What if we could reinvent the public square in the context of our elections so candidates can genuinely earn the attention to compete? At Pluribus we believe a more meritocratic and modern public square would: 1. Increase participation and informed decision-making by the electorate. 2. Lower the barrier to entry so there is greater competition and more diversity of candidates. 3. Increase prioritization of broad public interests.
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A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida on July 18, 2026.
(Thomas Simonetti/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
Beware the moral panic over AI data centers
Aug 28, 2026
Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.
The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics.” Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak out.
When I was kid, there was a moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game. It was sparked by the tragic suicide of a gamer and quickly led to various Christian groups insisting, in the words of one Georgia pastor, that "the game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons."
Moral panics are seductive to journalists. CBS News’ “60 Minutes” host Ed Bradley interviewed Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, in 1985, asking “If you found 12 kids in murder suicide with one connecting factor in each of them, wouldn’t you question it?”
Gygax responded, “I would certainly do it in a scientific manner, and this is as unscientific as you can get. It’s nothing but a witch hunt!”
Gygax was right, but it took a while for people to realize it.
History is full of similar episodes. Some were entirely silly — like the 1950s hysteria about comic books corrupting the youth. But often they take real concerns and legitimate issues and turbocharge them. The child-abduction panic of the late 1970s and early 1980s was sparked by some actual, horrific child abductions. The understandable fear among parents led to a kind of mass hysteria.
Moral panics form a bit like “perfect storms” with just the right conditions. But they differ in three ways. First, storms are easy to predict. Second, when you’re in a deluge, no one disputes that you’re in one. But when you’re in a moral panic, the people panicking can’t recognize it until it’s over — sort of like when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the other week “Woke 1 was crazy.” She didn’t think so when she was fomenting Woke 1.
Which brings us to the third difference: Humans don’t know how to create hurricanes, but they do know how to create moral panics.
Consider the freakout over AI data centers, which are proliferating across the country. A recent poll found that more people would rather have a nuclear power plant or steel factory in their community than a data center. That’s bonkers.
Panic-peddlers are pushing even crazier stuff. Steve Bannon’s “War Room” is describing AI data centers as “weapons labs” to be used on Americans. His “tech correspondent” claims that data centers are like the embryonic “neurons of the Antichrist, that’s what we’re witnessing. The false messiah.” A Kentucky farmer who turned down a $26 million dollar offer for her property explained to CNN that part of her reasoning is that the vibrations from data centers“vibrate at a low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels.”
We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this moral panic isn’t entirely homegrown. Fracking induced a similar freakout 15 years ago, and foreign governments played a role in fomenting it, hoping a moral panic would block the practice the way a similar one killed the nuclear industry for a generation. It would not shock me if we’re seeing something similar today.
Not all concerns about data centers are so crazy or even unreasonable. They do use a lot of water, though not nearly as much as some claim. They can cause electricity rates to go up. They’re ugly. And, if you’re freaking out about what AI will do to your job or to American society, taking it out on data centers makes a certain amount of sense.
Politicians, as a class, tend to indulge moral panics. Which is why it’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats alike are racing to get on the “right” side of the issue.
Consider Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, up for reelection this year. Texas has prided itself in being the most business-friendly environment possible, enticing Big Tech to flee California for the accommodating Lone Star State. Just last November, Abbot boasted that a $40 billion dollar investment by Google proved that “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”
Now, Abbott is throwing Google and Big Tech under the bus. By failing to win over local communities, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “ They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them.” He added, “That’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
AI is coming. The only question is whether America should take the lead or let China. If your answer is “America,” then data centers are the price. If your answer is “China” then by all means keep freaking out.
___
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Black wealth is rising but the racial wealth gap is widening. From Douglass to Mays to today, the freedom struggle's unfinished business is ownership.
Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Salute A True America 250: Black History Lessons on Power Everyone Needs Today
Aug 27, 2026
From Emmaus, Pennsylvania and Staten Island to Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in Kansas, Tennessee, N. Carolina and more, as well as the Ohio State Fair's butter cow theme (and deviled egg recipes), the celebration of America 250 continues throughout the rest of the sesquicentennial year.
Added to the recent Sail250 tall ship event culminating in Boston’s harbor attended by millions was part of the country’s s 1776 official birthdate of independence, but the persistent calls for Black freedom of the last two centuries are still ignored.
Two men, a century apart, stood before audiences and did the same audacious thing: they read the historic words aloud. In Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass took the founding scripture of the republic and turned it into an indictment: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
In 1967, at Morehouse College’s centennial commencement, President Benjamin E. Mays opened not with celebration but with a catalog of slander — Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, Louis Agassiz and Henry Grady — the learned apparatus that had declared the newly emancipated “a little less than human.”
Strip away the century between them and both men make one demand: refuse the status the country assigns you. “A man does not have to accept the view,” Mays told the Morehouse men, “that because he is a Negro, certain things were not meant for him.”
That is the whole Black freedom tradition in a single breath.
But Mays did something Douglass could not yet do — he predicted the current era. Discrimination in the future, he warned, “will not be administered by poor whites and the people who believe in segregation but by the ‘liberals’ who believe in a desegregated society but not an integrated society.”
Mays said they would “wine and dine with us in the swankiest hotels, work with us, and still discriminate against us when it comes to money and power.” He named the practice: our institutions are “by design kept on short grass.”
You only need to look at the ground beneath us.
The National Urban League titled its 2025 State of Black America report a “State of Emergency.” That emergency continues in President Donald Trump’s recent false screed in the National Address propagating election lies as the Voting Rights Act erases access; affirmative action is eliminated; and the machinery of fair treatment in schools, businesses, institutions and organizations is switched off.
The deepest number is a paradox: Black wealth is rising while the racial wealth gap widens. Black families’ median net worth jumped nearly 58 percent from 2019 to 2022, yet the dollar gap grew past $240,000 — because a small share of a large base compounds faster than a large share of a small one.
Black households hold about 13 cents for every white dollar at the median. That is Mays’s short grass rendered as arithmetic, and Douglass’s promissory note is still marked as insufficient funds.
The Black freedom struggle always carried an economic-justice wing, and it was the engine room, not the fringe. A. Philip Randolph was a socialist. Bayard Rustin, who architected the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a democratic socialist.
And Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — Mays’ own student — was murdered in Memphis in 1968 where he was launching a Poor People’s Campaign with sanitation workers that fused race and class. “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King asked, “if you cannot afford a hamburger?”
Out of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference where I served as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, came Operation Breadbasket, then PUSH, then Jesse Jackson, Sr.’s Rainbow Coalition — his insistence in 1984 and 1988 that a Black preacher could assemble a multiracial, working-class majority around economic justice.
The late Jackson drew that blueprint; the new movement inherits it whether it knows the names or not. But an honest elder audits the ledger: the Rainbow moved the platform and never captured enough machinery to convert votes into durable Black wealth.
Those views deserve respect, not ridicule. They represent the voice of a people who have buried too many children waiting for beautiful theories to pay out. Pragmatism is not timidity; it is scar tissue.
Along with Jackson, Douglass and Mays were not only prophets — they were builders, editors, fundraisers, and institution-makers who held the prophet’s fire and the steward’s ledger in the same two hands. They displayed radical ends with disciplined means.
Which calls up the hardest question: in a technologically disruptive, media-savvy age, how do Black folks survive?
The threat is concrete — Black workers are far likelier to hold the jobs automation eats first, in customer support, office work, food service, and production, while too thin a pipeline runs into the fields the new economy rewards.
Survival is the short-grass mind. The word this moment demands is sovereignty — moving from labor to ownership of equity, intellectual property, and capital. Moving from being the audience on platforms to owning the platforms and the story that runs on them.
The entrepreneurial signal is already there: Black-owned firms grew about 57 percent from 2017 to 2022. But they remain roughly three percent of American companies and one percent of revenue.
Formation is not the bottleneck; capital, contracts, and scale are. The fight Mays named — equal consideration for the tax and philanthropic dollar — is today the fight for venture capital, credit, and procurement. Politics that does not move capital toward ownership is decorative.
The through-line from Douglass to now is simple: the freedom this country grants on paper, it withholds in capital. Every generation’s task is to convert the paper into property and the property into power.
This generation’s task is to make certain that when the AI economy is finished being built, Black entrepreneurs are counted among its owners — and not merely among its displaced. Take us off the short grass, and we will show you what we grow.
Dr. Lamell J. McMorris is the founder of Phase 2 Consulting, and Greenlining Realty USA; serves as Senior Vice Chair of the National Urban League Board of Trustees and is author of The Power to Persist. He is the former Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) on Capitol Hill on June 25, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Texas Republicans’ Effort To Make a Safe House Seat May Backfire
Aug 27, 2026
LAREDO, Texas — Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, knows President Donald Trump called on the state to redistrict to create five safe Republican seats, but Cuellar now says Texas redistricting actually strengthened his chances of reelection in November. Polling experts agree.
State legislators looked at where Trump won in 2024 to redraw the districts, especially the tight ones like Cuellar’s District 28. But Trump voters do not necessarily equate to people who will vote for Republicans for Congress.
“They based it on Trump numbers,” Cuellar told Medill News Service in his Laredo office. “In my district, they actually made it more Democratic.”
The Texas Republican-led legislature’s 2025 effort to flip Democratic House seats through gerrymandering triggered a wave of redistricting bills across the country in Republican and Democratic states.
However, the Texas GOP might have inadvertently made it harder for Republican nominee Tano Tijerina to unseat Cuellar. Tijerina was elected as a judge in Webb County as a Democrat before switching parties in 2024.
Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate in a century to win several counties throughout the district, including Cuellar’s home of Webb County. However, Cuellar won reelection in 2024 and is fighting for his 12th term. Many Trump supporters, particularly among Texas’ Latino population, no longer support him. 1 in 5 Texas Latinos now regret voting for him, according to a recent UnidosUS poll.
“A lot of these voters, they may have liked Trump in 2024, but they're not consistent Republican voters,” said Erin Covey, Cook Political Report analyst. “It's better to think of them as more independent voters who are open to being persuaded.”
In a sit-down interview with Medill News Service, Cuellar said that the Texas GOP looked at the wrong data when it redrew the map, by voting along party lines to pass a rare mid-decade redistricting bill known as HB 4 in August 2025. After months of lawsuits over alleged racial gerrymandering behind the bill, the lawsuit challenging HB 4 was stayed by the Supreme Court in December. The stay allows the map to take effect for at least the 2026 midterm election.
Texas draws new electoral maps every 10 years based on the Democratic Performance Index, or “DPI,” data. DPI is a specialized political map that measures the partisanship of voting areas based on local-level voting history and weighted election averages.
Rep. Todd Hunter (R-TX), admitted the maps were redrawn to favor the districts that swung in favor of Trump in 2024 according to the select redistricting committee report Hunter authored.
“[HB 4] seeks to revise the composition of the districts for the election of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas by replacing the 2021 map with a new map to reflect the increased statewide vote for the Republican presidential nominee,” he wrote.
Several polls suggested that the Texas GOP’s reliance on Trump voters, without accounting for other features of the Texas voting bloc, made it unlikely the party would pick up five seats in the House of Representatives in November. But experts believe they will still gain some.
“I think there's a much better chance that they end up flipping maybe three seats as a result of the new map,” said Covey.
The Texas Partisan Index is a voting analysis tool published every two years after each statewide election by a local news organization called The Texan. The index looks at the Republican-to-Democratic partisan leanings of each legislative district and county in Texas, based on data obtained from the Texas Legislative Council and the Secretary of State.
The TPI initially found that following the 2024 election, Texas’ 28th Congressional District leaned 51% Democratic. The latest TPI, updated after the redistricting bill was passed, shows that the district is now 53% Democratic.
Bill King, a senior fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, said Republicans are “much more unlikely” to win seats in the three redrawn South Texas districts, including the 28th Congressional District.
“In fact, they cut the margin so thin down there, and they relied on what we think are some false premises,” King said.
Cuellar elaborated on those false premises King alluded to. Cuellar said the Republican Party misunderstood South Texas’ voting history and the influences on Latino Trump supporters in 2024 would vote for other Republicans down-ballot.
“What they did is they looked at South Texas or the narrative by the Republicans that Hispanics voted for Trump and voted for Republicans,” Cuellar said. “But if you look at those numbers . . . here in Webb County, we had some Republicans running. The Democrats won. So it didn't happen in 2024. Trump won, but the people said, ‘I'm voting for this local Democrat.’”
Gov. Greg Abbott denied the redistricting was racially discriminatory but said in a Fox News interview, “Four of the five districts we’re drawing are going to be Hispanic districts; they happen to be Hispanic Republican districts.”
In Texas, 55% of Latinos voted for Trump. In the 28th District, Trump won Webb County, which is 90.6% Latino, and Zapata County, which is 93.6% Latino. An overwhelming majority of those Latinos are Mexican-American.
Cheyenne Rodriguez, a Zapata County resident who identifies as Hispanic and voted for Trump, told Medill News Service that border security was a key issue for her decision to vote for Trump. She feels that support for Trump in her area is strong but quiet.
“There's a lot of people who are hardcore-not Trump- and then they ended up voting Trump; you see it a lot,” she said. “I mean, I don't really see a whole bunch of Trump flags or people celebrating stuff like that. But it's just the general vibe, you know, like, you can relate on the subject. Ain't nobody gonna be voting for Biden. I'm sorry, but no.”
Despite Trump’s historic Latino support, King said polling since redistricting shows that many Latinos are shifting against Trump.
“The polling seems to show that they're having some real buyer's remorse on Trump and the Republicans, and it's likely to flip back this time to more traditional results that we've seen,” he said. “If that's the case, they probably don't pick up any of those seats in the [Rio Grande Valley], and might even lose another one that's vulnerable.”
According to a 2025 UnidoUS poll, 66% of Texas Latino voters now disapprove of Trump.
“The drivers of that erosion are telling: the cost of living and inflation (44%), immigration enforcement in American cities (33%), job and wage stagnation (26%), and the war in Iran (25%) top the list. Latino voters are not just disappointed; they are making the connection between this administration’s policies and the economic pain they feel every single day,” UnidosUS wrote in its analysis.
While Latino voting blocs in other states have found issues with Trump’s immigration policy for moral reasons, Bill King explained that Latinos in Texas are “complicated” and have found Trump’s immigration policies hurt their wallet.
“If you go online, you'll see a lot of business people down along the [South Texas] valley talking about the difficulty in finding workers,” he said. “The fact that, like I mean, every time somebody gets deported or self-deports or doesn't come here, that's one less customer for a restaurant. It's one less tenant for an apartment owner. It's having the economic effect down the valley that they're not happy about. Latinos in Texas are very much economic voters.”
The majority-Latino Maverick County used to fall squarely within the 28th District, but redistricting has split it up.
Luis Ruiz, former chairman of the Democratic Party in Maverick County, said most Latinos in Texas, “especially Tejano Latinos,” don’t support Trump’s immigration policies.
“Why? Because most of us see it not as a personal issue. But rather as a financial issue. If it hurts our pockets, we don’t like it. That is going to cause a big problem in 2026 and 2028,” he said.
Wisdom Howell and Jamie Gareh are student journalists with Medill News Service.
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American businessman and politician Ross Perot, Annapolis, Maryland, 1992.
(Photo by Arnold Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
Perot 2.0
Aug 27, 2026
On February 20, 1992, Texas businessman Ross Perot appeared on Larry King Live and set in motion a significant challenge to the two-party status quo. I’m not asking to be drafted. But if the people want to register me in all 50 states, I’ll promise you this: between now and the conventions we’ll get both parties’ heads straight.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans responded. Volunteers put him on the ballot. By June he was leading in the polls. Even after dropping out of the race for a month (someone should write a book about why he did that), he received 20,000,000 votes.
The Perot movement shook up American politics. The major parties reacted.
First, they developed competing strategies to get voters back in line. The Republicans were the clear winners in this regard. They crafted the Contract with America and, in 1994, secured their first Congressional majority in 70 years by preaching balanced budgets (delivered) and term limits (lost in the mail). The Democrats floundered. They preached campaign finance reform and practiced triangulation, both of which failed to capture the spirit of radical change that Perot unleashed. The crime bill locked up hundreds of thousands of people of color in the name of public safety, and campaign finance reform unintentionally unleashed a geyser of cash into the system.
They also advanced a cooperative strategy to ensure there could never be another Perot. The rules, norms, and culture of politics (ballot access, sore loser laws, fusion, media coverage, debates, the FEC and more) were tweaked to diminish the likelihood of an independent insurgency ever again capturing the American people’s imagination.
Independents fought back. Many of us attempted to convert Perot’s candidacy into a durable third force, the Reform Party. We fought hard and worked hard, but we ultimately failed, not because there wasn’t interest, but because we could not figure out how to build an anti-party party while under constant attack from both major parties.
Perot never got the parties’ heads straight. We were not able to build a third-party alternative.
But independents are not averse to failure! We’ve gotten back on the horse and are driving new candidacies, new reforms, and new conversations to inspire Americans to take our country back from power-crazed partisans. In the 1990s we failed to create a new political party. In 2026, we are breaking new ground.
Here’s what I’m seeing:
1. Independent candidacies are surging. Even the New York Times has to admit something is brewing, although they have the nerve to write about it as if it is a Democratic Party strategy! Thousands of people are running for local, state, and federal offices as independents. Joe and Heather Manchin partnered with Adam Brandon to form the Independent Leadership Council and are working to ensure the American people have the opportunity to send 3-5 independents to Congress -- independents who won't caucus with either party once elected. Independent Veterans of America, the Forward Party, the Good Party, United Independents, Independent Voice, the Independent Voter Project, and many others are inspiring and supporting insurgent independents from Maine to Washington. When I first got involved in independent politics in the late 1980s, independent candidacies tended to be single-issue crusades to make a point, not change the game. That has evolved dramatically. Find the independent candidates running in your state. Chances are they are running to save our country from a failing two-party system, not to champion a pet issue.
2. Independent voters are surging. 10,000 Americans change their voter registration status from D or R to I every week. CNN puts independents at 48% of the electorate. Latino independent turnout in California primaries has surged 40% since 2022, three times the overall turnout growth. New Mexico independents won the right to vote in primaries in 2024, and 38,000 of them voted in the 2026 contests despite confusing information from county boards of elections. Independent voters in NYC flooded charter commission hearings with a simple message - I can’t vote! - and made primary reform the most talked-about issue of 2025. In states where they cannot fully participate, independents are going to court, putting measures on the ballot, and/or pressuring legislators to fix the situation. In states where they can vote, independents are participating in higher numbers.
In 2026, Ross Perot 2.0 is shaping up - without a Ross Perot. A combination of organized efforts and organic developments. Independent candidacies and open primaries. A movement built around the core American principles of fairness and competition. Open Primaries let all voters vote in every election for whomever they want. Independent candidates expose the dismal record of the bipartisan cartel and create new governing possibilities. Some campaigns are well funded and highly strategic. Others are micro-funded grassroots responses to on-the-ground partisan dysfunction. It’s a movement. And we are stronger than before.
Make no mistake, the parties are paying close attention. They are not stupid. They know the American people are fed up with gerrymandering, incompetence, self-enrichment, and blame-the-other-side opportunism while our position in the world deteriorates.
In the 1990’s, they were able to put the independent genie back in the partisan bottle. But Perot 2.0 (Perot-without-a-Perot) is stronger, more diverse, more flexible, and more appealing.
Keep your eye on the independents.
John Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization.
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