Your Government Built a Shakedown Operation and Called It a Police Department

Not every government abuse is big government and the Feds:

Brookside, Alabama has 1,253 residents and sits along Interstate 22 just northwest of Birmingham. In 2018 the town discovered something more reliable than tax revenue: drivers. Beginning that year, Brookside's police department systematically transformed itself from a public safety operation into a revenue extraction machine, increasing ticket and fine income by 640% in just two years. At the height of the scheme, fines, fees, and forfeitures made up more than 50% of the town's entire general fund — and 89 cents of every dollar collected went straight back to the police department, which used it to buy unmarked black SUVs, military-style equipment, and a mine-resistant armored vehicle that officers parked outside the police station. Arrests skyrocketed 1,100% as officers fanned out along the interstate looking for anyone to pull over. When a car was towed — which happened routinely, even when vehicles were perfectly drivable — the driver owed $175 to Brookside before they could even begin paying the private towing company's fees and daily impound charges. Brittany Coleman was pulled over, handcuffed for 30 minutes, had her car searched for marijuana, passed three field sobriety tests, and was still charged with marijuana possession and had her car towed anyway. No marijuana was found. Chekeithia Grant arrived at the scene of her daughter's traffic stop to help, and both women were arrested and jailed on misdemeanor charges while their cars were towed — destroying a 60th birthday party they had been driving to. The U.S. Department of Justice eventually intervened. In February 2026, Brookside agreed to a $1.5 million class action settlement, is banned from collecting policing revenue for five years, and was required to issue a formal written acknowledgment that its aggressive policing scheme "likely interfered with the Town's obligation to administer justice equally under law" and raised serious constitutional concerns. The police chief resigned. Alabama passed new legislation aimed at curbing small-town ticketing abuse. The armored vehicle presumably remains.

S.MacMillen - public domain

Commentary: A town of 1,253 people bought a mine-resistant military vehicle with speeding ticket money while arresting people 1,100% more often than before — and called it keeping the public safe. Brittany Coleman passed every test they gave her and they towed her car anyway, because the car was worth more to Brookside's budget than her constitutional rights were. "Police are supposed to protect and serve, not ticket and collect," she said after the settlement. She shouldn't have had to say it.

📰 https://www.courthousenews.com/alabama-town-faces-1-5-million-settlement-in-policing-for-profit-case/

Additional source: https://ij.org/press-release/class-action-plaintiffs-and-brookside-alabama-submit-settlement-proposing-1-5-million-in-compensation-plus-reforms-to-towns-towing-and-ticketing-practices/

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked Courthouse News and Institute for Justice articles, and corroborating reporting from ABC 33/40, Alabama Reporter, and Birmingham Free Press.

CCP Beat Pets to Death in Their Own Homes While Their Owners Watch Helplessly

When the Chinese Communist Party locked down Shanghai's 25 million residents during the Zero-COVID campaign in 2021 and 2022, it sent hazmat-suited government workers door to door to enforce compliance. What those workers did to the pets left behind has been captured on home security cameras, uploaded to Weibo, and viewed hundreds of millions of times before the censors could scrub it. In November 2021, a woman identified only as Ms. Fu was sent into quarantine after contact with a COVID patient. Government workers in protective gear entered her home in Shangrao, Jiangxi province and beat her corgi, Chaofen, on the head with a metal rod. Captured on her home security camera, the dog fled into another room after the first blow. The workers followed. When they emerged, one was carrying something in a yellow plastic bag. Ms. Fu said afterward that Chaofen was dead, and that her neighbors' pets suffered the same fate. She later received anonymous threats to remove the video. In April 2022, a Shanghai corgi owner forced onto a quarantine bus with no time to arrange care released his dog outside, hoping it would survive as a stray. The dog chased the bus down the street. Video filmed by a neighboring resident showed a COVID prevention worker in full hazmat gear chase the corgi down and beat it to death with a shovel, three blows, leaving it motionless in the road. Its body was removed in a plastic bag. In Huizhou, a woman sent into isolation was told government workers would disinfect her home. Video she obtained showed two workers beating her Samoyed, Snowball, with sticks. "Snowball is like family to me," she wrote on Weibo. The hashtag "Don't treat other people's pets like animals" was viewed 230 million times before censors intervened. Officials in at least one city issued a formal order authorizing the killing of all pets belonging to COVID-positive residents. China's own National Health Commission had stated there was no evidence of humans catching COVID from pets. The CDC agreed. The science was irrelevant. China has no national animal cruelty laws — a deliberate legislative gap that made every one of these killings perfectly legal — and the government's official response to the Shangrao video was to describe the beating death of a family pet as a "non-hazardous treatment" carried out "without adequate communication."

Image AI Generated

Commentary: The government locked you in a quarantine facility, sent workers in hazmat suits into your home, beat your dog to death with a metal rod, put it in a yellow bag, and called it a sanitation procedure. Then when the video went viral, the censors came for the video. China has no animal cruelty laws because the party that owns the legislature decided it didn't need them. That's not an oversight. That's a choice.

📰 https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/china/shanghai-corgi-death-china-covid-intl-hnk/index.html

Additional sources: NBC News — https://www.nbcnews.com | Fortune — https://fortune.com/2021/11/16/china-corgi-killing-covid-outbreak-delta-variant-pet-owners-quarantine-isolation/

📷 Image: The AFP photo by Hector Retamal of hazmat-suited COVID workers in Shanghai neighborhoods is widely published and available through AFP licensing. For free use, search Wikimedia Commons for "Shanghai COVID lockdown hazmat workers 2022" — several press-released images exist under editorial use. Alternatively the Weibo-sourced screenshots of the corgi chasing the quarantine bus have been republished by CNN and NBC and are in wide editorial circulation.

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from CNN, NBC News, Fortune/Bloomberg, and NationalWorld reporting on documented video evidence.

Your Government Shot a Tail-Wagging Puppy and the Jury Said So — Then Let the Cop Walk Anyway

On the evening of April 10, 2021, New Orleans Police Officer Derrick Burmaster and his partner entered the gated yard of Derek Brown and Julia Barecki-Brown responding to a noise complaint. Burmaster made what he described as "kissy noises" to check for dogs and decided the yard was clear. It was not. Two dogs came down the stairs — a larger adult dog that barked and moved toward Burmaster's partner, who sensibly stepped out of the yard, and Apollo, a 16-week-old, 22-pound Catahoula Leopard rescue puppy who ran toward Burmaster wagging his tail. Burmaster, who later told investigators he feared the puppy would bite him in the genitals, fired three shots at Apollo with one hand while covering his crotch with the other. He struck the puppy in the neck and chest. Apollo's owner ran outside and held his dog in his arms as he died. What followed was four years of institutional cover and legal maneuvering that laid bare exactly how the system protects its own. Three separate internal investigations found the shooting unjustified and in violation of department policy. The Use of Force Review Board ruled unanimously against Burmaster. His own colleagues stated Apollo posed no threat and that Burmaster never considered alternatives — a kick, a Taser, stepping back — before opening fire. Court records revealed this was not his first time fatally shooting a dog. Department leadership then overrode all of it in the final internal review step and cleared him of wrongdoing entirely. A federal jury in June 2025 heard all of it, reviewed all of it, and concluded that yes, Burmaster had violated the constitutional rights of Apollo's owners and violated state negligence and property laws — and then awarded the couple $10,000 for emotional distress and $400 for Apollo's market value as a rescue dog, while granting Burmaster full immunity from personal liability because he was acting in his capacity as a government employee. Apollo's owners were also found partially liable for their own puppy's death.

PHOTO COURTESY DEREK BROWN

Commentary: A jury looked at every piece of evidence, concluded a police officer illegally killed a tail-wagging puppy while shielding his own genitals, and the punishment was $400 — the assessed market value of a living creature that a family described as the love of their lives. The officer faces no personal consequences whatsoever. This is not a broken system. This is the system working exactly as it was designed to work.

📰 https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-06-12/jury-finds-new-orleans-police-officer-who-shot-and-killed-puppy-violated-rights-but-has-immunity

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked AP/US News article and corroborating reporting from The Washington Times, Insurance Journal, and court records.

Fuck Steph Curry

Steph Curry just signed a 10-year deal with Li-Ning and called it "the partnership of a lifetime." Let's talk about what Li-Ning's lifetime actually looks like.

In 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection banned every single Li-Ning product from entering the United States — not as a trade dispute, but because federal investigators concluded the company was using North Korean forced labor in its supply chain. That same year, Norway's sovereign wealth fund — the largest in the world at $1.3 trillion — dumped its entire stake in Li-Ning, citing what it called an "unacceptable risk that the company contributes to serious human rights violations" tied to Xinjiang. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute named Li-Ning in a report identifying companies directly benefiting from Uyghur forced labor transfer programs. The bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China investigated Li-Ning's supply chain and formally urged NBA players to walk away from their endorsement deals with the company. And through all of it, Li-Ning publicly declared it uses Xinjiang cotton and intends to keep using it.

That's the company Steph Curry just handed his name and his legacy to for the next decade.

This isn't about geopolitics or asking an athlete to be a diplomat. It's about a man who has spent twenty years carefully constructing an image built on faith, integrity, and doing the right thing — and then signing with a company that U.S. federal investigators concluded was built, in part, on slave labor. The Congressional commission that investigated Li-Ning specifically called out NBA players by name and asked them to walk away. Curry didn't walk away. He ran toward them with a ten-year contract.

"Partnership of a lifetime," Steph. For Li-Ning, that's exactly right. Somebody else's lifetime. Somebody who never got a choice about it.

North Korean forced labor — U.S. Customs ban: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/03/16/Li-Ning-China-ban-North-Korean-labor-customs-imports/4921647427576/

Xinjiang forced labor + Norway sovereign wealth fund divestment: https://sourcingjournal.com/topics/labor/li-ning-customs-border-protection-forced-labor-north-korea-xinjiang-334944/

Congressional pressure on NBA players to drop Li-Ning: https://sourcingjournal.com/topics/labor/li-ning-sporting-goods-north-korean-forced-labor-cbp-norges-334205/

Your Government Stole a Developer's Land and Handed It to His Competitor for a Parking Lot

 Bryan Bowers and his business partner Mike Licata saw an opportunity when a new hospital opened in downtown Utica, New York. Doctors in the area were looking for affordable office space, and Bowers signed a contract to buy a vacant lot at 411 Columbia Street — right across from the new hospital — and build a medical office building. It was straightforward private enterprise: willing seller, willing buyer, identified market demand. Then the doctors next door got involved. Central Utica Building LLC, which had already constructed its own medical office building on the adjoining property, didn't want competition cutting into its rental income. So it did what private businesses in New York apparently can do: it wrote a letter to the Oneida County Industrial Development Agency asking the government to seize Bowers' property using eminent domain and hand it over — not for a hospital, not for a road, not for a school, but for a private parking lot to serve their building. The agency agreed, citing vague "economic development" benefits. Bowers fought back through the New York courts and lost at every level. New York courts ruled that as long as a taking provides some conceivable public benefit — including easing the parking needs of a private medical business — eminent domain is fair game. The Institute for Justice took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, backed by briefs from the Cato Institute, George Mason's Scalia Law School, and the Buckeye Institute. On March 24, 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The property that Bowers had under contract to develop is now a parking lot for his competitors. The Fifth Amendment's "public use" requirement, for practical purposes in New York, means nothing.

Getty Images - Unsplash.com

Commentary: A private company wanted its neighbor's land, asked the government to take it, and the government obliged — and every court in America up to the Supreme Court shrugged and said that's fine. The Fifth Amendment says government can only seize private property for "public use." New York's interpretation of "public use" is apparently "whatever a well-connected business asks for." Bryan Bowers' property is now a parking lot. Democracy dies in a surface lot.

📰 https://ij.org/press-release/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-challenge-to-infamous-kelo-eminent-domain-decision/

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked Institute for Justice press release and corroborating reporting from Inside Investigator, Rome Sentinel, and the official Supreme Court docket No. 24-670.

CCP Is Harvesting Organs From Living Prisoners and Selling Them on Demand

For decades, wealthy patients from around the world have traveled to China for organ transplants and received them within days — sometimes hours — of arriving. In every other country on earth, patients wait years for a compatible organ. The reason Chinese hospitals can guarantee near-instant availability is that they maintain a living inventory. An independent international tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice — the lead prosecutor who convicted Slobodan Milošević for war crimes — spent twelve months reviewing testimony and evidence and concluded unanimously and beyond reasonable doubt that China has been harvesting organs from living prisoners of conscience on a massive, state-sanctioned scale for decades. The primary victims identified were Falun Gong practitioners, a peaceful spiritual movement that Beijing banned in 1999 and began systematically imprisoning. As the Uyghur detention system expanded in Xinjiang in the 2010s, investigators documented that Muslim minorities were subjected to mandatory blood typing and organ screening — the same preparation protocols used before extraction — and evidence now points to Uyghurs being killed for their organs as well. A Uyghur survivor testified before Congress on May 14, 2026 that local police told her directly that a detention center in her region had been converted into an organ extraction hospital and that the "halal organ trade is booming" — organs marketed specifically to wealthy Muslim buyers abroad who want religiously compliant transplants. Investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann, who has spent two decades building the evidentiary record, estimates that between 25,000 and 50,000 Uyghurs alone are killed for their organs annually. Despite Beijing's 2015 promise to rely only on voluntary donors, researchers have demonstrated that Chinese hospitals perform many times more transplants than voluntary donation could possibly supply — and the data has been falsified. On the same morning the May 14 Congressional hearing opened, a hot mic on Tiananmen Square captured Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin casually discussing living to 150 through continued organ transplants. The bipartisan commission co-chair called it exactly what it was: not small talk, but a glimpse behind the curtain of a system that treats human beings as interchangeable parts.

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Commentary: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic joking about living to 150 on harvested organs — on the same morning Congress was hearing testimony that the Chinese state kills between 25,000 and 50,000 Uyghurs a year to supply the transplant market. There is no diplomatic euphemism adequate to describe a government that runs a living organ bank stocked with imprisoned minorities. The China Tribunal called it crimes against humanity. A U.S. Congressman called it execution by extraction. Both are correct.

📰 https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/05/14/congress-holds-hearing-on-forced-organ-harvesting-on-opening-day-of-trump-xi-summit.html

Additional sources: China Tribunal final judgment (2019) — chinatribunal.com | CECC hearing record May 14, 2026 — cecc.gov | Raoul Wallenberg Centre joint statement, May 2026 — raoulwallenbergcentre.org

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked articles, the 2019 China Tribunal final judgment, bipartisan Congressional testimony, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre's May 2026 joint statement.

Your Government Killed an Innocent Man at the Wrong House and a Judge Called It Reasonable

 On a Wednesday night in April 2023, Robert Dotson — a 52-year-old father of two — heard knocking at his front door in Farmington, New Mexico just before midnight. He put on a robe, walked downstairs, picked up his legally owned handgun, and answered the door on his own property. Three police officers were standing outside, shining a flashlight in his face. They shot and killed him. The officers had been dispatched to a domestic violence call at 5308 Valley View Avenue. They went to 5305 — the house directly across the street. One officer had used his patrol car's GPS and placed the address on the wrong side of the street. A second officer had searched Google Maps, which correctly showed the house on the opposite side — and that officer verbally questioned whether they were at the right address before the knock anyway. They proceeded. When Dotson appeared at his door holding a firearm, blinded by flashlights, with no reason to believe the people outside were police, he raised the gun. The officers opened fire. He did not shoot. His wife then emerged, fired at the unknown figures outside, and only stopped when she realized they were officers. She was not told her husband was dead for eight hours. The officers did not immediately disclose to investigators that they had been at the wrong address — that detail was discovered by other officers who arrived on scene. No criminal charges were filed against the officers. When Dotson's family sued for civil rights violations, a federal judge dismissed the case in May 2025, ruling that the officers had acted reasonably given the circumstances — circumstances entirely of their own creation.

Tony Webster / tony@tonywebster.com

Commentary: A man answered his own front door with a legal firearm, got killed by police who had been told they were at the wrong address and went anyway, and a federal judge decided that's just how the Constitution works. The legal term for this is "qualified immunity." The plain English term is getting away with it.

📰 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-finds-police-acted-reasonably-shooting-new-mexico-man-wrong-addr-rcna208157

⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked NBC News article and corroborating reporting from ABC News, CBS News, and Reason.