(DCNF)—A grassroots effort to turn Americans against artificial intelligence and data centers struggled to draw a crowd.
Humans First, a self-described conservative anti-data center group led by former Tea Party activist Amy Kremer, began its national “Data Center Revolt” bus tour, featuring 35 stops in 27 states, on Sept. 12 in Austin, Texas, as part of a fight against what the group dubs “Big AI globalists,” according to the organization’s website. As tour stops across the country repeatedly draw small crowds, questions remain about the organization’s national reach and its undisclosed financing.
A small number of supporters and journalists turned out for a Thursday bus stop at Bren Mar Park in Alexandria, Virginia, the Daily Caller News Foundation learned upon observing the event. Among the attendees were protesters with the Alliance for Secure AI who held signs featuring anti-data center messages.
The hour-long protest consisted of speeches from Kremer and allies before a brief question-and-answer session. A total of 18 participants initially registered for the event, according to Humans First’s event posting.
About 20 people turned out for a recent Humans First stop in Effingham County, Georgia, the Current GA reported. Attendance at some of the group’s July 18 rallies was thin, Reuters reported, including about a dozen people in Atlanta and Tyler, Texas.
“LOL I’ll assume these questions were a joke, if they aren’t then let me know when anyone out in rural America shows up for a pro-data center rally and then we will be happy to compare notes,” Humans First spokesperson Chris Barron told the DCNF, when asked about the low turnout at the organization’s protests.
“This is what community looks like!,” Humans First said in a Thursday Instagram post showing participants at the organization’s stop line up in front of the tour bus in Jacksonville, Florida.
Innovation Council, a pro-AI advocacy group, cast the tour as manufactured.
“This is what the astroturf Humans First ‘bus tour’ looks like in practice,” Innovation Council said in a Sept. 12 X post responding to Kremer’s announcement of the bus tour. Attached to the post was a video showing sparse attendance at a Humans First protest.
“[This] bus tour has exposed the truth: The anti data center campaign is merely a manufactured op by dark anti-American forces and foreign governments,” a spokesperson for the Innovation Council told the DCNF. “Those who’ve been bought off by this effort should come clean now and try to retain whatever thread of credibility remains.”
Humans First was scheduled to stop in the heart of Washington, D.C., on Thursday as part of the tour, but canceled that same morning due to permitting delays, the organization told the DCNF.
The group, however, did not publicly announce the cancellation of the DC stop, which was reportedly planned for 12 p.m. Thursday at “Moving and Cleaning Solutions, Ellipse Rd NW, Washington, DC,” according to Humans First’s Facebook post.
“[L]ast minute changes means [sic] … that we had an event in Mannasus [sic] this morning, [and] are now driving the bus around central DC,” Humans First told the DCNF when asked about the event at around 12:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon.
Allies of the tour argue that large crowds are not the goal of the tour.
“I don’t think their intention or their expectation when they put the bus tour together was that they would have a million people show up,” Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[H]aving that mobile billboard running around the country can help add to all the other things they’re doing.”
‘Nobody Trusts Big Tech’
Jason Van Beek, chief government affairs officer at the Future of Life Institute and former general counsel to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, said he spent 20 years on the Hill watching tech go “from democratizing influence” to “this almost sort of monopolistic thing.”
“Nobody trusts big tech. We need to make sure that we maintain control of these systems. Humans are in control. We put humans first,” Van Beek told the DCNF.
That distrust, he argued, is why the response to these issues belongs in local communities.
“[O]n data centers, like Humans First, I think is more about local control, and there’s data center … ratepayer protection pledges … federally, which is hard to enforce, I would imagine, probably,” Van Beek told the DCNF.
Cathy Latham, Humans First’s Texas state director, said the fight is secrecy at city hall, not federal AI restrictions.
“I’m really fighting the NDAs and the lack of transparency,” Latham told the DCNF. “We have found where the data center development took the mayor and the city council to Hawaii to sign the forms, out of the purview of the people.”
Latham, too, wants to keep the fight local.
“If you put a blanket federal policy, it could not work well in California, but it might not work well in Florida,” Latham told the DCNF. “So that’s why, to me, it’s a state and local issue.”
Latham, a retired school teacher and a “strong Republican,” argued that tech companies are unable to regulate these technologies on their own.
“I saw what the cell phone did. I saw what social media did to kids, and that was big tech regulating themselves, and they still can’t do it,” she said.
Other supporters argue pushback to data centers is part of a larger concern about the speed of AI development.
“If you drive a car, you have a couple elements in your car, right? You have a brake and you have a gas pedal. Well, I’m saying … we need to have a steering wheel too … because right now we’re not headed in a good direction,” Robert Arnakis, director of external affairs and coalitions at the Alliance for Secure AI, who spoke at the Alexandria, VA, event, told the DCNF. He agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Sept. 12 call to “pace” the AI race.
Arnakis explained that he sees both “good things” and “bad things” about AI, but due to recent hacking incidents involving AI agents, the technology should be treated like nuclear weapons.
“I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev, and they said we’re going to take a time out on the nuclear race … and do what’s in the best interest of humanity,” Arnakis told the DCNF. “Why aren’t we having that conversation?”
Where The Fight Is Landing
Humans First describes itself as a conservative group fighting for an “America First approach” to AI on its website. Humans First has not publicly shared its budget or donors.
Kremer previously said the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) gave Humans First a loan to get the organization started, she told Fox News Digital in August.
CAIS received roughly $10.5 million from Open Philanthropy and $6.5 million from FTX, according to InfluenceWatch.
Open Philanthropy is the charity fund of Facebook co-founder and Democratic donor Dustin Moskovitz.
Other data center opposition gathered significant local support and potentially reshaped an election.
Residents of Mona, Utah, gathered in opposition to a 3 million-square-foot data center project in Juab County, Deseret News reported on Sept. 8. The local residents said they were unaware of the project and were working to appeal the permit, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
In Box Elder County, Utah, opposition to Kevin O’Leary’s proposed Stratos data center project packed a fairground gym, according to New Lines Magazine. Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who supported the Stratos project, lost his June primary election, and former commissioner Lee Perry said the data-center vote cost him the primary election, Newsweek reported.
O’Leary was sued by two nonprofit organizations on July 17 after claiming the groups were “proxies for the Chinese government” due to their criticisms of his project.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
