Last month, the Governor of California said the pitchforks are here. He did not say they were coming. He said they were already here. That is the kind of sentence a governor uses when polling data has become uninterpretable.
And he’s not wrong.
On Friday, June 5, the city of Monterey Park, California, became the first city in the United States to permanently ban data centers by ballot initiative. The measure passed 88.34 percent to 11.66 percent. The proposed facility would have consumed three times as much electricity as the rest of the city combined and would have been built less than 500 feet from the nearest home. Councilmember Jose Sanchez said he hoped Monterey Park would become an inspiration for other cities. By the time he said it, sixty-nine other jurisdictions across the country had already blocked new data center construction. Four of those bans are permanent.
In Shelbyville, Indiana, the mayor was caught on a hot mic referring to the people opposing a 429-acre, eleven-building data center complex as living in “shitty houses.” A woman corrected him. “Working-class,” she said. “You see them at working-class houses.” The mayor said most of them were renters. Another woman in the room replied, “It doesn’t matter if they’re rentals or not. They’re still human beings.” Over two thousand signatures had been gathered on a petition to halt the project. The city council advanced it anyway.
In Indianapolis, on April 6, a city-county councilor named Ron Gibson had thirteen rounds fired through his front door. His eight-year-old son was in the house. A note left behind read No Data Centers. The shooting followed Gibson’s vote to approve a Metrobloks data center in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood, a historically Black neighborhood on the city’s near east side. The FBI is now assisting Indianapolis police.
This is what the pitchforks are here looks like in June 2026.
Not a metaphor. Not a forecast. A ballot, a hot mic, thirteen rounds, an eight-year-old.
And the billionaires can read.
In the same month, Monterey Park voted, Jeff Bezos appeared on Squawk Box and said the bottom 50% of American earners should pay zero federal income tax. Around the same time, Elon Musk posted on X that Universal HIGH INCOME via federal checks is the best way to deal with AI unemployment. OpenAI released a thirteen-page policy paper proposing a Public Wealth Fund to share the proceeds of AI economic growth. And on June 1, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, proposing that the largest AI companies transfer 50% of their equity to a federally controlled sovereign wealth fund.
The proposals do not agree on the mechanism. They agree on the diagnosis.
The wealth generated by AI needs to flow to the public.
What none of them propose is a slowdown. Not one. Bezos’s tax cut. Musk’s check. OpenAI’s portfolio fund. Sanders’s equity transfer. Every proposal on the table asks the public to negotiate the terms of a deployment they were never asked to consent to. There is a third option. It is the one Monterey Park voted for at 88 percent. It is the one the woman in Shelbyville named. It is the one Ron Gibson’s neighborhood asked for. Stop building until the people who live next to the thing being built say yes.
The communities are asking for something different than what the billionaires are offering. The woman in Shelbyville did not ask for a check. She asked the mayor to recognize that the people in those houses are human beings. Monterey Park did not ask for a share of data center revenue. Monterey Park asked that the data center not be built within 500 feet of a home. Ron Gibson’s neighborhood did not ask for a dividend. It asked to be consulted before a half-billion-dollar facility broke ground next to it.
The distinction between redistribution and participation is one that the billionaire proposals consistently fail to address. Consultation before construction is not on the menu. Compensation after damage is the only language being offered.
I am writing this in the only voice I have. It is the voice of the class I was raised in. I have wanted to write this in a voice that would step outside what I was raised in, and I have not been able to. I am here. The question I am sitting with is here. If you are sitting with it too, sit with it.
The lineage I am reading is one lineage. There are others. The communities organizing against data centers in their backyards are themselves a lineage. The indigenous land defenders who have refused extraction for five hundred years are a lineage. The Black freedom tradition that organized against the same capital concentrations from the other side is a lineage. I am joining the one I have inheritance to. I name the others because they are present in the rooms my article describes, even when my article does not yet name them.
I have been reading Chuck Collins. He is the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave it away at twenty-six and has spent the past two decades directing the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing about how wealthy people stand effectively against extraction. I am reading him now. That lineage is not yet reading me.
I am also reading about Marlene Engelhorn, an Austrian BASF heiress who handed 25 million euros of her inheritance to a council of 50 randomly selected Austrians in March 2024 and let them decide where it went. And the Tappan brothers, who in 1833 used silk-import wealth to fund the American Anti-Slavery Society, were physically attacked and financially ruined for it.
The people in those rooms - Shelbyville, Monterey Park, Martindale-Brightwood - are not waiting for me. They are already organizing each other. That is what showing up at the third option looks like from inside their walls. The mechanism by which the rest of us might follow them is the subject of the next article. From this seat, the question is whether we will.
What I am sitting with, from inside the wall, is this: when the people building the thing that is hurting us are also afraid, and the people being hurt are organizing in ways that include thirteen rounds at a councilman’s door, and the proposals on the table are redistribute-the-proceeds-not-direct-the-build, what does the person in my seat do? I do not know the answer. I have not been trained to ask the question. I am asking it anyway.
I think the rest of you on the inside of the wall might be asking it too.
Erin Stanley Evoked June 11, 2026
All public-record claims verified June 11, 2026 against CBS News, Fortune, CNBC, Axios, ABC7 Los Angeles, and the office of Senator Bernie Sanders. The lineage citations draw on Chuck Collins’s published work at the Institute for Policy Studies; the Engelhorn account draws on CBS News and Fortune; the Tappan brothers account draws on Britannica and the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum.