Tag: police state

Texas Hemp THC Ban and Medical Marijuana Expansion Set to Become Law on Monday

With the deadline for gubernatorial action falling on Sunday, June 22, both bills are now expected to become law without Abbott’s signature unless he issues a rare weekend veto.

If no veto is delivered by the end of Sunday, the measures will automatically take effect. House Bill 46 would significantly broaden the state’s limited compassionate use program by adding eligibility for patients with chronic pain, terminal illness, and traumatic brain injuries. It would also expand the number of licensed dispensaries from three to fifteen and legalize new product forms, such as patches and inhalers.

Senate Bill 3 would prohibit nearly all hemp-derived THC products—including delta-8, delta-10, and THCO—when intended for ingestion, inhalation, or topical use. Only trace THC amounts would be allowed in non-intoxicating products like CBD. If enacted, the ban would deal a major blow to Texas’ multibillion-dollar hemp THC industry. The restrictions would take effect September 1.

Despite both bills passing with strong bipartisan support, Abbott said earlier this week that he was still undecided on the hemp ban. With time running out, stakeholders are bracing for the likelihood that both measures will quietly become law on Monday, June 23.

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The Coward’s Bargain: How We Taught A Generation To Live In Fear

Everyone’s Afraid to Speak

Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.

My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason and facts though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not.

This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.

But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “that can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.

But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes.

I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.

After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.

Another person told me they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during COVID sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.

But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity.

This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established.

And this is the world we’re handing to our children.

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Corruption: The Founders Warned Us About Ourselves

“This can only end in despotism.”

Benjamin Franklin didn’t offer that as a theory. It was a sentence – and prophetic. He knew exactly what happens when a people trade virtue for vice: liberty dies, and tyranny takes its place. Not by accident. Not by force. 

But by choice.

And he wasn’t alone. The founders – and the political thinkers they studied – understood this brutal truth: no system of government can survive the corruption of its own people. Not a monarchy. Not a republic. Not even one bound by the most carefully written constitution in human history.

Once the rot sets in, the outcome is inevitable. The laws become meaningless. The safeguards fail. The tyrants rise. And the people, soft and submissive, cheer them on.

That’s the path we’re on now. Not because we’ve been conquered. Because we’ve decayed.

This isn’t a warning about what politicians are doing to us. It’s a reckoning for what we’ve allowed to happen in ourselves. The one form of corruption no constitution can ever fix is the corruption of the people.

VIRTUE OR TYRANNY

Franklin made that plain just before the Philadelphia Convention began. He wasn’t focused on structures or amendments. He focused on character – because he knew freedom isn’t granted, it’s earned. And not everyone earns it.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

James Madison didn’t pretend otherwise. In the debates over ratification, he dismissed the fantasy that liberty could be preserved by parchment alone. If the people are corrupt, they won’t just tolerate corruption in office – they’ll literally vote for it. And that makes every branch of government just as rotten as the people who put them there.

“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”

Thomas Jefferson explained what comes next. The collapse of liberty doesn’t begin with gunfire or invasions – it begins with rot. A quiet, invisible corrosion that spreads through the people until the entire system breaks.

“It is the manners and spirit of the people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”

These weren’t new insights. The American founders didn’t invent this doctrine – they inherited it. Algernon Sidney paid for it with his life.

He warned that liberty and virtue are inseparable. Once one falls, so does the other.

“Liberty cannot be preserved, if the manners of the people are corrupted, nor absolute monarchy introduced where they are sincere.”

John Adams reached the same conclusion. He didn’t talk about elections or institutions. He made something else clear: the Constitution was made for a people of strong moral character – and it’s useless without them.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Samuel Adams didn’t just warn about corruption – he exposed the strategy behind it. Tyrants don’t need chains or armies to enslave a people. They just need to make the people ignorant and vicious. That’s how they hold power.

“It is in the Interest of Tyrants to reduce the People to Ignorance and Vice. For they cannot live in any Country where Virtue and Knowledge prevail.”

And the tyrants don’t even need chains. A broken people will do the job for them – gladly.

“The Religion and public Liberty of a People are intimately connected; their Interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this Reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin’d to destroy the People’s Liberties, practice every Art to poison their Morals.”

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Palantir Denies Claims It Is Building Master Database

Palantir Technologies is roundly denying claims it’s building a massive, unified database containing Americans’ personal information, following media coverage implying its work for various federal agencies could enable unprecedented surveillance.

On May 30, the New York Times published an article highlighting the potential impact of the more than $900 million worth of federal contracts awarded to the Denver-based technology company since the beginning of the Trump administration.

“We are not building, we have not been asked to build, and we’re not in contract to build any kind of federal master list or master database across different agencies,” Courtney Bowman, the company’s global director of privacy and civil liberties, told The Epoch Times, “Each of those contracts are separate and fulfill specific mandates that are scoped and bound by congressional authorities and other laws.”

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designed to limit wasteful spending by “eliminating information silos” among federal agencies. The order mandates that federal agencies must share data with each other. Furthermore, it requires the federal government to have unrestricted access to data from state programs receiving federal funding.

In the days following the report, various media outlets published reports that interpreted Palantir’s work as tantamount to developing a “’master database‘ or ’central intelligence layer’ drawing on Interal Revenue Service, Social Security, immigration and other records,” the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub at George Washington University said in June.

“Collecting and linking such a vast array of sensitive records could create an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure. … There is a heightened risk of sensitive data being repurposed for uses beyond its original intent, or being used for political purposes,” a team led by Michael Moreno, a research associate at the Hub said.

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U.S. Ramps Up Surveillance Amid Fears Of Iran-Backed Sleeper Cells 

President Trump stated Thursday that a potential U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear targets could occur within a two-week window. This announcement aligns with an uptick in U.S. military activity across the USNORTHCOM, USEUCOM, and USCENTCOM theaters, including airlift missions, the deployment of aerial refueling tankers, and the repositioning of naval assets—indicators consistent with pre-strike staging. While officially framed around countering Iran’s nuclear program, the operation so far suggests regime change. 

Simultaneously, in the Homeland, concerns are flourishing over the possible activation of Iran-backed operatives. According to CBS News, intelligence and law enforcement officials remain focused on Hezbollah-linked sleeper cells and IRGC proxy networks, which could be directed to carry out retaliatory actions if the U.S. initiates kinetic attacks against Iran to support Israel. 

Here’s more from CBS News, citing multiple sources… 

As President Trump is contemplating potential U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, law enforcement officials have stepped up surveillance of Iran-backed operatives in the United States, multiple sources told CBS News.

FBI Director Kash Patel has increased efforts to monitor possible domestic sleeper cells linked to Hezbollah — a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization backed by Iran — since Israel’s Operation Rising Lion offensive began earlier this month, U.S. officials said.

. . . 

The threat from Iranian operatives has worried current and former administration officials since Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was assassinated on Mr. Trump’s orders in January 2020.

CBS noted:

Late last year, federal prosecutors charged an operative of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and two U.S.-based people with plotting to surveil and assassinate critics of the Iranian regime. The IRGC operative allegedly told investigators he was pushed by unnamed IRGC officials to plan an attack against Mr. Trump.

The threat on the Homeland has never been graver given the Biden-Harris regime of globalists facilitated the greatest invasion this nation has ever seen on the southern border, with millions of unvetted migrants, criminals, cartel gangsters, and terrorists. 

In late 2024, former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams spoke on the Shawn Ryan Show about Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil. 

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex Has Now Become Self-Perpetuating

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle.

Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened.

Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.

The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic.

Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries.

A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naifs borrowed the malevolent concept of “disinformation” from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse, and tell other people what to do.

That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgements they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.

Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.

What is happening resembles classic “totalitarian” political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.

Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least ten years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.

The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day.

We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead.

This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too.

It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

How this happened is insidious.

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Loss of Narrative Control: How State Power Struggles Against Free Speech

The state is losing control over the dominant narratives in the competition of prevailing stories. Its apparatus of power responds predictably invasively and reveals its hostility toward dissenting opinions.

The German Bundestag’s Vice President Bodo Ramelow calls for stricter control of social media. “The platforms must be regulated,” Ramelow warns, demanding that operators “be held liable for what happens on their platforms.” In view of the “coarsening of language and writing” in the digital space, he advocates clear identity verification of users.

Of course, the former Prime Minister of Thuringia and self-confessed fanboy of cultivated socialism is as far removed from protecting free speech as he is from a fair exchange of arguments among different interest groups on an equal footing, where the state takes on the role of a passive guardian. No, Ramelow is a representative of the autonomously reproducing caste of statists, whose clearly articulated goal is to develop the state from a referee role into the dominant actor in the societal power field.

Socialism as a Viral Disease

A state that abandons its neutral role inevitably degenerates into an overbearing actor — socialism as a power construct is the consequence. One can also understand socialism in its revolving character as a kind of intellectual viral disease. Resentment, inferiority complexes, and failure translate in unstable personalities prone to one-dimensionality in societal disputes into vulgar fantasies of expropriation. Economic and cultural crises cause the rapid spread of this civilizationally deforming ideology — a mental pandemic gaining energy, whose discharge dissolves the pillars of civilization: private property, autonomy of action, family, religion, and cultural life.

It is of fundamental importance to understand at what point in the cyclical course of our society we have arrived. Ramelow’s talk can of course be dismissed as infantile utterances of a provincial politician and salon communist, who, like so many of his comrades, has carved a path through bureaucratic positions, public service, and NGO activism to eke out a life at maximum distance from normal reality. Yet in my opinion, this would be a superficial judgment. Ramelow’s unrestrained demands for control of the supposed sovereign are an expression of the final phase of the societal cycle. We stand at a turning point where representatives of the state feel the overstretching of their power, shaped in growing public debt, collapsing economies, and an as yet unspecific unrest among the people.

State Activates Last Resources

The left-wing power machine’s fight against dissenting opinions and political movements has long been institutionalized. In laws such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU undertakes as a kind of “Ministry of Truth” the obscene attempt to bring social media platforms under state control to counteract its loss of power. Soft, emotionally charged, the enforcers of control cite transparency and youth protection to justify their overreach. The obligation to moderate content and disclose algorithms opens the door wide to political influence.

The citizen’s digital sovereignty as a counter-public, as a new regulatory mechanism against state media dominance, has become the newest battlefield of a society that passively watched the rise of initially gentle socialism and must now experience how from climate moralism and diversity hype emerges a passive-aggressive classic control socialism, which spares no effort to deploy state organs like the judiciary apparatus against the growing dissident movement. In this way, the state forges ever new weapons in the war of memes, a war long lost but seemingly continued as a rearguard action until the bitter end. Consider the flood of lawsuits with which failed representatives of societal transformation like Robert Habeck defend their criticism-immune safe zones.

The judiciary’s assault on U.S. President Donald Trump during last year’s election campaign, intended to sideline the Republican, will go down as a unique case in American judicial history. These cases accumulate into a fundamental problem, drawing the battle line between the state apparatus and the civic sphere so sharply that one can already fairly confidently predict the failure of this pathological control fetish. That the U.S. government has actually managed in recent geopolitical turmoil to initiate the first budget cuts to the propaganda vehicle USAID can be seen as a milestone victory in the open culture war against civic freedom.

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Israel Cracks Down on Foreign Media Outlets with New ‘Zero Tolerance’ Censorship Policy

Israel is placing strict limits on video that news organizations can take at the scene of Iranian missile attacks.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi announced the policy, which requires prior approval from “the Israel Police, the Government Press Office (GPO), and the military [Israel Defense Forces] censor,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

“In accordance with new zero-tolerance enforcement measures led by the national security minister and the police commissioner, any transmission — live or recorded — from areas under missile fire must receive explicit clearance from the IDF censor,” GPO Director Nitzan Chen said.

The new policy was enacted after missile attacks in Beersheba, Holon, and Ramat Gan.

In those incidents, footage was appearing on Al Jazeera. The Jerusalem Post report said CNN and The New York Times were targeted by the new rule in addition to Al Jazeera.

Although some photographers said they represented other outlets, Israeli officials said the footage was used by Al Jazeera, regardless of who might have recorded it.

On Tuesday, Israeli police confiscated photo equipment used by journalists in Haifa.

Al Jazeera has made an unauthorized broadcast of a rocket strike on an Israeli oil refinery compound, something no Israeli media outlet was allowed to do.

“Following the successful coordinated enforcement against Al Jazeera broadcasts and others that violate censorship instructions and harm state security, we are implementing a new policy: All foreign journalists who wish to broadcast from Israel during wartime must receive specific written approval from the military censor — not only for the broadcast itself, but for the precise location, as well,” Ben Gvir and Karhi said.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid responded, criticizing the decision.

“Their decision to impose sweeping censorship will not be enforceable as long as people have cell phones with cameras, and it simply crushes the support that has emerged worldwide over the past week for the just war we are waging,” Lapid noted.

But Ben Gvir said broadcasts can be used as weapons.

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Belgian Nationalist Given 12 Month Suspended Sentence Because Someone Else Shared a ‘Racist’ Meme

Belgian conservative-nationalist Dries Van Langenhove has again been sentenced on appeal to one year in prison as a suspended sentence for what the judge said were violations of the Racism and Negationism Act.

The sentence stems from racist memes that were not even posted by him, but by members of a group chat he administrated seven years ago.

The sentence was delivered today by the Court of Appeal in Ghent, although Van Langenhove does not accept the sentence, and the case now goes into cassation.

On X, Van Langenhove simply wrote, “Guilty. 12 months in jail. Madness.”

He later clarified upon receipt of the written verdict that the custodial sentence “appears to be a suspended sentence,” which he suspects is “most likely because the prisons in Belgium are literally full of illegal migrants.”

“Most people don’t realize that the end result of such a sentence is the same. One politically incorrect tweet can now put me in jail. One meme sent by someone else in a group chat I am in can turn the suspended sentence into an effective one. This suspended sentence is the gravest form of censorship they could pursue and an effective way to kill activism,” he added.

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“What in the World Would Justify Doing This?”: A Texas Vet and Hemp-Business Owner on the Looming THC Ban

By Sunday, Texans will know whether the hemp-derived THC products that have been legal in the state since 2019 will be banned as of September 1. During the Eighty-Ninth Legislature, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 3, which would end a $5.5 billion industry and which now sits on Governor Greg Abbott’s desk. Sunday is the deadline for him to either veto the bill—breaking with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who made SB 3 a priority during the session and pushed it through both chambers with zeal—or allow it to become law. 

Lukas Gilkey, an Austin-based U.S. Coast Guard veteran, cofounded the cannabis company Hometown Hero, which has been producing hemp-derived THC products since 2019, and has emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of the ban. The 44-year-old has gone viral for his social media posts responding to Patrick and defending the industry. With just days to go before Abbott determines the fate of the industry, we asked him to explain his position and make his pitch to the governor for why weed is good for Texas.  

Texas Monthly: So there’s an argument that legalization of these products in 2019 was kind of an accident: The Legislature legalized hemp, mirroring language that appeared in the federal farm bill the previous year, and in the process allowed the proliferation of certain derivatives that it did not consider. And so the argument goes that what it has done this session is just correcting an oversight. Does that hold water for you? 

Lukas Gilkey: Knowingly or unknowingly, they legalized these products, and subsequently a fully legal industry was created from that decision. This industry has over four billion dollars in retail sales in Texas. It’s created over 53,000 jobs, over eight thousand small businesses. If they wanted to correct it, it should have been done much sooner, rather than letting so many Texans enter this industry under the assumption it was legal and the politicians were okay with it. They allowed this thing to grow and then changed their mind six years later when they could have done it in 2021. Why did they not? 

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