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Federal appeals court upholds controversial Illinois ban on semiautomatic guns

A federal appeals court upheld a controversial Illinois gun control law that largely bans assault weapons.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit decision issued on Thursday slapped down a district court decision that declared the ban unconstitutional.

“Among other things, the Act criminalizes the manufacture, sale, delivery, purchase, and possession of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. A grandfather clause permits preexisting lawful owners of the regulated items to continue possessing them,” the Thursday decision noted.

“For reasons that follow, we focus on the Act’s application to AR-15s and thirty-round rifle magazines. The Act’s restrictions on these items, we hold, are consistent with the principles that underpin our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation. Whether to adopt them is thus a decision reposed in our elected representatives, and we reverse,” the decision declared.

Chief Judge Michael Brennan dissented from the panel’s decision.

“Our Nation’s enduring traditions forbid governments from prohibiting firearms commonly owned for self-defense. Because the people have overwhelmingly chosen the AR-15 rifle and its magazine as their weapon of choice, they are protected by the Second Amendment,” Brennan wrote.

“Illinois’s ban goes too far and should be enjoined as unconstitutional. I respectfully dissent,” he noted.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who signed the controversial law in early 2023, hailed the court’s decision.

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Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy.

One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It’s said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk’s feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 — something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it’s now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee.

Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation. Nevertheless, the company has probably weighed the pros and cons of such a setup and has decided that it was worth taking the risk to gain an advantage in the AI infrastructure race.

Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of “behind-the-meter” power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta’s turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it’s designed to run independently of the power grid.

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Congresswoman Has a Blunt Message for the MSM on ‘Democratic Socialism’

“This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same,” Marco Rubio said last week when he hosted the leaders of over 60 different countries to a ministerial on the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.” 

He left out “democratic socialism,” but let’s face it. It’s all the same. And Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) spoke out about that today at a House Republican leadership press conference, warning about the rise of so-called “democratic socialists” and the reality for voters and the media.   

Malliotakis would know. Her mother fled Cuba in 1959 as Fidel Castro took power. The Castro regime stole her family’s home and their small business, a gas station owned by her grandfather. She says her mother never saw her grandfather again after that. I’ve heard countless stories just like that from Venezuelan friends and acquaintances. Communism ruins families. 

“Communism destroys. It steals from the people,” Malliotakis said. “…people end up living in squalor and lack the basic needs that human beings need, and the people that run the regime live as kings. That’s the reality. It’s about power. It’s about consolidating power for a select few.”   

She pointed out that, sadly, that’s exactly what we’re starting to see here in the United States with the winners of several recent primaries and elections. 

“We have Mayor Mamdani, who pushed and is pushing an agenda of government-run supermarkets, abolishing private property rights, and seizing the means of production,” she continued. “…And that is exactly what they did in communist Cuba.”   

The congresswoman pointed out that her Cuban mother says socialism is basically just a step toward communism. The government steals property and wealth and uses it to redistribute and create better lives for themselves, while their constituents suffer. She also pointed out that Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court, but that’s a move straight out of Hugo Chávez’s playbook. As I wrote yesterday, that’s one reason why Venezuela can’t have elections right now. The country’s Supreme Court is stacked in favor of the regime, and it will require dismantling the court, among other institutions, to get there. 

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Ukraine Drones Strike 13 Russian Vessels In 48 Hours — Black Sea Blitz Knocks Out Power Across Occupied Crimea

The following is reporting from Western and pro-Ukraine sources, and should be viewed with caution. Russian forces continue to take territory in Donbass. Constantinovka is in Russian hands and Slavyansk is in their crosshairs. The deep strikes on Russia are causing pain but yet to stop Russia’s advance on the ground.

Ukraine’s drone war pivoted sharply to the sea this week. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, announced Wednesday morning that Ukrainian drones had struck 13 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov within the past 48 hours — the most concentrated maritime strike operation of the conflict to date, per The Independent’s live war coverage.

The campaign is targeting Russian-flagged vessels operating between the Russian mainland and occupied Crimea — the lifeline that sustains Moscow’s grip on the peninsula. The Kyiv Post reported this week that the operation has now expanded beyond its original focus area to include Russia’s Krasnodar shoreline, marking the first time Ukrainian drone strikes have targeted that stretch of coast. In an earlier phase of the campaign, Ukraine’s drone forces commander told outlets that 183 vessels had been struck in July alone — a figure the BBC said it had seen evidence to support, though it could not independently verify the full tally.

Simultaneously, Ukraine hit Crimea’s power grid. Drones struck electric substations in Masandra and Yalta, according to Telegram monitoring channel Supernova Plus, triggering widespread blackouts across occupied Alushta and surrounding areas, per the Kyiv Independent. The blackouts add to weeks of infrastructure attrition: much of the peninsula is now reported to have limited access to food, running water, and electricity — a grinding siege by drone rather than by armor.

On land, Ukraine renewed strikes deep behind Russian lines Wednesday. The head of Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries — Tatyana Kim — confirmed on Wednesday that warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk had been hit. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev said 10 people were wounded in the Krasnodar storage complex attack, and social media footage showed a thick column of smoke rising over the city. Drone debris also damaged two residential high-rises in Krasnodar, with no reported casualties from that secondary strike.

The maritime escalation comes as Ukrainian military and political leadership is navigating a command transition. Zelensky overnight confirmed General Mykhailo Drapatyi as the new commander-in-chief, and it will fall to him to either sustain or redirect this naval offensive. Russian milbloggers, meanwhile, have been pushing back on official Kremlin claims that Russian forces have secured the M-14 Rostov-Crimea highway — the primary land route linking mainland Russia to occupied Crimea — against Ukrainian mid-range drone strikes, per the Institute for the Study of War’s July 20 assessment.

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Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI

Black prisoners in Ontario’s jails are being assigned to harsher living conditions than other prisoners, through the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that claims to predict their behaviour. A class action lawsuit says the province was aware its use of the software could disproportionately target Black prisoners, but went ahead with it anyway.

The Security Assessment for Evaluating Risk (SAFER) program has been operating quietly in Ontario’s jails since early 2021. SAFER inputs a prisoner’s personal information—including arrests, charges, and disciplinary records—into an algorithm. The program assigns each prisoner a score from 0 to 100 that determines whether they’ll be placed in minimum, medium, or maximum security detention.

Critics of the program argue that the data that SAFER is fed is racially biased: they cite documented patterns of police and courts handing out more severe punishments to Black people because of anti-Black racism. SAFER then uses that data to make harsher risk assessments of Black people who are sent to jail. 

The ministry responsible for Ontario’s prisoners agrees. It wrote in internal training documents viewed exclusively by The Breach that “Indigenous and racialized individuals face systemic discrimination in our justice system … As a result, assessments like SAFER would likely contribute to the overrepresentation of Indigenous inmates in maximum security.”

Despite this, the ministry has been using SAFER for five years. And while the province has included several measures in its rollout of SAFER to reduce the number of Indigenous prisoners in maximum security, it does not appear to have taken such steps for Black prisoners. “We are continuously evaluating to determine if it is necessary to make similar adjustments for other groups,” the same training document from the Ministry of the Solicitor General says. 

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More Evidence for Trump’s ‘Debunked’ 2020 Election Fraud Claims

We have all heard it many times.  According to “journalists,” claims made by President Trump regarding election cheating are “unfounded,” “disproven,” and/or “debunked.” However, irrefutable evidence of large-scale 2020 election fraud exists.

On Thursday night, the president outlined four specific areas of election concern.  I’d like to address one of them: corrupt Michigan voter registrations in the 2020 election.  Trump said, “Even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up.”

The president is correct: Widespread evidence of Michigan fraud was detected before the 2020 election.  After it was discovered and reviewed by the FBI, it was concealed by the Biden DOJ.  I know this because I read it in numerous confidential DOJ email communications.

The scandal is discovered

Shortly before the 2020 election, a woman walked into a Muskegon County (Mich.) election office and submitted 8 to 10 thousand voter registration applications.  An alert election clerk named Ann Meisch noticed that many of the applications were extremely suspicious, with birth dates, addresses, and signatures that did not match the information on related driver’s licenses.

Meisch and co-workers made a largely unsuccessful effort to verify the information by calling phone numbers on questionable applications.  The matter was then turned over to Muskegon local police and state authorities, including secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and attorney general Dana Nessel.  They briefly investigated the matter before the probe was turned over to the FBI.  It was then squelched by the Biden Department of Justice.

The story went dark for almost three years until the Gateway Pundit (G.P.) published a series of articles based upon state and city police reports.  Here is a short recap of the G.P. reporting, followed by some confidential information that has not been widely reported.

  • The woman who submitted the registration applications has the name Brianna Hawkins and was paid $1,150 per week and given a rental car and a “reloadable pay card.”  Her job was to register voters and help them use the registrations to get ballots.
  • The company she worked for was a Tennessee organization with the name GBI Strategies.  It had numerous branches and activities in many areas of Michigan, and in other locations in the United States.
  • GBI had very close ties to high-ranking Democrats and left-leaning groups.  A police investigation stated or implied that in 2018, GBI was paid $188,000 by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $1,571,000 by the Doug Jones for Senate Committee, and $657,000 by the left-wing New American Jobs Fund.
  • During their investigation, the police found several “semi-automatic rifles joined with suppressors and optics and customized pistols.”  Why they were there is a mystery.
  • The police also found “dozens of new phones” and hundreds of “prepaid payment cards.”  (Why hundreds?  Were people being paid with the cards if they registered and voted?)
  • GBI employees told police investigators that they never advocated that people vote for Joe Biden or any particular candidate.  However, police saw a script in the GBI office that encouraged people to vote for Joe Biden.
  • City police went door to door to confirm that the registration forms possessed by GBI were fraudulent.
  • Ruth Johnson, a former state senator and former secretary of State, stated, “My estimate is over 800,000 ballot applications were sent to non-qualified voters in Michigan.”

Phony registrations, no ID, and no signature-checking

To fully understand the scale of this corruption, and the significance of the phony registrations, you need to know how easily they can be converted into votes.

  • Although Michigan law required a voter to request a ballot application, Benson ignored the law, and she automatically mailed out 7.7 million ballot applications to everyone who was registered, including 4 million who were not planning to vote absentee and those with the phony registrations obtained by GBI.
  • To get a ballot application, no ID was required.
  • The only voting safeguard in Michigan (a weak one at that) was signature-matching.  However, secretary of State Jocelyn Benson unlawfully told election clerks throughout Michigan to “presume” that signatures matched.  Fortunately, Ann Meisch, the woman who discovered the scandal, ignored Benson’s unlawful instructions.
  • Four months after the election, Benson’s instructions were ruled to be illegal by a state judge.  The mainstream media ignored that ruling.  No appeal was filed by the secretary of State.

The Biden Department of Justice kills the investigation

Before the 2020 election, FBI agents knew that the real number of phony registrations could be several times larger than the 8,000 to 10,000 registrations originally reported.  I have the specific names of those agents but will not report them here.

At least one official reported that the number of phony registrations could change the election results.

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CIA Report: Venezuela ‘Could Have’ Used Voting Machines To Rig Elections

A newly declassified CIA report says the Venezuelan government “could have” used voting machines to rig elections. President Donald Trump declassified a series of documents and reports related to election integrity on July 16, including a “CIA Note” entitled, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting From 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities.”

The note says that between 2004 and 2020, “intelligence established that Venezuelan government officials developed sustained interest and likely some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems, including Smartmatic technology, to influence electoral outcomes in Venezuela.” The document says it was produced under the auspices of the CIA’s deputy director of analysis and is dated June 29, 2026.

The CIA produced a baseline assessment of Venezuela’s 2012 presidential election that maintained mass electronic election fraud had not occurred. A 2013 CIA “devil’s advocate” analysis, the note says, provided “plausible scenarios” in which “large-scale electronic manipulation could have occurred in Venezuela’s 2012 election without detection.”

The note summarizes sources reporting that, prior to the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s “intelligence services … worked with the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic to develop plans to manipulate election results using preprogrammed voting machines.” The source or sources of that reporting, however, are censored in the document released Thursday.

The note includes claims that such plans included sending “altered machines” to roughly 300 voting centers in pro-Chavez areas “to ensure victory by approximately 1.5 million votes.” Chavez won that election by roughly 1.6 million votes, according to the note.

“[S]ources reported that Chavez congratulated his team for successfully implementing the manipulation plan,” the report continues. The “devil’s advocate” analysis found that elections in countries that “are clients of the technology provider could be in doubt.” But the CIA assessed that such manipulation did not occur in the 2012 Venezuelan election, because the opposition party conceded loss, the CIA didn’t confirm these possibilities were acted upon, and pre-election polls showed Chavez in the lead.

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The Woman Who Came Back: What One Dose of Psilocybin Revealed About the Self We Thought Alzheimer’s Had Erased

In 1971, psilocybin was declared to have “no accepted medical use.” In 2026, it appeared to reach into the ruins of an advanced Alzheimer’s brain and switch a human being back on.

Not permanently. Not by reversing the disease. But for days and weeks—long enough for her family to have her back, long enough to force a question that mainstream neurology has spent decades trying not to ask.

I’ve reported before on psilocybin as a longevity molecule—the Emory findings showing psilocin extending human cellular lifespan by up to 57%, aged mice surviving 60% better, telomeres preserved, neuroplasticity switched on. In that piece I listed Alzheimer’s among the “neurological frontiers” where this ancient fungal ally was beginning to be tested. I did not expect the frontier to move this fast.

The paper is titled, in the careful language of clinical medicine, “Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration.” Behind that title is a woman.

She was an octogenarian Japanese-American woman living under continuous family and caregiver supervision. Her Alzheimer’s had been progressing for roughly ten years. For the last five, her speech had collapsed into monosyllables. She was chronically incontinent. She could not dress herself, could not walk unaided, struggled to swallow, and had lost most of her capacity for spontaneous interaction. Her affect was flat. By every conventional measure, she was in the late, “irreversible” stage of the disease—the stage where medicine offers comfort and little else.

Under supervision, she was given a single oral dose of 5 grams of psilocybin-containing mushrooms (the “Enigma” strain)—a deliberately high dose, well above what modern psychiatric trials typically use.

The acute phase was not gentle, and I want to be honest about that up front. She showed signs of autonomic overdrive: clinically suspected hyperthermia, profuse sweating, and a long, deep, sleep-like state. This is not a small detail, and I’ll come back to why it matters enormously.

Then, approximately nineteen hours later, at 3:30 in the morning, she woke up and began to talk. Not in fragments. She spoke about her own life—autobiographical, spontaneous, coherent—for something on the order of four hours.

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“Robin Hood In Reverse”: The Pentagon Is Stealing From the Working Poor to Pay for War and Enrich Contractors

In an era of high prices for fuel, food, and housing, an extra $4,000 could make a lifesaving difference for many families. But instead, that’s what the average household had to shell out for the Pentagon last year.

That’s right: The average US taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.

For the growing number of working poor in the United States, that money can mean the difference between making rent or falling behind, or between being able to afford an emergency trip to the doctor or going without care.

Money directed to the Pentagon represents nothing but betrayal for many Americans. A large majority oppose our wars, especially the latest conflict in Iran. And roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget flows to for-profit contractors, fueling the billionaire (and now even trillionaire) class.

Take SpaceX, one of many companies built on government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. Elon Musk’s company would not exist without US taxpayers. As early Tesla investor Ross Gerber put it, “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government.”

Early investments and contracts from the US government helped propel SpaceX to success, while continued awards from the Pentagon provided the stable revenue that made the government one of Musk’s largest customers. The company is now valued at more than $1 trillion. Private investors alone did not make Musk a trillionaire—taxpayers across the United States did.

But Musk isn’t the only person who made himself rich off the backs of American workers.

Lockheed Martin receives over 70% of its revenue from US government contracts. The numbers for Raytheon and General Dynamics are similar. These military contractors simply would not exist without the taxpayers—and a new $1.5 trillion budget would send hundreds of billions of dollars more to people who already have more than most Americans could even conceptualize.

At the same time, while taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex, the jobs those industries are allegedly providing are in decline, with the war industry creating over 2 million fewer jobs than it did 40 years ago.

Worse still, under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed a year ago, the money for these ever-rising Pentagon budgets comes directly from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other programs that help Americans make ends meet.

Under those cuts, millions of Americans—including children—have lost SNAP benefits already. And that’s impacting not just families but the farmers who helped feed them.

SNAP benefits were “guaranteed money in the pockets of farmers,” said Reese Amxy, a policy organizer at the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. But 150,000 people in the state have already lost eligibility.

It’s not just Illinois. Arizona has seen the steepest decline, with 50% of recipients—nearly half a million—already losing benefits. Louisiana (21%), Florida (20%), Oklahoma (16%), Virginia (16%), Texas (14%), Wyoming (13%), and Arkansas (12%) round out the rest of the hardest hit states so far.

Yet the person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget. This is Robin Hood in reverse. Worse still, the weapons those taxes buy are often to use to kill children like ours in Gaza and Iran.

The weapons and tech CEOs that would benefit from the massive war budget, and the politicians bought off by them, seek to keep this cycle going next year at an even grander scale. Americans need to demand their lawmakers say no more Pentagon spending—and invest in the things that actually keep our communities safe instead.

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Communist Tyrant Daniel Ortega Announces There Will Be No More Elections in Nicaragua

Communist tyrant Daniel Ortega announced this weekend that there will no longer be national elections in Nicaragua.

Ortega has been in power since 2007.

Daniel Ortega: “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition] can try to seize the government and seize power.” He added that “never again” would parties backed by the United States or “Somocistas” return to power.”

The pro-Cuban communist made the announcement during an official speech in Managua commemorating the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, that is traditionally observed on July 19th.

Ortega has jailed many of the potential rival candidates. US Democrats are following in his footsteps as they continue to persecute Trump and his supporters including supporters in the media.

According to Grok, this announcement effectively cancels or rules out Nicaragua’s next scheduled general elections (originally set for November 2027, after earlier term extensions). It represents a further consolidation of power by Ortega (in office continuously since 2007) and his wife, Rosario Murillo (co-president).

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