Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.



The Federal Communications Commission’s latest broadband report makes two things clear: America has made real progress, but the rural job is far from finished.

The number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband with download speeds of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps fell roughly 23% in one year, while rural gaps shrank more than 44% over two years. Prices for the mid-tier plans most households buy have also fallen in real terms.

The path is simple: Make the biggest users and beneficiaries of Universal Service Fund-supported networks help pay, without raising prices for consumers.

Yet the FCC still says deployment is not “reasonable and timely” for all Americans, especially in rural areas and tribal lands. For many families, broadband is now one of the rare essential services that is both faster and more affordable than it was a few years ago.

That’s why the Universal Service Fund remains indispensable. It connects an estimated 130 million Americans each year, supporting low-income and rural households, schools, libraries, students, and health care providers. At roughly $8.5 billion annually, USF underwrites a crucial piece of America’s digital infrastructure. It also supports the infrastructure beneath an internet economy measured in the trillions of dollars.

The problem is how we pay for it. Consumers bear a monthly surcharge on legacy voice services, while the largest internet platforms, which depend on broadband to generate enormous revenues, contribute nothing.

Congress knows the system needs reform. In 2023, Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) launched a bipartisan Universal Service Fund Working Group. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) now shares leadership with Luján, joined by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and the working group has heard from hundreds of stakeholders. Its assignment is straightforward: preserve a program that works while replacing a financing mechanism that does not.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and TikTok all depend on broadband networks to reach Americans. Each USF-connected household generates an estimated $3,000 annually in revenue for these companies, which collectively consume roughly two-thirds of U.S. broadband capacity. Data-center expansion will only increase that traffic. As more data centers come online to support AI, cloud computing, streaming, and other digital services, the demands placed on those networks will only grow.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, must keep investing in the networks that carry it. Without USF support, many networks would not be built, and broadband could become unaffordable for millions.

Don’t put the bill on consumers

Congress should not solve the problem by adding another fee to household broadband. Affordability remains politically and economically sensitive, and even modest price increases can push consumers out of the market. Broadband has remained relatively stable in price even as Americans have absorbed years of inflation elsewhere in the household budget.

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Economists Hal Singer and Ted Tatos found that a 5% increase in broadband prices could cause roughly 10 million households to cancel service. Their review found a different dynamic for large digital advertising platforms, where end users generally do not pay subscription fees and companies are better positioned to absorb assessments.

Former FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested assessing digital advertising revenue from the largest platforms. Congress could also consider certain transmission services — cloud interconnection, backhaul, content delivery networks, satellite transport, and wide-area networking — that depend heavily on the broadband ecosystem.

The precise mechanism matters less than the principle: Broaden the contribution base so consumers carry less of the burden. Bipartisan legislation already points in that direction. The Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act would extend contributions to large internet service providers, with thresholds aimed at companies of significant scale.

The rural job is not done

Some argue that low-earth-orbit satellite services have largely solved rural broadband and made subsidies unnecessary. They have not. Satellite is valuable where terrestrial networks are uneconomical, but it remains capacity-constrained and is not a full substitute for high-capacity terrestrial broadband in every household or community.

A rural family with several people working from home, taking virtual classes, or using telehealth can need sustained high-speed service and reliability that satellite cannot always guarantee as cell density grows. Prices have also risen, weakening the case for satellite as a cheap universal backstop. Satellite belongs in the mix, but it cannot carry the entire rural-connectivity burden by itself.

Big Tech should pitch in

Big Tech benefits from some $200 billion annually in USF-supported broadband investment, yet the companies oppose contributing to the fund by calling such payments a “tax.” That evades the basic question: Why should the largest users and beneficiaries of broadband infrastructure be the only major participants paying nothing toward its cost?

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta spend billions building their own data centers, cloud networks, and related infrastructure because infrastructure has economic value. They would never give unlimited use of those facilities away for free. Yet they expect private broadband networks to reach their customers without contributing to the universal service system that expands access to those networks.

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The contradiction is especially striking because 13 bipartisan governors recently joined major technology companies at the White House, where the firms pledged to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades needed for their data centers while protecting consumers from higher electricity bills. The Ratepayer Protection Act would codify those pledges. Congress should apply the same logic to broadband.

How Congress can act

Universal service already enjoys bipartisan support. In Consumers’ Research v. Federal Communications Commission, 29 lawmakers and working-group members filed an amicus brief defending USF before the Supreme Court. They warned that dismantling the fund would harm millions of Americans, particularly low-income and rural households. Congress established universal service in 1996 and has repeatedly recognized the need to adapt it as communications technology changes.

The Supreme Court upheld the program’s constitutionality. Congress defended USF in court; now it should make the funding system fair and sustainable in statute.

The path is straightforward: Broaden the contribution base to include the largest users and beneficiaries of the networks USF supports, while protecting consumers from rising costs. The companies that profit most from ubiquitous broadband should help ensure that ubiquitous broadband continues to exist.

China is building power. America is still debating it.



The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that it is turning old federal land — including Cold War uranium sites, closed military facilities, and other public parcels — into part of the physical backbone of America’s artificial intelligence buildout, pairing new data centers with the power generation needed to run them. The projects could also create new domestic jobs.

Critics will focus on the benefits to big technology companies. The larger issue is harder to dismiss: Energy security is national security. The country that can build and power the next generation of AI infrastructure will hold an enormous economic and strategic advantage.

Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

That means the United States cannot afford an ideological energy policy. Whether the resource is natural gas, nuclear power, solar, battery storage, or the critical minerals needed to build advanced technologies, domestic supply should be treated as a strategic asset.

AI is already changing the scale of America’s power needs. Data centers alone could soon consume as much electricity as the entire country of Malaysia. Advanced manufacturing is returning to American soil and will require still more reliable power.

The military is modernizing with increasingly energy-intensive technology as well. As retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General David Deptula argued in the Washington Post, data itself has become a strategic military asset. The countries that lead the next generation of AI will need more than talented engineers and sophisticated algorithms. They will need the infrastructure to power the entire ecosystem.

China understands this. Beijing has spent years pursuing an aggressive all-of-the-above energy strategy. It continues to build coal plants while investing heavily in solar, nuclear power, hydropower, and battery storage. Whatever disagreements Americans have over individual energy sources, China is not waiting for us to resolve them.

The Energy Department’s plan is therefore a timely step. It creates opportunities to pair new power generation with the infrastructure that will consume it. But if America intends to win the AI race, policymakers across the political spectrum will have to go further and remove unnecessary obstacles to new energy supply.

Solar power, for example, has been the fastest-growing source of new U.S. electricity generation for five years running. In 2025, the United States added 43 gigawatts of new solar capacity, enough to power over 32 million homes. Where permitting and regulatory barriers needlessly delay viable projects, Washington should remove them.

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The same urgency should apply to critical minerals. The United States has spent years allowing dependence on foreign supply chains to deepen even as minerals became indispensable to batteries, electronics, defense systems, and energy infrastructure. Domestic mining and processing cannot expand at the speed national security demands if projects spend years trapped in permitting and regulatory limbo.

This is not an argument for replacing traditional energy with newer technologies. It is an argument for abundance. Oil and gas remain essential. Nuclear power can provide large amounts of reliable electricity. Solar and storage can add capacity quickly in the right places. Critical minerals underpin all of them. The strategic question is not which source wins an ideological contest. It is whether America can produce enough energy, reliably and affordably, to meet the demands ahead.

China is already acting on that logic. The United States should do the same. The next phase of economic and military competition will be shaped not only by who invents the best technology, but by who can build the plants, mines, transmission, data centers, and generation needed to deploy it at scale.

The Energy Department’s announcement is a good start. Now we need to make abundance the policy: build more, permit faster, secure domestic supply chains, and stop treating energy sources as political footballs.

America will need all the reliable energy it can produce, however we can produce it. The country that powers the future will have a much better chance of leading it.

Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to save America from itself



It hasn’t been an easy path for Mark Zuckerberg. However you keep score on his performance as a major figure in American life, he has survived attacks from the highest levels of government against his business, reputation, and livelihood. Few major figures in tech, with the possible exception of his longtime mentor, investor, and friend Peter Thiel, have endured quite the same treatment. Simply put, Zuck won’t quit.

That indestructible attitude has carried straight into AI. Amid criticism, naysaying, and ridicule, Zuckerberg has refused to concede the race to the leading hyperscalers. Now, as those frontier companies hit their own buzz saw of criticism, Zuck has dropped a long manifesto laying out his vision for America’s technological future and Meta’s place in it.

Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

The most striking thing is not that Zuckerberg wants Meta to win. It is what he thinks victory requires. Despite years of periodic hostility from the U.S. government, he has positioned Meta as perhaps the most explicitly pro-American player in the AI industry. He is betting the farm on the proposition that America’s political principles — not merely its capital, engineers, or computing power — are what can carry us through the age of superintelligence.

That’s a gigantic wager, and it arrives at an awkward moment. Dissatisfaction with America’s actual system of government is near a breaking point. More Americans are asking whether the assumptions grounding the regime are viable any more — or even true.

Even many who still defend America’s founding principles believe the government we actually have has become corrupt, broken, and badly detached from them. The appetite for a “new founding,” on the left and the right, keeps growing. Yet the country is too divided and degraded for any ordinary political movement to break through to the other side.

That frustration is part of why so much American energy, ingenuity, money, and willpower have poured into the narrow goal of building the most powerful technology possible — something that may soon go far beyond what any individual human being can comprehend or control.

The irony is brutal. Technological prowess was once among America’s great sources of pride. Now millions of people increasingly experience it as a curse from hell rather than a blessing from God. They already feel reduced to peonage and stripped of agency by institutions they do not trust. And now tech, they fear, is preparing to sweep the refuse we have become into the trash.

Not so fast, says Zuck. His argument begins with a surprisingly old-fashioned insight: Human beings disagree. They struggle, suffer, compete, fear, and want incompatible things. No technical breakthrough abolishes politics because no technical breakthrough can reconcile every human value at once.

“There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once,” Zuckerberg writes. "Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others." His answer is not perfect alignment but a balance of power — the same basic insight, he argues, that underlies Western democratic institutions.

That is why America’s humbler principles — dispersing power, allowing people to define their own goals, and trusting them to work things out for themselves — matter so much in Zuckerberg’s vision. Paradoxically, political humility produces personal ambition. It renews energy more reliably than any genius, planner, or guru could ever manufacture from above.

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If this sounds familiar, it should. Zuckerberg is singing from the hymnal of good old-fashioned liberal democracy. His wild idea is that machines powerful enough to transform human life beyond recognition are best developed by patriotic Americans who still believe liberal democracy is basically right about how human beings ought to live together.

And here is the problem.

If liberal democracy brought us to a point where the American government has largely expunged liberal-democratic habits from its own operation, how exactly are we supposed to encode those habits into superintelligence?

Do you believe your vote counts?

Do you believe legislative, executive, and judicial power are effectively separated?

Do you trust your fellow citizens to form judgments and pursue their own plans?

Do you think most of us still possess the maturity, education, thoughtfulness, and patriotism that self-government demands?

In other words: Do Americans still believe in liberal democracy strongly enough to teach it to machines?

That is where Zuckerberg’s argument becomes both elegant and unnerving. The same country that increasingly doubts its political order is now being asked to use that order as the operating principle for technologies more powerful than any previous institution.

Many Americans, meanwhile, are trapped between two impulses: burn it all down or run for the hills. Almost nobody has a plausible alternative regime that could actually work here, much less arrive through a peaceful and orderly transition. People feel bereft of political options, which is one reason the hunger for some higher, almost spiritual answer keeps growing.

The trouble is that whatever spirituality emanates from the upper reaches of the tech world often combines the creepiest and least American aspects of the hippie and the nerd.

Zuckerberg’s answer is startlingly different. He is not proposing that superintelligence replace liberal democracy. He is proposing that the arrival of superintelligence may force Americans to recover it. The new computational powers will be so immense that only a political order committed to dispersed authority, pluralism, and limits can keep a handful of self-appointed global masters from remaking everyone in their own image.

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That is the real bet: AI does not redeem liberal democracy because the machines become wise. AI redeems it by making the alternatives intolerable.

It is a surprisingly elegant and tantalizing vision. But there is one catch. For it to work, Americans will have to treat AI the way they treat liberty itself — not as an accessory or afterthought, but as something woven into daily life. Maybe you personally can remain mostly outside it. But if most Americans do, Zuckerberg strongly implies, the country may not generate the distributed competence, power, and agency his model requires.

So Zuckerberg’s wager runs in both directions. Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

Maybe that circle is virtuous. Maybe it is impossible.

But Mark Zuckerberg has placed his bet. Now? It’s your turn.

Keep your eyes on the road — your car is watching



Automotive safety technology was supposed to help you keep your eyes on the road. Increasingly, it is keeping its eyes on you.

More new vehicles are equipped with cameras pointed directly at the driver, tracking where you look, whether your eyes are open, and whether the computer thinks you're paying enough attention. Look down at the touch screen too long and you may hear a warning. Turn your head away from the windshield and the steering wheel may vibrate.

There is a major difference between a sensor detecting that you're drifting out of your lane and a camera continuously observing your face.

This technology is no longer simply an optional gadget dreamed up by automakers. In Europe, regulators now require new vehicles to include systems capable of detecting driver distraction.

On a recent episode of "The Drive," co-host Karl Brauer and I spoke with longtime automotive journalist Michael Harley of Forbes about where this technology is heading.

The stated purpose is safety, and there are good reasons for that. But once a camera is installed inside your car, watching you every second you're behind the wheel, another question becomes unavoidable: Who else eventually gets to watch?

Stay focused

Subaru provides a good example of how quickly driver monitoring has moved into ordinary cars.

Its DriverFocus system uses a near-infrared camera aimed at the driver's eyes and head. Subaru says the system can identify signs of distraction or drowsiness and warn the driver accordingly. Because the camera is infrared, it can continue monitoring the driver even when the cabin is dark.

The intention is easy to understand. Distracted driving kills people, and so does falling asleep behind the wheel.

There is also evidence that many drivers appreciate the technology. An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study of nearly 3,500 Subaru owners found that 87% used DriverFocus most or every time they drove, while about 70% said they would want the system on their next vehicle.

But that same research identified the downside. Drivers reported false alarms, and some said the warnings came too frequently. Annoyance was one of the main reasons owners switched the system off.

Karl and I have each experienced this ourselves in new vehicles. Modern cars increasingly offer automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-centering systems, and other technology specifically designed to compensate when a driver makes a mistake. Yet some of those same cars are becoming more aggressive about policing exactly where the driver is looking.

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Nanny cam

This isn't only about automakers deciding what features customers might like.

Europe is turning driver monitoring into regulation.

Under the European Union's General Safety Regulation, all newly sold vehicles have been required since July 2024 to include technology warning drivers about drowsiness. Beginning in July 2026, additional rules require advanced systems designed to detect driver distraction as well.

The EU doesn't explicitly say every manufacturer must put an infrared camera in your face. The regulation is based on what the system must accomplish rather than specifying one particular piece of hardware.

In practice, however, camera-based systems are an obvious way to meet those requirements, and they're already becoming common.

Once these systems become mandatory in a market as enormous as Europe, automakers have another incentive to design them into vehicles everywhere rather than engineer completely different cars for different countries. That's why American drivers should pay attention.

Close quarters

Here is where I become uncomfortable.

There is a major difference between a sensor detecting that you're drifting out of your lane and a camera continuously observing your face.

Michael explained just how capable these systems already are:

“They’re [infrared] cameras ... watching every single thing in real time inside the car, and it's triggering verbal, audible and/or haptic alarms," he said.

“And you cannot defeat it. Some of them you can turn off, but the second you restart the car, it starts all over again. ... It's just a memory chip ... away from being able to record the telemetry."

Today's camera may simply analyze the information inside the vehicle and generate an alert. Technologically, however, there isn't an enormous distance between a camera that sees what you're doing and a system that stores or transmits what it sees.

Modern cars are already rolling computers connected to manufacturer servers through cellular networks. Automakers have collected driving data and shared information with third parties, while insurance companies increasingly offer policies based on telematics.

Cars can already record enormous amounts of information about speed, location, braking, acceleration, and crashes. Add an interior camera, and the vehicle potentially knows not only where you went and how you drove, but what you were doing while you drove there.

Were you looking at the road or at your phone? Were you yawning? Did you appear sleepy? Who else was inside the vehicle?

Manufacturers will tell us these systems have privacy safeguards, and many of them do. But privacy policies can change. So can software, regulations, and the circumstances under which information can be demanded by law enforcement or other third parties.

The hardware remains pointed at you.

Eyes have it

This is usually how intrusive technology arrives: not through some grand announcement that everybody will now be monitored, but through a series of individually reasonable steps.

It's there to detect drowsiness. It's there to make sure you're paying attention. It's there to prevent crashes.

Each argument has merit. I don't want a sleepy driver drifting across the center line any more than anyone else does. Consumers should nevertheless ask where the boundary lies.

A seatbelt protects me without needing to know where I'm looking. An airbag doesn't watch my face. Anti-lock brakes don't care who is sitting beside me.

Driver-monitoring cameras are different because they introduce something automobiles never historically required: a machine observing the occupants of the car in real time.

Governments are now beginning to require the systems capable of doing that.

New normal

There is one more irony.

Cars are becoming more capable of assisting the driver at precisely the moment manufacturers and regulators are becoming more insistent about monitoring the human being behind the wheel.

Your vehicle can steer, brake, maintain its distance from the car ahead, and in some cases even change lanes and navigate highway interchanges. But glance away for a little too long, and the same car starts scolding you.

Maybe these systems will save lives. I hope they do.

Before Americans normalize cameras watching drivers in every new automobile, however, we deserve clear answers about what those systems collect, whether any information leaves the vehicle, how long it can be retained, and who can obtain it.

Once the camera becomes standard equipment, the question is no longer whether the car can watch you. It's who gets access to what it sees.

This throwback app is competing with Big Tech — using a business model out of the 1980s



The future of commerce is not some complex algorithm; it's essentially the same as it has been since the 1980s.

That's the gambit of a hugely successful new company putting up numbers that rival tech's biggest.

Its latest valuation is a monstrous $20 billion, which is already a huge leap from its October 2025 numbers. The company has nearly doubled its valuation in those 10 months, up from $11.5 billion which secured an investment of $225 million.

That $11.5 billion valuation came less than a year after the company raised $265 million in January 2025 off of a $4.97 billion valuation.

This all means that the commerce app has quadrupled its value in about 18 months, something very rarely seen in its sector.

And that has the industry buzzing.

'We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value.'

Meet Whatnot. It's based on an incredibly simple idea. Picture a cable channel with a 1-800 number, but it's a livestream on your smartphone or computer.

That simple difference is what sets the livestream auction app apart from that staple of late-20th-century television, the home shopping channel. The buy-from-home TV programs exploded into popularity with the introduction of the Home Shopping Network back in 1982.

Whatnot has sellers present their items just as they did on TV back in the day, urging viewers of the livestream to buy before the time runs out.

As the Next Web puts it: "The urgency of a live sale, the countdown, the banter, the scarcity, does work that a static product page never could."

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Whatnot co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine. Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

The Next Web reported that the company handled about $8 billion worth of livestream sales over the past year in North America and Europe alone, which helps justify its massive valuation to backers, markets, and industry insiders.

Looking at the backers, perhaps it should have been obvious Whatnot would enjoy a big upward trend: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Google's CapitalG are all involved.

Those investment firms are strongly associated with the venture capital scene, and indeed the only other companies making the same kinds of leaps in valuation as Whatnot are in the tech space. Companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, and ByteDance are some of the comparable valuations in recent history, some of which far exceed a 4x jump.

The spike is largely driven by Whatnot's rampant consumer base, which logs an insane amount of time on the app.

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Co-founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine wrote in 2024 that buyers spent more than 80 minutes per day on the app that year.

Grant previously worked in product roles at YouTube and Facebook and co-founded Kit, a merchandising company that was acquired by Patreon in 2024.

LaFontaine said in May that success comes down to being willing to put in hard work while also being willing to be wrong.

"We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value," he told Fast Company.

"If you want to build a customer-centered culture," the CEO added, "you have to actually follow through on building one and inject it everywhere you possibly can in the organization."

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America’s two-tier economy is working exactly as planned



The left suddenly fears that artificial intelligence will replace American workers. It showed far less concern when illegal immigration undercut wages and jobs.

The double standard reveals a larger economic vision: protection for the credentialed class, cheap labor at the bottom, and little concern for the working Americans caught between them.

The left has built a bifurcated economy because it has bifurcated loyalties. Neither side of that arrangement puts America’s working class first.

Progressive warnings about AI often begin with the claim that employers will use new technology to replace costly labor or avoid training new employees. One progressive platform warns that AI could cause massive labor-market disruption. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposes taxing AI so that its gains do not flow only to the wealthy.

The concern isn’t inherently foolish. New technology can displace workers, at least temporarily, and policymakers should consider how people adapt. But the left’s labor solidarity becomes strangely selective when the competing worker entered the country illegally.

The Migration Policy Institute recently estimated that the illegal immigrant population may have reached 15.8 million. The Biden years also produced more than 10 million border encounters, although that figure includes repeat attempts and excludes people who evaded detection.

Meanwhile, the July Bureau of Labor Statistics report counted 7.1 million unemployed Americans. Those numbers do not prove that every illegal worker displaced a citizen. They do make it absurd to pretend that millions of additional workers have no effect on wages, bargaining power, or employment.

The standard answer is that illegal immigrants perform jobs Americans refuse to do. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) put the argument plainly: In a capitalist economy, someone will always do the work others do not want.

But jobs are not fixed objects with permanently assigned wages. When employers cannot attract workers, they must raise pay, improve conditions, invest in equipment, or change the way the work is performed. Labor scarcity gives workers leverage.

Progressives claim to understand that principle when they campaign for higher legal wage floors. The five states with the highest minimum wages are deep blue. Democratic lawmakers routinely demand “living wages” and stronger benefits.

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Yet the same politicians short-circuit the market mechanism that might raise wages naturally. They permit a large supply of unauthorized labor, including an estimated 8.5 million people working off the books, to fill jobs at wages and under conditions many would never accept.

That arrangement is not compassionate to workers. It allows employers to avoid the higher pay, benefits, and taxes that legal labor would require. It also leaves illegal immigrants vulnerable to exploitation because their status limits their ability to challenge abuse.

The result is a two-tiered labor market.

At the top sit credentialed professionals whose jobs may be threatened by AI. Their anxieties receive white papers, Senate hearings, tax proposals, and sympathetic coverage. At the bottom sit unauthorized workers whom progressive politicians describe as indispensable because they perform society’s least desirable tasks.

Crockett’s own words and similar comments from other Democrats expose the hierarchy. The jobs at the top must be protected from technological competition. The jobs at the bottom must remain cheap enough that Americans supposedly will not take them.

The people excluded from both priorities are working-class citizens.

They are told that automation may eliminate their better-paying opportunities but that low-wage jobs cannot pay more because imported labor must fill them. They face high legal wage mandates and benefit requirements on one side, then competition from off-the-books labor on the other.

Government benefits without strong work requirements can compound the problem by creating a steep penalty for returning to employment. Sanctuary policies then protect the unauthorized labor supply that keeps wages down.

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This is not a coherent defense of workers. It is a coalition strategy.

The modern left protects the professional class that staffs its institutions and the immigrant constituencies it hopes to mobilize. The blue-collar Americans who once formed the Democratic base receive speeches about dignity while policy steadily erodes their bargaining power.

Long gone are the days when the left at least pretended to organize politics around the American worker.

AI may indeed disrupt employment. Illegal immigration can also depress wages and displace workers. A party genuinely committed to labor would confront both pressures honestly instead of treating one as a crisis and the other as a moral obligation.

The left has built a bifurcated economy because it has bifurcated loyalties. Neither side of that arrangement puts America’s working class first.

Nothing says fake grassroots like an email from a corpse



Data center boosters routinely accuse local opponents of serving China or obstructing progress. In Coweta, Oklahoma, supporters of a proposed hyperscale project appear to have answered authentic opposition with something less democratic: phony support from real residents.

“Dear Vice Mayor Barnett, Project Atlas would generate millions for city services and schools, and all the needed upgrades are paid for by the developer. This seems like reasonable, low-impact growth. Please support this opportunity for Coweta.”

The data center lobby may have money, consultants, and automated emails. Its opponents have something more durable: actual voters and the truth.

The message appeared to come from a known Coweta resident. When the vice mayor contacted the supposed sender, the resident replied that he had not written it and opposed the project. Fox23 News confirmed the account with the victim.

That was not an isolated irregularity. Local farmer and activist Darren Blanchard obtained public records showing nearly 300 substantially identical messages supporting the data center. Many arrived at strange hours and apparently originated through an advocacy website that automatically generated letters to council members.

Automated advocacy tools aren’t new. But using the personal information of real people to send messages in their names without permission is not grassroots politics. It is political identity theft.

“What we suspect as to what was going on is that local citizens’ data — names, address, phone numbers, emails — was purchased, and probably a script was written and likely inputted into this advocacy website,” Blanchard said in an interview on my podcast. “And then nearly 300 people were impersonated within the community of Coweta, asking the city council to approve the data center. It was completely made up.”

The irony is hard to miss. Companies seeking to build facilities that warehouse and process vast quantities of information allegedly used residents’ personal data to impersonate them and manufacture consent.

The most grotesque message allegedly came from a dead man. Blanchard said a council member received an email supporting the project in the name of a deceased relative — on the second anniversary of that relative’s death.

That message persuaded city officials that the matter required the attention of law enforcement. Yet the city has redacted the names attached to the nearly 300 emails, making it harder for residents to learn whether their identities were used. Blanchard says an appeal to the Oklahoma attorney general has gone nowhere.

The proposed 270-acre hyperscale development from San Francisco-based Beale Infrastructure, backed by Blue Owl Capital, was abandoned at the end of March after intense local opposition and scrutiny of the campaign supporting it.

RELATED: Before you say ‘no’ to a data center, here’s what you’re giving up

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Coweta is not an isolated case of public resistance. In Box Elder County, Utah, Kevin O’Leary proposed a data center complex projected to consume enormous amounts of electricity and occupy a footprint larger than thousands of Walmart Supercenters. A public-records review by the Salt Lake Tribune found overwhelming opposition in emails to county commissioners. Just seven messages — about 2% — supported the plan.

The voters delivered an even clearer verdict. Last month, two Box Elder County commissioners who backed the project were crushed in their Republican primaries. Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who played a prominent role in the state entity that approved the development, also lost.

In Calvert County, Maryland, Republican voters booted all three commissioners who had signed nondisclosure agreements with data center companies and then opposed a proposed moratorium.

These defeats expose the basic political problem facing Big Tech. Opposition to giant data centers is deep, local, and often bipartisan. Residents worry about electricity demand, water use, tax subsidies, land consumption, secrecy, surveillance, and the transfer of private risk to the public.

Those concerns cannot be erased by labeling opponents agents of China or enemies of innovation. Nor can they be overcome honestly by sending hundreds of nearly identical emails in the names of people who never authorized them.

Astroturfing usually tries to make a small constituency look large. The Coweta campaign went further: It manufactured a constituency from stolen identities, including one voice from beyond the grave.

Republican officials need to decide which side they are on. They can stand with citizens demanding transparency and control over their communities, or with globalists and techno-feudalists willing to fabricate public support.

The data center lobby may have money, consultants, and automated emails. Its opponents have something more durable: actual voters and the truth.

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Adam Candeub understood the alliance between Big Tech and the administrative state before most Republicans in Washington had bothered to learn what Section 230 was.

We're winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn't going away that easily



Imagine driving a manufacturer-provided press vehicle for a road test and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by police because a license-plate reader misidentified your temporary tag.

That's exactly what happened recently to an automotive journalist Joel Feder, who says officers tracked the vehicle for days before stopping him in a parking lot over a plate-reading error.

Some license-plate readers have also been installed near businesses that sell firearms, creating records of vehicles visiting those locations.

It isn't an isolated case.

Armed and dangerous

We've covered Flock cameras before. They were sold as precision crime-fighting tools that could quickly locate stolen vehicles and help police solve serious crimes. But mistakes continue to happen. Similar errors have led to innocent families, used-car buyers, and other drivers being subjected to high-risk traffic stops. In some cases, officers have even drawn their weapons.

At the same time, residents are pushing back.

Dozens of cities and towns have allowed Flock contracts to expire or removed cameras altogether after residents questioned the systems' accuracy, privacy implications, and data-retention policies. Public pressure is making a difference.

Before anyone declares victory, however, there's another side to the story.

The surveillance network itself isn't disappearing. In many communities, Flock is simply being replaced by another vendor.

Different vendor, same spying

Companies such as Axon, Motorola Solutions through Vigilant Solutions, Rekor Systems, Genetec AutoVu, and ELSAG — now part of Leonardo — are stepping in to compete for the same contracts. They may promise stronger privacy controls or improved technology, but the basic model remains the same: photograph passing vehicles, record where they were seen, and store that information in searchable databases.

The debate is no longer whether these systems should exist. It's who gets to operate them.

Privacy advocates argue that building long-term databases showing where people travel raises serious Fourth Amendment questions, particularly as courts have become increasingly skeptical of warrantless collection of detailed location information.

The concerns extend beyond highways and intersections. Some license-plate readers have also been installed near businesses that sell firearms, creating records of vehicles visiting those locations. Critics argue that this raises additional questions about lawful activities protected by the Second Amendment.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It's 'terroristic' to want to know where we put our spy cameras

Timothy Fadek/Boston Globe/Getty Images

DeFlock delivers

One of the most effective responses has come from ordinary citizens.

An independent project called DeFlock.org maps known automated license-plate reader locations across the country, allowing residents to see where cameras have been installed. Armed with that information, people have attended city council meetings, questioned local officials, and in some cases convinced communities to remove cameras or reject new contracts.

Technology companies will continue improving these systems because there's money to be made, and police departments will continue looking for tools they believe help fight crime.

The real question is where communities decide to draw the line.

Every time you leave your driveway, these systems collect another data point about your movements. If everything works perfectly, most drivers never notice. When something goes wrong, however, innocent people can find themselves explaining a database error to police officers on the side of the road.

Changing vendors doesn't necessarily change that reality. It simply changes whose logo is on the camera.