JIM HIGHTOWER

FOR RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 2026

Rising Progressive Populist Revolt Stuns AI Profiteers

There's a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they're entitled to turn America's farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory AI "data centers." But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Okla., recently hit those puffed-up elites where they're most vulnerable: The funny bone.

Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates:

SUPPORT THESE

DATA CENTERS

Schools

Libraries

Bookstores

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, "Uh ... Hell No!" Indeed, at least 48 data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt Gov. Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them — and the state's far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.

Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there's growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What's happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run head-first into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno-scammers.

THE MAIN PROBLEM TODAY'S BILLIONAIRE "GENIUSES" HAVE IS THIS: THEY'RE STUPID

"Stand back," shout Silicon Valley's tech billionaires, "geniuses at work!"

They refer to themselves, of course, demanding that public officials, farmers, towns, environmentalists and all others get out of their way as they impose their massive AI data centers over rural America. "Our Big Money and Big Brains," they exclaim, "will remake nature and produce phenomenal wealth."

Haven't we heard this before? Yes ... and from these same uber-rich zealots. Just a decade ago, they declared they intended to replace farmland agriculture with a techno-marvel they called "vertical farms." Yes, instead of relying on messy, natural stuff like soil, food would henceforth be produced on sanitary plastic trays stacked to the ceilings of windowless factory warehouses controlled by computer networks. Big Tech investors like Jeff Bezos, Walmart and Japan's SoftBank plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into their "reinvention" of agriculture.

But what the geniuses actually produced was a bumper crop of bankruptcies, for the tech bros knew nothing about farming. Sure, displacing nature meant saving money to till the soil and feed the hogs. Still, those costs are nothing compared to the piles of capital required to pay for the ever-rising costs of corporate infrastructure, computers, utilities, executive salaries, administrative overhead ... and capital itself.

Worse, the clueless corporatizers were surprised to discover that consumers are not actually motivated to buy a head of lettuce just because it was "vertically farmed." So, with exorbitant costs and zero market appeal, the tech geniuses' ag revolution fizzled.

Let us all recall this as Bezos and his billionaire coterie now insist we must follow them into their Brave New World of artificial intelligence.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Aideal Hwa at Unsplash