Tag: police state

Corporate Media Silent as Mass Protests Taking Place Worldwide in Reaction to New Lockdowns, Mandates

As TFTP reported this week, despite many countries across the planet achieving vaccination rates as high as 100%, covid cases are still spiking. Because the state’s only tools are force and coercion, as the seasonal spikes inevitably hit, governments across the world are ushering in more tyranny. But after nearly two years of being locked down, shut in, covered up, driven to poverty and watching the police state thrive, many of we the people have had enough. They are mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.

On Monday, Austria rolled out the most tyrannical measures yet and segregated society into two classes: vaccinated and unvaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, you are forced to stay in your home and are not allowed to go out into public unless it is for food or other explicitly designated activity.

Multiple videos of cops patrolling stores and demanding to see citizens’ vaccination status have surfaced since, and Austria is beginning to resemble a place similar to 1930s Germany.

Keep reading

Enemies of the School Board

School boards have always attracted their share of controversies: disagreements over curriculum, bitter election fights, and personality clashes. But in recent months, as parents express their frustration over Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and critical race theory, local school districts and federal law enforcement have upped the ante by monitoring parents, requesting undercover agents at school board meetings, and even arresting parents who attend board meetings to express dissent.

The latest and most egregious example comes from Round Rock, Texas. In a series of school board meetings this fall, two fathers—a minister named Jeremy Story and a retired Army captain named Dustin Clark—spoke out against alleged corruption and school officials’ hostility toward parents. Journalist Pedro Gonzalez reported that at an August meeting, Story had calmly “produced evidence that the board had covered up an alleged assault by the superintendent, Hafedh Azaiez, against a mistress.” The superintendent and school board president cut him off midsentence and ordered officers to remove him from the premises.

At the next meeting, in September, with the district’s controversial mask mandate on the agenda, the school board locked the majority of parents out of the room, preventing them from speaking. Clark and other frustrated parents asked the board to open the nearly empty room to the public. Instead, school board president Amy Weir directed officers to remove Clark from school property. As he was dragged out by two officers, Clark shouted to the audience: “It’s an open meeting! Shame on you. Communist! Communist! Let the public in!”

A few days later, the school district, in coordination with law enforcement, sent police officers to the homes of both men, arrested them, and put them in jail on charges of “disorderly conduct with intent to disrupt a meeting.” Families and supporters of Story and Clark held an all-night protest outside the jail, until the men were released the following morning. They are now raising funds for their legal defense.

The school board was able to do this because the Round Rock Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has the power to order the arrest of citizens in their homes. For many parents, the school board is sending a message: if you speak out against us, we will turn you into criminals. When reached for comment, the school district’s police department confirmed that it initiated the investigation and that “one board member requested details from the RRISD Police” prior to the criminal referral.

Round Rock is not the only school board to resort to repressive tactics to stifle dissent. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, where parents have protested against critical race theory and a sexual assault cover-up, the superintendent asked the county sheriff to deploy a SWAT team, riot control unit, and undercover agents to monitor parents at school board meetings. The sheriff refused, telling the superintendent that he had not provided “any justification for such a manpower intensive request,” but the mere attempt was astounding.

Keep reading

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN skip DOJ whistleblower revealing ‘threat tag’ targeting parents at school board meetings

The media have largely ignored the explosive allegation made by a DOJ whistleblower about the counterterrorism targeting of outraged parents that appears to undercut sworn testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

On Tuesday, a whistleblower revealed the FBI created a “threat tag” to aid in tracking alleged threats against school board officials, teachers, and staff as part of its implementation of a controversial memo issued by Garland last month.

An Oct. 20 internal email from the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions, released Tuesday by House Republicans, instructed agents to apply the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” to all investigations and assessments of threats directed specifically at education officials.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” the email stated.

The email also directs FBI agents to consider whether the criminal activity being investigated is in violation of federal law and what the potential “motivation” is behind it. 

Keep reading

After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA

On this day in 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was created in a demonstration that the Keystone Kops are always prepared to exploit a crisis. In the ensuing two decades, the TSA has proven itself skilled at harassing travelers and freaking out over pocketknives and water bottles while steadfastly failing at its assigned task of making air transportation any safer. The TSA, in short, is an awful example of government in action.

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia,” the TSA summarizes in its official history. “The attacks resulted in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, designed to prevent similar attacks in the future.”

The TSA launched with the passage of the Aviation and Transportation and Security Act on November 19, 2001. The new law nationalized passenger screening, which previously had been the responsibility of airlines. It’s not clear why anybody saw a need for the TSA, since it’s unlikely that a federal agency would have been any more successful than private contractors at predicting terrorists’ unprecedented use of aircraft as kamikaze weapons. It’s especially unlikely that the federal agency we actually got would have successfully diverted itself from confiscating play-doh to thwarting homicidal fanatics.

“The TSA is failing to defend us against the threat of terrorism,” security expert and frequent TSA critic Bruce Schneier pointed out in 2015. “The only reason they’ve been able to get away with the scam for so long is that there isn’t much of a threat of terrorism to defend against.”

“Terrorists are much rarer than we think, and launching a terrorist plot is much more difficult than we think,” Schneier added. “I understand this conclusion is counterintuitive, and contrary to the fearmongering we hear every day from our political leaders. But it’s what the data shows.”

Keep reading

Police caught using online spy tool to plot “pre-crimes”

Tech startup Voyager Labs helps law enforcement agencies use what you post on social media and who you interact with to predict whether you have or “plan to” commit a crime. It is one of a growing number of companies that claim they can use social media analysis to help predict and solve crimes and has opened many questions about privacy.

Non-profit organization Brennan Center obtained documents through freedom of information requests that revealed the strategies Voyager uses violate the first amendment protections. For instance, the software uses posts about Islam and social media usernames indicating Arab pride as signs of potential inclination towards extremism. But they can also be used to target any group.

Additionally, according to the documents, obtained by The Guardian, the company uses questionable processes to access data on social media, and even enables law enforcement officers to infiltrate groups and private accounts using fake personas.

Keep reading

The Church of State: Taxonomy of a New Religion

Darkness descends over civilization and freedom. It flows not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear and anxiety reemerge transformed. 

To live right now, then, is to live in paradox. Despite conditions of relative peace and abundance, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, more turn now to political authority. Merchants of fear magnify the significance of certain human problems, which obscures complicated truths and feeds the dogmas of this new faith. Adherents believe they are on the side of the angels, but their faith threatens to bring about a new Dark Age. Why? Because more and more people in the grip of this religion are willing to use illiberal means.

Keep reading

How Many Guns Does the IRS Have?

President Joe Biden and Democrats who support his multi-trillion dollar “Build Back Better” spending agenda want to empower the IRS with even more resources. 

According to the Heritage Foundation, the bill would increase the IRS budget by 70 percent. 

“House Democrats’ massive tax-and-spending package would reward the unpopular tax-collecting agency by increasing its current budget by more than 70%. Over the next 10 years, the bill would add $88 billion of new funding for the IRS, including $45 billion dedicated to enforcement, $27 billion for operations support, $5 billion for new business systems, $4 billion to administer green energy initiatives, and $4 billion to administer child tax credits,” Heritage analyzes. “Meanwhile, it dedicates less than $2 billion for taxpayer services.”

“Between the huge sums aimed directly at enforcement activities and operations support, expect a large majority of the $88 billion of new IRS funding to directly or indirectly support things like asset monitoring, audits, taxpayer investigations, and legal actions against taxpayers,” they continue. 

“On the issue of enforcement actives and operations support,” Americans for Tax Reform is reminding taxpayers the IRS already has substantial authority and power. This includes ownership of thousands of guns and agents who can be deployed to use them. 

Keep reading