Tag: police state

Freedom advocates seek judicial review of the Nova Scotia forest ban

The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) is challenging Nova Scotia’s province-wide travel ban on wooded areas. An August 5 proclamation made it illegal to enter any wooded area — including Crown and private land — without a permit, with fines of $25,000 (plus HST).

Freedom advocates wrote to Premier Tim Houston and Natural Resources Minister Tory Rushton on August 6, urging a reconsideration of restrictions, but received no reply. 

The CCF will now seek judicial review and an expedited hearing to challenge the government.

Due to “incredibly dry weather,” Nova Scotia has seen 122 wildfires this year, below the 10-year average of 152. Minister Rushton stated that “only a significant amount of rain” would improve conditions as current fires burn deep underground.

The extensive restrictions under the guise of wildfire prevention include a ban on hiking, fishing, off-road vehicles, and camping outside designated areas. Additionally, forestry, mining, and other industrial work in wooded areas now requires an exemption permit.

Josh Dehaas, author of the August 6 letter, stated the travel ban is “unlawful, disproportionate and unreasonable,” despite the government’s legitimate interest in wildfire prevention.

The Foundation argues that Nova Scotia’s Forests Act unconstitutionally restricts access to “woods” and improperly impacts Charter rights through vague and overbroad imprisonment offences.

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The Ninth Circuit Rules—Court-Sanctioned Authoritarianism?

On July 31, 2025, the Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in Health Freedom Defense Fund et al. v. Megan K. Reilly et al., vacating the earlier ruling of a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in favor of plaintiffs Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF), California Educators for Medical Freedom (CAEMF), and several individual plaintiffs.

The reasoning of the court in its latest ruling, as represented by Judge Bennett’s majority opinion, is an affront to all who value truth, justice, the United States Constitution, and logic. Incredibly, the court concluded that as long as a government official believes a vaccine will protect public health, it is irrelevant whether the vaccine actually works. Armed with this rationale, a state government, simply by uttering the words “This is for public health,” can force any individual to submit to a medical treatment, even if that medical treatment does not benefit that individual—and perhaps harms him. The implication of this line of thinking is clear: Government is our absolute ruler, our master, and we are its chattel.

Here is the context of the ruling: In November 2021, the plaintiffs sued the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for mandating Covid injections for all employees. We argued that the Covid injections do not stop transmission or infection and therefore lack any public health justification. We contended that Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case from 1905, did not apply to our case because Jacobson was predicated both on the extreme emergency posed by smallpox—its death rate was 30%, whereas Covid has a 1% rate of death—and on a safe and effective smallpox vaccine that was believed to actually stop the spread of the dreaded disease based on decades of use, therefore providing a public health justification.

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Ninth Circuit Overturns California’s ‘One-Gun-Per-Month’ Restriction

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a mandate Thursday overturning California’s “one-gun-a-month” restriction.

The case is Nguyen v. Bonta and the plaintiffs include the Second Amendment Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., San Diego County Gun Owners PAC, two FFL gun dealers, and six private citizens including Michelle Nguyen.

The Second Amendment Foundation noted the “one-gun-a-month” restriction allows law-abiding citizens to purchase only one handgun or semi-automatic centerfire rifle (or combination thereof), from a licensed dealer within a 30-day period.

The August 14th mandate overturning the restriction follows a June 20, 2025, Ninth Circuit three-judge panel decision which affirmed a lower court ruling against the “one-gun-a-month” restriction.

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Immigration, Censorship, and the Deep State in the Yookay

Mass immigration and the refugee crisis have transformed European politics over the last decade. The United Kingdom has experienced some of the biggest changes, as repeated popular revolts against immigration have led to both Brexit and the collapse of the Conservative Party in favor of Reform UK. The American Conservative sat down with Connor Tomlinson, a British journalist and political commentator, to talk about the impact of immigration on the UK and the country’s future.

Let’s start with something that I think a lot of Americans have found quite puzzling looking at the situation in the UK. Immigration is the question in British politics, especially right now. Every British government for years has been elected on the promise of lowering immigration. None have done so. Why?

When you say for years, that means going back to 1974. Every single election referendum since has promised lower migration and never delivered. There’s a few reasons. 

The first, I think, is the economic system. Anytime someone promises to cut immigration, a pie chart is wheeled into the room by the so-called experts, and they say, “If you do this, we won’t be able to fudge the numbers on the population, which then builds our annual GDP up, which then allows us to borrow even more debt to pay down for subsidized socialized medicine and pension system.” One thing that Keir Starmer ran into when he was elected to government was that because the Treasury predictions are done on an annual cycle, you can’t cut the size of the civil service, because if you make anyone lose their jobs—and it’s very hard to do the extra legislation anyway—but if you make anyone lose their jobs, they get a year severance pay, and it doesn’t register as cuts. If you cut immigration in the short term, there might be a dip in GDP, because you cut X amount of totally useless jobs. So instead, all they ever do is cut the very few things that they can do—the extra payments and pensions and things like that, which ends up estranging entire swathes of their voter base. 

So economics is one reason. The other one is that there is a human-rights industrial complex that has taken root. Keir Starmer, when he was a human-rights lawyer busy going around the world acting on behalf of murderers to get rid of the death penalty, actually helped write the text for Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act, which wrote the European Court of Human Rights and Convention on Human Rights into British law. So even after Brexit, we still have European laws on our books, because they’re a separate entity.

That means that you get Pakistani pedophiles or Albanian gangsters who say, “My son doesn’t like the taste of foreign chicken nuggets,” appealing to the statue and saying, “My right to a family and private life should mean that I get to stay in this country even though I’m a criminal.” No politician wants to touch that because of the deep taboos that have existed since 1945, since the atrocities of the Holocaust, since Hitler killed a lot of people in a very racist way. So all these antiquated human rights doctrines, like the UN Refugee Convention, like the European Convention of Human Rights, which were written with Dutch Jews fleeing persecution in mind, are now pertaining to North African rapists, and we’re just battery-farming them at the taxpayers expense. 

The final reason, I would say, is that the government has a hell of a lot of contracts with private security and housing firms like Serco. So local councils which mismanage their budgets and these private security firms and these hotel chains will take direct government subsidies to house not just legal migrants that come over (95 percent of whom aren’t paying any taxes at all, and are just a net drain), but also loads of illegal migrants who have come over the physical barrier of the English Channel. These illegal migrants have been picked up by the RNLI, our border force, ferried back, and are now housed in four-star accommodations at the cost of over £14 billion a year to the taxpayer.

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Supreme Court Allows Mississippi Age Verification Law to Take Effect, Advancing Online Digital ID Push

The Supreme Court’s choice to let Mississippi enforce its new age verification law is part of a growing shift toward digital ID requirements across the internet, raising urgent concerns about privacy and censorship.

By declining to block the law while legal challenges continue, the Court has effectively allowed states to begin tying online activity to users’ real-world identities, a move that could reshape how people access information and speak freely online.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Mississippi’s HB 1126 requires social media platforms to verify a user’s age before allowing them to create an account. Those under 18 must obtain parental permission. Platforms are also required to restrict access to what the state broadly labels as “harmful” content. For companies to comply, identity checks will be necessary, meaning users may soon need to provide government IDs or other personal documents just to post or view content on public platforms.

The Supreme Court has already allowed a similar Texas law to be enforced.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing separately from the Court’s unsigned order, stated that the law is “likely unconstitutional” and said NetChoice had “likely” shown that enforcement would violate the First Amendment. Still, the Court allowed the law to take effect, saying the trade group had not shown a strong enough risk of harm to justify emergency relief.

NetChoice, which includes companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, and Discord, argues that mandatory age checks for general-purpose platforms violate free speech protections. The group had previously won a ruling to block the law, but that decision was overturned in April by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said the ruling was a delay, not a defeat. “Although we’re disappointed with the Court’s decision, Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence makes clear that NetChoice will ultimately succeed in defending the First Amendment — not just in this case but across all NetChoice’s ID-for-Speech lawsuits,” he said.

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Man ‘given no choice’ over trowel arrest caution

A man who was cautioned for carrying a bladed trowel in public has said he was given no choice but to accept the reprimand because police were unable to contact a solicitor for him.

Armed police were sent to challenge Samuel Rowe as he walked home from his allotment in Chorlton, Manchester, carrying the tool, a peeling knife and a sickle.

The 35-year-old theatre manager said he was held for 12 hours, before being told he had to accept the caution without representation or face longer in custody.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said Mr Rowe had admitted possessing a “dagger” and was given a conditional caution, which entailed advice about the law on the carrying of bladed weapons in public.

The keen gardener said he was terrified when the armed officers, who did not draw their weapons, arrived outside his home on 3 July.

He said the officers were shouting at him to “drop the knife”.

“I said I didn’t have a knife and they told me to drop the knife again,” he said.

“So I dropped my Japanese hand gardening sickle and a handful of privet that I just cut off the hedge.

“They turned me around, pushed me up against my house, handcuffed me, then put me in the back of a van.”

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Marijuana prohibition has been a fraud

Since its inception, efforts to criminalize marijuana and to stigmatize those who consume it have been based upon hyperbole, stereotypes and outright lies.

The initial push for cannabis criminalization, which began in earnest more than a century ago, had little to do with preserving public health or safety. Instead, the move to prosecute cannabis users was based primarily on sensationalism and xenophobia.

For instance, a July 6, 1927, story in the New York Times, headlined “Mexican Family Goes Insane,” farcically claimed: “A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.”

An academic paper titled “Marijuana,” published in 1933 in The Journal of Law and Criminology, similarly made over-the-top allegations about marijuana’s supposed dangers. The authors wrote, “The inevitable result is insanity, which those familiar with it describe as absolutely incurable, and, without exception ending in death.”

By 1937, Harry J. Anslinger — America’s first “Drug Czar” — had successfully lobbied Congress to ban cannabis nationwide. He did so through the continuous use of racist rhetoric. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use,” he asserted. “This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Fast-forward to 1971. That’s when the Richard Nixon administration declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.” The lynchpin of this campaign was marijuana, which Congress had just classified as a Schedule I controlled substance — the strictest federal category available. Yet, privately, Nixon acknowledged that he did not think cannabis was “particularly dangerous,” and he lamented the “ridiculous” penalties faced by those arrested for possessing it.

Nonetheless, he and those in his administration publicly doubled down on the supposed marijuana threat for reasons that were almost entirely political. As his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, later acknowledged, “We couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the (Vietnam) war or Black,” but we could get “the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin.”

By “criminalizing both heavily,” Ehrlichman explained, “we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” he asked. “Of course we did.”

Now, 50-plus years later, marijuana remains categorized as a Schedule I controlled substance — the same classification as heroin — and various politicians still reiterate many of these same myths and mistruths. Slowly but surely, the public is turning the page. 

According to Gallup, 70% of U.S. adults think “the use of marijuana should be legal.”

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RFK Jr. Takes A Page From The Prohibitionist Playbook By Endorsing Criminalization Of Kratom Compound 7-OH

At a recent press conference, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recommendation to classify 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) as a federally controlled substance. Despite political promises to forge a different path, the same tired Drug War tactics were on full display.

What Is 7-Hydroxymitragynine?

7-OH is one of many naturally occurring alkaloids found in the leaves of kratom trees. These leaves have been used for centuries as an herbal remedy. They contain a complex blend of alkaloids that interact with opioid, serotonin and alpha-adrenergic receptors. Around the world, people use kratom to help manage discomfort, enhance focus or relax.

In raw, dried kratom leaf, 7-OH exists only in trace amounts (typically less than 0.1 mg per gram of leaf). It’s formed when a more abundant alkaloid, mitragynine, degrades in the leaves.

But in recent years, manufacturers have begun converting large amounts of mitragynine into 7-OH to create extremely potent products. Some capsules and tablets contain 15–50 mg of 7-OH, hundreds of times more than what you’d find in a standard 2–5 gram serving of kratom leaves. 7-OH products produce stronger pain-killing effects than leaf kratom or kratom extract.

Yet potency, on its own, isn’t a problem. The problem is how these products are being manufactured, marketed and sold—with little to no safety testing, evidence for medical claims or manufacturing oversight.

7-OH manufacturing practices are often substandard, resulting in tablets that contain a range of unknown byproducts and impurities with substantial differences between batches. Oftentimes, manufacturers label them with kratom leaf imagery and terminology (such as “advanced kratom alkaloids,” “superior kratom alkaloids,” “premium kratom alkaloids” or “organic kratom extract full-spectrum 7-hydroxymitragynine”) with the clear intention to mislead consumers into thinking isolated 7-OH is similar to kratom.

Few come with clear dosage instructions, warnings about potential interactions or disclosures about dependency risks. And most are sold at gas stations and smoke shops, where employees typically have no education on the products or their potential risks.

What the Media and Government Get Wrong About 7OH

With growing popularity has come growing scrutiny. But government agencies and major media outlets aren’t focusing on the issues laid out above. Instead, the FDA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and HHS are leaning on a familiar narrative predicated on fear: opioid = bad, synthetic = dangerous and availability = addiction.

None of these equations hold up under scrutiny. First, opioids have saved far more lives than they’ve taken—through pain management, trauma care and palliative medicine. The vast majority of opioid-related deaths involve combinations with other sedatives, not opioids alone.

Second, the natural vs. synthetic distinction tells us nothing meaningful about a drug’s safety. Consider nicotine (natural, widely available, highly addictive) versus naloxone (synthetic, life-saving, non-addictive).

And finally, while availability may shape patterns of use, it’s not what drives addiction. We don’t attribute alcoholism to the mere existence of alcohol—especially when younger generations are drinking less despite liquor stores on every corner. Nor do we assume that junk food availability is the sole cause of disordered eating. Addiction is about context, not presence.

So far, there is little evidence to support the HHS’s narrative that 7-OH is ruining lives. Many people do report issues with dependency and withdrawal, as well as financial issues from spending a lot of money on 7-OH products. But reports of severe 7-OH-related harms (like overdoses) are sparse. There’s currently no public record of a single verified death caused solely by 7-OH. At the same time, many individuals report success using 7-OH to manage conditions that they haven’t found any other viable treatment for.

Despite the lack of research into 7-OH and evidence of significant harm (and the nascent state of medical research), the FDA has formally recommended that 7-OH be added to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. If approved, possession or production of 7-OH above a certain concentration would be a felony offense.

But placing a compound in Schedule I has historically done nothing to eliminate risk. In fact, we’ve often seen this categorization increase harm by pushing substances into the shadows, where they become harder to monitor, regulate, or use safely.

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Palestinians detained over 7 Oct attack face ‘no charges, no trial’: Report

Israeli authorities have yet to prosecute or charge a single person over Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023, despite tens of thousands of arrests made since the attack. 

According to public records cited by the New York Times (NYT), several hundred Palestinians have been detained on suspicion of direct involvement in the operation. At least 200 remain in custody. 

Army officials have said dozens were arrested in or around Israeli settlements during the time of the operation. 

Israel also holds around 2,700 others who were taken from Gaza since then, suspected of Hamas affiliation but not necessarily direct involvement in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. 

The human rights of these prisoners have been systematically violated by Israel. They have not been charged or given trials, and are held in harsh conditions. Media censorship and gag orders have kept details on their situation hidden. 

Lawyer Nadine Abu Arafeh said the way Israel is holding the prisoners “effectively erases these individuals from public awareness and strips them of fundamental rights.”

“Families in Gaza live with questions: Are their loved ones alive?” she added. 

Israeli authorities are “stretched beyond capacity,” former senior Israeli prosecutor Moran Gez told NYT. As a result, there have been delays in the 7 October cases moving forward. 

Simcha Rothman, an Israeli lawmaker from the ruling coalition, put the blame on state prosecutors for failing to adapt legal proceedings to the “unusual scale and nature of the attack.” 

Yulia Malinovsky, an Israeli opposition lawmaker, said Tel Aviv fears that pursuing the 7 October cases could ignite public scrutiny of the government and the Israeli army’s failure to prevent the operation. 

“They don’t want that discourse,” she said. 

The Knesset recently passed an initial vote on a bill to set up a tribunal to try suspects linked to the attack. It requires several more votes and could take months before detainees start going to court. 

Gez, the prosecutor who spoke with NYT, had said in January 2025 – nearing two years since the operation – that there were still zero complaints of sexual violence committed by Palestinians on 7 October. 

“The biggest difficulty is evidentiary. Using evidence to link a specific crime to a specific defendant when dealing with dozens of crime scenes, where hundreds of suspects were caught and thousands of offenses were committed, is almost impossible,” Gez said at the time, noting that ordinary laws of evidence are not suitable in this case” and admitting that Israel has very little evidence against any specific individual. 

The UN has also noted a lack of forensic evidence, testimonies, or eyewitness accounts. While Hebrew and western media continued to push narratives of mass rape on 7 October, Palestinian prisoners were being subjected to sexual violence by their Israeli jailers. 

In July last year, Israeli settlers rioted against the decision to arrest soldiers responsible for brutally raping and torturing a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention center – known as Israel’s Guantanamo. 

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Trump’s State Department Slams Romania’s Globalist Regime in Human Rights Report: Election Results Wiped, Democracy Under Attack

The latest human rights report from the U.S. State Department is turning heads—and not in a polite way.

Under President Donald Trump’s tough, no-nonsense foreign policy lens, the annual review reads less like a bureaucratic exercise and more like a direct call-out of Europe’s creeping authoritarianism. And right now, Romania’s globalist regime is sitting squarely in the hot seat.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, on December 6, 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court made a stunning decision, annulling the results after insurgent populist candidate Călin Georgescu secured a first-round victory in what had been a fair contest for the presidency.

Officially, the court, well-known for its corruption, cited “multiple irregularities and violations of electoral law.” The U.S. State Department isn’t buying it, however. In unusually pointed language, the report called it what it was: political interference, a crackdown on voices the establishment doesn’t like, and a full-scale attack on the legitimacy of the vote.

The court claimed Russian disinformation on social media tainted the election. Independent analysts, however, see it differently. This “foreign meddling” story looks a lot like a cover for a domestic crackdown orchestrated by Romanian globalist elites who didn’t like the results. In other words, the Kremlin, as we’ve seen numerous times in the past, was a convenient scapegoat for a homegrown power grab.

And Romania isn’t alone. Trump’s State Department report flags a worrying trend across Europe. Germany, France, and the U.K. all get called out for restricting free speech and using increasingly authoritarian methods..

France is battling restrictions on expression alongside a rise in antisemitism, while Britain’s so-called Online Safety Act—sold as child protection—has become a censorship weapon, according to critics. The pattern is clear: the erosion of liberty isn’t happening in far-off dictatorships; it’s unfolding right in the heart of the so-called free West.

Romania’s inclusion in the report is particularly damning. Here’s a NATO front-line nation, supposedly a post-communist democratic success story, now demonstrating that election results can be erased by judicial fiat.

And the European Union’s reaction? Tepid at best—its usual “monitoring” and “expressing concern” routine, signaling to every globalist establishment creature in Bucharest that you can get away with gutting democracy.

Scrapping the election results wasn’t a minor bureaucratic hiccup. It was a direct assault on representative democracy. Tossing out results, of course, sends a dangerous message: your vote only counts if the globalist elite overlords approve. This is how public trust erodes and political fights turn into endless courtroom battles, or much worse.

Perhaps even more shocking is the silence from supposedly ‘democratic’ European institutions. In any functioning democracy, such an extraordinary move would trigger outrage: parliamentary investigations, constitutional scrutiny, international condemnation.

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