Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke exclusively with Kelly O'Grady about Trump accounts, which officially launch on Saturday, as well as when gas prices could lower to pre-Iran war levels and wage growth for Americans.
The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to quickly lift her recent ruling against major provisions of a presidential executive order on elections, arguing in an appeal that the court’s action will effectively prevent the government from putting new voting restrictions in place before the November election.This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. Her 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections, as his March executive order tried to do.The executive order directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens over 18, and thus presumably eligible to vote in federal elections. It also called on the U.S. Postal Service to create a system to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.Talwani’s order prevents the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.This week, the Trump administration appealed Talwani’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and said it is still proceeding with its efforts to set up the new system for the rest of the states. But it warned that the judge’s order will make it impossible for the U.S. Postal Service to create a bifurcated system for the November election, even if the administration ultimately prevails on appeal. Government attorneys asked Talwani to lift her ban by Monday.The request for a quick decision suggests that the Trump administration may be trying to speed things up so the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.“Operationally, it would not be possible for us to put a two-tiered system in place where one set of rules apply to the ballot mail of the Plaintiff States, and another applies to the remaining states,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in a court filing. “Doing so would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity and efficiency of implementing any final rule.”But the Trump administration’s nationwide efforts to use the Postal Service to regulate who gets ballots also hit a separate legal roadblock this week when another federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the executive order violates a years-old agreement requiring the federal government to ensure voters who request mail-in ballots get them in time to ensure they can be counted.U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that the Trump administration’s plans to send ballots only to voters on preapproved lists breached a 2021 agreement between the Postal Service and the NAACP meant to ensure that the agency prioritized ballot delivery. In contrast to Talwani’s ruling, Sullivan’s decision applies nationwide.“These proposed rules directly undermine commitments that the Postal Service made to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered and counted,” said Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel for the NAACP, in a statement.The U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org. Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico proves, time and time again, that he is a radical with no place representing Texans in the Senate.
The post “America-laster”: Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico Slammed in New Ad Ahead of the 250th Anniversary of American Independence for Comments Calling American Flag a “Complicated Symbol” (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The country's theocracy hopes to see millions flood the streets of the capital beginning Saturday in scenes reminiscent to the burial of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.
A conservative writer scolded Democrats on Thursday for not focusing on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption in the months leading up to the November mid-terms.“For all intents and purposes, nobody cares,” The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote. He described Trump’s blatant profiteering from being in office, which is without any analogous example in modern American history. Agreeing with a source in the Senate who said that the indifference to Trump’s corruption means “we’re just screwed,” he argued that “any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here.”He denounced Republicans who give Trump a pass on his grift by saying that “depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.”Yet in addition to Trump’s own party, Catoggio criticized Democrats — especially those on the left — since “few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.” Instead they seem more interested in opposing Israel and trying to purge the party of its centrist leaders.He adds that this is a great missed political opportunity.“If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it,” Catoggio said. “In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look.” His financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, almost quadrupling his income from 2024, of which roughly $1.4 billion “came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.”He added, “Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was ‘pausing’ his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.”Refraining from discussing Trump’s conflicts of interest, “petty graft like kickbacks” and selling pardons, “we’d be here all day.” The bottom line is that, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkely told NBC News, “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in. There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”Instead of exploiting this opportunity to win elections on a populist theme, Catoggio suggested that left-wing populists are relatively indifferent to those issues compared with others that rile up their base. By doing this, though, they are normalizing Trump’s unprecedented corruption and making it easier for both him and future perpetrators to get away with it.Indeed, Catoggio said Democrats’ failure to adequately bring up and emphasize Trump’s corruption has made it easier for Republicans to obscure that what Trump is doing far and away exceeds the actions of any of his predecessors.“Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now,” Catoggio said. “I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.”If this attitude continues into the 2028 election, it could be disastrous — and Catoggio suspects that is exactly what will happen.“Some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028?” Catoggio wrote. “If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?”He concluded, “‘We’re just screwed’ is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge.
In a 6-3 decision breaking on partisan lines, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump can fire Federal Trade Commissioners and other federal agency directors without cause. The ruling overturns longstanding Supreme Court precedent and express statutory instruction that combined to protect the political independence and subject matter expertise of federal agencies for over 90 years.The ruling presents a novel reading of a president’s Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” expanding that power for a rogue president hellbent on breaking laws instead of executing them. As Justice Sotomayor put it, “The Court… is elevating (Trump) above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”An activist Roberts Court has now written into existence an all-powerful unitary executive despite elaborate instructions in art. I, II and III to keep the three branches of government separate and equal. Rejecting federal laws that restrict a president’s removal of agency directors to for-cause removal, SCOTUS has made the president all powerful and Congress less relevant, while arrogating scientific and technical questions to itself.Trump’s corporate donors can now choose their own regulatorsBefore republicans on the bench rewrote it this week, the Federal Trade Commission Act stated that a President could only remove a commissioner for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That statute clearly and intentionally barred presidents from firing directors for partisan or corrupt reasons, and from punishing regulators who rule against a president’s corporate donor(s). Vesting a singularly authoritarian executive with unprecedented, expansive powers, the Supreme Court re-wrote federal laws to advance their own political narrative.Over two dozen federal agencies will be affected, covering everything from the financial markets, the commodities markets, and nuclear power. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were all Congressionally designed to be independent watchdogs, enforcers insulated from partisan whims. Now Trump can remove any commissioners who threaten to rule against his allies, assuring that his political supporters will be afforded preferential review, licensing, merger approvals and other rulings.With Trump’s new latitude to fire any agency head who threatens meaningful regulation, his corporate donors have been effectively empowered to choose their own regulators. Federal laws passed to protect human health, finance, banking, communications, workplace safety, and clean air, soil and water have been rendered functionally meaningless.Replacing science, expertise and merit with political fealtyCongressionally created and funded federal agencies serve express, statutory purposes written to safeguard the American public. The Supreme Court had protected agency autonomy and expertise dating back to 1935, ruling that some degree of autonomy was necessary for federal agencies to meet specific scientific, economic, communications, trade, health, and environmental mandates. Federal agencies were never meant to be a president’s personal toys with which to reward donors and cronies.For a president in the habit of accepting lavish gifts and cash from foreign governments, along with hundreds of millions from domestic supplicants, finding even more room for self-dealing, corruption and political favoritism must be heady. For the rest of us, it’s dangerous. We actually need competent people to run the federal government, even in its post-DOGE watered down state.If Trump declares that every home must be heated by dirty coal, the head of the Energy Commission must try to effectuate that command no matter the harm to Americans’ lungs. If Trump declares that particulate matter, fossil fuels and the widespread use of Monsanto is good for the environment, any EPA director who contradicts him with cancer and death statistics will be silenced through removal. It’s governance by full Idiocracy.A know-nothing, anti-science president can now follow his gutTo every American outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, Trump has demonstrated astonishing incompetence on all fronts. From economically illiterate tariffs to our defeat in Iran, sprinkled with comically disastrous results in between, an ignorant and arrogant “I follow my gut” Trump revels in rejecting science and expertise as Americans pay the price.The only thing saving the nation from complete chaos and disaster to date is that several federal agencies had retained some level institutional competence despite Trump (and Musk’s) best efforts to dismantle them.
