Leaked GOP Memo: Data Centers Politically Toxic, Might Cost Ohio Senate Race

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Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

Ohio GOP Senate candidate Jon Husted is in hot water with the electorate, caught in a statistical tie with his Democrat challenger.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, via a memo leaked to CIA mouthpiece Axios, blames popular blowback on mass data center construction.

From the memo:

“Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown are in a dead heat. Private polling has been consistent: when voters hear Brown’s positions and his record, Husted pulls away. That is still the path in this race. The new ingredient(and the new problem) is data centers.

Ohio is one of the leaders in building these AI factories. Brown has made his opposition to them the centerpiece of his campaign against Husted. Brown is using it because it works. More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and datacenters get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one..

Data centers are the centerpiece in the case Sherrod Brown is litigating; he has made them his de facto opponent, and no one is correcting the record. Brown has put three unique television ads on the air and spent millions doing it, to the tune of more than 6,000 points on television. This is more than a month’s worth of messaging during one of the most critical times in the race.

Our polling indicates that this messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic. This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle…

Campaigns or party committees can not [sic] fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy. The companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans see them: who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one. Until that happens, the issue will continue to dominate this race. If it is still this potent in November, elected officials everywhere will treat Ohio as their reason to work against data centers in the future. If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly*, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio…

While the perceptions of data centers are weak, the American people are with us. By overwhelming margins, the American people prefer a Republican candidate who wants to only let data centers be built in communities that approve them by a local vote of the people, and that pay for their own power, water, and other utilities versus a Democrat candidate who wants to stop data center construction altogether, which will cause America to lose the AI race to China.”

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Curiously, you may notice that at no point does the memo indicate moderating the party’s commitment to the data center bonanza.

Rather than tweaking policy, it’s the “voters’ perception” that needs fixing.

The peasants have gotten their minds right — yet.

The party leadership won’t change tack, of course, because the donor and consultant classes of both parties dictate policy, even when it incurs political expense, and those interests are fully invested, literally and figuratively, in the data center game.

Related: U.S. Corporate Profit Margins Surge to All-Time Apex

The job of the politician, therefore, is not to serve the constituency but to figure out how to sell to the public the policies prescribed by their masters, which are often in direct contravention of the electorate’s desires — in laymen’s terms, to manipulate them into ideological alignment with the special interests.

Noam Chomsky termed this, in the context of corporate media, “manufacturing consent.”

The memo reads like a marketing plan for AI manufacturers, because that’s what it is: “The companies that need these projects built have to fix how Ohioans see them: who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.”

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There will be no come-to-Jesus moment when the National Republican Senatorial Committee acknowledges that the majority of their constituents hate the data center regime and that, accordingly, maybe they should alter course to maintain popular support.

They know their own voters hate the data centers, and they plow onward anyway.

And why shouldn’t Ohioans hate them?

The overseers on the nascent techno-plantation have made no serious effort to convince the serfs of their benefits, whereas the obvious drawbacks include:

· Noise pollution

· Blight on the landscape

· Seizure of private property, including family homes, via eminent domain

· Massive power sink that will drive up electricity costs

· Draining the reservoirs and dumping toxic sludge into the water supply

· The obvious nefarious utility of the facilities once they’re completed, to serve as the nervous system of the Panopticon Beast State

Related: Chinese Communist Party Literally Names Its Domestic Surveillance Program ‘Skynet’

The last point is probably the most salient — what people feel in their bones when they behold these sprawling monstrosities spontaneously appearing on the landscape, as if birthed from the underworld via some portal from hell, and it dawns on them what they’re all about: to monitor the activity of every human being on every square inch of God’s green Earth.

Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’

Organic demand for data centers never existed, and, again, the developers have never offered any compelling case for why they’re necessary by the thousands.

The best they’ve come up with so far is a.) some vague promise that AI will cure cancer (including, presumably, the cases caused by the data centers) by spitting out mRNA “vaccines” and b.) “China bad.”

Their inability to articulate a compelling answer to the why of it all is because the honest answer is that they’re going to be used to foster totalitarian control over everything.

Without hyperbole, the sociopaths erecting these machines literally want insight into everything, right down to the happenings underneath our skin — thus far mostly a black box which has sometimes been termed the last frontier of surveillance technology.

A proverbial Flock camera for every organ, for every cell, for every strand of DNA.

“Total vision” — “pan opticon,” if you will.

One Nation, Under Surveillance! pic.twitter.com/j8Bf4QxdP9

— Armageddon Prose (@ArmageddonProse) July 13, 2026

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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