When artists were invited to participate in what’s being called the Great American State Fair, they were promised that it was not political or partisan. And proving that point, Donald Trump will be kicking it off.
The Great American State Fair is described as a birthday bash to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, and it will include a series of concerts on the National Mall from June 24 to July 10.
After several artists dropped out, including Morris Day and the Time, Young MC, the Commodores, Martina McBride and Bret Michaels, Trump took to Truth Social and said, “I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance … so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”
The “yips” is what Trump has when he TACOs out or something. (snip-MORE)
Donald Trump had another mystery visit to a doctor’s office this week.
Three years ago, only 28% of Americans surveyed by a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll said Trump was NOT healthy enough to serve as president. Today, that same poll found that 55% of Americans don’t believe Donald Trump is healthy enough to serve as president. There needs to be a poll asking if he’s mentally healthy enough to be president.
Trump has always rambled incoherently, but it seems to be distressing people more now in combination with his cankles, hand bruises, swollen eyes, and excessive blinking. Shhhh…he’s sleepy.
Trump had a physical in April of last year, and then he had a semi-annual physical in October, and now he has gone back for his third physical in 13 months. Additionally, he’s been to a Dentist twice over the past five months, which surprises everyone. He still has his teeth? (snip-MORE)
All my life, I have heard people say they respect the office of the president, even if they do not like the current occupant. Even though I did not like or respect George W. Bush, I still respected the presidency. But it’s getting harder and harder to respect the office when the current occupant is holding cage fights on the south lawn.
Are we in gladiator times? Are we conducting fights on the self lawn to distract us from our troubles, like inflation, illegal tariffs, ICE goons shooting Americans in the streets, and Donald Trump’s chosen war? In addition to a gaudy oversize ballroom, should we also build a replica of the Roman Colosseum on the White House grounds? Is today’s Caesar, Donald Trump, going to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to determine the fate of the loser of each bout? Will wenches be feeding Trump grapes during the fights? (snip-MORE)
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich is appealing to the public for help after launching a website to report data center concerns as the rapid expansion of AI-driven facilities across the United States increasingly clashes with local communities.
The appeal threatens to thrust an iconic anti-corporate activist into the heart of the battle to expand AI infrastructure at a time of growing public skepticism about the technology’s impact on jobs, safety and the environment.
The website, brockovichdatacenter.com, lists several “key concerns” surrounding such data centers, including high energy consumption that drives environmental impacts and costs, substantial water use for cooling that can strain local supplies, increased e‑waste from frequent hardware upgrades, exposure to location risks such as natural disasters or geopolitical instability, growing scalability pressures that can outpace local infrastructure, and constant noise from cooling systems and generators that can disrupt nearby communities.
“These challenges highlight the need for sustainable, secure, and efficient AI data center practices,” the website says. “Self-reporting is the best way we can get this information out to the public!”
A map on brockovichdatacenter.com shows major AI data centers in the U.S. that are either operational or under construction, overlaid with locations w…Read More | brockovichdatacenter.com
There are now more than 4,200 data centers—built to train, deploy and deliver AI—across the U.S., according to Data Center Map.
According to the website’s statistics, more than 2,716 reports have been submitted, with the most in Texas (612), as of Monday. The state is home to more than 460 data centers, according to Data Center Map.
The greatest concern among communities was water, followed by electricity, health and wildlife.
“The race to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed. In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether. This map captures the real-world footprint of that race—revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty,” Brockovich said.
Virginia Long a hub for government contractors and cloud infrastructure, Virginia—particularly Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley”—offers proximity to federal agencies and one of the world’s densest fiber networks. Established infrastructure reduces build times and attracts hyperscalers looking to scale quickly.
Texas Texas combines vast, inexpensive land with a deregulated energy market that gives companies flexibility in securing large power loads. Cities like Dallas and Austin also bring a growing tech workforce and business-friendly policies that appeal to major AI investors.
Ohio Ohio has positioned itself as a Midwestern data hub, with strong incentives and central geographic access to U.S. population centers. Its legacy industrial sites are often repurposed for data centers, offering space and existing infrastructure at competitive costs.
Arizona Arizona’s dry climate is favorable for certain cooling technologies, while its abundant land and aggressive economic development incentives have drawn major tech firms. Phoenix, in particular, has become a key destination for new AI and cloud infrastructure builds.
Georgia Georgia, anchored by Atlanta, offers strong connectivity as a Southeast internet exchange hub. State and local tax breaks, combined with access to both talent and transport infrastructure, have made it increasingly attractive for large-scale data operations.
Utah Utah benefits from lower real estate costs, a stable regulatory environment, and access to renewable energy sources. Its growing tech sector, known as “Silicon Slopes,” provides an emerging talent pool to support AI-focused expansion.
Why companies are choosing these states:
Cheap land: Large-scale AI data centers require vast footprints; these states offer space at significantly lower costs than coastal markets.
Power access: Reliable, high-capacity energy grids, often with options for renewable sourcing, are critical for AI workloads.
Tax breaks: State and local governments are competing aggressively with incentives to attract long-term infrastructure investment.
Fewer regulations: Streamlined permitting and business-friendly policies enable shorter development timelines and reduced compliance burdens.
Trumpeter Robyn Steward thought clubs weren’t for her until she encountered Fabric’s accessible upgrade – the new home for her radically inclusive, space-themed night
Working the crowd … Robyn playing at one of her Robyn’s Rocket nights at Fabric. Photograph: Siân O’Connor
Until May last year, trumpeter Robyn Steward had never been in a nightclub space, save for playing trumpet with Lancaster duo the Lovely Eggs at London’s Heaven, and a few nights in a university hall that doubled as a lunch room. Steward is autistic and has multiple disabilities including cerebral palsy. “Sometimes strobes can trigger migraines for me, or feel overwhelming,” she says. “I feel like my body’s a bit lost.”
When she wanted to see a gig at Fabric nightclub in London, she asked a friend to go with her as a carer. “I was amazed at how accessible it was,” she says. Subtle touches integrate multiple access needs into the space. “The mezzanine level meant that I didn’t have the strobes in my face. There was a rail that I could hold on to, and there was seating opposite the balcony so I could sit and watch the gig.” She also noticed Fabric’s recently upgraded sensory dancefloor, which deliberately transforms sound into tactile vibrations to better cater for the hearing impaired. “I could see that the lights were strobing and everything, but I felt safe,” Steward says.
Inspired, she contacted Fabric to see if they might host her long-running, space-themed experimental music night Robyn’s Rocket, which since 2017 has been booking noise bands, DJs and improv groups in London venues from Deptford to Dalston. While it champions disabled and autistic performers and audiences, Robyn’s Rocket is principally about integration. “People with and without learning disabilities – and autistic and non-autistic people – should spend time together, where there isn’t any kind of power dynamic,” she says. Her aim is to create a space “where people are all just having a really nice time together”.
We meet in a music studio in Deptford, south London, the day before the Rocket’s first night at Fabric. Steward, 39, is relentlessly upbeat; straight after the interview, she heads to the shops where a friend helps her figure out an unspecific drinks rider request. It’s in keeping with the Rocket spirit of clarifying what might usually be assumed or implied. Online, she supplies detailed visual storyboards of how an evening will progress. All artists fill out detailed tech and access riders. Every box and cable is given a name, shape or colour. All Rocket gigs are livestreamed and timings are strictly adhered to so those streaming the gig don’t get lost. “The schedule, once it’s agreed, it’s pretty non-negotiable,” Steward says.
On arrival, everyone is presented with a silver rocket-shaped badge, angled up, across or down as a visual barometer of how much communication they’re comfortable with. Fabric is adorned with more than 100 posters: signposts always feature words and shapes and are populated with cartoon characters, human and alien. Silver foil covers the stage, and live projections from visual artist Rucksack Cinema are suitably astral. “You’re into new planets, are you?” crows the frontman of “cosmic dross” band Henge.
For Steward, the space theme is also about imagining an equitable new world. “You might meet somebody here with a learning disability, or an autistic person. You might not. But everyone is equal in this space.” The Robyn’s Rocket nights echo the aesthetic and political spirit of Afro-futurist jazz visionary Sun Ra and his Arkestra. “The idea that you can create a different dimension, almost a different planetary experience, at these events is very consistent,” says Mark Williams, co-founder of the Deptford-based arts charity Heart N Soul (where Steward is an associate artist). “It’s using imagination and creativity to free people, and to exist on a different kind of plane.”
Steward was born in Suffolk, and took to music when a tutor brought instruments to her primary school: “I really wanted to go on the trumpet, but they ran out of time, so I spent a whole week blowing raspberries.” The tutor returned for an assembly the next week, and Steward immediately requested the trumpet. “I played a clear note straight away.”
As an infant, Steward used Makaton (a language that uses a combination of signs, symbols and speech) to communicate until she attended Musical Keys, a group for children with special needs, aged three: “It was song based, and so I learned to speak that way – there was a lot of repetition.” Once she learned to speak, she wouldn’t stop; her parents got her a Dictaphone for long car journeys: “They’d say, ‘You can talk to this Dictaphone as much as you want, but leave us alone in the front.’ I would make my own radio shows that would come out sounding like Alan Partridge’s Knowing Me, Knowing You.”
Unlike her East Anglian counterpart, Steward is an excellent, direct communicator. The first half of her career was spent delivering autism training, speaking at conferences, and in research. She’s also written books such as The Autism-Friendly Guide to Self Employment. But, by age 30, Steward became “very conscious that I needed to think about what I want to spend the rest of my life doing”. She had recently learned to improvise on trumpet through the big band at a local adult education centre, and seeing a gig by trumpeter Andy Diagram (who plays the trumpet with guitar pedals) proved crucial to developing her own art. With the help of Heart N Soul, she built Robyn’s Rocket up from a small residency in Deptford to a regular slot at Cafe Oto in east London, later inviting musicians including Alabaster DePlume, Coby Sey and Mica Levi to perform.
The vocalist Seaming To played a Rocket night in 2024. “More and more friends of mine are realising that they have neurodivergent aspects,” Seaming To says. “And quite a lot of them find it really awkward coming out to noisy places. At Robyn’s night, you can admit to feeling awkward, and it’s all acceptable.”
On the night, Steward dons her trademark purple fedora and doubles up as space trumpeter and energetic MC. “I’ve done this gig partly because I just wanted to put Henge on,” she says, beaming from the stage. For all the very human practicalities of Robyn’s Rocket, Steward still has celestial ambitions. “And why wouldn’t you want to put them on in a homemade spaceship?”
More than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the massive and costly complexes used to power artificial intelligence, with a majority saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard instead. While women and men overwhelmingly expressed opposition, women did so more intensely. Out of 1,000 adults surveyed, 55 percent of women said they strongly oppose data centers, compared to 43 percent of men. In fact, men were more likely to favor data centers, citing their economic benefits and job opportunities.
Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup and the study’s author, attributed the distinction to women having more empathy for public-facing issues like the environment and healthcare, and favoring Democratic policies that protect the environment. Resistance to data centers often focuses on the imposition of environmental and financial problems, like water scarcity, noise and air pollution, and excessive energy use that can result in higher utility bills and increased health complications for the low-income communities of color who live near where they are usually built.
“A lot of the opposition is based on environmental concerns about using too many resources, especially water,” Jones added. “Centers need a lot of water to cool the computing machines that they’re using. Land, electricity, and resources are the most common concerns people have.”
Gendered fears about the environment are nothing new, experts say. Women are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation and at higher risk of poverty, food insecurity and gender-based violence when displaced by climate change, the United Nations reports. Studies have consistently shown that women are also key to driving inclusive, effective action to address the impacts of climate change.
“I’ve been organizing for 15 years, and it’s always been the case that women are leading our fights,” said Danny Cendejas, a campaign specialist for MediaJustice, who works with grassroots movements across the country that are opposing data centers. “We are definitely seeing everyone join the fight, but we have to recognize the truth, and it’s women, trans, queer and nonbinary people leading the work.”
Cendejas pointed to environmental justice movements in places like Memphis, Tennessee, and Amarillo, Texas, which have already been overburdened by environmental pollutants and health impacts from gas and oil industries. Those impacts are now being exacerbated by data centers.
“There’s a big connection where big tech is targeting Black, Brown and Indigenous communities,” Cendejas said. “The progress that has been made over the years to shut down coal plants or gain protections… a lot of that is being undone, by big tech and the demand for data centers.”
Data centers have become an increasingly pressing issue for candidates and their campaigns heading into the midterms in November. They’re also a rare source of bipartisan concern in a polarized political environment.
“There are really strong feelings about this. I see this playing out as a political issue, and now people who are running for governor, Senate, or local offices, are having to take a position on this, whereas this is not something people were talking about two years ago,” Jones said. “And now politicians across both parties are coming out as against data centers, which seems like the more popular viewpoint.”
During a House hearing on Wednesday featuring the Environmental Protection Agency’s Assistant Administrator for Water Jessica Kramer, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held up jars of an opaque, brown liquid that she said had come out of a rural community east of Atlanta where Donald Trump got 70 percent of the vote in the last election. Meta has disputed the claim.
“This is the current drinking water in Morgan County, Georgia, right after a data center was constructed, the Meta data center was constructed,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center.”
In New Mexico, first-time candidate Daisy Maldonado is running for county commissioner in Doña Ana County on a platform that includes opposition to Project Jupiter, a $165 billion mega data center under construction in the area. Maldonado was recently endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a proponent of data center regulation, adding to the national conversation about community resistance to AI infrastructure and environmental accountability.
“I see a lot of moms concerned,” said Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, a researcher at the nonprofit Data & Society Research Institute who studied Pittsburgh’s data center industry. “It’s very connected to ‘I want a good future for my kids and if things go this way, I don’t know what world we will have for them in 15 years.’”
To Nunes, the Gallup poll’s results serve as a reminder and reflection of the gendered impacts of AI in society.
“A lot of the interviewees we had in Pennsylvania, when it comes to developers, or people in government, are mostly men, but people who are activists and doing work on the ground, they are mainly women,” Nunes said.
Last summer, journalist turned comedian Charlie Berens started getting social media messages from concerned Wisconsin residents about plans for a massive datacenter campus in their state.
The developer, Vantage Data Centers, claimed the $8 bn project would largely run on zero-emission energy resources like solar, wind and battery storage. The company said the campus would bring thousands of temporary construction jobs and potentially more than 1,000 permanent jobs to Port Washington, a city of 13,000 people about a half-hour north of Milwaukee. Residents opposed the project for what they said was lack of transparency and criticized the lucrative tax incentives offered to Vantage. They worried about the strain on local water and energy sources from an enormous 1.3-gigawatt project that could ultimately span 1,900 acres.
Berens, who shot to internet fame with his “Manitowoc Minute” videos that play on midwestern quirks and stereotypes, had his own reservations about the artificial intelligence datacenter boom. A Milwaukee-area native who still lives in the city, he’d heard about the potential environmental hazards, the steep rise in energy costs for neighbors and noise pollution, among other risks.
When he Googled, he found that lawmakers in his state had paved the way to make the Port Washington project a reality. The deal between Port Washington and Vantage gave an estimated $458m in tax breaks to the developer over 20 years to fund infrastructure for the project,with the city not seeing any of that tax revenue during that period.
“It was shocking,” Berens said.
That’s when he decided to do something he had rarely done before: discuss politics in his videos. He used his platform to address one of the more polarizing issues in contemporary life: what AI portends for Americans.
In August 2025,Berens published his first “Manitowoc Minute” video on AI datacenters.The two-minute skit matched the typical style of Berens’s videos, where he intersperses facts with humor in the style of a TV news report. But he was remarkably direct in his critique of big tech. Sporting a Green Bay Packers tie, he lambasted Silicon Valley CEOs, accusing them of using Wisconsin as a “dumping ground” for datacenters at the expense of the state’s cherished natural resources while evading any type of public scrutiny.
“It is our civic duty to make sure the billionaires become trillionaires,” said Berens in a satiric bit.
He channelled his outrage at lawmakers in Port Washington, a historic city on the banks of Lake Michigan and once home to thriving fishing and shipping industries. In a contentious vote last August, officials there approved the initial $8bn datacenter campus despite strong resistance from residents. (The project later expanded to a $15bn joint venture with OpenAI and Oracle, one of the Trump administration’s showcase “Stargate” megaprojects.)
“I was shocked at how many people I saw speak against this [at public meetings he watched online] and then to see a unanimous vote for it,” Berens said. “It just felt like an imbalance of democracy.”
The video went viral, garnering more than 2.5m views on YouTube alone. Berens’s inbox was soon flooded with messages of support from Wisconsinites of all political stripes – self-declared Maga supporters, avowed socialists and everyone in between – sounding the alarm on datacenters.
“It was 99% positive comments, which doesn’t happen on anything these days,” said Berens. “From that point, I decided that I should do more because nobody’s negotiating for the people here.”
Berens has since thrown himself into the cause, routinely publishing videos and headlining well-attended events with field experts and anti-datacenter activists. He has quickly become the most famous face of a burgeoning movement in Wisconsin, where resistance to these projects – Port Washington is just one of seven hyperscale datacenter projects across the state– has risen dramatically in the last year. A March survey from Marquette University Law School found that nearly 70% of registered voters in Wisconsin say the costs of large datacenters outweigh the benefits they provide, a remarkable shift from last October when that figure stood at 55%.
The attention has placed the comedian in the crosshairs of most of the state’s labor unions, pro-business groups and much of its political establishment, who argue the badger state cannot afford to be left behind in the AI arms race.
In a series of interviews, Berens laid out why he decided to jump head-first into the movement; his case for how big tech destroyed public trust through hard-armed, often secretive tactics to push forward datacenters; and what he has learned as he has crisscrossed the state and toured the country.
“Every step of the way, the more people look, they’re seeing that this is not really a fair fight here,” said Berens.
‘Protecting the people’
On a late winter evening in March, hundreds of people packed a community center in Juneau, a tiny rural town about 45 miles north-east of the state capital, Madison.
The crowd had assembled for a “people’s town hall” to address a $1bn Meta datacenter that has pitted residents of nearby Beaver Dam against their elected officials. The featured speakers ranged from community activists to a former Meta employee. The main act was Berens, who squeezed in the appearance between stops in Iowa and Vermont on his standup comedy tour.
“This is the most bipartisan issue since beer,” he said in opening remarks.
Construction is ongoing at the Beaver Dam Commerce Park where a new Meta datacenter is being built on 2 February 2026 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Photograph: Wisconsin Watch/Getty Images
In his roughly 15-minute speech, he called for more regulation of AI, pointing out that a beloved Wisconsin staple, bratwurst, was more heavily regulated than the trillion-dollar industry. Berens warned the audience of the risks of AI technology, running through a slideshow of news headlines that highlighted the potential, and very real, harm to children. He also addressed his critics.
“I will stick to comedy when our politicians stick to policy and stop protecting big tech and start protecting the people that put them into office,” said Berens, to applause.
As he turned his attention to the project in Beaver Dam, he attacked Meta’s use of a shell company and nondisclosure disagreements (NDAs) that required secrecy from some public officials in the process of getting to an approval. In April 2025, a report found Meta was the mystery tech company behind Degas LLC, the listed corporation on the development. By November, the company acknowledged they were behind the project.
Meta’s practices in Beaver Dam are part of a larger pattern across the state, where datacenter projects have often been developed in secrecy despite their huge price tags and massive footprint on communities. A recent investigation from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit news site, found that NDAs have been signed in at least five cities in Wisconsin where AI datacenters are proposed or under construction.
Another panel speaker that night was Maily Kocinski, a lifelong Beaver Dam resident whose farm lies less than 2 miles from the 700,000 sq ft datacenter campus construction site. Last June, she posted a TikTok video after a creek that runs on her property had gone dry one morning. The water came back, but occasionally appeared milky white and gave off a toxic smell. Kocinski said she contacted the state’s department of natural resources on several occasions and was told the agency collected water samples but were not always able to reach her property in time before the water cleared up again.
She personally commissioned a water analysisin February from a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which found metal levels in her well water above what was considered safe to drink, per recommendations from the Wisconsin department of health services. She questions whether the daily controlled blasts on the construction site led to disruptions in her water supply. Meta commissioned its own study in response, denying any link.
A spokesperson for the Wisconsin department of natural resources confirmed that the department collected a water sample at Kocinski’s creek last November. The results, shared with the Guardian, show elevated metal levels but the department did not speculate as to the potential cause.
“Without a site specific review, the DNR cannot speculate on the role of the blasting on the aquifer and Ms. Kocinski’s private water supply,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Protesters gather for a statewide datacenter day of action at the Wisconsin state capitol on 12 February 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph: Wisconsin Watch/Getty Images
Kocinski, an elementary school teacher, saidsince last fall, she has spent up to 15 hours a week researching the large-scale construction of datacenters and the potential environmental harms they can wreak in a community. In March, she testified in the Wisconsin senate in favor of a datacenter oversight bill that ultimately failed to reach a vote.
She said she had never met Berens before the event in Juneau but the two had been in regular contact for months after she cold-emailed him her story.
“Charlie has really put in the work to understand this issue,” said Kocinski. “Most people came to Juneau probably because he was there, but they stayed and maybe learned a bit about these things [datacenters] … That kind of education leads to action.”
The risks of speaking out
As Berens’s critiques of datacenter projects in Wisconsin have gained traction with the public, he has faced pushback from the state’s trade unions, who welcome the thousands of temporary construction jobs that typically come with a project.
A major Wisconsin labor leader called out Berens in a December op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “For us in the building trades, data centers aren’t some big, scary mystery,” wrote Emily Pritzkow, head of the Wisconsin Building Trades Council that represents nearly 50,000 workers in the state. “They’re high-skill, long-term work. The kind of work that feeds families, pays mortgages, and sends kids to college.”
Local governments have weighed in too. In Port Washington, city officials posted a “fact sheet” online to “clarify some lingering misconceptions” after Berens posted a second video urging residents to question officials about the datacenter project at an October council meeting.
Ted Neitzke, Port Washington’s mayor, expressed frustration with the attention that Berens’s videos had brought his city. He noted that more than 100 people began showing up at council meetings after the comedian published his first video last August, forcing the city to move them to a hotel conference center with an added police presence.
“After Charlie Berens’s video, things escalated very rapidly, very contentiously, and our city was besieged with people from outside of our town,” said Neitzke. “Charlie Berens created chaos for us.”
Neitzke also challenged some claims Berens has made in his videos, including those about the amount of jobs the project would create, its environmental impact and whether residents’ power bills would increase.
“I don’t know where the line gets drawn between factual and embellishment for him,” said Neitzke. “There’s a very gray area between the entertainment and the facts.”
Berens defended his videos and the people who showed up to council meetings in response, noting that a hyperscale datacenter affects not just one city but the surrounding communities and “they deserve a say too”. He maintained that his videos were well-researched and cited news articles to back up his claims.
“I informed people about a massive AI datacenter going up by adding some punchlines,” said Berens. “If the truth brings chaos, that seems like something the mayor would want to take accountability for.”
Neitzke met with Berens last fall in an attempt to find common ground. The mayor described the two-hour meeting as cordial but both left in disagreement. He has been the project’s greatest champion, referring to it as a “transformative” development for the Rust Belt city, one that has the potential to once again make Port Washington a hub in the midwest.
That stance has drawn some fierce public opposition, even leading to an attempted recall effort over the $458m tax incremental finance, or TIF, district with Vantage. Under the deal, Vantage will pay upfront costs for the development and the city will reimburse the company with new property tax revenues over a period up to 20 years. Neitzke said he was no fan of TIFs but called them a “necessary evil” in negotiations to win the contract over other cities chasing major developments to boost revenue.
“This is a save our city strategy,” said Neitzke. “[Berens is] doing what he does, and we’re going to do what we’re doing.”
Berens has also faced criticism online from those who say the comedianhas built his career on tech platforms, while looking to close the door to their projects in Wisconsin. He said he “understands the irony” but wants to use his sizable platform to educate his audience on these types of developments that could remake their communities.
Berens engaging with his audience on stage. Photograph: Todd Rosenberg
Advertisers, too, have noticed his shift to politics. Berens acknowledged that he lost a major brand deal with a company that did not want to appear alongside his anti-datacenter content, though he declined to name the business.
“I’m asking for transparency. I’m asking for honesty. I’m asking for people to get informed,” said Berens. “I’m trying to facilitate that and if that at the end of the day means I lose everything, then so be it.”
A personal evolution on AI
Berens was not always an AI pessimist.
A few years ago, he believed the utopian vision laid out by AI luminaries like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who spoke of how the technology could be used to cure social ills, even to treat intractable diseases. Berens thought maybe it could also help Wisconsin deal with its Pfas contamination issue. “My interest in AI started with a lot of hope and optimism actually,” he said.
That sentiment eventually turned to cynicism as, he claims, the industry’s billionaire CEOs dispelled any virtuous use of the technology for the social good in favor of enriching themselves and their investors. He cited Altman’s recent efforts to create an Erotica feature in OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, despite concerns even from the company’s advisers that such a tool could create a “sexy suicide coach”, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“I thought this thing was supposed to cure cancer,” Berens said, referencing Altman’s past statements. “Is this what we’re giving our land for? Is that what we’re giving our water for? Is this what you’re asking to change our communities for?”
For him, the “tip of the iceberg” was the gold rush to build hyperscale datacenters in his state through secretive tactics and potentially exploitative agreements in post-industrial cities longing for an economic revival.
“Wisconsin created an environment that would please the billionaire tech companies,” said Berens of the tax incentives. “Billionaire tech companies took full advantage of that.”
Prescott Balch knows a bit about those types of corporate tactics. A former technology executive at US Bank turned anti-datacenter activist in retirement, Balch was on the frontlines of the successful effort to stop a major Microsoft AI datacenter project last fall in the picturesque eastern Wisconsin village of Caledonia, where he lives. In April, he won a seat on the town’s village board, beating an incumbent who supported the datacenter. He views the AI datacenter boom as akin to the dot-com bubble crash of the early 2000s, another chapter in the boom-and-bust cycles of the volatile tech industry.
“We got irrationally exuberant and built too much stuff,” Balch said of the dot-com period. “Maybe the company running your datacenter will go bankrupt. This big dollar amount that you’re chasing comes with significant risk.”
Balch’s insider expertise in the wonky world of municipal subsidies has been fundamental for Berens. Balch factchecked many of Berens’ videos on the issue, even appearing in one where he methodically crunched the numbers on thesedevelopments, referring to the Port Washington project as “up and down a horrible deal”.
The 62-year-old is, in many ways, the polar opposite of Berens. He is professorial in demeanor and careful to point out that he is not an AI alarmist. Where the two agree is a belief that there’s been an information vacuum around these projects, leaving the public largely uninformed abouttheir size and scope. That’s part of the message they have taken on the road, appearing together at events in Wisconsin and Illinois. Berens’s celebrity has been the draw for people to turn out.
“[He] gets people interested in the topic and warms them up,” Balch said. “And I get to do the dry delivery of the financial perspective.”
Port Washington vote
On 7 April, Port Washington residents passed the nation’s first anti-datacenter referendum. By a roughly 2-1 margin, voters approved a measure that would require city officials to get approval from voters before approving tax incremental districts of more than $10m.
An aerial view of Port Washington, Wisconsin. Photograph: Lena Platonova/Shutterstock
The effort came together after a group of residents called Great Lakes Neighbors United gathered more than 1,000 signatures in less than two weeks to get it on the ballot. The referendum does not stop the $15bn datacenter campus under construction, but would apply to all future projects above that $10m threshold. Industry advocates have warned the vote could set a dangerous precedent for municipalities across the country, potentially paralyzing AI datacenter developments.
Mayor Neitzke said the referendum makes the city less competitive and puts it at a disadvantage to vie for future projects. For Berens, the vote reflected the energy he has seen on the ground in Port Washington and in every corner of the state.
“The people who are the heartbeat of this movement are like people in Great Lakes Neighbors United,” said Berens. “These are people from all different walks and all different political stripes, but they all care about the same thing: [that] their community should have a voice.”
The Interior Department added $6.2 million to the no-bid contract for repairs to the Lincoln Memorial pool late last week.
Atlantic Industrial Coatings was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump said that his handpicked contractor would charge only $1.8 million to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and paint it blue.
The actual cost is now more than seven times that, after the Interior Department nearly doubled the size of the contract late last week, federal records show.
On Friday, the Interior Department added $6.2 million to the contract’s previous cost, saying it now planned to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. President Trump said he chose that company to repair the landmark because the firm had worked on the swimming pools at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
The government awarded that firm a no-bid contract last month, bypassing the requirement to seek competing offers by saying that the situation was so urgent that any delay would cause “serious injury” to the government. The government has not publicly said what that injury would have been.
Instead, it has cited Mr. Trump’s desire to get the work done before the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
Public contracting records do not say why the contract’s cost increased so sharply on Friday. Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said that the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”
Atlantic Industrial Coatings did not respond to questions about the increase.
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that the contract’s current value matches, down to the dollar, an offer submitted to the government by Atlantic Industrial Coatings in the middle of last month. That offer included a 20 percent profit margin, the documents show.
Competitive bidding laws aim to ensure that the government is getting a fair price from its vendors.
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“Every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered,” a lawsuit filed Monday said.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
The contractor was hired to repair leaking joints between the pool’s concrete slabs, waterproof the pool’s bottom, and paint it a shade called “American flag blue.”
The pool has also been troubled for decades by leaks and algae blooms that turn its water green.
On Monday, a nonprofit dedicated to landscape architecture filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington seeking to halt the paint job. The Cultural Landscape Foundation said that the Trump administration had ignored a law requiring advance scrutiny of projects that alter historic landmarks.
The foundation, based in Washington, said in its lawsuit that “every day that the resurfacing continues, the historic character of the Reflecting Pool is being further and fundamentally altered.”
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
“This person is already thinking bigger, writing, ‘If this succeeds the people can band together to buy even more companies that get intentionally bankrupt by private equity and we can start bringing back consumer friendly practices or seizing the means of production maybe.’”
“Get in losers, we’re going to buy an airline” is the short bio next to the smiling face of Hunter Peterson, an aviation enthusiast making waves as he tries to disrupt the air travel industry. On Saturday, May 2, at 3 a.m., Spirit Airlines abruptly shuttered, leaving thousands of employees out of work and thousands of travelers holding unusable tickets.
There was no notice or warning. One day, people were booking tickets, and the next, the budget airline went dark. The airline made air travel affordable to a subset of people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
The FAA and other airlines scrambled to offer solutions for those booked with the budget airline. While Spirit is offering refunds, the loss of a budget airline giant will be felt. Peterson decided to go further by doing something unheard of in the airline industry–crowdsource to buy an airline.
The idea behind crowdsourcing funds is to make the airline people-owned. This means there would be no corporation backing the airline. No overpaid CEO, and no large shareholder who gets to decide the fate of the company. Peterson calls it Spirit 2.0, and much to his surprise, an astonishingly large number of people were interested.
What started as a zany idea quickly turned into an unexpected movement. Peterson set up a website where interested people could pledge money starting at $45–the average price of a Spirit ticket. The potential CEO wanted to keep the price point within reach. None of the money has left anyone’s accounts. Their pledge acts as a placeholder for future funds, but the clock is ticking.
It may sound like an elaborate joke or scheme to go viral, but Peterson is doing the work. Not only has he met with the Spirit Flight Attendants’ Union, but he’s also spoken with attorneys. In videos shared on Instagram, he explains the importance of doing the legal footwork before money leaves people’s accounts.
“I just got off two calls,” Peterson says. “One, with one of the largest law firms in the world that specializes in mergers and acquisitions, aviation distress assets, and debt, and they basically said, this is doable. We can do this. I also got off a call with someone that represents high-net-worth individuals who may be interested in basically giving us some money to just burn to figure out the legalities of this.”
Peterson explains that in less than a week, they’ll be auctioning the operation certificate for Spirit. This means that if this lofty goal is going to be reached, potential small-donor investors need to reach the astronomical $1.75 billion total. Yes, billion.
Before giving the brief update, Peterson’s site letsbuyspiritair.com had already raised over $24 million. The total continues to climb rapidly, with people pledging amounts anywhere from $45 to $850. Since the website popped up, the total pledged has reached $437 million, and it’s restoring hope in people trying to make this proposed people-owned airline a reality.
“ITS ACTUALLY HAPPENING WE CAN DO THIS,” one person screams.
“Is this feeling I have…. hope? It’s been so long since I’ve felt it lol,” another says.
This person is already thinking bigger, writing, “If this succeeds the people can band together to buy even more companies that get intentionally bankrupt by private equity and we can start bringing back consumer friendly practices or seizing the means of production maybe.”
Someone else shares, “This Spirit Airlines 2.0 project is giving me hope for America. I know there are more important fish to fry when it comes to issues in America. But if we are successful with this, imagine all the other issues we can address (e.g. healthcare, reparations, homelessness, etc.) using this framework. Like truly power to the people.”
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