Data Center Backlash Unites MAGA and Greens Against Big Tech
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- Joe Allen rose to national prominence as the anti-tech correspondent on Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, touring the country to lecture against AI and authoring "Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity."
- Data center opposition has exploded into a cross-spectrum movement, with a Gallup poll showing 70% of Americans opposed to construction in their area, moratoriums introduced in at least a dozen states, one passed in New York, and local bans in deep-red places like Hill County, Texas.
- The Trump administration rolled back environmental regulations to accelerate data center buildouts, but a MAGA coalition led by Bannon blocked the administration's late-2025 attempt to re-up a 10-year ban on state-level AI regulation.
- Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie were early national voices against data center development, with Greene tweeting in June 2025 that "forcing eminent domain on people's private properties to link the future Skynet is not very Republican."
- Elon Musk's xAI campus in Memphis reportedly trucked in unpermitted gas turbines to a majority-Black neighborhood already suffering from high pollution and contamination, according to the article.
- The backlash has turned violent in places: an attack on Indianapolis pro-data-center council member Ron Gibson, an attack on OpenAI's Sam Altman, and protesters arrested, detained, or escorted out at public meetings in New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, and Indiana.
- June research on a small voter sample shows that most data center opponents don't live near facilities and are also skeptical of AI—undermining the polling and policy practice of treating AI anxiety and data center opposition as separate issues.
Why it matters: Data centers have become a rare bipartisan populist flashpoint where 70% of Americans oppose local construction and moratoriums are spreading across a dozen states. Washington—which failed to anticipate the fury—now faces a movement that pits its own MAGA base against the Trump administration's deregulatory AI agenda, as Greene and Bannon's coalition already killed one federal preemption attempt in late 2025.
