New research from MIT and Yale examining national electric bills from 2015 to 2024 found that data centers have actually modestly lowered electricity costs nationally by spreading fixed grid costs across more kilowatt hours and unlocking economies of scale. Chevron signed a twenty-year lease with Microsoft to provide natural gas-fired power for a West Texas data center that will generate its own electricity entirely off the public grid. Nvidia announced closed-loop liquid cooling systems for AI facilities that reduce water consumption by up to one hundred percent compared to traditional cooling. Against those developments, comedian and podcaster Theo Von told his audience that data centers are an enslavement mechanism connected to a conspiracy in which certain elites have figured out how to live forever and are using surveillance infrastructure to lock everyone else down.
Allum Bokhari, managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and author of Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Subvert Democracy, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain the political dynamics fueling opposition to data centers and the emerging pattern of anti-tech violence.
Bokhari said he has spent most of his career criticizing big tech for election interference and censorship of political content, which he said continues often under pressure from foreign governments, so he finds it somewhat odd to be in the position of defending these companies. But the claims being made about data centers have become so detached from reality that the correction needs to come from wherever it comes from.
His central thesis is that the hidden driver behind the explosion of anti-tech sentiment is political rather than practical. Silicon Valley underwent a significant political realignment in 2024 and 2025, pulling away from the progressive political establishment it had supported for years. Led most visibly by Elon Musk and exemplified by figures like Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who has explicitly rejected progressive orthodoxy and embraced the Trump administration’s agenda, the tech industry stopped cooperating with government censorship directives, unbanned users who had been suppressed for political speech, and aligned itself with Republicans. This was a political gamble that progressive politicians have not forgiven, because they view it correctly as an undermining of their power over news narratives and information flows.
Bokhari said the result is that the global progressive establishment now treats the entire tech industry as an enemy in exactly the same way it once designated the oil and gas industry as the enemy. The alliance that formed in previous decades between progressive politicians and radical environmental activists, who spoke about energy in apocalyptic and end-of-the-world terms, has been replicated with data centers serving as the new focal point for the same coalition and the same rhetorical framework. He said he believes that is the actual explanation for much of the sentiment being expressed against data centers, rather than any genuine grassroots concern about electricity prices or water usage, though he acknowledged those local concerns exist and deserve to be addressed seriously.
On Palantir and Alex Karp specifically, Bokhari noted that Karp has drawn disproportionate hostility for two reasons that are not often stated openly: he is Jewish, and he broke ranks from the tech industry’s political orthodoxy to support the Trump administration. He said that combination is treated as particularly unforgivable by certain constituencies on both the left and the populist right.
On the question of anti-tech violence, Bokhari said the pattern is now sufficient to call it a trend and that the term anti-tech terrorism is not an exaggeration, though he said he generally wants to avoid inflating language around extremism. He cited a series of documented incidents: an Indiana councilman who supported a local data center had his home shot at, an AI doomsday cult called the Zizians has been linked to six murders, a string of firebombing attacks targeted Tesla stores motivated by left-wing hostility toward Musk’s political alliance with Trump, and Sam Altman’s home was targeted with a Molotov cocktail by an individual whose manifesto explicitly called for killing AI company executives. He noted that the ideological range of the perpetrators cuts across traditional political categories, with some incidents clearly driven by the left and others by conspiratorial movements not easily categorized, though the political element on the left is particularly important to understand because it is directly connected to the loss of censorship power that accompanied big tech’s political realignment.
On reports that the Chinese Communist Party and other foreign adversaries are funding or amplifying domestic campaigns opposing American data center construction, Bokhari said he wants to see more evidence before making definitive claims about foreign influence, having witnessed the excesses of Russiagate, but said the strategic logic is obvious. China is the only serious competitor to the United States in the AI industry, and whoever leads in AI will control the economies and militaries of the future. AI infrastructure may represent the only remaining industrial advantage America holds over China, which makes domestic opposition to data center construction a straightforward strategic interest for Beijing to cultivate.