Anti-AI data center protests reveal unusual cross-ideological coalition

From the aging strip malls of Kenilworth, it’s hard to see this blue-collar borough as part of northern New Jersey — one of the richest regions in the country.

But on Saturday, it was hard to see anything at all. Carcinogenic compounds from the Canadian wildfires saturated the air, extending the long days of grayscale gloom. Making matters worse was the flood watch. Cars in nearby Manhattan were submerged. Still, the voices outside the red-brick borough hall sounded defiant.

“We want water, not AI!” a clump of protesters shouted, as the clouds obliged and dumped down hard rain.

A Protest of Unlikely Alliances

“It looks like mostly lefties here,” mused a woman in a Cato Institute jacket. She turned out to be a New York Post writer who believes the hazards of AI are greatly exaggerated. The dozens of protesters in rain gear didn’t look like lefties, exactly, but it’s true that she was the only person in Cato merch.

The turnout in Kenilworth was part of the National Day of Action — a set of demonstrations against AI data centers announced not by the usual tired hippies but by the right-wing nonprofit Humans First. The protest day had 120 construction projects across 37 states in its sights, including one in Wasilla, Alaska, and 18 in Texas.

All week, Humans First chair Amy Kremer, a MAGA firebrand, had been beating war drums. These protests, she’d prophesied in RealClearEnergy on July 14, would power a Tea Party–scale revolution against the technopolitical machine that’s steadily choking out American life.

Echoes of Past Movements

The Kenilworth protest wasn’t a revolution. But there was a current of real radicalism on the wet street. The protest did manage to conjure the Tea Party in the 2010s, but also, on closer examination, Occupy Wall Street of the same period — when figures like Keli Carendar and David Graeber rose up against corporate-political corruption, including the Wall Street bank bailouts.

Jennifer Wilkes, a voluble activist from nearby Roselle Park, approached me. She was fired up.

“Everybody is starting to revolt,” Wilkes said. “They call us crazy because of how we act. But everybody is tired. What else can we do but act crazy? The frustration level is up to here.”

A Unifying Message

We want water, not AI had a unifying beat. It was hard to argue with the idea that human cells have hydration needs and robots don’t. Maybe humans have finally found something we can dehumanize without guilt: machines.

Only the media representatives who were present — including reporters from NewsNation and an AI newsletter called Transformer — puzzled about the protesters’ ideologies. At a time when Americans wear their political allegiances like rib-splintering corsets — and in the very same month that white supremacists marched on D.C. and Democratic factions nearly came to blows over the future of the party — the grassroots coalition was maddeningly hard to read. It seemed to belong to the future.

“We are the 99 percent,” the Occupy protesters had said. When the enemy is the billionaires, our numbers grow. Perhaps it’s time to think of a coalition made up entirely of nonbillionaires. “We are the 99.999 percent,” a new slogan might go, if it were ever finished.