, cited VAERS when convenient, then treated the same database as a scare tactic.

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Protection Orders, Gun Training, And 3D Printing Laws Among Gun Bills Signed By California Governor

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of 10 gun bills into law that he says will enhance what he considers to be the state’s already exemplary record of firearms safety.

Newsom’s office announced the signing in a press release on Monday. According to the release, the laws are meant to reduce violent crime involving guns and reduce the number of illegal guns on the street, among other things.

They include a training requirement for the purchase of a gun, expanding criteria for the state’s extreme risk protection orders, voluntary firearms storage by law enforcement to prevent violent crime and suicide, and a requirement for firearms blocking technology on 3D printers in the state by July 1, 2029.

“California has been a leader in gun safety. Today’s laws continue that work – using data, prevention, and proven tools to help keep firearms out of dangerous situations and support communities affected by violence,” Newsom stated in the press release.

Senate Bill 948 will make a training requirement necessary for acquiring a state firearms safety certificate for the purchase of a gun. Existing law requires the certificate for the purchase, transfer, or importation of guns within the state within 60 days of the transaction.

The new law adds a requirement for a four-hour training course that must cover firearm handling and safety as well as a live-fire component. The law becomes effective Jan. 1, 2029.

The press release also touted the state’s Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVRO), crediting them with preventing 58 mass shootings and reducing violent crime overall.

Assembly Bill 175 expands this by allowing courts to issue extreme risk protection orders even if the subject of the order has not been notified. It also prohibits courts from requiring petitioners to show that exceptional circumstances exist that make the order necessary.

Thousands of GVROs have been issued since the first laws were implemented in 2016, the press release states.

“Between 2021 and 2024, the number of longer-term GVROs issued each year in California more than doubled. In 2024 alone, California courts issued GVROs against 1,727 individuals found to pose a significant danger of firearm violence toward themselves or others,” the release states.

Newsom also signed a law meant to prevent suicides by providing temporary gun storage for those who are in crisis.

Assembly Bill 1974 allows law enforcement agencies to establish programs to take temporary possession of firearms from those who request such. The law requires the agency to provide clear instructions on voluntarily transferring custody of a firearm and instructions on requesting its return.

It also requires the agency to ensure the person is not prohibited from owning a firearm. The agency must also ensure the firearm has not been reported lost or stolen, used in a crime, or part of an active investigation. Guns that are not picked up by their owners will be destroyed.

The law also exempts the agencies and gun owners from certain requirements for concealed carry and transfer of firearms.

Assembly Bill 2047 is meant to hamper the production of homemade guns that do not have serial numbers or other identifying marks. The law sets a deadline of July 1, 2029, for any 3D printer sold in the state to have firearms blocking technology.

This technology would prevent the user from 3D printing so-called “ghost guns.” These guns are most often frames of synthetic materials produced on a 3D printer with metal parts purchased separately. The fact that the homemade guns have no serial numbers makes it difficult to trace them back to their source.

The press release states that the number of unserialized guns has been on the decline in recent years.

“Seventeen percent fewer ghost guns [were] recovered as crime guns in 2025, bringing the decline since 2021 to 37 percent,” the release reads.

Gun rights advocates decried the package of gun laws, saying they are about gun control more than gun safety.

Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), was especially critical of the training requirement, which he considers an obstacle to legal gun ownership.

“It comes after California has already passed an 11 percent excise tax on guns and ammo, and carry permits cost anywhere between $500 and $2,500 in the state, depending on the county. SAF is currently litigating against both of those abuses and will consider a lawsuit against SB 948 as its effective date in 2029 approaches,” Kraut stated in an email to The Epoch Times.

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Florida Deputy Charged After Using Flock License Plate Reader System to Search Woman 300 Times, Another Deputy Arrested After Looking Up 17-Year-Old Girl in Police Database

The misuse of Flock Safety camera systems continues to grow.

On Wednesday, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests of two deputies accused of improperly accessing law enforcement databases, including an automated license plate reader system that uses Flock cameras.

According to Gualtieri, Deputy Karl Gwynn, 57, ran 381 searches on a 35-year-old woman he had arrested years earlier because he reportedly wanted a relationship with her.

Of the 381 searches, 300 queries were made through the Flock ALPR system.

The second deputy arrested was 33-year-old Travis Stanton who allegedly used the police databases to gather information on a 17-year-old girl he was reportedly “romantically interested in.”

Per WTSP:

Two Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies have resigned and face criminal charges after investigators said they improperly accessed sensitive law enforcement databases, including the Flock camera system.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrests Wednesday, describing two unrelated cases involving a former deputy’s interest in a 17-year-old girl and another deputy’s repeated searches of a woman’s information across multiple databases.

The first case involves former Deputy Travis Stanton, 33, who resigned on Sept. 25 after the sheriff’s office began investigating his conduct involving a 17-year-old girl who had filed a complaint with the agency. Gualtieri said Stanton used several databases to gather information about the girl and her vehicle, including running her license plate through Florida’s vehicle registration system using a computer in his patrol car.

In an unrelated case, Deputy Carl Gwynn, 57, allegedly queried a 35-year-old woman’s information 381 times.

Sheriff Gualtieri said Gwynn had arrested the woman years earlier and wanted a relationship with her. Unlike the Stanton case, Gwynn’s alleged misconduct directly involved the sheriff’s office automated license plate reader system (ALPR), commonly associated with Flock Safety cameras.

Gwynn has since resigned and was arrested on four counts of unlawfully accessing secure systems with his bond being set at $25,000.

Stanton was charged with unlawfully accessing secure systems and his bond was set at $10,000.

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Reporting of the RAF Fairford Arrests Blows the Idea of a ‘Free Press’ Out of the Water

It’s easy to forget that the western media – the so-called “free press” – likes to distinguish itself from media in authoritarian regimes on the basis that, unlike them, it asks critical questions of the powerful, reports facts objectively, and formulates its analyses dispassionately.

They do propaganda, we do news – or so the western media argues.

The feverish coverage since five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning close to RAF Fairford in the UK is blowing that claim all too obviously out of the water.

Here are the known facts so far.

Three white vans, bearing the logo of a genuine fuel transit company, were spotted by a local farmer on the road outside her property as she returned from a party. Police arrived promptly and arrested the men, who were all British nationals in their twenties.

On Tuesday, it emerged that one of the arrested men actually called the police earlier – seemingly the reason officers were on the scene so quickly.

Although the men were initially arrested on explosives charges, no “viable” explosives were found. Although they were arrested on terrorism charges, which allow for 14 days of detention, they were released on bail under normal criminal laws in less than two days.

It has also emerged that the men had several empty “barrels” in their vans, plus one that contained what police described disturbingly as an “accelerant”.

Actually, that was simply a reference to petrol. The stuff that goes into vehicles to make them accelerate.

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