Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“More than 2,200 National Guard soldiers and airmen, a majority from out of state, have been deployed to D.C. to support what Trump has framed as a concerted effort to tackle crime and homelessness in the nation’s capital.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/national-guard-troops-d-c-225235010.html
“The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/20/trumps-d-c-goon-squads-are-un-american/
“A police officer who had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring cannot be sued, a court confirmed.., because she was acting under color of federal law—a puzzling reminder of the inverse relationship between power and accountability in government.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/01/a-cop-lied-fabricated-a-sex-trafficking-case-and-jailed-a-teen-on-false-charges-and-still-cant-be-sued/
“The city of Allentown has spent more than $2 million settling excessive force claims, and yet the police still crack down on civilians exercising their constitutional rights.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/23/police-officer-threatens-to-run-over-protester-for-filming-on-the-sidewalk/
“”The FBI took Linda’s savings without clearly saying what she did wrong. That shouldn’t happen in America, but taking on the entrenched federal civil forfeiture system is challenging,” said Bob Belden, an attorney at I.J. (which represented Martin), in a statement via email. “Unfortunately, there is not a clear path to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. We know that several Justices are alarmed at how civil forfeiture works in America and hope that the right case will work its way to the Court.”
…
“Owners must decide whether to fight against the federal government, default, or plead for mercy, all without knowing why the FBI is doing this to them,” he says. “It’s therefore little surprise that 93% of federal forfeitures never get to a court, meaning the FBI gets to keep the money without ever telling anyone why they should be allowed to”—which, at least for now, will remain the status quo.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/28/the-fbi-took-her-40000-without-explaining-why-she-fought-back-and-lost/
“Over the past three months, the Trump administration has filed lawsuits against Los Angeles, Illinois, Colorado, New York state, New York City, and other places for the express purpose of forcing them to abolish their “sanctuary city” policies and start aiding the feds in rounding up undocumented immigrants and enforcing federal immigration laws.
But unless the U.S. Supreme Court rapidly overturns several of its own precedents, including a recent one from 2018, all of these cases will be constitutional losers for President Donald Trump. Why? Here is how the late conservative legal hero and long-serving Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once spelled it out.
“The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems,” Scalia wrote for the Court’s majority in Printz v. United States (1997), “nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
…
federal agents still retain their own independent authority to enforce federal immigration law inside of sanctuary states and cities, just as federal authorities retain the independent authority to enforce other federal laws in states and cities. The key point under Printz is that it is unconstitutional for the feds to compel local officials to lend them a helping hand in carrying out the enforcement of federal law.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/31/on-sanctuary-cities-its-trump-vs-the-10th-amendment/
Police control gang databases and they have low barriers for putting people on them. Non-gang members get put on the lists for stupid reasons.
Protestors have been added to the lists.
It can be hard to get your name off these lists, and you can be added without your knowledge.
Former gang members are still on the lists.
Police use the poorly made lists as justifications to deport peaceful people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlR8d9JVWtQ
“On the face of it, Gomez’s alleged gunplay, which involves a human victim, is more alarming than his vicious treatment of the baby rabbit. But combined, the allegations make you wonder what sort of people Grant County is trusting with guns and badges. It is especially worrisome that two supervisors not only saw nothing wrong with the behavior that one of them jovially documented but actually egged on Gomez as he sought to torment Salas with the sort of casual cruelty that is usually seen as a marker of dangerously antisocial tendencies.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/11/watch-a-new-mexico-sheriffs-deputy-jovially-hurl-a-baby-rabbit-to-its-death-as-his-supervisors-laugh/
“Former interim NYPD commissioner Tom Donlon is suing the department, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and several former and current police executives alleging the nation’s largest police force operated as a vast criminal enterprise designed to enrich top officials.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/16/former-nypd-chief-accuses-top-city-officials-including-the-mayor-of-overseeing-coordinated-criminal-conspiracy-in-lawsuit-00455791
“Think about the timeline in Martin’s case. The feds invaded her home and held her at gunpoint while her terrified seven-year-old son cowered in a different room, all because the officers could not be bothered to perform basic due diligence—are we actually at the right house?—before breaking down the (wrong) door and detonating a flash grenade. This deplorable and entirely avoidable misdeed occurred eight years ago, which means that this family has been fighting an uphill battle for redress and accountability from the government for the better part of a decade. And their fight is still not over yet, even after securing an important win at the highest court in the land.
To say the least, it should not be so hard—and it should definitely not take so long—to hold the government to account for such blatant wrongdoing.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/17/dont-let-rights-violating-federal-agents-dodge-accountability/