The Liberty Daily The Bus Came Home. The Fight Didn’t.
I came home from the Data Center Revolt bus carrying more questions than I left with.
For nearly a month, we traveled across America, through 35 cities in 28 states, listening to people who never imagined they would need to study megawatts, aquifers, substations, tax incentives and zoning law simply to understand what might happen next door.
We met farmers, homeowners, parents and grandparents. Some were angry. Some were frightened. Many were simply exhausted. But they kept showing up—with their questions, their documents and, often, a determination I will not forget.
The first three installments of this series told their stories and followed the financial interests driving the buildout. This final chapter is about what that journey taught me—and what happens when the bus comes home.
From farm roads to Silicon Valley
Our final stop was almost too fitting. After weeks in towns where residents wondered what might be built beside their homes, we rolled into the San Francisco Bay Area and visited the headquarters of companies central to the AI boom: NVIDIA, Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
We had carried the concerns of ordinary Americans across the country. Now we were bringing those concerns to the doorstep of the industry shaping this new future.
The Data Center Revolt bus in San Francisco, near the end of a journey that took residents’ questions from American communities to the heart of the technology industry.
Somewhere between those farms and those headquarters, it became clear to me: this was never only about data centers. It was about agency. Who decides? Who knows what, and when? Who bears the risk? Who receives the benefit? And where, in all of that, are the people whose communities will live with the consequences?
The false choice
There is a familiar response to anyone asking these questions: If you use technology, how can you object to the infrastructure behind it?
I use artificial intelligence myself. It can save time, help explain complicated subjects, and make useful tools available to ordinary people. But using an AI program does not mean I have consented to every project proposed in its name.
A farmer can use GPS without welcoming a massive industrial campus beside his land. A parent can appreciate modern technology while demanding safeguards for children. A ratepayer can support American innovation and still ask who will pay for transmission lines, substations and future upgrades.
At a park beside the river in Salix, Iowa, a local commissioner made the point with a highway. As I remember it, he said he loved driving on highways—but he pointed to the ground where we were standing and explained that he wouldn’t want one built right there. I’ve thought about that exchange ever since. Appreciating a technology is not the same as consenting to put its infrastructure wherever someone wants to build it.
Those are not contradictions. They are the questions of responsible citizens.
We are not anti-technology. We are anti-tech takeover. Technology ought to serve people—not the other way around.
A sign in Boulder City, Nevada, captures one community’s position as the Data Center Revolt bus travels west.
What the road taught me
I saw a remarkably similar pattern across communities with very different landscapes and politics. Residents described learning about major proposals late in the process. They struggled to identify the eventual operators, understand infrastructure costs, or obtain the studies needed to evaluate claims about water, jobs, taxes and noise.
Then they did the work. They read filings. They studied maps. They packed meetings. And they learned that a promise made at a microphone is not the same thing as a commitment that survives a sale, a change of ownership or a disappointing financial projection.
That may be one of the clearest lessons from the tour: if a developer’s assurances matter, put them in writing. Make them enforceable. Specify who monitors compliance, who pays when something goes wrong, and what happens when the facility reaches the end of its life.
The Humans First team stands together beside the Data Center Revolt bus during the nationwide tour.
I also learned that the physical buildings are only the beginning of the conversation. AI and expanding data-collection technologies raise questions about privacy, our children, employment, individual liberty, and the concentration of power. We need not pretend every system has the same purpose to ask what these capabilities make possible—and what protections should keep pace.
Where we go from here
The answer is not to abandon innovation. Neither is it to shrug and accept every project as inevitable.
Across the country, people are still asking the same basic questions about costs, resources, enforceable promises, and their ability to participate before decisions are made. Those questions deserve clear answers—and citizens deserve to be heard.
Local control matters. Ratepayers deserve protection. Water deserves honest accounting. Privacy and children deserve serious safeguards. And communities deserve meaningful participation before decisions become effectively irreversible.
Two questions must never disappear beneath the forecasts, the presentations and the promises: Who benefits? And who pays?
Brooke McGowan and Kylie Kremer of Humans First join local residents for a roadside sign wave, drawing waves and supportive honks from passing motorists.
The people progress is supposed to serve
When I remember these 8,000 miles, I do not first remember the server buildings. I remember the people.
The farmer who did not want to sell. The homeowner wondering what might rise beyond the fence. The citizen reading utility filings late at night. The grandmother thinking about what her grandchildren will inherit.
They had lives before this issue arrived—jobs, families, farms, churches, ballgames and plans for retirement. They did not go looking for a cause.
A development proposal came looking for their community.
And they are hardly alone. By 2026, more than 1,500 new data centers were in various stages of development across America, according to Pew Research Center. Hundreds of counties were confronting proposals, while many sites had become the subject of public disputes, organized opposition or litigation.
This was no longer a collection of isolated zoning controversies. It was a nationwide transformation of America’s physical infrastructure, reaching from major metropolitan areas into rural communities where families had never imagined they would be debating megawatts, water supplies, industrial-scale computing or the financing behind artificial intelligence.
The technology may be new. But the question is as old as our republic: Who gets to decide what happens to the place we call home?
Sometimes people like these are described as obstacles to progress. They are not. They are the people progress is supposed to serve.
America should innovate, compete, and lead. But America can win the AI race without making actual Americans lose to it.
I left home asking questions about buildings. I came home asking a larger one: Who gets to decide what kind of future we live in?
I know where I stand. We carried that question from American farms and small towns all the way to Silicon Valley. Now we bring it home—to our neighbors, our local governments, and the citizens who will live with the answers.
The bus tour is over.
The work is not.
The future must be human.
Source for national development figure: Pew Research Center, “Most new data centers in the US are coming to rural areas” (April 13, 2026).
