Adventures of a Gonzo Journalist
Posted in Journalism, and Ministry of Hemp
A bill passed by the Texas Legislature will usher in a new era of legal hemp in Texas. The same bill will also explicitly legalize the sale of CBD oil supplements by licensed vendors.
“It was voted out of the House and the Senate unanimously,” said Coleman Hemphill, president of the Texas Hemp Industries Association, a recently formed chapter of the national Hemp Industries Association nonprofit. Ministry of Hemp is also a member of the HIA.
Posted in Austin, Journalism, Ministry of Hemp, and Video
We heard that Prohibition Creamery had a CBD ice cream flavor, so we knew Ministry of Hemp had to go check it out!
Owner & founder, Laura Aidan, told us about how she discovered CBD and why she decided to make a CBD ice cream! We also got to try the flavor, “Afternoon Delight.”
Posted in Austin, Creative Commons, and Journalism
Last week, Austin anarchists marked Juneteenth a day early with a protest against modern-day slavery.
Juneteenth, honored on June 19 each year, marks the day that news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached slaves in Texas. However, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution legalizes unpaid or shockingly underpaid slave labor by those behind bars. The Juneteenth prison protest in Austin targeted two offices operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Around dawn, activists scaled flag poles at the Austin offices of the TDCJ parole board to replace the U.S. and Texas flags with an anti-prison slavery banner. Later, more anarchists (and this reporter) gathered to protest at a showroom where corporations come to hire prison labor.
“ Texas is one of the few states where prisoners receive no paid compensation for their labor, yet are expected to afford commissary items, $100 medical copays, and post-release expenses,” a representative of the group told me.
Posted in Austin, Journalism, Ministry of Hemp, SXSW, and Video
The Texas hemp industry is booming despite the obstacles faced by Lone Star State entrepreneurs.
That’s the message of the Texas Hemp and Garden Show, which took place on March 13 and 14 in Austin, Texas, at a downtown nightclub near the heart of the popular SXSW festival and not far from the capitol building.
2018 marked the Hemp and Garden Show’s second year, and there were about a dozen different vendors or organizations represented when I dropped in on the second day. Activists helped passersby fill out voter registration cards on the sidewalk, a DJ spun tunes from a small stage outside, and inside a succession of experts spoke about topics ranging from agriculture to the war on drugs. At night, musicians took over for the speakers including a surprise appearance from rapper Lil’ Flip.
You can wear hemp fashion, put hemp seeds on your oatmeal, even write on hemp paper, so would you try hemp wines?
It’s a product years in the making, but Americans in 37 states can now try hemp-infused wine, the creation of Texas-based TVM Wines.
TVM’s new hemp wines are actually wine cocktails, infused with flavors like “rum and Coke” and “Texas tea,” and graced with playful names like “Forbidden,” “Covert” and “Taboo” that invite drinkers to take part in something secretive and daring. However, for the wine’s creators, the product is about more than just capitalizing on an increasingly “hip” ingredient: they’re believers in the benefits of hemp too.
Last week, Texas neo-nazi Will Fears, along with his brother Colton and another local fascist, Tyler Tenebrink, were arrested after a speech by the notoriously punchable Richard Spencer at the University of Florida.
Fears was, once again, working with Patriot Front, the neo-nazis who attacked the Houston Anarchist Bookfair and themselves a spin off of Vanguard America, the neo-nazi group that included Heather Heyer’s killer in Charlottesville. Patriot Front and other fascist groups like Anti-Com were working as security for Spencer’s event, according to a document leaked by Atlanta Antifascists that has since been verified by multiple sources including Spencer’s think tank.
The Fears brothers and Tenebrink were arrested after the speech when Tenebrink, under encouragement from Will Fears, opened fire on a group of antifascist activists.
I recently spoke with Newsweek reporter Michael Hayden about Fears’ long history of violence against antifa and the left in Texas, which includes his participation in the May Day fascist attack in downtown Austin and an assault on a clergywoman at Houston airport during the Muslim Ban protests.
