Grand Junction: Freedom City USA? No!

Republished with permission from The Revolutionist, written by Jacob Richards with research help from other contributors.

A cabal of tech-bro oligarchs have their greedy eyes on almost 200 square miles of public land near Grand Junction and Montrose as potential sites for their dystopian deregulated company towns that they are unironically calling Freedom Cities.

Freedom Cities are envisioned to be tech hubs free of pesky environmental, labor, food and drug safety laws, and nuclear energy regulation. These corporate fiefdoms are to operate outside of our normal legal framework, and like company towns of old, the owners would have all of the power.

The Freedom Cities Coalition, founded by NeWay Capital is leading the push in Washington to make freedom cities a reality. NeWay capital is tied into Prospera, Honduras, a crypto-state within a state, a proto-Freedom City,  that has the backing of tech-billionaires like Peter Thiel, and Mark Andersson. Other FCC

partners include Frontier Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Foundation for American Innovation.

Back in March, Nick Allen, with the Frontier Foundation named Grand Junction specifically as a potential site for a Freedom City, in an interview with Wired Magazine. 

Additionally, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a well-established conservative think tank, has created an interactive “Homesteading 2.0” map of public lands that they would like to see developed.

The AEI identified two parcels of land north of Grand Junction totaling 143.02 square miles as the #1 and #2 best prospects for a Freedom City in Colorado. The AEI estimates that the parcels north of Grand Junction and Fruita combined could house some 376,206 people. For context, currently the population of Mesa County is roughly 161,000 people. The AEI map also identifies an additional 42.76 square miles of public land north of Mack that they think could be developed.

 

The next three best Freedom City sites in Colorado, according to the AEI, are west of Olathe and Montrose, and total 37.64 square miles. With an estimated potential population of 99,034 people.

The Revolutionist has gotten a copy of the draft Freedom Cities Act (pdf). The Act authored by Tom W. Bell, a legal professor at Chapman University, is currently being shopped around Washington, D.C.

Prospera Chief of Staff, Trey Goff, working with the Freedom Cities Coalition told Wired, “The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” adding, “you can tell in meetings with the people involved that they have the mandate to do some of the more hyperbolic, verbose things Trump has mentioned.”

The draft is clear about the lawless nature of these proposed company towns, “state-law shall be preempted within the boundaries of an Freedom City,” and that federal laws like the Internal Revenue Code, National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Clear Water Act, Davis-Bacon Act (labor rights), OSHA, Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and the Fair Labor Standards Act, would be “waived, modified or adjusted.”

The draft legislation lays out criteria for Freedom Cities, one of which gives us a clue of which industries are looking to benefit from these corporate run tech-cities. One criteria looks for proposals that are, “driving innovation in nuclear and data centers, advanced manufacturing and biotech, defense and space.”

While the Freedom Cities Act, is still just a proposal, there is currently legislation in the Senate that would seek to sell off three million acres of National Forest and BLM lands to pay for Trump’s tax cuts in the ‘Big Brutal Bill,” which could also pave the way for the creation of Freedom Cities.

The development of a Freedom City in the Grand Valley would be a catastrophe. It would likely require the dewatering of much of our local farmland. It would require the development of lands where people hike, ride dirt bikes and recreate, and it would forever change our semi-rural way of life. Grand Valley as Freedom City, USA–Hell No!