Tag: police state

‘Smoking Gun’ Emails Show New York City Officials Played Role in Firing Unvaccinated Workers

Unredacted internal emails obtained after a three-year legal battle may reshape ongoing lawsuits over New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates, according to attorneys who spoke on “Good Morning, CHD” this week.

The records, obtained through New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), show top city officials and government lawyers working together behind the scenes to push back on religious exemption requests, privately dismissing workers’ beliefs while building arguments to help arbitrators deny them.

Attorney Jimmy Wagner, who led the records fight, said the documents expose a “smoking gun.”

In the lawsuits over the documents, the unredacted versions were visible to everyone in the courtroom except the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Wagner said. City lawyers knew exactly what the emails contained while making arguments that directly contradicted them.

“They’re literally arguing out of both sides of their mouth,” Wagner said.

The government attorneys claimed they were acting with integrity and protecting religious rights. Yet “in the same breath, they have this … smoking gun piece of evidence that shows the city from the beginning … believed that anyone making a religious accommodation request, especially as it was associated to abortion, it was BS. That’s their language — ‘BS,’ in capital letters,” he said.

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60-Year-Old British Tourist Charged Along with 20 Others in Dubai for Filming Iranian Missiles Despite Deleting the Video Immediately

A 60-year-old British tourist from London was detained and formally charged in Dubai under the United Arab Emirates’ strict cybercrime laws after allegedly recording Iranian missiles flying over the city.

The man, whose identity has not been revealed, is part of a group of 21 people of various nationalities being prosecuted for the same reason: recording and sharing material related to recent Iranian missile and drone attacks that have struck Emirati territory.

According to reports confirmed by British authorities and the organization Detained in Dubai, the tourist was arrested on Monday, March 9, 2026, in the Bur Dubai area.

Police found a video on his phone showing an Iranian missile impact in Dubai, although the man claims he deleted it immediately when confronted by the authorities and denies any intention of publishing or distributing it.

Nevertheless, he was charged with “using an information network or technological tool to disseminate, publish, republish, or circulate false news, rumors, or provocative propaganda that may incite public opinion or disturb public security.”

The invoked Emirati law expressly prohibits publishing or sharing any material that may “disturb public security.”

The UAE Attorney General’s Office had previously issued warnings: “Photographing or sharing attack sites, unreliable information, or images of projectile damage may lead to legal action and compromise national security.”

Since the start of the current conflict between Iran, the United States, and Israel on February 28, 2026, the Emirates have reported more than 1,800 drones and missiles launched against their territory, resulting in six deaths and 141 injuries.

The Emirati Ministry of Defense and senior officials, including the ambassador to the United Kingdom Mansoor Abulhoul, justified the measures as citizen protection: preventing missile fragments from falling on those filming and avoiding panic or the disclosure of defensive positions.

The British Embassy in Abu Dhabi immediately published an official alert on X: “UAE authorities warn against photographing, posting, or sharing images of incident sites, projectile damage, government buildings, or diplomatic missions. British nationals are subject to UAE laws; violations may lead to fines, imprisonment, or deportation.”

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UK Regulator Ofcom Has Fined 4chan £520,000 Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US

Ofcom has now fined 4chan £520,000 ($691,572) under the Online Safety Act. The platform hasn’t paid a penny and isn’t intending to. Its lawyer replied to the latest demand with a picture of a hamster.

That’s the state of UK online speech regulation in 2026: a regulator issuing fines to American websites, receiving rodent-themed correspondence in return, and collecting almost nothing.

The breakdown: £450,000 for failing to put age verification in place, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published, and £20,000 for failing to set out in its terms of service how it protects users from criminal content. Ofcom says 4chan must comply by April 2 or face daily penalties on top.

But this confrontation and push for 4chan to start checking IDs didn’t start with a £520,000 fine. It started with an email sent across the Atlantic to a company that owes the UK government nothing.

4chan is an American platform. Its registered in Delaware. Its servers are in the United States. It has no employees in Britain, no offices in Britain, no legal registration in Britain, and no business presence of any kind in Britain. It is, in every meaningful sense, none of Ofcom’s business.

And what good would the First Amendment be if it could be overridden by foreign demands?

When the Online Safety Act came into full force, Ofcom declared that any site with “links to the UK” had duties to protect UK users, regardless of where in the world it was based.

That phrase, “links to the UK,” is intentionally vague, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website. Under that logic, any American platform that a British person can visit is subject to UK speech law. No presence required. No UK operations required. Ofcom thinks it has jurisdiction over planet Earth.

Beginning in April 2025, Ofcom sent a “legally binding information notice” to 4chan’s corporate services company, by email, demanding compliance with the Online Safety Act and threatening that failure could “constitute a criminal offence” resulting in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and imprisonment for up to two years.

The notice was sent to a company not authorized to accept service on 4chan’s behalf. No UK court had issued it. No treaty process had been followed. It was, legally speaking, a strongly worded email.

Preston Byrne, the attorney representing 4chan, described the regulator’s actions as “an illegal campaign of harassment” directed at American tech firms, and made clear his client would not comply: “4chan has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty.”

By June 2025, Ofcom had opened a formal investigation.

Byrne’s reply was characteristically direct: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” He continued: “After an entire year of your agency’s spectacular failure to get the memo, my only suggestion is that you take a first-year course on U.S. constitutional law.”

In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms took the fight to the US federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties. The complaint states: “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence.”

The platforms argue that Ofcom’s demands, including written “risk assessments,” content moderation systems, removal of speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and user identity verification, would require violating the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Byrne told reporters: “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an email.”

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Jury Clears Afroman of Defamation for Mocking Cops Who Raided His House

An Ohio jury on Wednesday found the rapper Afroman not liable for defaming the sheriff’s deputies who raided his house nearly four years ago.

The verdict is a free speech victory for Joseph Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High.” Over the course of a three-day civil trial that captured social media attention, Afroman, who appeared in court dressed in an American flag-print suit, insisted that he had a First Amendment right to make fun of the deputies who kicked down his door and pawed through his belongings. Afroman released several music videos about the incident using surveillance footage of the raid.

“I got freedom of speech. After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my back yard, use my freedom of speech, and turn my bad times into a good time, yes I do,” Afroman told jurors on Tuesday. “And I think I’m a sport for doing so, because I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors [and] then try to play the victim and sue them.”

The sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, were reduced in court to watching full-length music videos of Afroman mocking them and testifying about how the rapper had called them “dipshits” and made claims to sleeping with their wives.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, which filed an amicus brief in support of Afroman, applauded the verdict.

“We’re very pleased with this outcome, and we think the jury got it right. Robust protection for free speech requires leaving room for speakers to give their opinions in strong, florid, or figurative terms without fear of criminal or civil consequences,” says David Carey, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. “All the more so with speech involving criticism of government officials and their actions. Juries exercising common sense and considering the full context and actual meaning of a speaker’s words are a critical part of that system.”

Adams County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house in 2022. According to a search warrant, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon. 

Body camera footage of the raid showed the deputies—after the initial excitement of busting down the front door—ambling through Afroman’s house, rifling through his clothes and CDs, and trying to find false walls and secret rooms. But the hourslong search turned up no evidence to corroborate the claim of a basement dungeon. Part of the problem may have been that, as Afroman’s record label told Vice, the house did not have a basement.

Afroman was never charged with a crime.

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Prairieland Verdict: Texas Man Found Guilty of Transporting Constitutionally Protected Pamphlets

A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted eight protestors on charges ranging from rioting to attempted murder after a noise demonstration turned violent outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Prairieland Detention Center last summer. Federal prosecutors claim the group was part of an “Antifa Cell” and provided “material support to terrorists.” First Amendment legal scholars have raised serious concerns about the chilling effect these prosecutions and convictions will have on future political dissent.

One man’s conviction emphasized just how far that chilling effect could go. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, the husband of one of the convicted protestors, wasn’t present at the time of the July 4 demonstration. After receiving a call from his wife, Maricela Rueda, from the Johnston County Jail, in which she told him to do “whatever you need to do” and “move whatever you need to move at the house,” officers began watching Sanchez-Estrada, according to the criminal complaint filed against him.

Shortly after, officers observed Sanchez-Estrada load and move a box from his home to another residence. Sanchez-Estrada was then arrested on state traffic offenses, and officers obtained a search warrant to locate and search the box. Inside, they found “numerous Antifa materials, such as insurrection planning, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents,” according to a November indictment. Sanchez-Estrada was subsequently charged federally with corruptly concealing a document and conspiracy to conceal documents.

Sanchez-Estrada was convicted on both counts on March 13 and now faces up to 40 years in federal prison. But despite ICE proclaiming in a post on X that the contents of Sanchez-Estrada’s box contained “literal insurrectionist propaganda,” these controversial materials fall squarely under constitutionally protected speech.

“I feel like the U.S. lost here with this verdict and what it means for future defendants,” Christopher Weinbel, Sanchez-Estrada’s federal public defender and a U.S. Army veteran, told The Washington Post. “I feel like it turned its back on justice with this.”

The other eight protestors were charged and convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and using explosives after they set off fireworks outside the Prairieland ICE facility. Rueda was also convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents along with Sanchez-Estrada. Additionally, Benjamin Song was convicted of attempted murder of a U.S. officer and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence after he allegedly shot and wounded a police officer during the demonstration.

In response to the convictions, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the guilty “verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.” But First Amendment lawyers are wary of conflating constitutionally protected speech after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September categorizing the loosely defined “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal group, told the Associated Press that the government wants to “squash” opposition, and a case like this one creates fear, “hoping that folks in other cities then will think twice over protesting.” The U.S. district judge presiding over the case, a Trump nominee, Mark Pittman, also signaled First Amendment concerns, according to The Guardian, when he asked prosecutors about the relevance of including antifa in the jury instructions. “Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” Pittman asked during the trial, reported The Guardian.

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Homeschooling Families Push Back on Proposed Regulations in Connecticut

When Gina Stewart began homeschooling her oldest child 30 years ago, there were no regulations requiring her to notify the state if, how, or what she was teaching her son in their house.

Stewart, in the years that followed, informed her local district annually, as a courtesy, that her boys wouldn’t be enrolled in public schools.

One son later became a plumber, one enrolled in community college before he was even old enough to drive, and one will attend a police academy after he turns 21.

The youngest, 15, is still completing his high school curriculum, including pre-calculus.

Stewart recently began homeschooling her grandchild, but she said she fears that the educational freedom her family enjoyed for decades is under threat.

A proposed Connecticut state law would require homeschooling parents to provide their local school districts with proof of “equivalent” instruction annually.

It also requires school districts to notify the Department of Children and Families if a child is removed from public schools.

“I don’t want their curriculum,” Stewart, who attended Connecticut public schools and previously taught at a Catholic school, told The Epoch Times.

“I never originally intended to homeschool my kids. But I don’t think the schools are preparing kids to become productive citizens.”

Stewart was among hundreds of concerned parents who attended a legislative committee hearing last week on the proposed legislation.

The hearing went for about 19 hours, during which more than 300 people testified and 3,000-plus provided written opinions, a vast majority against the bill.

“I’d say it’s about 99-to-one against the bill,” Ralph Rodriguez, an attorney with the Home School Legal Defense Association, who also attended the hearing, told The Epoch Times.

“No regulation is acceptable. Today’s check-in can very easily encroach on other freedoms.”

The check-in and notification to the Department of Children and Families regulations are in response to the recent murder of an 11-year-old girl whose mother attempted to cover up the death by telling the local district that she was homeschooling her daughter.

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Brazil Launches Mandatory Age Verification Law for Online Platforms

Brazil’s Digital ECA (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente Digital) took effect today, March 17, requiring nearly every tech product accessible to children to clear a long list of compliance obligations.
Apps, operating systems, app stores, video games, social networks: all potentially covered, all facing fines of up to 50 million Brazilian reais (roughly US$9.44 million) or 10% of their Brazilian revenue for non-compliance.

As always, the framing is child protection. The infrastructure being built is a national age verification system woven into the fabric of internet access.

“Brazil has stepped forward as the first country in Latin America to pass a dedicated law to protect children’s online privacy and safety,” goes the official line.

Every major technology platform operating in Brazil must now determine how old its users are and restrict what they can see accordingly. The checkbox that said “I am over 18” is explicitly banned.

Article 37’s sole paragraph states that regulations “may not, under any circumstances, impose, authorize, or result in the implementation of mechanisms of massive, generic, or indiscriminate surveillance.”

Then Article 9 bans self-reported age. Article 12 demands “auditable” verification. The law prohibits the only mechanism that would make the law work.

Auditable, non-self-declaration age verification requires collecting something real about you.

The law permits a range of methods: government ID, biometric face scanning, behavioral pattern analysis that watches how you type and what you click, age inference from activity data, and educational history.

Every single one of these collects sensitive personal information and creates a record. There is no method on the approved list that doesn’t involve building exactly the kind of identity infrastructure Article 37 claims to forbid. The legislators either didn’t notice the contradiction or they noticed and didn’t care.

The obligation falls on platforms, not directly on every individual user. But the effect is the same. Platforms that want to comply need to verify who you are and how old you are before showing you restricted content. If you want to see it, you provide the data. If you don’t provide the data, you don’t get access.

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Liberals reject strengthening self-defence laws in Canada

On Monday’s Rebel Roundup livestream, David Menzies and Alexa Lavoie said the Liberals were, yet again, on the wrong side of an important issue.

“I love what Pierre Poilievre had to say after a few high-profile home invasions,” David said, recalling the Conservative leader’s pledge to “fix” self-defence laws by removing the caveat regarding “excessive force or unnecessary force, which nobody can define.”

Referring to an incident from Lindsay, Ont. where a man defended himself from an intruder armed with a crossbow, David said Canada’s current legal framework is “insane.”

Granting homeowners the right to use lethal force during a break in is “the right call,” he added.

“What are you talking about,” Alexa said in response to MP Sahota’s comments.

If someone, especially an armed criminal, enters into an individual’s private dwelling, then that person “should have the right to reply and defend myself and the people who live under my roof,” she said.

The justice system put in place by the Liberals is also releasing more dangerous offenders back onto the streets, putting ordinary citizens in at risk, Alexa continued.

“They should have the right to defend themselves,” she said, slamming politicians like Sahota for not “living in our reality.”

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Trump suggests treason charges for journalists as Iran war spins out of control

You know a war probably isn’t going well when the President starts threatening media outlets with treason charges.

This weekend, President Trump unleashed one of his infamous Truth Social rants. This one targeted the Wall Street Journal, for reporting an Iranian strike that hit five U.S. Air Force refueling planes at an air base in Saudi Arabia.

“The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies,” he wrote.

This assertion doesn’t refute any part of the reporting, as the WSJ story says the planes weren’t destroyed.

Trump’s post equates the WSJ report with AI-generated videos of U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln burning, which began spreading after the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy falsely claimed it had attacked the aircraft carrier. Outlets like the New York Times have debunked the authenticity of those videos, but Trump imagines that they have been shared by U.S. media in collusion with Iran’s government. He then suggested that these news organizations be charged with treason, which carries a maximum penalty of death.

“The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!,” wrote Trump. “The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they ‘win’ are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets.”

The President embraced the same narrative while talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. “Iran is known for a lot of fake news,” he declared. “I actually think it’s pretty criminal because our media companies, who have no credibility whatsoever, are putting out information that they know is false.”

Trump’s latest maniacal fantasy comes just days after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to take away the broadcasting licenses of networks that failed to “operate in the public interest” while covering the war on Iran.

“The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves,” tweeted Carr. “It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.”

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Decentralizing Defense: A $96 Guided Rocket Just Put Precision Warfare into the Hands of the People

In a world where the State spends trillions of dollars on bloated defense contracts to build “smart” weapons that often end up incinerating wedding parties or schools in the Middle East, a single individual with a 3D printer and $96 just shattered the monopoly on high-tech violence. A video, along with the plans, has recently surfaced showcasing “Project Canard,” an open-source, 3D-printed guided rocket system that recalculates its trajectory mid-air using a $5 sensor and some piano wire. The creator, operating under the GitHub handle novatic14, has essentially handed the keys to advanced surface-to-air defense to anyone with an internet connection and a spool of plastic filament.

The technical specifications of the build are a direct slap in the face to the military-industrial complex. The entire launcher and interceptor frame are printed in standard PLA and run off an off-the-shelf ESP32 microcontroller, proving that the barrier to entry for precision hardware has not just been lowered—it has been obliterated. The system even creates its own local Wi-Fi network, allowing the operator to monitor live telemetry and arm the “MANPADS” (Man-Portable Air-Defense System) prototype from a laptop. It uses a distributed camera node network to triangulate targets and update flight paths in real-time, a capability that, until about ten minutes ago, was the exclusive domain of governments with the power to tax their citizens into poverty.

Of course, the usual suspects in D.C. and the corporate press are likely already clutching their pearls, preparing the “public safety” scripts they use every time the people reclaim a sliver of their natural rights. We’ve seen this play out before with pioneers like Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed, who fought the State to a standstill over the right to share files for 3D-printed firearms. The reality is that this technology is about the decentralization of power. When a “precision weapon” costs less than a pair of designer sneakers, the era of the State using air superiority to crush dissent or occupy foreign lands is nearing its expiration date.

Indeed, the state has already begun mobilizing its legislative machinery to ensure that the “Project Canard” breakthrough remains a fleeting moment of defiance rather than a permanent shift in power. As we move through 2026, the regulatory landscape is shifting from targeting just the finished product to criminalizing the very tools and information that make decentralized defense possible. In a move that mirrors the most dystopian science fiction, lawmakers in states like California and New York are currently pushing bills that would force 3D printer manufacturers to install “firearm blocking technology” directly into the hardware.

Take California’s Assembly Bill 2047, for instance. This proposal would effectively turn every 3D printer into a government-monitored device, requiring mandatory “blueprint detection algorithms” to stop the production of “unlawful” parts. It’s not just about the plastic; it’s about the code. Under similar legislation like Colorado’s HB26-1144, the mere possession of digital instructions for a firearm or “firearm component” can now be classified as a crime if “intent to manufacture” is suspected. When a “component” can be as simple as a 3D-printed fin or a motor casing, the state has essentially granted itself the power to arrest you for having the wrong files on your hard drive.

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