The mass mobilization against data centers is coming to a boil this week, and the tech aristocracy is turning paranoid. No wonder: The AI zealots of Silicon Valley have staked their souls on President Trump’s commitment to blitzscaling these rural facilities.
On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing a yearlong statewide moratorium on data-center construction. This panics the AI overlords. If a commie-style ban can make it in pro-business New York, it can make it anywhere.
“The real worry in the industry isn’t New York specifically, it is the precedent,” said Joseph Hoefer, a key AI lobbyist, about the response of Silicon Valley to Hochul’s move. “The concern is real, and it moved fast.”
And then there’s the mounting popular disgust with facilities that guzzle water and power from rural communities, giving nothing back.
“Data centers—why would you want that?” Tucker Carlson said recently on a podcast. “Why are you telling me all of the bad things that are going to happen, not telling me really any of the good things, and then telling me that it’s inevitable and I can’t have electricity or water because the machines need it?”
Indeed. We know that data centers drain water reserves and strain electrical grids. But their round-the-clock “brute force” lighting also eliminates dark nights, wreaking havoc on the circadian rhythms of humans and animals.
As for air pollution, according to a recent study, just one data center in Northern Virginia pumps out enough aerosolized waste to cause respiratory diseases and premature deaths to the tune of $53 million to $99 million in health damages annually.
And then there’s the headache- and insomnia-inducing noise pollution. No wonder seven in ten Americans now oppose data centers, including a majority of Republicans.
Caleb Max, another AI lobbyist, describes this polling on data centers as “devastating” and warns, “If the industry doesn’t wake up quick and start solving this, it’s going to get a lot worse.”
All of which brings us to tomorrow, July 18, when Humans First, an activist group fronted by staunch America First conservatives and supported by Marjorie Taylor Greene, is planning a national day of protest to fight the facilities across the country, from Alabama to New Mexico, Missouri to Idaho, West Virginia to Wyoming.
With conservatives in the fight, AI’s foes can no longer be dismissed as tree-huggers, degrowthers, and union thugs. This leaves almost nothing in Silicon Valley’s rhetorical arsenal.
The idea that the data centers are noble citadels in the AI war with China doesn’t exactly fire up the popular imagination.
The 2010s concept that our Silicon Valley overlords are entitled, as geniuses, to turn American towns into sacrifice zones—that also rings hollow.
So this week the oligarchs resorted to the last refuge of a scoundrel: They described the protests as a psy op.
Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen amplified a thread alleging that Humans First is really an anti-ICE socialist outfit. The thread pointed to a March article about Humans First called “Built to Deceive: How the Effective Altruist Machine Infiltrated the Conservative Right on AI,” by Jordan Schachtel, an AI zealot with Blaze-and-Breitbart bylines and a Substack called The Dossier. (On Friday, Schachtel argued in the newsletter AG—yes, American Greatness—that data centers power “the new American Industrial Revolution.” )
Aspiring trillionaire Elon Musk, along with mere billionaire David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, showered X love on Schachtel’s gotcha when it came out.
But the exposé is not as revelatory as they think it is. Schachtel chronicles how a small group of EA activists committed to AI safety—not socialism—fostered Humans First to engage conservatives in the fight against data centers. Then they handed it off to them. That sounds like coalition-building, not deceit. (The “pro-human” mobilization against data centers has been ideologically diverse from the start.)
In May, Humans First published an open letter urging Trump to pump the brakes on data-center construction: “We write as committed America First leaders to thank you for considering an Executive Order to vet potentially dangerous frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models before they are released.”
This remarkable appeal, both populist and pro-regulation, is signed by marquee rabble-rouser Steve Bannon, as well as other leading lights of America First, the MAGA splinter group.
Amy Kremer, another signatory and the chair of Humans First, is an inveterate Tea Partier who founded Women for Trump and organized the rally that spun into the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington.
Cathy Latham, who also signed the letter, is a former Georgia elector who was indicted in 2023 for signing “alternate ballots” certifying Trump as president (Trump pardoned her.) Outside of data centers, Latham’s interests include “advocacy for transparent, non-ideological education that prioritizes critical thinking, American history, and conservative values over ‘woke’ or Marxist influences.”
Kremer, for her part, considers the data-center protests “the most important fight of our lifetime” because “this technology could wipe us off the face of the planet.” This week, she wrote in RealClearEnergy, “The same disconnect that gave rise to the Tea Party in 2009 is happening again in 2026. Instead of a battle over bailouts and Obamacare, this time the battle is over runaway big tech, dangerous AI, and AI hyperscale data centers.”
The right comes by its skittishness about data centers honestly. Even Schachtel concedes: “Their AI skepticism might be fairly perceived as genuine, rooted in years of commentary on transhumanism and civilizational risk involving Silicon Valley elites having power over the average American.”
So have right- and left-wing populists really made common cause at last—or is someone playing someone? If the left is pulling the levers, America Firsters may end up supporting green policies or government regulation. If the right’s in charge, DSA types might have to recognize that conservatives, in Schachtel’s words, “arrived at doomer-adjacent conclusions through a distinctly conservative and Biblical lens.”
Not bad. The only losers are the oligarchs. And religious tolerance, along with a government that works for the people, seem like a pretty American place to converge.
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