Free Republic

In the town of Festus, Missouri, a community of 14,000 people near St. Louis, residents have ousted four city council members who backed plans for a massive AI data center, replacing them with candidates who openly opposed the project. At a packed City Hall meeting following the election, newly sworn-in officials were greeted with cheers - while the city's mayor Sam Richards, who still supports the development, was met with boos and jeers from the crowd. 'You're next!' one resident shouted, underscoring how heated the fight has become. At the center of the dispute is a proposed $6 billion data...

Teens who use marijuana may be at greater risk of permanent brain damage later in life, a study has revealed. About 18 million Americans report using marijuana daily or nearly every day, and use is on the rise, largely due to recent decriminalisation across the US. From 1992 to 2022, for example, daily and near-daily use saw a 15-fold increase. About one in seven of those users are teenagers, whose brains are still undergoing rapid changes in areas responsible for judgement, decision-making and memory. Now, the largest-ever study of American teenagers has found regular cannabis use restricted vital growth in...

… By Sunday afternoon, investigators and White House officials — including the president himself — had already released a trove of information, including the suspect’s name and photos. They also divulged clues to his alleged motive and targets — which may have included Trump and administration officials. But in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, when no tangible evidence was available, the conspiracists of the internet turned their attention to the Leavitt quote. “False flag confirmed,” wrote user @ProudSocialist on X, an account with nearly half a million followers. The baseless false flag claim — that the shooting was orchestrated...

The Trump administration is expected to move soon to reclassify marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under federal law, according to Axios — a step that would ease restrictions on medical research but would not legalize it. The change also would not automatically affect sentences for people incarcerated on marijuana possession charges. President Donald Trump signaled impatience with the pace of the effort during an April 18 White House event, saying his administration was slow-walking the rescheduling order and pressing aides to get it done. Trump's remarks came four months after he directed the Justice Department to move marijuana...

Big Tech faces a number of challenges with the expansion of data centers, including getting the energy to power them. But if the impacts of renewable energy opposition are any indication, the local opposition to data centers is going to become a formidable opponent to the expansion of artificial intelligence. Renewable energy requires large amounts of land, and unlike other energy sources, it requires a lot of new acreage in rural areas. Local opposition has been identified as the biggest impediment by Big Wind and Big Solar to the buildout of renewable energy. Become fanatical, even violent The opposition to...

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “paranoia” about Army Secretary Dan Driscoll taking his job fueled the firing of the Army’s top general, current and former administration officials tell The Post — as a top contender emerges to replace Driscoll if he’s canned next. Hegseth on Thursday demanded the resignation of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s — Driscoll’s top aide — in the middle of the Iran war for reasons that were not publicly stated, following months of mounting tensions with Driscoll. “This is all driven by the insecurity and paranoia that Pete has developed since Signalgate. Unfortunately, it...

Recessions and stock market crashes are inevitable in a market-based economy, but few Americans realize that their investments face risks far greater than falling stock prices. Because of largely unknown legal changes, millions of Americans could temporarily or even permanently lose their retirement and other investment savings in the next major financial crash, all while too-big-to-fail Wall Street firms and banks are protected. That might sound like a wild conspiracy theory, but the danger is real and well documented. How Wall Street centralized ownership of your investments Beginning in the 1970s, at the request of powerful Wall Street and banking...

Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and...

Clairvoyant Baba Vanga, long believed by devotees to have foreseen events such as 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, predicted alien visitors and the outbreak of World War III for this year. The blind Bulgarian mystic, who died in 1996 at age 85, was said to have predicted humanity’s first-ever encounter with extraterrestrial life would take place in November 2026, according to The Mirror. She warned that a colossal alien spacecraft would enter Earth’s atmosphere, though she did not elaborate on the visitors’ intentions. The blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga predicted alien visitors and the outbreak of World War III for...

Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology at the expense of the technology they actually need. The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers — sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, “It takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.” That framing ignores what is being...

Gary D. Barnett warns that humanity is being taken over through digitisation, digital ID, algorithmic confinement and technocratic incarceration, which will lead to the end of freedom and property. The transformation of mankind involves the intentional fusing of human and machine through neuroscientific nanoscale brain-computer interfacing, with methods including “vaccines,” geoengineering, mRNA platforms and precision medicine. The only solution to stop this technological transhuman invasion, he writes, is through education, exposure and mass non-compliance. (snip) I do not know how many more times I will have to bring up the subject of the AI takeover; digitisation, digital ID, algorithmic confinement...

This image of eight teenagers laying in the shape of a swastika on a football field has been circulating online. This image of eight teenagers laying in the shape of a swastika on a football field has been circulating online. Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area. Updated at 5:50 p.m. A photo of eight teenagers lying in the shape of a swastika on Branham High School’s football field, accompanied by an antisemitic quote from Adolf Hitler, circulated online Wednesday, raising concerns in the district and beyond. The photo was...

More than a third of Americans who were vaccinated against COVID-19 say they had side effects from the shot, and nearly half suspect the vaccines killed many patients,The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 68% of American Adults say they got a COVID-19 vaccination, and a majority (60%) of vaccinated adults report no side effects from the vaccine. However, 26% say they had minor side effects and 10% reported major side effects from the vaccine. Based on a U.S. adult population of 258 million, this would mean 63 million had at least some side effects from...

S.3218 - A bill to provide for the first credible audit of gold owned by the United States in decades, to upgrade the purity of gold to meet global market standards, and to conduct subsequent audits every 5 years. Summary: S.3218 — 119th Congress (2025-2026)

They Designed a System You Can Never EscapeWatch here Every country on earth is in debt. The US owes $38 trillion. The planet owes $315 trillion. But if everyone owes money, who is owed? The answer will change how you see the entire financial system. WHY WATCH THIS VIDEO: (15 Mins) This video reveals the documented history of how four bankers across three centuries engineered a system where debt can never be repaid. You'll discover: ✓ How William Paterson's 1694 Bank of England charter made government debt permanent for the first time in history ✓ Why Nathan Rothschild's bond market...

There’s a gold empire hiding in plain sight. Not in history books. Not in museums. But right now — operating in secret, controlling more wealth than most nations. This is the story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the mysterious institution in Basel, Switzerland, that acts as the central bank of central banks. Created after World War I, it quietly became the world’s most powerful financial entity — managing the hidden gold that backs nations, funds wars, and shapes the global economy. From Nazi gold transactions to Bretton Woods, to modern gold manipulation through paper markets, the BIS...

[H/T Red Badger]Since most portions of the post, including the video, contain profanity, I excerpted just the summary at the bottom of the page out of respect for FR's policy regarding profanity. Basically, the theory is the big insurance companies are threatening not to pay for Dem campaigns next year so Dems shutdown the government during which time the insurance companies get paid while those they insure (e.g., military) do not. Below is an AI analysis of the theory.SNIPSummary: The speaker claims the government shutdown isn’t really about political infighting or healthcare policy—it’s about protecting major insurance companies (like UnitedHealthcare,...

Mark Zuckerberg is said to have started work on Koolau Ranch, his sprawling 1,400-acre compound on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, as far back as 2014. It is set to include a shelter, complete with its own energy and food supplies, though the carpenters and electricians working on the site were banned from talking about it by non-disclosure agreements, according to a report by Wired magazine. A six-foot wall blocked the project from view of a nearby road. Asked last year if he was creating a doomsday bunker, the Facebook founder gave a flat "no". The underground space spanning some...

This short clip shows the moment the shot hit Charlie. It appears the shot was synchronized to Robinson's .30-06 cover shot. While not definitive, what is clear is that the hit drove Charlie to his left and off his chair. Someone has to have better video. It is noteworthy that the cameras to Charle's rear, mounted up on the tent super-structure, were removed 5 minutes after the shooting. No one secured the crime scene and the FBI didn't arrive until 18 minutes after the shooting. Indeed, the entire crime scene was corrupted immediately and now they have stripped the entire...

District Judge Kevin Mullins, who was gunned down in his own chambers by former Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines, is now at the center of shocking allegations that his courthouse was operated like a “brothel.” The revelation comes from police recordings obtained by NewsNation’s Banfield, exposing a web of abuse of power, sexual exploitation, and a justice system gone rogue. Audio recordings from the investigation into former Deputy Ben Fields, who was convicted of rape, sodomy, and perjury, have revealed chilling details of a sex-for-favors scheme that allegedly involved Judge Mullins. The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Sheriff Stines was deposed...