Tag: snitching

Columbus Jewish organization reports anti-war protests to police after rise in antisemitism

After the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, antisemitism spiked in central Ohio. Jewish Columbus reported threats and harassment against Jewish people to police, but WOSU found the organization also reported protest activity that was critical of Israel.

Some believe Jewish Columbus’ actions blurred the lines between hate speech and protected speech by reporting both to police. The group defended its actions to WOSU at first, saying it didn’t believe the protests as a whole were antisemitic. Now, Jewish Columbus says it is reporting both antisemitic attacks on Jewish people and events it believes are against Zionism.

Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis when it invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel retaliated, invading the Gaza Strip.  In the nearly two years since, it is estimated that more than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed.

Here in Columbus and around the U.S., people took to the streets to protest after Israel’s counterattack began, alleging Israel was committing genocide.

At this time Jewish Columbus, a branch of the Jewish Federations of North America, started seeing a rise in antisemitism. The group and its umbrella organization have increased security and established an intelligence apparatus across more than 100 locations in U.S. cities, including Cincinnati and Cleveland.

Jewish Columbus reported these antisemitic acts to police, but went a step further. WOSU found through a records request to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office that Jewish Columbus was also reporting any protest activity it thought was critical of Israel’s actions.

Jewish Columbus told police about Students for Justice in Palestine events at Ohio State University and Ohio Wesleyan University.

It also reported a candlelight vigil at the Ohio Statehouse hosted by the Noor Muslim Student group.

This small group of mostly young women and girls stated on Instagram in Nov. 2023 they were gathering for a silent tribute to the victims in Gaza.

There were no protests or speeches.

But Jewish Columbus reported the vigil to police anyway.

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Anti-Marijuana Groups Narc On D.C. Dispensaries In Letter To Trump, Saying They Are Too Close To Schools

Anti-marijuana organizations are formally narcing on several locally licensed cannabis businesses in Washington, D.C.—sending a letter to President Donald Trump, the U.S. attorney general and a federal prosecutor that identifies dispensaries they allege are too close to schools despite approval from District of Columbia officials.

Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) President Kevin Sabet and the head of a D.C. organization called “1000 Feet” recently sent the letter to the White House and DOJ, saying they “support prioritizing public safety and reducing drug use in the District of Columbia.”

This comes as the president considers a proposal to federally reschedule cannabis, which he said last week will be decided imminently. The issue has divided key voices in the MAGA world, and SAM is among the most vocal opponents of the reform.

But as Trump has moved to federalize D.C. law enforcement by putting DOJ and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in positions of power to subvert local police control, the letter from the anti-cannabis groups encourages the administration to address the “ongoing lawlessness” allegedly associated with certain marijuana businesses in the jurisdiction.

Specifically, they say that over the last two years, “the DC government has licensed marijuana retailers to operate in close proximity to several elementary schools and daycare centers, over the strenuous objections of parents and educators, and in blatant violation of the Federal Drug-Free School Zones Act.”

The groups said that while they were “pleased” to see former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin “take initial steps against one of the worst offenders” by threatening a locally licensed medical marijuana dispensary with criminal prosecution back in March, “we have not seen any public progress since then.”

Martin, for his part, has since been tapped by Trump to serve as U.S. pardon attorney.

“We hope the initiative you announced this week will provide another opportunity for you to protect the District’s children by taking swift action to close down all the offending marijuana retailers near schools and to inform the DC government that any further licensing of retailers at locations in violation of the Federal Drug-Free School Zones Act will be treated as a criminal conspiracy,” SAM and 1000 Feet said in the letter, which was sent on Friday.

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Minnesota’s COVID Snitch Line Exposed: Hundreds Turned in Neighbors for Going Outside!

In March 2020, the State of Minnesota opened a hotline for residents to report violations to Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, social distancing guidelines and lockdown directives.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Infowars has exclusively obtained over 950 emails and phone calls that were sent in to Minnesota’s violation tip line, showing busybody residents reporting others for using city parks, attending drive-thru church services, and indeed for merely walking on the sidewalk.

The emails illustrate how the fear instilled by the media and corporate establishment resulted in neighbors turning against one another, eagerly buying in hook, line and sinker to the largest psy-op campaign ever waged on humanity.

Below are just a few emails we’ve reviewed that show the extent to which many went along with Gov. Walz’s request.

Beware: These people live among you.

In one of the more incredible emails, a woman reported her own 18-year-old brother for “going back and forth…between houses.”

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Report Your Family For Wrong Think, Says German Government Initiative

Germany’s Interior Ministry, headed by Nancy Faeser – known for banning media outlets – and the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth have launched a project dubbed, “Advice Compass on Conspiracy Thinking.”

The center is there to provide advice to anyone who “suspect their friends or family members have fallen victim to conspiracy theories,” according to the Interior Ministry.

You can’t make this up, and Germany’s current authorities are no pioneers here. In one form or another, the “spying starts at home” policy – trying to get people to make the state’s population surveillance job easier – has existed before.

But, worryingly, that was/is under some of the most repressive regimes in recent history.

As serious as the matter is, hilariously enough, the German word for “advice” happens to be – “rat.”

“Holistic” is how Faeser chose to describe this approach and the inclusion of the “advice” center into Germany’s overall fight against what the authorities consider to be extremism and disinformation.

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State ‘Bias Response Hotlines’ Encourage People To Snitch on Their Neighbors for ‘Hate Speech’

By the end of this year, as many as 100 million Americans could live in a state where they can be reported to a “bias response hotline” for a wide range of protected speech. While states claim that these reporting mechanisms don’t punish people for non-criminal speech acts, many also claim to attempt to stop hateful speech incidents “before they occur.”

According to a recent report in The Washington Free Beacon by reporter Aaron Sibarium, these reporting systems allow people to “snitch” on their neighbors. Connecticut allows people to report “hate speech” they “heard about but did not see.” Vermont encourages citizens to call the police over “biased but protected speech.” Philadelphia actually directs people to give the names of alleged offenders so they can be contacted.

“If it is not a crime, we sometimes contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” Saterria Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, told Sibarium.

Oregon’s Bias Response hotline encourages citizens to report not only hate crimes, but also “non-criminal hostile expression motivated in part or whole by” someone’s protected identity. These incidents can include “hate speech,” “displaying hateful symbols or flags,” and “telling or sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.”

What happens when someone calls this hotline? The Free Beacon called the hotline and reported a fictional incident—a man, identifying himself as a Muslim said that he felt “targeted” by his neighbor’s Israeli flag. 

“Within 20 minutes, a hotline operator had logged the display in a ‘state database,’ referred to it as a ‘warning sign,’ and suggested installing security cameras in case the situation ‘escalates,'” Sibarium writes. “He also informed this reporter that, ‘as a victim of a bias incident,’ he could apply for taxpayer-funded therapy through the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, which covers counseling costs for bias incidents as well as crimes.”

Even though nothing criminal had allegedly occurred—or even something that could be fairly described as objectively offensive—the operator nonetheless treated the report with immense gravity.

“Even if it is not very explicit, we go with whatever the victim is experiencing,” the operator said during the call. “And if your sense is that this is based on discrimination against your faith or your country of origin…that’s how I would document it.”

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Share an ‘Offensive’ Joke? A State Bureaucrat May Ask You To Attend Sensitivity Training

We’re all familiar with the time-honored creed, “Snitches get stitches.” In states like Oregon, it turns out they get taxpayer-funded therapy. 

That’s according to the Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium, who investigated the “bias response hotlines” popping up in states and cities across the country. In Oregon, for example, “trauma-informed operators” overseen by the state’s justice department field calls outlining “bias incidents”—cases of “non-criminal” speech allegedly motivated by prejudice or hate, like “racist images” or “offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.”

Sibarium called the Oregon hotline to report a fictitious incident in which he said he was a Muslim concerned about the “genocide” in Gaza and felt “targeted” by an Israeli flag on his neighbor’s front door. It took just 20 minutes for an operator to log the incident in a state database as a “warning sign.” The operator went on to suggest installing security cameras. “He also informed this reporter that, ‘as a victim of a bias incident,’ he could apply for taxpayer-funded therapy through the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, which covers counseling costs for bias incidents as well as crimes,” Sibarium writes.

Similar reporting systems are up and running in Connecticut, Vermont, Philadelphia, and Maryland. In the City of Brotherly Love, residents can fill out an online form that asks for the “exact address,” name, and gender identity of the alleged offender. The city uses that information to “contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” according to a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations.

“The systems, which include hotlines and online portals, resemble the bias response teams commonplace on college campuses, which allow students to report each other, anonymously and without verification, for ideological faux pas,” Sibarium notes. “What sets the state-run systems apart are their ties to law enforcement.”

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Utility company’s proposal to rat out hidden marijuana operations to police raises privacy concerns

Operators of illegal marijuana grow enterprises hidden inside rural homes in Maine don’t have to worry much about prying neighbors. But their staggering electric bills may give rise to a new snitch.

An electric utility made an unusual proposal to help law enforcement target these illicit operations, which are being investigated for ties to transnational crime. Critics, however, worry the move would violate customers’ privacy.

More than a dozen states that legalized marijuana have seen a spike in illegal marijuana grow operations that utilize massive amounts of electricity. And Maine’s Versant Power has been receiving subpoenas — sometimes for 50 locations at a time — from law enforcement, said Arrian Myrick-Stockdell, corporate counsel. It’d be far more efficient, he suggested to utility regulators, to flip the script and allow electric utilities to report their suspicions to law enforcement.

“Versant has a very high success rate in being able to identify these locations, but we have no ability to communicate with law enforcement proactively,” Myrick-Stockdell told commissioners.

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Walz Created ‘Snitch Line’ for COVID Mandate Violators

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate for the 2024 presidential election. 

This choice has reignited discussions around Walz’s controversial actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the establishment of a notorious “snitch line” in March 2020.

He and his family have also been under fire for their actions and revealing remarks amid the 2020 BLM riots.

The Post Millennial (TPM) reported that Walz’s administration set up the hotline to encourage Minnesotans to report their neighbors for violating COVID-19 lockdown orders. 

This initiative drew thousands of complaints, with citizens reporting on activities such as going to church, hosting birthday parties, buying nonessential items, and not enforcing mask mandates.

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Tim Walz Was a COVID-19 Tyrant

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz was a moderate Democrat when he served in the House of Representatives but veered left during his two terms as governor. He referred to socialism as synonymous with neighborliness, pursued an extremely progressive governing agenda, and earned an F from the Cato Institute on fiscal policy.

Another notable thing about Walz is that he served as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thus possible to parse his approach to the virus—and that record is extremely disturbing. Indeed, Walz’s coronavirus policies were extremely heavy-handed and restrictive; under his leadership, the state endured the pandemic in a fundamentally anti-libertarian fashion.

When the coronavirus was first spreading, Walz was an enthusiastic promoter of social distancing rules. He described the crowds in public, outdoor spaces as “a little too big.” He even defended Minnesota’s ridiculous hotline for COVID-19 snitches. That’s right: Walz’s government maintained a method for people to report their neighbors for failing to abide by social distancing rules. Walz insisted in a recent interview that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness”; denouncing one’s neighbors as insufficiently loyal to government policies is a fundamental aspect of socialism, however.

When asked by Republicans to take down the hotline, Walz responded: “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.”

And though Walz instructed police to merely issue citations to people caught violating stay-at-home orders—which is still bad enough—he also maintained the right, via executive order, to issue $1,000 fines and send violators to jail for 90 days. His government maintained that private, indoor gatherings should be limited to 10 people. Outdoor gatherings were arbitrarily capped at 25 people. On July 23, 2020, Walz declared a statewide mask mandate for most indoor spaces and even some outdoor spaces.

“If we can get a 90 to 95% compliance, which we’ve seen the science shows, we can reduce the infection rates dramatically, which slows that spread and breaks that chain,” Walz said at the time. “This is the way, the cheapest, the most effective way for us to open up our businesses, for us to get our kids back in school, for us to keep our grandparents healthy and for us to get back that life that we all miss so much.”

What followed was the implementation of one of the stupidest COVID-19 rules: Diners at restaurants had to wear masks while walking to their table and moving about the establishment but were allowed to go maskless as long as they were eating and drinking.

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Cops Called on 8-Year-Old Child for Being Outside

Kay Eskridge is a Kentucky mom, former child protective services worker, and fan of the Free-Range Kids movement. Over the years, she’s written to me several times about our shared passion for fostering kids’ independence. This includes a note she sent in 2021 saying that a 7-year-old riding her bike in their quiet Louisville neighborhood had been stopped by cops who wanted to know where her mother was.

But earlier this summer, it happened to Eskridge’s own kid.

“The police were called because my 8-year-old was riding her bike on our street,” says Eskridge.

Her note arrived in my inbox recently. Subsequently, we connected over a Zoom call. She set the scene: Her daughter, Julia, had just finished second grade. Thanks to a weird schedule, Julia arrives home two hours before her friends. That leaves her bored and eager for fun by late afternoon. On May 18, when at last a friend had made it home, Julia hopped on her bike to ride eight houses over to his place.

“She was three houses away,” says Eskridge, “and the police stopped her.”

The policeman was actually someone the family knew. (Eskridge’s husband is in local politics.) He told the girl that “this isn’t a good time to be outside,” according to Eskridge. Julia assured the officer that she was used to traffic and knew how to ride her bike, and continued on her way.

The officer left her alone but decided to pay a visit to the Eskridge house.

Her husband answered the door, but when Eskridge heard what was going on, she took matters into her own hands.

“I was not about to let him handle this,” she says. “So I come bursting through and say, ‘Can a child not ride her bike on the street in this neighborhood anymore? Is that what we’re saying?'”

The policeman assured her no, it wasn’t that. Rather, a woman had called the police because she was “upset that a child was outside.”

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