In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding the range of ideas people have about hyperscale AI data centers. As you’d probably expect, the vast majority of people are against them and excited to see this kind of backlash through the architecture of local government. But there’s a small but vocal group saying: no, this is all a kind of NIMBY moral panic driven by anger at Big Tech when a lot of these deals, maybe most, actually are good deals for the local communities.

The last part isn’t totally crazy. Or at least they’re certainly on to something that a big part of the punch behind the data center backlash is fueled by a broad politico-economy anger about tech platforms, AI, and nascent oligarchy which in this one set of circumstances people can actually fight back against. I discussed this in a post at the end of last month. Part of the big sour mood that seems to pervade every nook and cranny of our society today is focused on Big Tech, the central and most visible moneyed power in the U.S. today. Everyone has this sense that these guys can simply do anything and there’s no accountability — no democratic control — over any of it. It’s their world and we’re just living in it. But here you have a case where you need to build a super big data center, where finally you have to come and ask permission from some sleepy town council or county commission. And all that pent up powerlessness just comes out as, No! Or, really, Fuck no! And along with that is comment that amounts to, I don’t even care what you’re doing. The answer’s still no. Because you guys have way too much power and someone has to say no to you.

As you can see in my most recent post, yesterday evening TPM Reader BC flagged this news out of Independence, Missouri, best known as the hometown of Harry Truman. A city councilman, John Perkins, got canned in a recall election over a data center and by a massive margin: 68% of the town’s residents voted to end Perkin’s term immediately. It’s all backlash from the town’s approval of a major hyperscale AI data center on which construction is now already well underway.

While this is just one city council race, the broader metastory and this particular development sounds like one of the ur-stories of the 2026 midterm cycle. It coincides with and is related to the backlash against Donald Trump and all his corruption and wrongdoing over the last 18 months. But it’s only in the last three or four months that the AI data center story has fully broken into the national headlines. For all these reasons, I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more of the details. It’s really quite storybook in a kind of made-for-TV-movie dystopian kind of way.

Here’s the story as I understand it.

We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.

It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.