Free Republic

Thousands of commuters cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day, but few realize that beneath its eastern span lies a piece of military history. The Nimitz House, officially named Quarters 1, is a Classical Revival woodframe rectangular house of 5,886 square feet. Quarters 1 was built as part of the initial wave of building construction that established the Naval Training Station, on what was then known as Goat Island, as an active base between 1900 and 1923. The first barracks and the Commander's Quarters were completed in 1900. Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet during WWII,...

The Washington Post reviewed leaked audio from four off-the-record lectures the tech investor delivered in San Francisco over the past month that fused beliefs about religion and technology.Tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently warned that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and critics of technology or artificial intelligence are “legionnaires of the Antichrist” in private lectures on Christianity that connected government oversight of Silicon Valley to an apocalyptic future, according to recordings reviewed by The Washington Post.In the four, roughly two-hour lectures, which began last month and culminated Monday at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Thiel laid out his religious views to...

Imagine a world without McDonald’s, Nike, or Kraft Foods. A world where the budget-conscious and time-strapped have nowhere to grab a quick bite, where almost no one drives a car, where television is extinct. Sound pretty bleak? This is the utopian vision of the Adbusters Media Foundation. “We will wreck this world,” Kalle Lasn declares in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge -- and Why We Must. That, quite simply, is the goal of the Vancouver-based organization he founded and runs. A self-described group of “anarchists” and “neo-Luddites,” Adbusters are not merely environmentalists, animal-rights activists,...

Since 1976, a nearly 30-foot-tall statue depicting Saint Junipero Serra overlooked Highway 280 in Hillsborough, but not any more. Many were recently surprised to find the statue was no longer in its usual spot, including the Archbishop of San Francisco. Here one day, seemingly gone the next.

SAN FRANCISCO - The National Guard has been called to California's Golden City to neutralize a 600-foot-tall Katie Porter, who is apparently rampaging her way through San Francisco. Porter, a frontrunner in California's gubernatorial race, reportedly began roaring and growing to an unusual size after a reporter asked her a question. "You didn't ask her a question, did you? Oh no! She hates that!" cried Mayor Daniel Lurie as the hulking monstrosity smashed a giant hole in the the Transatlantic tower. "There's no stopping her now! Run! Run for your lives!" "BLLAAAAWWWRRRGGHHHHH!" responded Porter before swallowing a cable car....

Wells Fargo, the San Francisco-based banking giant, has fired a small group of employees who allegedly tampered with their computers to fake the appearance of working. The company’s St. Louis-based subsidiary, Wells Fargo Clearing Services, filed five disclosures with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority saying that it had fired workers in early May. Each disclosure said the worker was “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” Bloomberg, which first reported the firings on Thursday, wrote that “more than a dozen” employees were fired from Wells Fargo’s wealth and investment management arm. SFGATE...

The Hard Rock Casino Tejon, a partnership between the Tejon Indian Tribe and Florida-based Hard Rock international, is set to swing its doors open for the first time on Nov. 13, more than a month ahead of its original expected opening date.

Pete Hegseth! Remember that guy? Former Fox News weirdo? Famous for drinking on the job? Accused of sexual assault before paying a settlement to make that lawsuit go away? Tapped to head the Department of Defense and then accidentally texted his war plans to the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic? Oh yes, I think you’re quite familiar with Hegseth. He’s a real asshole! And an embarrassing one, too!

Excerpt: "A 26-year-old white man who attempted to commit a terror attack on an Amtrak train in rural Nebraska also attended the doomed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August on the white supremacist side, according to a court document. St. Charles, Missouri resident Taylor Michael Wilson has been charged with an attempt to commit terror by targeting an Amtrak train in southwest Nebraska in October 2017. FBI Special Agent Monte Czaplewski, writing in an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint, suggested that Wilson wanted to murder black people. The document suggests that he had weapons, as well...

Photos from the 2025 edition of the yearly kink-friendly street festival

Residents of a San Francisco Bay Area city are on the lookout for an aggressive squirrel that has sent at least two people to the emergency room for medical treatment. Joan Heblack told ABC affiliate KGO-TV that she was walking in the Lucas Valley neighborhood of San Rafael when a squirrel seemingly came out of nowhere and attacked her leg, clawing and biting. “It clamped onto my leg. The tail was flying up here. I was like, ‘Get it off me, get off me!’,” Heblack said. Isabel Campoy also said she was attacked while walking in the same area. The...

Supreme Court justices have faced harassment and intimidation after a pro-abortion group calling itself Ruth Sent Us posted a map to their homes. Justice Alito and his family, who wrote the draft opinion on abortion that had been leaked by leftists, have had to go into hiding at an undisclosed location. Had conservative protests outside the homes of Sotomayor and Kagan led one of them to go into hiding, the FBI would already be on the case and the media would be calling it an insurrection and a threat to democracy, but it’s not political terrorism when leftists do it....

A Santa Clara engineer, who once worked for Apple's co-founder, was charged on Friday with threats connected to State Sen. Leland Yee, who was sent an email a month ago by a man who claimed he was a "trained sniper." Court documents show that Everett Basham, 45, - a onetime employee of Steve Wozniak a decade ago - faces 12 charges. The charging document for the first time revealed how many and what kind of guns were allegedly found at Basham's home. The full list of charges include: threats to commit a crime resulting in death or great bodily injury,...

A federal district judge sentenced former state Sen. Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat, to five years in prison Wednesday for trading political favors for campaign contributions. He was also fined $20,000. Yee admitted in a plea deal that he was part of a racketeering conspiracy that involved exchanging official acts for money, conspiring to traffic in weapons and money laundering. Specifically, Lee promised an undercover FBI agent favors in return for campaign contributions. During the hourlong proceedings, Yee asked the court for leniency in light of his public humiliation, his wife's severe illness, his admissions of wrongdoing and his...

The largest shopping mall in San Francisco is now reportedly 93% vacant and has seen its value plunge by 25% over the past year, as high rents and retail crime continue to batter the Northern California city. A new appraisal has slashed the value of San Francisco Centre, located at 865 Market Street, to $195 million, which is a 25% decrease since August 2024 and more than $1 billion below its valuation in 2016, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing research from Morningstar. The 1.4 million-square-foot mall has become largely deserted, with 93% of its property now empty, according to...

READ MORE: Future of mall favorite's 1.4k shops in the air as buyer swoops in Shops in San Francisco's most iconic mall can't catch a break. The San Francisco Centre, once a shining beacon of economic strength featuring a multi-level golden spiral staircase and ornate Corinthian columns, has been snowballing into oblivion. Shops have been closing for years. Owners have stopped paying their rent. Auctions for the building's sale have been continually postponed. And now, 93 percent of the mall's 1.56 million square feet of retail is vacant. At its peak, more than 200 stores attracted deal-seeking shoppers, but today,...

A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutor offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government. The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other leftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.” The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written...

On September 5, 1975, in Sacramento, California, a woman named Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme had attempted to shoot Ford. On September 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore aimed a gun at President Gerald Ford as he left the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

Oracle Corp. is pulling the plug on its annual San Francisco technology convention, relocating the event to Las Vegas in a major blow to the city's hospitality industry. The Redwood Shores company has signed a three-year agreement to bring its OpenWorld convention to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, citing rising hotel rates throughout the Bay Area as well as poor street conditions in San Francisco. An Oracle spokesperson confirmed the deal, first reported by CNBC.

0.0001208% death rate leads to urgent crisis. Do you miss having a blue rag clamped over your mouth and nose? Frowns from the people wearing masks? Having to shuffle six feet apart from the line at the supermarket counter? In Governor Gavin Newsom’s California, the local health officials have you covered. Across California, ‘health officials’ are calling for bringing back masks. They’re describing a “summer COVID wave” in September (trust the science) before a predicted “winter wave” and warning that everyone will either be dead or masked by the spring. “California is experiencing a summer COVID wave,” Dr. Aimee Sisson,...