Denver CANCELS Contract With Flock – But There’s A Twist!

 

THE COMING WAR WITH RUSSIA: A EUROPEAN ROAD TO RUIN

 

Because we cannot adequately defend against conventional ballistic missiles and have no defense against hypersonic missiles, the damage to our economies would be catastrophic.

By Steve Jermy

Executive Summary

NATO, EU and E3 leaders are taking Europe down a path to be ready for war by 2030. In the light of European bellicosity, Russia could decide to start this sooner. If so, the US would be unwilling to fight Russia on Europe’s behalf. Unable to defend itself against Russia’s conventional ballistic/hypersonic missiles, Europe would suffer a rapid defeat and very high military losses. Even after suing for peace, destruction of Europe’s energy system would plunge Europe into economic crisis. Europeans should be invited publicly to debate these risks and have their views heard.

1. Introduction – Understanding War’s Nature

As European leaders’ calls to be ready for war with Russia by 2030 grow ever louder, we would do well to consider the advice of war’s greatest philosopher, General Carl von Clausewitz:

‘Wars must vary with the nature their motives and the situations that give rise to them. The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something which is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.’[1]

We should think hard on the nature of war with Russia: how our leaders’ public statements are heard in Russia; when such a war might start; how it might unfold; what its consequences and costs might be. This article builds one such scenario.

2. The Strategic Context

To begin, we must understand how we got here. It is clear, to anyone familiar with strategic history, that the roots of the crisis run back to 1989. When the Berlin Wall fell, there was an opportunity to build a durable, inclusive European security architecture — one that accommodated Russia’s legitimate security interests. That opportunity was squandered. Through the 1990s and 2000s, despite the original reassurances offered to Russia, NATO expanded relentlessly eastward. Prescient voices of caution — Kennan, Matlock, Burns, Kissinger, Mearsheimer— were dismissed or ignored. So too were Russia’s explicit and repeated red line warnings.

The Russo-Ukraine War must be understood in this context. The West is replete with conventional opinion that Russia intervened for imperial ambition. But all the credible evidence suggests that Russia went to war because it concluded — rightly or wrongly — that NATO expansion represented an existential threat. In Russia’s eyes, this was – and still is – a defensive war of survival.[2] Not surprising given that Kaja Kallas, EU foreign policy lead, has called publicly[3] for the breakup of Russia. Whatever one thinks of Russia’s methods, understanding its motivation is critical to understanding the nature of our future war with Russia.

3. Russia responds to European Escalation

Notwithstanding this fundamental insight, the publicly stated intention of the E3’s leaders — Macron, Merz and soon, no doubt, Burnham — is to increase the supply to Ukraine of long-range precision drones and cruise missiles, all capable of striking deep into Russian territory. In response, Moscow’s public warning is unambiguous: if this continues, directly targeting European production facilities will not be ruled out.

If E3 leaders choose not to take this warning seriously – a logical assumption, given that they have ignored all of Russia’s previous warnings – it is quite possible, even likely, that such a conflict could start this year, much earlier than Europe’s planned 2030. The second half of 2026 is thus taken as the start line for this scenario.

In September 2026, with its warnings ignored, and attacks into the Russian heartland increasing with E3 increased weapons deliveries, Russia acts. Conventional ballistic missile and hypersonic strikes destroy key E3 drone and missile production facilities in the Britain’s Midlands, the Ruhr, and outside Bordeaux. NATO Article 5 is invoked. But Article 5 does not require military action — it requires each member to take ‘such action as it deems necessary’. The shallowness of the guarantee upon which E3 leaders assumed they could rely is now exposed.

Spain and Hungary decline to commit forces. Italy, Poland, and several Eastern European members equivocate. More importantly, the White House, after recently appearing to shift to support operations against Russia now has urgent second thoughts. Having just lost a war in Iran, with badly depleted ammunition stockpiles, no domestic appetite for US troops fighting and dying on the other side of the Atlantic, and the mid-terms ahead, ‘Extending Russia’[4] does not look like such a good idea. The White House quickly concludes it is not in the US national interest to join a war with Russia on the European mainland. After spent years talking about strategic autonomy without creating it, the E3 now know what this means.

4. The First 3 Months of the War

Nevertheless, trapped in the political narrative they have constructed, the leaders of the E3 and smaller willing nations — perhaps the Dutch, Scandinavians, and Balts — respond.

The only place where an offensive is possible is in the air. But Europe’s strike packages now discover what Ukrainian pilots have known for years. Whilst a small proportion of European cruise missiles find their targets, the majority are destroyed by Russia’s layered and well-practiced S-400 and S-500 networks, which also exact an unsustainable toll on European pilots and aircraft. Without American suppression of enemy air defences – and perhaps even with it – there is no further prospect of achieving air superiority nor any effective counter attack.

In response to the air strikes, Russia takes the gloves off, determined once and for all to remove the threat from Europe to its people and homeland. Russia strikes airfields, training bases, dockyards, logistics hubs, and marshalling yards, inflicting 1,000s of military casualties amongst European forces before they can even deploy. The Europeans now learn the lesson that the US have just learnt in the Gulf – European militaries have very little protection against conventional ballistic attacks, and none against hypersonic missiles.[5]

The point is cruelly reinforced by simultaneous Russian strikes that systematically dismantle the Europe’s energy infrastructure — gas terminals, power stations, grid interconnectors, storage facilities — with the same clinical precision applied to Ukraine’s grid from 2022 onwards. Acutely vulnerable as the world’s largest regional hydrocarbon importer, at 12.8 million barrels per day,[6] Europe’s energy system is already under severe strain — the consequence of self-defeating sanctions on Russian oil and gas, recently compounded by the Strait of Hormuz energy shock.[7]

At sea, Russian submarines have deployed into the North Sea and Atlantic, and a wartime blockade has been announced. The mere threat of losing commercial vessels is enough for maritime insurers to withdraw cover and for shipping companies to stand down. Europe’s hydrocarbon imports grind to a halt and energy systems start to fail. The lights begin to go out. More importantly, without diesel, Europe’s farming, fishing and food logistics systems fail. Although only 2-3 months into the conflict, Europe’s economic situation is now perilous.

4. The Ceasefire, Costs and Consequences

Faced with the binary choice of escalating with nuclear weapons or accepting defeat, British and French leaders pause. Both nations’ nuclear deterrents exist to deter nuclear attack on their own territories, not to take nationally suicidal action to rescue a failing conventional campaign. Meanwhile, the US – having made its position on the sidelines clear and now acutely worried about the risk of nuclear war with Russia – is urgently working with both sides to bring the war to a close. Which can only be done on Russia’s terms. Under intense pressure from the US and the smaller European nations, E3, NATO and EU leaders sue for peace.

Only 3 months into the conflict, the human costs are already severe. Military casualties are orders of magnitude higher than Western and NATO losses in 25 years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But military surrender is not the end, just the beginning.

With its energy system shattered, European industrial production is collapsing, unemployment is surging. Europe’s largest countries, other than Germany, are already shouldering debt-to-GDP ratios over 100%[8]. European public finances buckle then crack under the rapidly increasing burden of emergency energy subsidies, future reconstruction costs, collapsing stock markets, bond market runs leading to higher government interest costs, and lost tax revenues.

The failed state that is Ukraine provides indisputable evidence of what comes next. An economic contraction of 10% is the conventional criterion for a depression[9]: Ukraine’s is over 30%. The US is fiscally unable – and the Rest of the World politically unwilling – to offer a Marshall Plan. Thus, Europe faces alone an economic contraction greater than the Great Depression.

The political consequences are no less profound. The coalitions that launched the war collapse, and the leaders who led the charge are rapidly and ruthlessly deposed. NATO and the European Union, both judged complicit in the war’s commission, are irreparably fractured. Populist and nationalist movements surge. Social contracts between elites and the peoples, built over generations and in societies that had not experienced war on their own soil since 1945, strain to breaking point. Europe, once a coherent political and economic region, now faces a dystopian reckoning.

5. Conclusion – The Choice Europeans Face

If this scenario is plausible – even remotely so – are the risks the E3 leaders are inviting us to accept worth it? Without any public discussion?

There is an alternative: it’s called diplomacy. Not the diplomacy of ultimatums, nor meaningless peace conferences from which one belligerent is triumphantly excluded. But rather the diplomacy of honest conversation, in which each side listens to the other. Russia’s security needs are not difficult to understand. Because they have been repeating them for 20 years, almost ad nauseam for those of us who were prepared to listen and hear. A neutral Ukraine. No NATO membership. Real security guarantees. All of which Russia was willing to offer and Ukraine willing to accept in March 2022 – before Zelensky was persuaded otherwise by Boris Johnson and Joe Biden.

As General André Beaufre wrote: ‘In war the loser deserves to lose because his defeat must result from errors of thinking, made either before or during the conflict’. Over the first quarter of this 21^st Century, Western leaders in general and Europe leaders in particular have a consistent track record of ‘errors in thinking’ – as our failed operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine unequivocally prove. This time though the stakes for Europeans could not be higher.

To conclude, before they march us onwards towards war, our leaders owe us two things. First, an honest, public, strategic assessment of the risks to which this course of action could expose us. Second, an opportunity for our views to be sought and our voices to be heard. After all, it is we, not they, who will be the ones expected to fight the war and bear its costs and consequences.

The choice we Europeans face is simple. Should we change course toward peace, and begin a difficult but honest diplomatic conversation with Russia? Or should we let our leaders – guided by a political narrative that they have constructed and ignoring the existential risks set out here – continue to lead us onwards towards war? As did their illustrious predecessors, a century or so ago, in the Summer of 1914?

________________________________________________

Commodore (Rtd) Steven Jermy RN is the founder of Mor Gallos and the author of Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century (2011). He offers strategic advisory services to organisations in the energy, defence, and geopolitical risk sectors. Enquiries: advisory@morgallos.co.uk

References

1. Steven Jermy, ‘Right Now NATO Could Not Win a War with Russia’, Responsible Statecraft, 29 January 2025. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/nato-war-with-russia/

2. Steven Jermy, ‘Russia Is in the Driving Seat’, Brave New Europe / NATO Watch, 15 May 2025. https://braveneweurope.com/steven-jermy-russia-is-in-the-driving-seat

3. George Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, New York Times, 5 February 1997; William J. Burns, ‘Nyet Means Nyet’, US Embassy Moscow cable, 1 February 2008 (WikiLeaks); John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2014.

4. ‘Oreshnik Missile Is Unstoppable, Undetectable’, The Week India, 21 December 2024. https://www.theweek.in/news/defence/2024/12/21/oreshnik-missile-is-unstoppable-undetectable-another-military-analyst-echoes-putins-claims.html

5. International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Outlook 2024.

6. ‘Lloyd’s Executive Likens LNG Attack to Nuclear Explosion’, Resilience.org, 20 September 2004. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-09-20/lloyds-executive-likens-lng-attack-nuclear-explosion/

7. Kyiv School of Economics / World Bank, Ukraine War Damage Assessment, various reports 2023–2025.

8. IMF Fiscal Monitor — General Government Gross Debt (% of GDP). https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/

9. General André Beaufre, An Introduction to Strat

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[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, tr. Michael Howard & Peter Paret. (Princeton, 1976) p.88.

[2] George Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, New York Times, 5 February 1997; William J. Burns, ‘Nyet Means Nyet’, US Embassy Moscow cable, 1 February 2008; John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’, Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2014.

[3] https://fampo.no/estonias-pm-kaja-kallas-calls-for-the-breakup-of-russia/

[4] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf

[6] International Energy Agency (IEA), World Energy Outlook 2024. Europe’s oil import dependency at approximately 12.8 million barrels per day.

[8] IMF Fiscal Monitor — General Government Gross Debt (% of GDP). https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/

[9] Kyiv School of Economics / World Bank, Ukraine War Damage Assessment, various reports 2023–2025

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Nearly 50 House Republicans Push Bill That Grants “DE FACTO AMNESTY” to Illegal Alien Farm Workers

 

Bill Sponsor: Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA-15)

Republican Cosponsors (49)

• Rick W. Allen (GA-12)
• Don Bacon (NE-2)
• James R. Baird (IN-4)
• Cliff Bentz (OR-2)
• Mike Bost (IL-12)
• Monica De La Cruz (TX-15)
• Troy Downing (MT-2)
• Chuck Edwards (NC-11)
• Gabe Evans (CO-8)
• Julie Fedorchak (ND-At Large)
• Randy Feenstra (IA-4)
• Brad Finstad (MN-1)
• Michelle Fischbach (MN-7)
• Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (TN-3)
• Mike Flood (NE-1)
• Brett Guthrie (KY-2)
• Bill Huizenga (MI-4)
• Brian Jack (GA-3)
• Mike Kelly (PA-16)
• Trent Kelly (MS-1)
• David Kustoff (TN-8)
• Darin LaHood (IL-16)
• Nicholas A. Langworthy (NY-23)
• Laurel M. Lee (FL-15)
• Celeste Maloy (UT-2)
• Michael T. McCaul (TX-10)
• Mark B. Messmer (IN-8)
• Daniel Meuser (PA-9)
• Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-1)
• John R. Moolenaar (MI-2)
• Tim Moore (NC-14)
• Dan Newhouse (WA-4)
• Mike D. Rogers (AL-3)
• David Rouzer (NC-7)
• Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27)
• Austin Scott (GA-8)
• Pete Sessions (TX-17)
• Michael K. Simpson (ID-2)
• Lloyd Smucker (PA-11)
• David J. Taylor (OH-2)
• Claudia Tenney (NY-24)
• David G. Valadao (CA-22)
• Jefferson Van Drew (NJ-2)
• Derrick Van Orden (WI-3)
• Joe Wilson (SC-2)
• Robert J. Wittman (VA-1)
• Ryan K. Zinke (MT-1)

This bill fundamentally alters U.S. immigration enforcement and labor protections. Under the guise of "streamlining" agricultural labor, the bill establishes sweeping amnesty provisions and expands the H-2A visa program to the direct detriment of American workers. It-

• Grants amnesty to illegal aliens present in the United States as of May 31, 2026, who meet minimal agricultural work history requirements (180 days over the last two years); 
  • Waives statutory bars to inadmissibility and deportability for these illegal aliens, wiping away prior lawbreaking including illegal entry without inspection, visa overstays, document fraud, and the 3- and 10-year unlawful presence bars;
  • Allows amnestied aliens to obtain H-2A visas;
• Grants amnesty to lawbreaking employers, protecting them from civil or criminal prosecution under Section 274A for previously hiring illegal aliens, so long as they cooperate with the alien’s amnesty application;
• Caps year-over-year adjustments to the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) at a maximum 3.25% increase and freezing wages mid-contract, ensuring foreign labor remains artificially cheap;
• Expands the H-2A program into year-round industries, broadening the definition of "agricultural labor" to include sectors like meat and poultry slaughter, logging, aquaculture, and equine management, systematically displacing domestic labor in those fields;
• Expands H-2A certifications to up to three years, eliminating the requirement that employers annually test the domestic labor market;
• Enforces a mandatory 15-day deadline to adjudicate H-2A petitions, guaranteeing that overwhelmed adjudicators will rubber-stamp applications without thorough vetting; and
• Authorizes the State Department to waive in-person consular interviews for returning foreign workers and allowing staggered entry dates across a 180-day window on a single petition.

 With Traitors like these, who needs Democrats?

WAR UPDATE: Military Insider Gives Terrifying Prediction & Reveals How Unprepared America Truly Is

 

The Data-Center Revolt Goes National: Tea Party Veteran Leads 142 Rallies Across 42 States

by Tyler Durden

The backlash against the AI data-center build-out - which we've been tracking since it was a smattering of county fights across 28 states - staged its first coordinated day of action on Saturday: 142 protests across 42 states, from Wasilla, Alaska to Naples, Florida, organized by Humans First, the nonprofit that Tea Party veteran Amy Kremer co-founded and chairs. The crowds spanned both sides of the aisle...uniting a MAGA stalwart in a 'faith, family, freedom' T-shirt in New Jersey, a first-time activist in Texas, and a left-leaning organizer in California's Imperial Valley.

The fight looked like Kenilworth, New Jersey. Residents of the 8,500-person borough gathered outside the municipal court at mid-morning with drums, plastic horns, and sidewalk chalk to protest the $1.8 billion CoreWeave AI data center their planning board approved in May 2025 on the former Merck campus - a project that has since drawn more than 12,000 petition signatures against it, several thousand more names than the town has people. The woman in the "faith, family, freedom" T-shirt marched beside neighbors holding "Build community, not data centers" signs. When heavy rain arrived later in the day, they pulled on ponchos, shared umbrellas, and kept marching. One sign, caught by Business Insider's photographer on the scene: "You think this is pressure? Wait 'til there's no water pressure."

Texas, the country's hottest data-center market, hosted the most rallies - 18 - with Georgia at 11, California at eight, and Pennsylvania, Florida, and Indiana at seven apiece. In Imperial Valley, where a proposed facility could pull 260 million gallons a year from the Colorado River, Ivan DelSol, 54, told Reuters that around 50 people turned out in 100-degree heat. "It's dystopian that you would use this much fresh water for AI," he said. Organizers released no headcounts; turnout ran below expectations in some rural areas and in Atlanta, where about a dozen showed - most of them, a volunteer there said, driving in from the smaller Georgia towns where the biggest data centers are going up.

Kremer is a founding figure of the Tea Party movement who went on to found Women for Trump, and an organizer of the January 6, 2021 rally that preceded the Capitol riot (she neither planned nor took part in the riot itself). She has spent months calling data centers the defining fight of her lifetime, warning the technology could threaten humanity itself, and she is open about running the old playbook: grassroots pressure, town by town, aimed at both parties.

Today was incredible!

142 protests. 42 states. One message: ONE NATION UNITED AGAINST DATA CENTERS!

Communities across America showed up today for a National Day of Protest Against AI Data Centers to say that We The People deserve a voice before massive data centers are… pic.twitter.com/TwE7oRjR6V

— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) July 18, 2026

Her crowds bear that out. One of Saturday's Texas rallies, in Tyler, was organized by Eva Cardona, a 31-year-old self-described political nomad and first-time activist who told Reuters she wanted something more hands-on than posting on Facebook; about a dozen people came. And in Imperial Valley, the man who helped lead the rally leans left. The polling explains why a coalition that broad holds. A June Reuters/Ipsos survey found only 14 percent of Americans would support a data center in their own community. Gallup polling fielded in March found 71 percent oppose building an AI data center in their area - 48 percent strongly - a worse number than a local nuclear plant gets. And Morgan Stanley told clients in a July 14 note that support for local data-center bans runs strongest among Republican, higher-income, and urban voters, while Morning Consult's national tracker crossed a line of its own in May: "stop building" (about 45 percent) overtook "keep building while expanding energy supply" (about 38 percent) for the first time since last October.

Several democratic candidates, including candidate for Texas Governor Gina Hinajosa, stopped in Lubbock to discuss campaign topics including data centers. A data center protest was also held to collect signatures to pause building hyperscale data centers in the Lubbock area. pic.twitter.com/wh3mdGNcu4

— KAMC News (@KAMCNews) July 19, 2026

For all the movement's reputation, Kremer's demands stop well short of a shutdown. She opposes a national moratorium and statewide moratoriums alike, telling Business Insider that each community should choose what gets built inside it, and that too many of those choices are made behind closed doors. Humans First's platform runs to transparent approval processes, environmental review before permits are granted, union construction jobs, and binding developer commitments of the kind lawyers call community benefits agreements. She has aimed as much fire at her own side, accusing Republicans of giving Big Tech a free pass and predicting the industry will cozy up to Democrats the moment the majority flips. The fix, she argues, belongs to Congress.

Amy Kremer is the cofounder of Women for Trump and Women for America First. Now she's taking on AI data centers. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The organization is a narrower thing than the crowds it convened. Humans First announced in April that its non-conservative team members would spin off into a separate group, with Kremer promising "a topflight team of conservatives" to fight Big AI and its lobbyists. The banner over Saturday's rallies, in other words, was a conservative one - which makes the mix of people who marched beneath it all the more striking.

Official Backlash

The rallies capped a fast-moving week. On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing the nation's first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers - an immediate pause of up to a year on state environmental permits for projects of 50 megawatts or more while regulators draft standards covering energy demand, water use, and air quality. Her office promised localities community-benefit guidance within 60 days, and Hochul will pursue repeal of the state's sales-tax exemptions for massive data centers. A tougher bill passed by the legislature, with a 20-megawatt threshold, remains unsigned on her desk; her office has called it complicated, and Hochul said the state wants to be "the first to get it right."

New York was not alone. Virginia's new tax on data-center electricity - 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour - took effect July 1. Pennsylvania's House passed a ban on non-disclosure agreements in data-center deals by a 171-31 vote, and separately voted 197-5 to repeal the industry's sales-tax exemption, a break worth roughly $517 million a year by 2030. Arizona's governor signed a three-year moratorium on new data-center tax breaks in June. Legislators have filed more than 300 data-center bills this year; local pauses have passed at the county, city, and tribal level in at least 15 states.

Meanwhile In China

Nothing comparable is happening on the other side of the Pacific. Two days before the marches, Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter system billed as the largest open-weight model ever built and claimed to perform level with America's best frontier models. Bloomberg has reported that Beijing plans to spend roughly $295 billion over five years on a nationwide network of AI computing hubs - and none of it will face a zoning board. Under the state's "Eastern Data, Western Computing" program, the buildout is steered into the arid, sparsely populated west; provincial governments compete to attract data centers with tax holidays, cheap land, and compute vouchers, and the state absorbs up to half of operators' energy costs, so the strain never shows up on a household bill. No Chinese county has passed a moratorium, because no Chinese county gets a vote.

The financial toll is no longer hypothetical. Third-party trackers cited by Morgan Stanley in its July 14 note put the value of cancelled or delayed projects at roughly $156 billion in 2025 and another $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone - about $286 billion in all - set against the bank's own estimate of $877 billion in AI capital spending this year. The underlying quarterly count comes from Data Center Watch, a tracker run by 10a Labs, an intelligence firm whose client list includes AI companies, which logged at least 75 projects blocked or delayed from January through March - matching in one quarter the number of projects derailed in all of 2025 - as active opposition groups more than doubled from 396 to 833 and spread to 49 states.

Saturday itself stayed peaceful - chalk, chants, drums, umbrellas - though the wider fight has had harder edges: developers of the Piedmont transmission line into Northern Virginia's data-center corridor asked a federal court last summer for U.S. Marshals to escort survey crews after landowners threatened workers, an episode we covered at the time.

The industry answered forcefully. The Data Center Coalition warned that New York's moratorium tells investors the state is "closed for business" and will push jobs and tax revenue to neighboring states. Seven major AI and cloud companies - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI - point to the Ratepayer Protection Pledge they signed at the White House in March, a voluntary commitment to cover the grid costs their facilities create. And White House AI czar David Sacks went after Hochul's case point by point on the All-In podcast, calling data centers "the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI." His answer to the utility-bill complaint: let developers build their own generation behind the meter instead of competing with households for grid power.

David Sacks: Everything Kathy Hochul Said About Datacenters Was a False Accusation@DavidSacks: “These data centers become the scapegoat for all of the angst that people have about AI.

Everything she's saying there is a false accusation on datacenters. So let's just go one by… pic.twitter.com/gAxesw3fRD

— The All-In Podcast (@theallinpod) July 18, 2026

Some industry allies go further, pointing to OpenAI's June disclosure that it banned a China-linked network using ChatGPT to mass-produce comics and comments blaming data centers for rising power bills. OpenAI itself found the operation gained almost no authentic traction - and the crowds in Kenilworth and Imperial County were unambiguously homegrown.

Kremer spent Saturday evening thanking volunteers and looking past the weekend. "America is not for sale, and our communities are not collateral," she wrote on X. She expects data centers on the ballot in November, and again in 2028. The midterms are less than four months away. 

The Next Phase Of Shrinkflation: Rolling Blackouts

  

 Via SchiffSovereign,

The lights went on at approximately 3pm on September 4, 1882 in New York City.

Thomas Edison (with major funding from JP Morgan) had spent roughly two years building the first-ever commercial power plant, located in Manhattan’s financial district. Its total capacity was about 600 kilowatts… barely enough to power a single rack of GPUs today.

But at the time it was nothing short of miraculous.

Edison’s coal-fired DC power plant initially served just 82 customers, and electricity was nothing more than a luxury flex by the ultra-wealthy.

But over time– especially after Westinghouse and Tesla’s alternating current became the gold standard– electrification rates in the United States skyrocketed.

At the turn of the 20th century, hardly anyone had electricity in their homes. By 1920, it was about 35%. By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, roughly 70% of US homes were electrified, and urban areas were nearly 85%.

The systems were surprisingly reliable given the rudimentary technology of the day.

Blackouts were not infrequent, but they were generally short and localized, often just affecting a few streets or houses.

And typically the biggest reason for a short, localized blackout was simply because electrical demand was increasing more rapidly than the grid could create new supply. More and more homes were being electrified, and, after World War II, consumer appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners began consuming more power. We’ll come back to that.

In response, the industry began looking for efficiencies to be able to scale more quickly. They built larger, beefier power plants and connected their independent grids to be able to share reserves and load balance.

In short, they planned for speed and scale. Not resilience. And the end result was an incredibly complex network that was highly vulnerable to systemic failure.

That failure first came at 5:16pm on November 9, 1965: a minor maintenance issue near Niagara Falls triggered a chain reaction across the entire grid. 30 million people went without power– most until the next morning, some for a few days.

It was a wake-up call… and the first catastrophic grid failure of many more to come. So naturally the government stepped in to “fix” it.

With the electrical grid’s vulnerabilities laid bare, Congress held inquiries and hearings. New rules and regulations were passed. And, before long, the US electrical industry became a confusing alphabet soup of state, local, and federal authorities– ISOs and RTOs, FERC, PJM, MISO, CAISO, SPP, and so many more.

Layers and layers of bureaucratic agencies didn’t fix anything. But technology was quite fortunately on America’s side, and over the past few decades, advances (like LED bulbs) made consumer appliances more energy efficient. Power plants also became more productive.

In fact, today the US consumes less electricity per capita than it did in 1995. And the grid produces much more power.

But this balance is starting to change rapidly.

We all know the story of data centers and their insatiable appetites for energy. Electricity is such a critical input, in fact, that data centers are typically described by their power consumption.

For example, Softbank recently announced 5GW of new data centers in France. The famous StarGate project in the US is targeting 10GW. Facebook is building a 5GW data center in Louisiana.

And various plans over the next few years go in to several hundred gigawatts.

This trend is similar to the 1950s– utility companies struggled to keep up with surging demand from US consumers who were plugging in air conditioners and refrigerators for the first time.

But supply and demand in the electricity market is a funny thing. Demand can surge very quickly… just like we’ve seen over the past year or so. But electrical supply grows more slowly.

New power plants take years to build. Thanks to the aforementioned alphabet soup, the regulatory burden alone is a minefield.

And most electrical producers aren’t willing to go through the effort, risk, and capital expenditure unless they’re sure the new power plant will be profitable. And profitability depends on the price of electricity.

That’s where politicians and the regulators have stepped in to screw it all up.

Naturally, with demand soaring and supply constrained, electricity prices are rising. You’d think that politicians would respond by making it easier for utilities to build new power plants, i.e. reduce the regulatory and permitting process to increase electricity supply.

But no. Instead, they’re capping prices.

Last year, a whole lot of state officials and federal regulators got together to set a ceiling for certain wholesale electricity prices to roughly $333 per megawatt-day.

Clearly, they’re responding to voters’ demands to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living.

Unfortunately, $333/MW-day isn’t high enough to justify investment in new power plants.

Existing power plants are old. Sometimes extremely old. They already own their land, and their construction loans are all paid off. So $333/MW-day is sufficient for them to pay for fuel, conduct maintenance, and turn a small profit.

But $333 isn’t enough to build a new plant– to cover the additional costs of construction, land purchases, permitting, etc.

In fact, the regulators themselves estimate that electricity prices need to be about $500/MW-day (i.e. 50% higher) to justify investment in new power plants.

This means there won’t be enough new commercial power plants built to sufficiently supply the grid. In fact the northeast grid (known as PJM) is already in a 6.5 GW deficit against its own reserve requirement for the first time ever, increasing the chance of failure next summer.

This is essentially a form of shrinkflation. i.e. paying the same amount of money but getting less for it. We’ve all seen it at grocery stores and restaurants– same price, smaller portions.

In this case, electricity prices are supposedly remaining flat. But you’re getting less for it– potential grid failure.

All because the maze of political and regulatory authorities won’t do the obvious thing and make it easy for new power plants to be built.

Take Your Pick - Either Jesus Christ or the Third Temple!