Court Rules New York County Denied Free Speech Rights to Pro-Life Advocates

A federal court has ruled that Westchester County, New York, violated the First Amendment rights of pro-life sidewalk counselors, marking a significant victory for free speech in a legal challenge brought by Thomas More Society attorneys. The decision in Hulinsky v. County of Westchester found the County liable for enacting an unconstitutional provision in its 2022 “Reproductive Health Care Facilities Access Act,” or Chapter 425, which restricted peaceful pro-life advocacy near abortion facilities.

The decision awards plaintiffs Oksana Hulinsky and Regina Molinelli nominal damages for the chilling of their life-saving sidewalk counseling for over two-and-half years as a result of the unconstitutional law, even though the County attempted to avoid liability by repealing the offending provision earlier this year.

This ruling builds on a March 14 decision that rejected the County’s attempt to dismiss Plaintiffs’ claims against part of Chapter 425 prohibiting so-called “interference” with abortion access “by deceptive means or otherwise”—a sweeping and unprecedented restriction adopted as part of the County’s furor over the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs.The Court rightly held the provision “criminalized large swaths of protected speech” on pain of jail, fines, and civil liability, flagrantly violating the First Amendment.

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Judge Puts Infowars Up For Sale Again As Leftists Clamor For Alex Jones Takedown

The establishment media has long argued that the Sandy Hook lawsuits against Alex Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, are about “justice” for grieving parents suffering from harassment.  However, the actions of the plaintiffs and others involved in the civil case suggest that their goals are highly political and have little to do with compensating for alleged pain caused by Jones voicing his opinions on the event. 

If the suit was simply about reparations for hardship of the “victims” caused by defamation, then the payout would have been based on an amount Jones could realistically produce.  Instead, judges awarded 15 plaintiffs $1.5 billion in damages; an insane punishment designed to bury Jones forever. 

Because a bankruptcy judge in Connecticut ruled Jones’ behavior was “willful and malicious” in spreading “false information” about the Sandy Hook shooting, his debt to the families cannot be erased through bankruptcy proceedings and Jones could be required to continue to pay on all future income until the the plaintiffs receive the full amount. 

Meaning, the political left wants to make Jones into a pauper or a slave for the rest of his life and a cautionary tale to others in the alternative media. 

Furthermore, officials in charge of the initial auction allegedly rigged the outcome in favor of a sale to leftist propaganda rag, The Onion.  The Onion did not have the cash on hand to service their $7 million bid for the sale, instead they relied on a deal that would have tapped into Jones’ future payments to the plaintiffs, as if Jones’ wallet could be treated as a bank account in control of The Onion (otherwise known as a “contingency bid”).  

The Onion offered $1.75 million in actual cash for Infowars assets. First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name that sells nutritional supplements bid $3.5 million, but somehow The Onion still won the auction.  Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez blocked the sale and criticized the auction process as flawed.  He said the outcome “left a lot of money on the table” for families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. 

In other words, this suggests that the plaintiffs were willing to sacrifice part of their damages just to see The Onion take control of Infowars and humiliate Jones. But again, the lawsuits weren’t politically motivated at all…

A new decision by Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in a Wednesday hearing orders that Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, will once again be turned over to a court-appointed receiver, who will be responsible for selling the assets and using the proceeds to pay Jones’ debts to the Sandy Hook families.

Numerous progressive legacy outlets jumped on the story this week, all of them hoping that The Onion will still be able to buy the brand and turn it into a “parody of itself”.  Of course, this would require that they have more cash on hand than any competing buyers.  It also requires a level of comedy talent that doesn’t exist at The Onion, which means readers would be few and the Infowars parody website would likely fade into obscurity.   

Leftists have been salivating over the possible dismantling of Alex Jones’ media empire for years, believing that the selling of his assets will represent a massive “victory” for their side and remove one of their most popular enemies from the culture war chessboard. 

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Israeli unit tasked with smearing Gaza journalists as Hamas fighters – report

A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, to target them and to blunt international outrage over the killing of media workers, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports.

The “legitimisation cell” was set up after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack to gather information that could bolster Israel’s image and shore up diplomatic and military support from key allies, the report said, citing three intelligence sources.

According to the report, in at least one case the unit misrepresented information in order to falsely describe a journalist as a militant, a designation that in Gaza is in effect a death sentence. The label was reversed before the man was attacked, one of the sources said.

Earlier this week, Israel killed the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and three colleagues in their makeshift newsroom, after claiming Sharif was a Hamas commander. The killings focused global attention on the extreme dangers faced by Palestinian journalists in Gaza and Israel’s efforts to manipulate media coverage of the war.

Foreign reporters have been barred from entering Gaza apart from a few brief and tightly controlled trips with the Israeli military, who impose restrictions including a ban on speaking to Palestinians.

Palestinian journalists reporting from the ground are the most at risk in the world, with more than 180 killed by Israeli attacks in less than two years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel carried out 26 targeted killings of journalists in that period, the CPJ said, describing them as murders.

Israel has produced an unconvincing dossier of unverified evidence on Sharif’s purported Hamas links, and failed to address how he would have juggled a military command role with regular broadcast duties in one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Israel did not attempt to justify killing his three colleagues.

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State Department Accuses China of Genocide and Slavery — and Rape, Torture, Starvation of Dissidents

The U.S. State Department published its annual global human rights reports on Tuesday, featuring a profile on the Chinese Communist Party that accused that government of a host of atrocities including genocide, slavery, worker abuse, forced abortions, and various forms of torture against dissidents.

The State Department human rights reports are published annually and broken down by country. The 2025 report published this week covers the year 2024. The profile on China focused significantly on updates regarding the ongoing genocide of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. While widespread evidence indicates that the Chinese Communist Party has attempted to violently subjugate the Turkic peoples of East Turkistan for decades, human rights experts largely agree that dictator Xi Jinping dramatically expanded this effort in 2017, turning the region into a high-tech surveillance state and imprisoning as many as 3 million people in concentration camps.

Following a wave of negative publicity and action by human rights groups to raise awareness of the mass imprisonment of Uyghurs in concentration camps, the Chinese government began to describe the concentration camps as “vocational education” centers and claim that most of its victims had “graduated” from the prisons. Survivors of the abuse nonetheless persisted in reported experiences of beatings, psychological abuse, rape, and slavery at the hands of regime thugs at the camps.

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New EU Media “Freedom Law” Allows for Journalist Arrests if Justified by “Public Interest”

The European Union’s “European Media Freedom Act” became binding law across all member states on August 8, but behind its name lies a set of provisions that could restrict the very freedoms it claims to safeguard.

We obtained a copy of the act for you here.

Alongside language about protecting reporters, the regulation authorizes arrests, sanctions, and surveillance of journalists whenever authorities say it serves an “overriding reason in the general interest.”

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, hailed the legislation’s arrival on social media, saying, “A free and independent press is an essential pillar of our democracy. With our European Media Freedom Act, we want to improve their protection. This allows journalists to continue their important work safely and without disruption or intimidation.”

Although the law outlines protections such as prohibiting spyware or coercion to expose sources, those assurances are undercut by built-in loopholes.

Governments can bypass them if their actions are allowed under national or EU law and deemed proportionate to a vaguely defined “general interest.”

That permission extends to intrusive surveillance technologies in cases tied to crimes carrying a maximum prison term of three years or more, a list that ranges from terrorism and human trafficking to offenses labeled as “racism and xenophobia.”

The legislation also orders each country to maintain registers of media owners and addresses. It targets so-called “disinformation,” accusing some media outlets of manipulating the single market to spread falsehoods.

Large online platforms are portrayed as choke points for access to news, blamed for fueling polarization.

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Conservative Moms Org Labeled ‘Hate Group’ in Police Training

A police training entity in Massachusetts asserted that Moms for Liberty, a nationwide conservative grassroots parental rights coalition, is a “hate group.”

The designation was made by the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, an entity which trains over 20,000 officers across Massachusetts.

A Friday report from The Daily Wire, which first covered the story, said that Moms for Liberty was listed alongside other “Hate Groups.”

Some of those other groups included Antifa and various Neo-Nazis.

The slides claimed that Moms for Liberty is an “anti-government extremist” entity.

The training materials also said that Moms for Liberty opposes “books that reference race and gender identity.”

The group has indeed mobilized conservative parents nationwide to raise the alarm over heavily sexualized books, as well as those with leftist ideological themes.

The training accused Moms for Liberty of purportedly using “parents’ rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ students.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist,” a reality likewise cited by the training materials.

“Moms for Liberty is here to show up at school board meetings, speak out against curriculum, failing schools, inappropriate books maybe in your public school library,” Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, reacted to the designation of her group.

Antifa is burning down whole cities and parts of cities and rioting in the streets,” she said.

“These two are not equivalent.”

Moms for Liberty secured copies of the training documents through a freedom of information request of the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee.

“We have to ask what is going on here in Massachusetts with these trainings to police officers,” Descovich said.

“We are not conducting ourselves in a way that police ever need to be concerned about the way we act,” she continued.

“As a matter of fact, our chapter chair there in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who is the one that brought all this to my attention, said she has local members of their police force come up to her all the time.”

“Please keep going. We can’t talk about it publicly, but I have kids. I appreciate you guys speaking out. So thank you for your courage and your bravery,” the officers reportedly say.

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Trump Order Targets Political Debanking but Spares Visa, Mastercard, Payment Processor Monopolies

The White House has decided that banks shouldn’t play political bouncer, at least the banks that answer to federal regulators.

In a flourish of pen and podium, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that supposedly halts “politically motivated debanking.” That’s the practice where someone loses their bank account, not because they bounced checks or defaulted, but because someone behind a desk didn’t like their politics, religion, or choice of lawful business.

The order’s language is strong. Trump, who has a personal score to settle in this arena, told CNBC’s Squawk Box, “The banks discriminated against me very badly. They totally discriminate against – I think me, maybe even more, but they discriminate against many conservatives.”

While the press release version sounds like a broad defense of free financial access, the actual order is more of a neighborhood watch than a citywide ban. It applies only to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other outfits directly supervised by federal banking regulators or the SBA.

That means Visa and Mastercard, the twin tollbooth operators of the global payments highway, are untouched. Same with PayPal, Stripe, and other tech-driven platforms that have spent years quietly freezing out lawful but unpopular actors with all the due process that in the real world wouldn’t even get you a parking ticket.

These companies have been the muscle in modern financial blacklisting, but they will not get so much as a warning letter under this policy.

For the institutions it does cover, the order tells regulators to rip out any guidance that allows “reputation risk” to be used as an excuse for cutting customers loose over political or religious reasons. SBA-partner banks are instructed to reinstate clients who were politically deplatformed. Federal watchdogs are told to fine, sanction, or otherwise make life difficult for any bank caught doing it again. Cases that appear to involve religion must be sent to the Attorney General for potential civil action.

It’s a tidy list of marching orders that leaves one wondering why the most aggressive financial censors, the ones that dominate online commerce, get to keep their scissors. The order takes a few swings at the branches while leaving the trunk standing.

If the point was to stop political discrimination in finance, it’s an odd choice to leave out the players who can cut you off from selling so much as a baseball card online.

President Trump has long argued that regulators wield excessive control over banks. In June, he told reporters, “The regulators control the banks” and that when an administration pushes regulators to target certain institutions, “they really control it.”

The move takes aim at a framework built during the Obama years, when the Justice Department advised regulators to treat “negative public opinion” as a legitimate risk factor. That phrase became a free pass for banks to exit relationships with any client who might attract headlines or activist campaigns. It was sold as prudence. It quickly turned into a permission slip for politically driven account closures.

The personal angle is never far from the story. First Lady Melania Trump wrote in her memoir that her own account was abruptly closed after years with the same bank. She added that Barron Trump was refused an account entirely after January 6, 2021. It was not just political activists or small-business owners on the wrong side of the ideological fence getting hit.

But while the order is a strong start, its scope makes sense only if you believe banks are the ultimate choke point. They are not. There are thousands of banks and credit unions in the United States, and if one decides to cut you off, you can usually find another willing to take your business. Even for niche or controversial industries, a determined customer can work the phones long enough to land an account somewhere. The process may be frustrating, but it is rarely terminal.

Payment processors are a different animal entirely. Visa and Mastercard are more than dominant; they are the rails on which nearly all card-based transactions run. Lose access to them, and it does not matter how many banks are technically willing to serve you; none can process your payments without going through those networks.

By leaving them outside the reach of the order, the administration has left the real monopolies in place, fully empowered to decide who gets to participate in the economy.

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Brazilian Woman Granted Refugee Status in Europe After Facing 25-Year Sentence for ‘Misgendering’ Trans Politician

In a precedent-setting move, a European country has officially granted full refugee protections to a Brazilian women’s rights activist who was facing 25 years in prison in her home country for misgendering a transgender politician. Isabella Cêpa is the first person to be recognized as a victim of state persecution for her outspoken opposition to gender identity ideology.

As previously reported by Reduxx, Cêpa first came under criminal investigation after she made a social media post about Erika Hilton – a male politician who “identifies” as a woman. Hilton was elected to São Paulo’s municipal government in November of 2020, winning his seat by a landslide that gave him the title of the most voted-for ‘woman’ in Brazil.

At the time of his victory, Hilton was celebrated in international media as being a “symbolic triumph” for transgender people. Hilton was amongst the top 10 most-voted for candidates in all of Brazil, and was touted as the “only woman” to make the list. 

It was the widespread announcement of his victory that first put him on Cêpa’s radar.

“At the time I didn’t even know who this person was. I just saw a headline on an Instagram page celebrating that ‘the most voted woman in São Paulo is a transwoman,’” Cêpa told Reduxx during a 2022 interview, recounting how her ordeal began. “Then, I shared a video with my followers saying I was disappointed to hear that the most voted-for woman in São Paulo – later found out that it was in the entire country – was a man.”

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Massachusetts Official Labels ‘Moms For Liberty’ as Neo-Nazis in Police Course on ‘Hate Crimes’

In Massachusetts, a state trooper involved in a hate crimes unit has co-authored a controversial police training course. This course labels the parental rights group, Moms for Liberty, as a “hate group” alongside Antifa and white supremacist organizations. The training is part of a broader initiative by the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, which educates over 20,000 officers statewide.

Trooper Emily Todisco, who works with the Hate Crimes Awareness and Response Team (HART), is at the center of this debate. Appointed by Democratic Governor Maura Healey, Todisco’s role involves enhancing data collection and information-sharing on hate crimes. Her participation in developing this training has sparked a backlash from conservatives who see it as an attack on pro-family values.

Charlie Misseijer, from Moms for Liberty, expressed concern over the implications of this training. He argues that comparing their organization to neo-Nazis puts families at risk. Misseijer emphasizes the danger of law enforcement materials that construct what he calls a “wholly contrived narrative.”

Attempts to get a response from the police training committee were unsuccessful. Both Todisco and her co-author, Curriculum Specialist Hannah Gianfriddo, were unavailable for comment. This silence has only fueled the controversy surrounding the training’s content and intent.

The presentation at the heart of the issue is titled “Freedom and Hate: Speech, Crimes & Groups.” It aims to inform law enforcement about local “hate groups” and includes Moms for Liberty in its list. The training highlights the group’s efforts to challenge books on race and gender identity and to promote conservative candidates.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is cited as a source for defining hate groups in the training. Critics argue the SPLC has long lost its credibility by targeting groups that don’t align with its leftist agenda. This inclusion has intensified the debate over the course’s objectivity and fairness.

The training underlines that “hate speech” is legally protected in the United States. Despite no violence being attributed to Moms for Liberty supporters, the course warns of their “active” presence. It advises police to recognize the signs of these groups to better prepare for potential incidents.

The course suggests that understanding these groups’ symbols and missions is crucial for law enforcement. This knowledge is seen as vital for identifying propaganda and harmful rhetoric. Such preparation, the training argues, enables effective community policing.

Inquiries to Governor Healey’s office for a statement went unanswered. The governor’s involvement in appointing Todisco has brought political dimensions to the controversy. The lack of response adds to the frustration of those seeking accountability.

The Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent media outlet, initially reported on this issue. They emphasize that their content is available for widespread distribution. The goal is to ensure transparency and broaden the audience for important stories like this one.

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Cancer Patient Denied Treatment Because of Her Conservative Christian Views

An Oregon hospital refused a Catholic cancer patient treatment because she voiced her views on “transgenderism.”

The staff at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) disregarded Marlene Barbera’s concerns when she commented on the office’s prominently-displayed “transgender” flag. After she had a disagreement over the phone with a staff member, the clinic dropped her as a patient, informing her in an email:

“Effective immediately, you are discharged from receiving medical care at the Richmond Family Medicine Clinic. This action is being taken because of ongoing disrespectful and hurtful remarks about our LGBTQ community and staff… Please note that you are also now dismissed from all OHSU Family Medicine clinics, including Immediate Care clinics.”

In a message to her doctor last year, Barbera had written this:

I have been threatened on Twitter by trans activists with rape and death — so it is daunting to go for medical treatment with that banner proclaiming that what I am, an adult human female, is a mere opt-in category for any gender non-conforming male and not a reality. May I please have a telephone appointment to discuss how I may access your medical care without walking under a banner that seeks to negate all I am?

Barbera thought the message was private, but it was shared with other staff. When she tried to leave a message for her doctor about her medical situation, the receptionist refused and insisted she make an appointment. When she called back, she was still refused service.

“I asked, guessing ‘Did I hurt the trans person’s feelings?’ And the receptionist took offense to the question, asking ‘What did you say?’ slowly and with great emphasis,” Barbera told Reduxx.

A few weeks later, on June 29, the practice manager, Stein Berger, messaged her to say that she had made “transphobic remarks” that harmed the staff of the “inclusive” clinic. That day, the clinic notified her that she could no longer get care at the clinic, effective July 29.

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