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Shocked! ICE To Equip Officers With Gloves That Can Deliver Electric Zaps

Zero Rss
2 months ago
Shocked! ICE To Equip Officers With Gloves That Can Deliver Electric Zaps

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to spend up to $20 million on gloves that can deliver electric shocks for its agents, according to a notice published by the Department of Homeland Security on Aug. 10.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents walk outside the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, Calif., on July 27, 2026. Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images

The devices, known as CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are expected to be delivered by March 31, 2027, according to the notice.

The notice refers to the gloves as "conductive distraction and de-escalation" devices, which ICE seeks to buy for Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement Removal Operations officers and agents.

The device manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, states on its website that the devices were designed "to supplement existing tools for law enforcement, corrections, security, EMS [Emergency Medical Services] and the military."

The devices must be applied directly to someone's skin and are ineffective through clothing or hair, according to the user manual. No more than two gloves should be used at a time, with each application lasting not more than 15 seconds, it states.

Compliant Technologies said the gloves should not be used to respond to "verbal defiance or belligerence," as punishment or for torture. The company also warned against using them on children, elderly people, pregnant women, or people with disabilities.

The manual also recommends that the gloves be deployed as necessary to "accomplish lawful objectives within the scope of the agency's policies" when a suspect becomes violent to the point of endangering the officer or the public.

Officers must be trained and certified to use the gloves, with recertification required every two years, according to the manual.

The Epoch Times reached out to both the Department of Homeland Security and Compliant Technologies for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director for policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, expressed doubt that ICE officers would use the devices appropriately and questioned why the devices would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement.

"ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do," she said. "Introducing gloves that can so easily be used to deliver terrible pain in encounters is a recipe for harm to the public."

Meanwhile, acting ICE Director David Venturella announced on Aug. 8 that federal agents will be equipped with body-worn cameras by the end of the month in a move to increase "transparency and accountability."

The cameras are a key measure that congressional Democrats demanded during a months-long funding dispute earlier this year over the funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Democratic lawmakers in Congress have demanded that ICE be reformed following the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal agents during operations in Minnesota earlier this year.

Troy Myers and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/12/2026 - 20:55
Tyler Durden

Mamdani's Socialist Utopia Collides With Reality As Manhattan Rents Hit Record

Zero Rss
2 months ago
Mamdani's Socialist Utopia Collides With Reality As Manhattan Rents Hit Record

Socialist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani built his political campaign by relentlessly attacking America and, most importantly, portraying capitalism as the root cause of nearly every social problem, from affordability pressures to soaring rents.

Voters were sold the idea that his administration could deliver an instant utopian transformation built on free bus rides, government-run grocery stores, and cheap housing.

However, like every Marxist before him, Mamdani's vision of utopia is not grounded in economic reality. The dream pitched to millions across the metropolitan area is now colliding with market reality: a continuing nightmare for renters. Even with Mamdani's rent freeze and threat of a pied-à-terre tax, rents are still rising.

Delving into the granular data, a report from the New York Post, citing data from Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, shows that Manhattan's average monthly rent jumped to a record $6,655 in July, up 10% from a year earlier.

The median rent reached $5,295, a 6% increase from the same month one year ago, according to the data. Average rents rose across every apartment category, including 8% for studios to $4,088, 7% for one-bedroom apartments to $5,486 and 13% for two-bedroom apartments to $8,054. Three-bedroom apartments averaged $12,228, up 12%.

NYC's rental vacancy rate has fallen to 1.49%, the lowest since 1968 and well below the 5% threshold typically associated with a landlord's market. Separately, state data show that roughly 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat vacant in 2025

A severe housing shortage, elevated mortgage rates, and new rental regulations have intensified competition for available apartments. Let's not forget that a recent Center for Migration Studies report showed that more than 500,000 illegal aliens live in NYC.

Via Pew Research 

Yet the socialists in City Hall have no interest in deporting illegal aliens - that because that's their imported voter bloc. These illegals add pressure to the housing supply and force rental prices higher. Even the Dallas Federal Reserve recently confirmed that the illegal alien invasion under the Biden-Harris regime led to pressure on rents and housing prices on a national level. 

To begin the week, a New York judge temporarily halted Mamdani's socialist tax experiment on second homes. The far-left in City Hall also published a controversial list doxing more than 900,000 homeowners, exposing them to targeting by radical activists, including Luigi-worshipping far-left activists. Maybe the socialists' game is not affordability but more about seizing private property.

President Trump commented on Truth Social yesterday about Mamdani's dangerous tax "experiment" before it "destroys what was once a great City and State." He said the federal government is looking for ways to challenge the tax scheme. 

Related:

Beyond tax schemes, doxing wealthy, and attempted rent freezes, Mamdani and the radical left are trying to build more housing, but that takes time, something they do not have if they hope to prove that their utopian vision works. These policies may work in the short run if implemented, but over the long term, such fundamentally flawed policies have repeatedly failed around the world. 

Meanwhile...

Reality Bites: Socialist NYC Mayor Mamdani Turns To Capitalist Bankers For Help https://t.co/C18ePozoCI

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 7, 2026

Read: South America Just Rejected Socialism. So Why Is North America Buying It?

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/12/2026 - 20:30
Tyler Durden

The Return Of Economic Gaslighting

Zero Rss
2 months ago
The Return Of Economic Gaslighting

Authored by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute,

Around two and a half years ago, as the Biden administration was entering what we now know was its final year, the then-president’s re-election campaign was growing frustrated.

According to nearly all the big economic indicators and aggregates, the economy was doing quite well, especially considering the historic shutdown governments had forced on the global economy a few years before.

However, at the same time, the American public as a whole felt very negatively about that same economy. And that negativity was persistent.

That diversion appeared to genuinely baffle some media figures and political strategists who seemed to believe everything you could ever need to know about the health of the economy could be gleaned entirely from GDP and the unemployment rate. But, more urgently, it forced the president’s team to make a decision.

On one hand, they could find some politically useful scapegoat for the public’s economic discomfort and run a campaign on addressing it. That would allow them to meet voters where they were, but it would force them to tone down their aggressive celebrations of all the nominally strong economic data drops.

On the other hand, they could continue to celebrate the “strong” economy and give themselves credit for rescuing the country from the dark days of covid with “daring” legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Acts.

Clearly, the team of presumably seasoned political strategists on Biden and later Harris’ campaign chose to pursue the latter. It went terribly.

In one of the most unsurprising developments in modern American politics, it turned out that people who were struggling to navigate the aftermath of the government’s destructive economic shutdowns and keep up with rising prices did not like being told by establishment-approved economic “experts” that they were essentially stupid if they didn’t understand how excellent the economy actually was.

And the establishment really did try. The media loudly credited Biden and the big spending bills he helped move through Congress whenever a good jobs report came out and then all but ignored the later revisions that revealed virtually all that job growth wasn’t real. Establishment-friendly economists kept the public laser-focused on GDP as the one and only indicator of the economy’s strength while leaving out how much government spending was propping the number up. And an effort was made to falsely frame all negative economic sentiment as a dishonest ploy by Biden’s political opponents to tank the president’s re-election bid.

None of it worked. The majority of the American public, including a sufficient number of independent voters, could tell that something was deeply wrong with the American economy. And that, worse than merely doing nothing about it, the people in power were trying to gaslight them into thinking everything was fine.

Trump won, in large part, because he focused on confronting this mounting “affordability crisis” as it was quickly coming to be called. But now, as the midterms approach and he and his party are the ones in charge, the Republicans are faced with the exact same choice the Democrats had been faced with before 2024. And, notably, they have decided to adopt the same strategy that helped torpedo the Democrats last time around.

That was made very clear on social media last week after an X post about the price of burritos ignited a firestorm on the right. Trump-aligned figures lambasted the younger generations especially for continuing to espouse the very sentiment that helped propel Trump back to the White House. Again, the disaffected public was told to shut up, accept what the president was saying about how this was the strongest economy ever, continue to vote Republican, and scrounge together cheaper food if they didn’t like how much burritos cost nowadays.

The figures and specific talking points may differ, but the formula remains the same.

First, voters can tell that the economy is not only weaker than the official metrics are letting on, but that, somehow, it is rigged against them.

They then vote for the party or candidates who are closest to echoing this sentiment and who promise to make sweeping changes in the name of addressing this economic pain.

Then, when that sense that something in the economy is off persists after those politicians get into office, anyone who points that out is called either a liar, lazy, or bad at managing their money by the very people who they had once voted for and supported.

This kind of cyclical economic gaslighting is infuriating. But it isn’t surprising.

The cause of this so-called affordability crisis is not a mystery. It is, primarily, the result of the government inflating the money supply. When the Federal Reserve creates new money out of thin air to buy financial assets, the purchasing power of all dollars goes down—something we all experience as a general rise in prices. But it does not happen instantaneously across the whole economy. The people who get their hands on the new dollars first get to use that new money to buy things at old prices. And, on the other side of the spectrum, the people who get the new money last have to first pay higher prices before they ever get access to the new money that helped bid those prices up.

This is called the Cantillon effect, and it is, in every way, a forced wealth transfer from the bulk of the population to the small, typically well-connected group who gets the money first. However, what makes this form of redistribution especially damaging is that, even though economic theory is very clear that it is inevitable with the kinds of monetary operations the Fed is doing, it is not easy to identify. There is evidence if you know where to look and what to look for. But for most everyday people, this institutionalized theft is only ever experienced as this vague sense that things are getting less affordable.

That difficulty in detecting the true cause of this impoverishing policy gives the monetary authorities and all the people in government and well-connected industries who benefit from it a lot more room to operate than they typically get with more visible measures of taking our wealth, like taxes and government borrowing.

So money printing has become one of the primary ways the political class both transfers our wealth to themselves and, because the Fed also loans many of the dollars it creates directly to the Treasury Department, funds their extremely expensive government programs. That’s been true for decades. But the levels of theft through money printing hit historic levels during the pandemic. The Fed printed trillions of new dollars and injected most of them straight into the economy.

That is the reason we’re dealing with this so-called “affordability crisis” and, further, why there is such a visceral sense among the public that something is deeply wrong with the economy. That, somehow, they’re being ripped off. And they are right.

However, this isn’t ever talked about in the establishment media or genuinely taken on by politicians in either party because solving the problems caused by the Fed’s money printing is not in the interest of those in power. What is in their interest is using the money spigot for their own ends while obfuscating the issue in public and redirecting people’s righteous anger towards some useful scapegoat.

The Trump administration is facing no pressure to address the true cause of this problem and—with the expensive war they launched and their complete disinterest in doing anything but increasing federal spending—every reason to keep it going.

That puts them in a hard electoral position, but the truth is, with the massive increase in social spending most democrats are calling for, the other party will—once again—be in the same boat once they win back some power.

In other words, unless and until people wake up to the political class’s scheme or, at least, grow used to the jump in prices caused by the government’s historic monetary expansion during covid, the gaslighting will continue.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/12/2026 - 20:05
Tyler Durden

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