Tag: police state

At The FBI, The Rotten Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Tree

You can’t make this up.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Put these clichés together and you have the chilling saga of two FBI agents linked by blood whose conduct has forever stained the Bureau’s reputation.

One bad apple is former FBI Deputy Director Larry A. Potts. He was in a supervisory role during the Waco raid and demoted in the 1990s following the Ruby Ridge fallout, two of the bloodiest incidents in FBI history.

The other is Walter Giardina, who was among several senior FBI officials terminated by Director Kash Patel in August 2025. His firing came after months of Senate Oversight letters citing whistleblower allegations about his role in Trump-related investigations.

As I recount in my new book “I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To,” Giardina was also the FBI agent who put handcuffs and leg irons on me after orchestrating my circus-style arrest at Reagan National Airport, an ambush that dragged my fiancée into the spectacle as collateral damage.

Here’s the you can’t make this up kicker: Potts is Giardina’s father-in-law.

Potts: A Study in Bad Apple FBI Culture

In the early 1990s, Larry A. Potts rose quickly at FBI headquarters, eventually becoming the Bureau’s second-in-command as deputy director. His ascent coincided with the Ruby Ridge tragedy of 1992. Potts was in the Washington oversight chain when the Bureau abandoned its standard deadly-force policy and adopted special “rules of engagement” for that operation.

Under normal FBI policy, agents were authorized to use lethal force only when facing an imminent threat of death or grievous bodily harm. At Ruby Ridge, however, the rules were rewritten. The order declared that “any armed adult male observed in the vicinity of the Weaver cabin could and should be shot.”

This was not the restrained standard of constitutional policing. It was a license to kill. Within 24 hours, Randy Weaver’’ 14-year-old son was dead, as was Vicki Weaver, killed while holding her infant daughter in her arms. Barely a year later came Waco. After a 51-day standoff, the FBI’s siege — armored vehicles, CS gas, aggressive psychological tactics — ended in a fire that killed 76 men, women, and children.

Under intense scrutiny, FBI Director Louis Freeh demoted Potts; he then retired in 1997.

But not before “Pottsgate.”

To justify billing the Bureau for Potts’ lavish retirement dinner, senior managers created paperwork for an ironically named “ethics conference” at Quantico. When exposed, letters of censure followed. Rank-and-file agents fumed: falsify records as a line agent and you’re fired; do it for a boss’s party and you get a slap on the wrist. (DOJ OIG—Potts retirement; GAO).

Potts would later sit at the family table with his daughter and son-in-law Walter Giardina. Giardina is not just the FBI thug who put me in handcuffs; he also tried, in my view, to take down Donald John Trump.

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Here Are Three Ways Americans Can Fight The U.K.’s Orwellian Attempts To Suppress Free Speech

Yesterday, the news came that Graham Linehan was arrested by five police officers the moment he stepped off a plane at Heathrow. Though he’s less well-known in America, Linehan is an Irish comic genius who created two of the most beloved U.K. sitcoms of the last 30 years — Father Ted and The I.T. Crowd. Linehan’s supposed crime is that he has been a persistent online critic of the transgender movement, and his arrest was over three tweets, which you can read here. Nothing about his tweets are debatable as a matter of free speech or incitement. In a sane society, they would all be protected.

For a while now, people have been screaming that the U.K. has transformed itself into an Orwellian police state. The U.K. now arrests as many as 30 people a day for online speech, and like what happened to Linehan, much of what is punished is benign by First Amendment standards.

Yet, the punishments handed down are quite severe, and there are numerous examples of how political U.K. courts operate according two a two-tiered system of justice. One woman got a 31-month sentence for an offensive tweet that was deleted after four hours; the same judge gave a 21-month sentence to someone who participated in a violent mob that tried to kick down the door of a pub looking to possibly attack the people inside.

Still, arresting someone as high profile as Linehan marks a significant escalation. Not because Linehan’s rights deserve more deference than any normal U.K. citizen that’s been arrested for speech, but because the U.K. government is openly inviting the enormous amount of criticism that will come with such a high profile arrest. Just last year, persistent transgender critic J.K. Rowling dared the Scottish police to arrest her under the country’s new and laughably expansive hate crime law. Scottish authorities demurred, not because they couldn’t punish her under the law, but because presumably they realized the blowback that came with arresting one of the most beloved authors of the last century would be too great.

Still, I hope the Linehan arrest shines a harsh spotlight on the U.K.’s increasingly draconian speech laws and leads to much needed reforms — here is a good primer on where the U.K. should start. But for now, the incident should lead those of us in America to act on some inescapable conclusions to help restore freedom of speech in the U.K. and elsewhere.

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More Age Verification Fallout: Artist Blogs Blocked, Porn Data Leaked, Traffic Boosts for Noncompliant Sites

As more places around the world—including U.S. states—pass laws requiring age checks around the internet, we’re continuing to see a slew of unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences. The latest round includes some U.S. residents being blocked from a blogging platform, French folks in dangers of their porn viewing habits being leaked, and porn websites that violate the law in the U.K. being rewarded with big boosts in web traffic.

Let’s start closest to home.

Another website is blocking access to Mississippi residents in response to the state’s age verification and online harm prevention law taking effect.

We’ve already seen some fallout from this law, including the social media platform Bluesky beginning to block Mississippi residents.

Now, Dreamwidth Studios—a blogging platform meant for artists (and one of the parties represented by tech trade group NetChoice in a challenge to the Mississippi law)—is also blocking access for people in Mississippi, as well as preventing minors in Tennessee from opening new accounts.

“People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we’ll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential,” Dreamwidth says on its website.

The company announced its new Mississippi policy on August 26, saying, “Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don’t want to do this.” But “the Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who’s under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users’ parents to allow them to finish creating an account.””

Dreamwidth goes on:

[The Mississippi law] also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn’t like it — which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn’t like, you’re absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don’t want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can’t: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity.”

Mississippi users of Dreamwidth aren’t the only ones with restricted access. The platform will also “prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk,” it said. “The judge in our challenge to Tennessee’s social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds,” Dreamwidth posted. “The Tennessee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it’s still a risk to us.”

Dreamwidth’s moves further highlight how age verification laws like the ones enacted by Mississippi and Tennessee will come down harder on small and niche platforms than on big tech companies.

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Starmer’s Regime Just Lit The Fuse On The U.K.’s Free Speech Crisis

Robin Wright, longtime member of the Hollywood glitterati, tells The Times that she feels “liberated” in fleeing the United States for the “freedom” of England. 

“America is a s—show,” the leftist House of Cards star told the London publication, declining to fully go into what she believes to be the present state of American politics.  

Wright, who says she’s found Mr. Right after three failed marriages, including her ill-fated union with “Marxist moron” Sean Penn, loves the “freedom of self” she has found in the United Kingdom. 

The Times’ gushing profile was published on Saturday, just two days before five Metropolitan Police officers arrested Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan at London’s Heathrow Airport on charges of expressing an opinion.

Linehan, co-creator of the popular sitcom Father Ted, was returning from the U.S. to the land of “freedom of self” when the speech police grabbed him “on suspicion of inciting violence via his posts on X.” What violence did he incite? The violence of thought, which in no small part has effectively become outlawed in leftist Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Jolly Old England. 

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Dystopian Rollout Of Digital IDs & CBDCs Is Happening

This isn’t conspiracy; it’s all in their own documentation.

They are building a full-spectrum digital cage, and its two locked doors are Digital Identity and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). You cannot have one without the other.

The plan is to replace your government-issued ID with a Digital ID, but it’s not just a card in your phone. It is fundamentally built upon your immutable biometrics: your fingerprints, the precise structure of your face, the unique pattern of your iris.

This biometric data is the key.

It is the hard link that ties your physical body directly to your digital identity credential.

Your very body becomes your password. The reason this is so critical for them is the financial system. UN & Bank for International Settlements docs overtly state that Digital ID and CBDCs are designed to be integrated.

The system cannot exist without this biometric digital ID.

Why?

Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols.

For this new digital financial system to function, they must absolutely “know” every single participant. Your digital wallet will be tied to your digital ID, which is mapped to your biometrics. Total financial-biological linkage.

We see the prototypes being rolled out now:

  • Sam Altman’s WorldCoin lures people to scan their irises for a “unique identifier” and a digital wallet. This is the exact model.
  • The UN’s “Building Blocks” program forces refugees to scan their iris at checkout to receive food rations. The value is deducted from a wallet tied to that biometric ID.

They justify this total surveillance under the guise of closing the “identity gap,” claiming the world’s poor need digital IDs to access essential services like banking and healthcare.

The reality?

This is the ultimate onboarding mechanism into a system of programmable control, where your access to society and your own money is permissioned and revocable based on your compliance.

This is the bedrock of the new global financial system.

It is not about convenience. It is about control.

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Democratic senators say Israel barred their entry to Gaza

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) drew praise from the Council on American-Islamic Relations for their efforts to enter Gaza, and the group, which blamed Israel for being attacked shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, urged other U.S. lawmakers to attempt the same thing.

On Friday, Van Hollen used language that U.S. Jewish groups have said hearkens back to centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“Why have a State Department bureau on the Middle East if Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio are taking their orders from Netanyahu?” stated the Maryland Democrat. “We can save a lot of money by cutting out the middleman.” (Many American Jewish groups have said that suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu runs the U.S. government is Jew-hatred.)

“What will his next post be? The Jews who control our U.S. government?” stated Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Antisemitism, anyone?”

In nearly a dozen and a half statements posted to social media, the two senators criticized Israel and Netanyahu, including accusing the latter’s government of “weaponization of hunger.”

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Australia’s Senate Orders Release of eSafety Censorship Emails

The Australian Senate has formally ordered the production of all communications between “eSafety” Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), adding to the scrutiny over the Commissioner’s role in transnational efforts to stifle online political speech.

While the contents of the emails had already come to light through a US House Judiciary Committee investigation, the Senate’s move signals a significant shift, one aimed squarely at holding a senior Australian bureaucrat accountable for her coordination with a foreign activist group pushing to censor views, including those of US President Donald Trump.

Senator Alex Antic, who introduced the motion, confirmed its passage on Wednesday afternoon, posting: “The Senate has voted in favour of my order for production of documents relating to communications between the Office of the eSafety Commissioner and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.”

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Mississippi’s Digital ID Law Hits a Wall with Mastodon

Mississippi’s privacy-ruining online digital ID law is putting pressure on decentralized platforms, and Mastodon says it simply cannot comply.

The organization behind the software states that it lacks the technical ability to verify users’ ages and refuses to implement IP-based restrictions, which it argues would wrongly affect travelers and those temporarily located in the state.

The law, known as the Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act (HB 1126), has already led to Bluesky withdrawing its service from Mississippi.

Mastodon is not following that path. Instead, it points to the design of its platform, where individual server administrators are responsible for their own compliance with local laws. Mastodon itself neither collects user data nor maintains centralized control over the network.

Although Mastodon’s nonprofit arm initially declined to comment, it later provided a statement to TechCrunch.

The organization explained that while its own servers require users to be at least 16, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” and that the software does not retain any data collected during sign-up.

A feature added in the July 2025 release of Mastodon 4.4 allows server administrators to set age minimums and manage legal terms, but does not support storing verification data.

Each server in the network operates independently. It is up to those server owners to decide whether to integrate third-party systems to check user ages.

Mastodon confirmed it cannot offer “direct or operational assistance” to these operators and instead points them to resources such as the IFTAS library, which provides guidance on trust and safety practices for federated platforms.

The nonprofit reiterated that it does not track user behavior or enforce policy across the wider ecosystem. Responsibility for legal compliance, it says, belongs to those who host and manage the servers in their own jurisdictions.

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How Canada lost its way on freedom of speech

American singer Sean Feucht has completed his 11-city tour of Canada. Well, sort of anyway. Public officials cancelled or denied him permits in nine cities, from Halifax to Abbotsford, B.C. Montreal went so far as to fine a church $2,500 for hosting his concert. As you know by now, these shows were cancelled because some people are offended by Feucht’s viewpoints, such as his claim that LGBT Pride is a “demonic agenda seeking to destroy our culture and pervert our children.”

How can a country that purports to protect freedom of speech tolerate this blatant censorship? The answer is that our free speech law is so difficult to decipher that some officials may have genuinely believed they can shut Feucht down to prevent hateful or discriminatory speech.

As I explain in a new essay for C2C Journal, the problem is that, since the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the Supreme Court has failed to draw a principled line between when governments can and can’t limit expression. This is despite the fact that a principled rule – first articulated by John Stuart Mill in his still-famous 1864 essay On Liberty and established to varying degrees in Canada’s pre-Charter jurisprudence – was ripe for the taking.

Mill argued – persuasively, in my opinion – that governments can limit harmful forms of expression like nuisance noise or imminent physical consequences like inciting an angry mob to burn down a person’s house – but they must never seek to censor content or ideas. A clear, principled line, understandable to every citizen, government official and judge. Something like “golden rule” for understanding the domain, and legitimate boundaries, of free speech.

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The Harsh Truth About Life In Canada Today

Canada is often portrayed as a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Reality, however, tells a different story…

Statist policies, crushing taxes, bloated bureaucracy, and a society overtaken by woke ideology have shattered Canada. This is a cautionary tale for those looking at Canada as an ideal living space. If you are asking yourself what living in Canada is like, let me explain: Canada is not a land of fulfilled dreams but of enduring harsh conditions and barely getting by.

As if economic hardships aren’t enough, Canadians are also oppressed by the Orwellian newspeak that woke culture is creating. If you speak your mind, you’re labeled a fascist. If you question social policies, you’re accused of microaggressions.

There are no best places to live in Canada anymore. As a Canadian, I see little chance of Canada becoming livable again. Since I founded Expat Money in 2017, I have been helping expats build their Plan-Bs to protect their wealth and freedom and leave countries like this one.

Let’s look at the unfortunate condition that Canada has fallen into.

The Restrictions Imposed During Covid

The strict quarantine measures and harsh government interventions implemented in Canada during the COVID-19 hysteria were shameful. The government expanded police and administrative powers to smash public backlash against its COVID policies.

A significant protest movement called The Freedom Convoy began in early 2022. Truckers and citizens held large demonstrations in Ottawa against vaccination mandates, harsh pandemic restrictions, and the government’s authoritarian tendencies.

Former Prime Minister Trudeau used extraordinary powers to freeze the bank accounts of protesters and crack down on activists. Individual and property rights were arbitrarily violated.

The Canadian government imposed mandatory vaccinations on federal employees, healthcare workers, and those in the transportation sector, turning personal health decisions into state mandates. Those who were not vaccinated were suspended from their jobs, their travel rights were restricted, and they were ostracized from society. Even the private sector was coerced to impose vaccinations under government pressure.

Moreover, harsh lockdowns and restricted entry into the country forced businesses into bankruptcy. Massive numbers of people lost their jobs, and the government’s financial structure was severely damaged.

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