The Lincoln Logue | Trump's Depraved War on Drugs, Data Centers Drain MAGA Country, & RFK Jr. Makes Childhood Diseases Great Again
The week unfolded like a series of government experiments conducted at the expense of anyone still naïve enough to believe public institutions are sturdier than the people currently steering them. Federal agencies lurched into new extremes of authority, insisting that accelerated timelines, discarded safeguards, and improvised enforcement were merely patriotic adjustments rather than structural breaches. Communities that once welcomed national policy as a distant abstraction suddenly found themselves grappling with the kind of federally engineered turbulence that treats local life as raw material. Decisions presented as technical or temporary hardened into something more invasive, reshaping land, law, and daily existence while officials pretended the consequences were peripheral. Each announcement arrived with the same hollow reassurance — nothing to worry about, nothing to question — even as the ground kept shifting under the people meant to endure the fallout. What emerged wasn’t competence or strategy but a pattern: crisis dressed as reform, pressure repackaged as necessity, and power exercised with the quiet confidence of those who assume everyone else will adapt.
Beyond Washington’s glow, the human cost sharpened. Households already squeezed by rising costs watched new policies carve additional burdens into their budgets, turning utilities, safety, and stability into luxuries rationed by political whim. Immigrants navigating the legal system collided with bureaucratic stonewalls that treated their futures as threats to be neutralized rather than petitions to be processed. Abroad, the administration escalated force with the ease of flipping a switch, translating suspicion into firepower while insisting that legality and morality were obstacles it had already cleared. Each frontier — domestic, economic, diplomatic — carried the same unmistakable signature: authority expanding faster than accountability, and the public left to interpret the damage after the fact. What passed for leadership resembled something closer to impulse, fortified by institutions too exhausted or compromised to resist.
Underneath it all ran a deeper recognition, one impossible to ignore no matter how loudly officials insisted everything was functioning as intended. The country is being conditioned to mistake escalation for protection, silence for stability, and confusion for inevitability. But exhaustion hasn’t extinguished awareness; it has sharpened it. People are paying closer attention than the architects of this chaos expect, and the gap between their lived reality and the government’s self-portrait widens by the day.
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Monday, December 1 — The AI Boom Arrives With a Shovel and a Power Bill
▌It turns out MAGA country likes farmland more than server farms.
Trump’s AI build-out hit rural Pennsylvania like a tech boom written by someone who’s never met a farmer and assumes land is just an unused asset waiting for a data center. Residents packed the hearing in camo hats and red shirts — not to praise the president they voted for, but to protest the corporate annexation of their valley. Washington framed the project as a national security necessity, though the only threat locals recognized was the one aimed at their water, their bills, and their crops. Utilities have already warned that soaring energy demand will push costs past what families can absorb, while developers collect subsidies designed to look like patriotism. And watching this revolt form in Trump country was the week’s clearest sign that loyalty ends where the electric meter begins.
The opposition wasn’t ideological; it was survival dressed as civic duty. Farmers, environmentalists, and homeowners realized that the bipartisan push for AI infrastructure somehow placed the burden squarely on communities least equipped to absorb it. Their county could become the next Northern Virginia — a sprawling maze of server farms run by companies that won’t live with the consequences. State leaders from both parties promised jobs while ignoring the farmland that would disappear under concrete and cooling units. And every time residents raised concerns, they were reminded that “innovation” apparently means everyone must adapt except the people profiting.
Electricity prices have already jumped nearly twice the national average, and overdue balances are stacking up like another invisible tax on rural life. Analysts warn the bills will keep rising as capacity auctions spike, leaving households to subsidize corporate expansion they never asked for. Georgia’s recent utility revolt shows how these pressures migrate into voting booths, much to Republicans’ discomfort. The administration expected enthusiasm for a futuristic economy, not a coalition of fed-up voters tracing their financial pain back to Washington. And if this is how the AI revolution begins, the backlash may be the only thing growing faster than the data centers.
Source: Reuters