Big Tech companies helped censor Americans during COVID. Now many of the same interests pillaging rural America for surveillance data centers want to suppress debate over their next great project. This time, they are not merely trying to censor speech. They are helping create the pretext to criminalize it.

Federal and state law enforcement should have their hands full with real threats: jihadist networks, political assassinations, attacks against ICE, and the growing culture of left-wing violence that led to Charlie Kirk’s murder. Yet last week, Wired obtained documents showing a coordinated effort among the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and roughly 80 regional fusion centers to monitor supposed anti-tech and anti-data-center violence.

It is disgraceful to watch law enforcement silence Americans on behalf of Big Tech.

More than 1,000 pages of internal DHS, FBI, and fusion-center reports describe “anti-technology extremism” as an emerging domestic threat based largely on a handful of unverified threats against politicians. No one should excuse genuine threats or violence. But the idea that data-center opponents have created a domestic threat requiring this level of federal coordination is absurd. It is gaslighting dressed up as intelligence work.

This is the same logic behind the Trump administration’s decision to station marshals with surveyors for data-center transmission lines in Carroll County, Maryland. The point was not to respond to credible threats. The point was to frame opposition — especially in one of Maryland’s most conservative counties — as dangerous before the debate even began.

Which brings us to Dixon, Illinois.

Last week, resident Harley Delander organized a Facebook protest outside the home of former state Rep. Tom Demmer (R), who is now promoting a 387-acre data-center site through the Lee County Industrial Development Association. People can debate the prudence of protesting at an official’s residence, though such protests have become common in local disputes. But police produced no credible evidence that Delander or his friends planned violence.

Delander was arrested outside his home 12 hours later and charged with two felonies: intimidation and stalking. Police said his communications “knowingly and willfully” caused fear for Demmer and his family’s safety. Delander recorded the arrest.

This reflects a growing trend: criminalizing sharp public debate based on how a public official claims to feel rather than what a citizen actually did.

A Massachusetts resident was sentenced to prison and spent a full year behind bars before trial for writing angry emails to a local Michigan politician. The emails were ugly — the sort of language elected officials receive every day — but they contained no personal threats or even veiled threats. He was extradited to Oakland County, Michigan, in December 2023 and charged under Michigan’s law against intimidating public officials, which hinges on whether the “victim” felt “terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.”

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We have reached the point where heated political debate — a tradition as old as Adams and Jefferson — can become grounds for abridging the First Amendment. What a way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence!

The crackdown is not limited to nasty emails or home protests. Across the country, law-abiding rural residents, many of them seniors, are getting roughed up or arrested for speaking too long or objecting too loudly at data-center hearings.

On February 17, Oklahoma farmer Darren Blanchard exceeded his three-minute speaking limit by a few seconds at a Claremore City Council town hall on “Project Mustang,” a proposed AI data center backed by Beale Infrastructure. Once his time expired, he stopped speaking and walked to the rostrum to give the city manager a written copy of his remarks. For that, police handcuffed and removed him, transported him to Rogers County Jail, and booked him on criminal trespassing charges.

In April, Imperial County, California, resident Ismael Arvizu was arrested and charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and threatening a public official. Did he attack an official? No. After speaking during his allotted time at an Imperial County Board of Supervisors meeting, Arvizu applauded when another resident threatened to start a recall petition against the supervisors. The Los Angeles Times reported that an officer led him out and arrested him, and prosecutors charged him with threatening a public official.

In Midland, Texas, video shows a resident calmly calling for a point of order under meeting rules at a data-center meeting. He was immediately grabbed and removed from the room. He does not appear to have been arrested or charged, but the point remains: Police increasingly seem prepared to remove data-center opponents before their speech, outbursts, or objections would traditionally qualify as disrupting a meeting.

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This is happening in deep-red counties across America. It is disgraceful to watch law enforcement silence Americans on behalf of Big Tech.

Recently, the Intercept obtained a law-enforcement bulletin from a fusion center housed within the Philadelphia Police Department showing that federal authorities were monitoring anti-data-center social media posts for “domestic violent extremists.” The bulletin warned that “domestic violent extremists” were “likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence data centers,” posing physical and cyber threats to infrastructure in the Philadelphia region. Then it conceded that authorities lacked “specific information on plans to target AI data centers in the Philadelphia area.”

That is the whole game. Invent a vague threat, inflate it into a domestic extremism category, and use it to justify surveillance, intimidation, and arrests. Then pretend ordinary citizens are dangerous because they object to surrendering their land, power, and communities to Big Tech.

The irony is hard to miss. Governments at every level are deploying censorship, surveillance, and criminal enforcement to service an agenda built on surveillance, data extraction, and control.

Talk about paying for the rope to hang ourselves!