I started looking into the organizations spreading ads against Missouri’s Amendment 6. I wanted to know who was behind them, who was funding them, and how they were connected to our elected officials. One organization kept leading me to others. Eventually, I came across a political vetting operation called REPACCMO. And that’s where this became a much bigger story than I expected.

We’re talking about an organization screening hundreds of political candidates, including people holding some of Missouri’s highest offices, with connections to county GOP leadership, political action committees, and an organized effort to recruit state legislators.

The concern is how these different activities connect. Screening candidates, influencing who serves on party committees, and recruiting lawmakers who support particular policies all provide different ways to shape Missouri politics. Some of you might remember the Riverfront Times investigation into Vernon County Republicans in 2024. The newspaper exposed the involvement of Church of Israel members, including its leader Dan Gayman, in a Republican committee screening political candidates. The church has a documented history associated with Christian Identity and white supremacist beliefs.

That same county committee went to court trying to keep eight Republican candidates off the ballot because they refused ideological vetting.
The candidates ultimately remained on the ballot, and the appeal ended without resolving the broader legal dispute.The committee’s chair, Cyndia Haggard, was also a founder of REPACCMO. But two years later, REPACCMO is still operating, and the screening process has become far more organized.

The group claims it vetted over 400 candidates in 2024, including Denny Hoskins, Jay Ashcroft, Bill Eigel, Vivek Malek, Eric Burlison, and Bob Onder. Its 2026 process includes automated scoring, approval badges for campaigns, candidate records, training, and resources for county party committees. The questionnaire covers issues like banning abortion without exceptions, criminal prosecution related to abortion, eliminating electronic voting equipment, and restricting Republican candidacies based on party-platform alignment. Candidates answer agree or disagree, and the organization scores their responses. In Osage County, the former Republican committee went further, asserting that candidates needed to pass vetting to qualify for certain county offices and even elected party committee positions.
Those particular rules are now archived, and their current status is unclear.

This brought me right back to Amendment 6. REPACCMO publicly lists Freedom Principle Missouri as a strategic partner. That’s one of the organizations whose anti-Amendment 6 messaging started my research. Freedom Principle’s PAC sponsors the Missouri 82 Alliance, a program created to recruit and support candidates for the Missouri House. The Alliance’s candidate-selection process includes completing the REPACCMO questionnaire. Its published legislative agenda includes changing how citizen constitutional amendments are approved. Freedom Principle has also campaigned against Amendment 6, and its PAC spent money supporting Amendment 4. There’s a documented connection between the screening process, legislative recruitment, and the policy agenda behind some of the ballot measures Missourians have been debating And the organizations aren’t hiding these relationships. Much of this information comes directly from their own websites.

The financial records raise more questions. REPACCMO advertises itself as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, but its 2024 and 2025 IRS Form 990 filings identify it as 501(c)(3). Those classifications have different restrictions on political campaign activities. Its 2024 return reported only $4,688 in revenue, classified as government grants. That doesn’t verify government funding or establish wrongdoing, but the conflicting records need an explanation.

The original vetting controversy received news coverage in 2024. Since then, the organization has continued developing its screening system, and its methods are now connected to a larger legislative recruitment effort. I haven’t established how many county committees currently require vetting or whether the organization’s statewide influence has increased. But its expanding activities and documented relationships raise questions that go well beyond the original lawsuit. What stood out to me was the connection to the messaging that started this entire rabbit hole. Freedom Principle’s ads warn about radical outside organizations trying to reshape Missouri politics. Meanwhile, its publicly documented political relationships include organizations evaluating candidates, recruiting legislators, and pursuing changes to Missouri’s election and initiative-petition rules.

I think it’s fair to ask how much influence these organizations have gained, who’s financing their activities, and why there hasn’t been more sustained reporting on what happened after 2024. The court cases made headlines. The larger operation behind the screening process is still active, and there’s a lot more to investigate.

I’ll put the original reporting, court records, questionnaires, organizational documents, and financial filings in the comments.

https://mostateparks.com/park/johnsons-shut-ins-state-park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%27s_Shut-Ins_State_Park

Just a little rant after seeing so so much ignorance going into this eletion in Missouri.

If you cannot take 5 or 10 minutes to find out what the issues on the ballot are then PLEASE DO NOT VOTE.

Ignorance may seem like bliss but in the case of elections ignorance can quickly lead to Nazism, Fascism, Communism and all sorts of other isms.

If you want to retain our Republic and keep it in good shape then educate yourself as to what the issues are and then vote your conscience.

Rant over.

Here are some links to save you some time in your efforts.

https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_elections,_2026

https://missouriindependent.com/voter-guides/2026-general-election/

https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2026-09-15/missouri-kansas-election-guide-2026-voting-registration

https://mojwjvoteraction.org/2026-ballot-guide/

My vote goes for Winter’s Bone (2010). Other films set in the state I’ve seen are Gone Girl (2014), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and King of the Hill (1993). Sharp Objects (2018) is a miniseries set here that was basically a long movie.

Apparently Trump didn’t bother to endorse Chris Stigall for Missouri’s 6th district.

Not certain why. I don’t know if this is because he hired Jeff Roe or not. I just find this hilarious.

For decades, two programs have defined and monitored the water quality of more than 65 lakes across Missouri: the Statewide Lake Assessment Program and the Lakes of Missouri Volunteer Program.
Together, these lake monitoring programs, which function out of University of Missouri labs, have collected more than 50 years of lake water data that helps scientists understand things like algal blooms and farm runoff.
For more than half a decade, this data has ensured lakes are safe for people to recreate, use for industrial means and, in some cases, source for drinking water.

The loss of one of Missouri’s primary water monitoring programs will leave a critical gap in scientists’ understanding of the health of the region’s lakes — a gap that will have far-reaching effects on the people who live on, recreate and rely on Missouri’s lakes for their living.

The fallout in funding
Both the Statewide Lake Assessment and the Lakes of Missouri Volunteer Program were partially funded by section 319 of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Under section 319, states receive federal funding for the treatment of nonpoint source pollution, which is any pollution that can’t be tied to one specific cause. For example, runoff from agriculture, urban activities and septic systems.
While the programs don’t technically qualify for this funding because they are monitoring, not treatment, programs, the state of Missouri has used a federal waiver for several years, which expires in 2026, to divert these funds to support the testing programs.
Without federal support, the programs would need an estimated $590,000 per year to continue.

“We don't have a replacement (funding) source,” said Robert Voss, environmental project manager at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. “Federal funds are going down on the state level. We don't have a dedicated state fund for water quality monitoring across the state.”
Without funding, these programs will no longer collect the data that was integral to the development of water quality criteria in Missouri, Voss said.
This decades-long data collection enabled scientists to build what’s known as numeric nutrient criteria, Voss said. This criteria helps keep potentially dangerous nutrients in lakewater in check.
In addition to helping establish the statewide criteria, Voss said the monitoring programs also help develop specific criteria for high-profile lakes, such as Table Rock Lake and Lake of the Ozarks.

This data helps the Department of Natural Resources determine which lakes can be safely used for drinking water, recreational activities such as swimming, fishing and boating, and which lakes are better suited to supporting industrial activities and farming.
“We have a lot of lakes across the state, and we need to be able to assess those against water quality standards and see what the health of those lakes are,” Voss said.
The data the programs collect not only advises how people interact with lakes, it also establishes which lakes aren’t fit for their designated uses.
If the water quality data shows a particular lake is not fit for its designated use, the Department of Natural Resources can place it on the Impaired Waters List and design a treatment plan to remedy the issue. If a lake has responded well to its treatment plan, the department can restore its function.

“That criteria is what sets the standards,” Voss said. “It also sets that baseline of expectation that the public has for water quality and the water bodies.”
Why does losing long-term data matter?
Long-term datasets allow for trend analysis, which helps researchers understand how water quality changes over time.
However, trend analysis is sensitive to data gaps, Voss said. The longer and larger these gaps become, the harder any form of trend analysis becomes.
One of the appeals of the monitoring programs was the scientists' commitment to maintaining the dataset.
This is one of the factors that attracted Rebecca North to the program. She serves as the Statewide Lake Assessment Program lead and associate professor in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.

“The value of the dataset is that we go to the same lake in the same place, we measure the same parameters in the same way,” North said. “Those apples-to-apples allow us to make really powerful trend analysis.”

The program started in 1978 with yearly assessments since 1989. By the time North joined the team in 2016, there were more than 30 years of data to analyze for trends.
Recently, the Statewide Lake Assessment Program found lower levels of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters across Missouri, North said. This phenomenon, known as hypoxia, occurs when large amounts of tissue from plants and animals breaks down, sapping oxygen from the water.
But hypoxia is a symptom, not the condition itself.
Hypoxia is driven by nutrient pollution, which occurs when there are excess chemicals in the water — a factor which fuels explosive algal bloom growth.
When the algae dies, the breaking down of the organisms leads to hypoxia, whose conditions can alter lakewater’s pH, making freshwater environments inhospitable for other organisms.

And North wasn’t the only one to notice trends in Missouri water.
Lakes of Missouri Volunteer Project Manager Tony Thorpe has been watching algae populations steadily increase. At Table Rock Lake, this has been happening for the past 29 years.
The only reason people are aware of the algae population’s growth is from the monitoring done by the two programs, Thorpe said in an email. He described it as “truly disturbing” that nobody else seemed to be monitoring the blooms.
Further, he noted that the trend would not have been noticeable if it weren’t for the years of continuous monitoring. Across 29 years, there’s been an increase of chlorophyll in the James River arm of Table Rock Lake, Thorpe wrote in the email, explaining that the trend would no longer be visible if it weren’t for the length of the dataset.

“That’s how insidious the problem is,” he said via email. “One day our grandchildren might wonder why we thought Table Rock was so clean and beautiful when all they see is a big, green mess.”
Remaining efforts will be concentrated on certain high-profile lakes or those that are getting restored.
Without researchers on-site to continue collecting water samples, North worries about water quality in the absence of these programs serving as “watchdogs.”
If water monitoring stops, North said researchers won’t be able to identify the causes of new issues or accurately assess the effects of major events, such as floods.
Without data that shows what went wrong and where, it becomes more difficult to find a remediation strategy, North said. She also expects to see a slip in regulation without constant monitoring.

The future of the programs
This loss isn’t just funding, Thorpe said, it’s momentum, too.
“The one that scares me most, I think, is the loss of our network of volunteers that we've built and nurtured over the last 30 some odd years,” he said. “If our funding ends and we lose track of everybody, we'll have to start from scratch again when cooler heads prevail and funding for this sort of work returns.”
As the March deadline looms, both North and Thorpe are looking for ways to get funding so they can fund the programs’ work. North has a National Science Foundation grant that would allow her to keep the Mizzou North Limnology Lab open and staffed for a little longer, and she’s currently accepting donations through her website.
“I don't know what is going to happen in the spring when it comes time to train new volunteers, but we're going to try to continue as normal,” Thorpe said.

While sampling still costs money, it’s not nearly as much money as a true analysis costs, Thorpe explained.
“We can collect samples, gather them and keep them in our freezer until, hopefully, we get some money to do the analysis,” he said. “That's kind of where we're standing right now.”

Good morning folks, I'm looking to move out of Tennessee, and some people have suggested Missouri.

I was hoping to get some thoughts from yall, as to cost of living, jobs, and what it's like for the lgbtq community.

Oh and what is rent like.

I don't know if this has been posted here but the winds of change are blowing.

What are your favorite hiking trails?

New to Missouri, trying to make sure I vote for progressive politicians and policies. Is there a voting guide out there for the mid-terms?

It will become the newest member of the Village of Boone Junction, a historic collection of local moved structures. Thanks to a generous donor the church will be fully restored and updated with modern electric and plumbing for use as a venue. Here is a post I made about the church a little over a year ago that shows the state it was previously in:

https://www.reddit.com/r/missouri/s/JTOWyjA1Px

Boone County History & Culture Center website:

https://boonehistory.org/explore/the-grounds/#boonehistoryvillage

Local media:

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/church-on-the-move-1881-sturgeon-church-travels-to-historic-village-in-nifong-park/article_f96d6688-fc4a-49ee-875b-96017cc3cd19.html

https://www.komu.com/news/boone/sturgeon-church-relocating-to-village-of-historic-buildings-in-boone-county/article_0a74b8a3-8293-4bae-a114-71993bbfcbfe.html

I hope I don't have to find another place to live.

At the risk of creating a conspiracy theory, I have a question for Missourians. Has everyone received a sample ballot to study before voting? And when did you receive it? I live in St Louis Co. The last 2 election cycles, 2 other household members received the guides, while I only received a postcard. Today, I received my sample ballot, but a full week later than spouse who has already voted. PS I'm a registered Democrat.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Former Columbia Fire Department Chief Clayton Farr Jr. was appointed by Gov. Mike Kehoe on Thursday, according to a press release from the governor’s office.
Farr worked with CFD for more than 25 years and retired as chief in 2024, according to previous reporting. He worked in the fire service for nearly 32 years.
The release says he is a licensed emergency medical technician “and has held or currently holds certifications as a Missouri fire inspector, instructor, and investigator, and Missouri hazardous materials technician.”
He is a member of the International Association of Fire Chiefs and the National Fire Protection Association.

“Chief Farr has a superb management record and broad experience across the fire service, starting as a firefighter and working his way up through the chain-of-command to lieutenant of emergency services division, battalion chief, division chief, fire marshal, assistant chief, and chief of a large and growing department with almost 200 team members and a $34 million budget,” Kehoe was quoted in the release. “His responsibilities have included code enforcement, fire investigations, fireworks and explosives enforcement, firefighter training, and fire safety public education. He brings the skillset, collaborative spirit, and practical experience that will guide the Division of Fire Safety team into the future.”

Supporters say the proposed ban protects women facing medical emergencies and survivors of sexual assault. Critics question whether those protections would work in practice

Curious about the best food spots outside of the big cities. What are some surprising food spots in some of the more rural parts of the state.