The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today, amidst so much bleak and awful and overwhelming news bombarding us at all times from all over the world, we’re going to do something different and we’re going to talk about some good news for once. Because this week, a new worker-owned cooperative launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it’s called the Pittsburgh Progress. Here’s their story, which you can find on their website. “The Pittsburgh Progress is a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members.

It was formed in the weeks and months after owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced on January 7th, 2026, their intention to close the newspaper. This move by the post-Gazette came just weeks after unionized workers there had won a strike lasting more than three years. Those workers and their community supporters initially formed the organization Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting or Paper, with a mandate to research the creation of a daily news outlet more deserving of Pittsburgh. Paper quickly resolved that any new publication would, unlike the block-owned Post-Gazette, respect its employees and address the concerns of all working class people in the region. The publication would serve as an essential and sustainable source of communication and connection in the Pittsburgh region. Workers and their supporters decided on a publication name, the Pittsburgh Progress, in a nod to the striking Post-Gazette Workers Award-winning strike publication, The Pittsburgh Union Progress.

Work continues on the Pittsburgh Progress website, marketing strategy, and the building of a newsroom. We continue to raise funds to lift up worker-centered journalism in Western Pennsylvania, and those funds will be used to hire full-time staff and freelance journalists dedicated to looking out for and telling the stories of the working class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.” So to talk about the birth of the Pittsburgh progress and what it means for working people in and beyond Pittsburgh, I am really grateful to be joined once again on the show by some familiar voices. Steve Mellon is a journalist who was on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than three years and is now a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress. And Natalie Duleba is a former post-Gazette striker. She serves as local secretary of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and is now also a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress.

Natalie, Steve, it is so great to see you both and thank you so much for coming back on the show for over three years while you guys were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We’ve gotten to know you and your coworkers over the many conversations that we’ve had on this show, on the Real News Network, when I was at Breaking Points. It’s been a long road. Did you ever think that it would lead you here?

Steve Mellon:

No, I certainly did not. Our hope, I think Natalie probably feels the same way. I won’t speak for you, man and Natalie, but we were hoping to win the strike and get a contract. That was our goal. And we thought we had accomplished that. We had an incredible community support during the strike. That was a long, hard battle. And Max, you know that. You guys cover the strike more than any other publication, more than any other organization, you know that. But we did win the strike. We won. We went back to work. Things were going pretty well. We had a big rally in front of the Post Gazette. All the community showed up to support us. We went back in. Things were going pretty well. I think we were as acrimonious as the strike was, we were working together. We were resolving conflicts. We were actually producing good journalism.

That all changed on January 7th when the company announced it was just. Max, this came just about an hour and a half after the Supreme Court had denied the Post-Gazette’s request for a stay on a healthcare issue that was related to the strike. It was think of the last gasp effort of the owners of the Post-Gazette to delay the consequences for their lawbreaking actions. Don’t forget that this strike was a result of a law-breaking action by the owners of the Post-Gazette. So they announced the closure of the paper within, I think, what, Natalie, two hours or so after that announcement came down that the Supreme Court had denied their request for a stay. They announced the closure of the Post-Gazette. And it’s like at that point, I think that among a lot of us, Max, there was a lot of anger and frustration is that we did all this stuff to win, and yet the system still fails you.

The system’s not going to let workers win. And at that point, I think a lot of us, we were angry, we were frustrated. That very quickly settled into, we have to do something about this. We cannot let this stand. And we had an extraordinary meeting that night. I think January 7th was a Wednesday, Natalie, I believe. And that night we had an extraordinary meeting of our membership and we just decided like, no, we’re not. You learn things about yourself and your community when you strike for three years, about your colleagues. I looked at Natalie and Erin and all the people we’ve been to strike on. I thought we can do whatever we want. We have a community support, we have the skills, we had the talent, we had the determination. And after a series of meetings, we though, let’s form our own publication, one that we can inoculate against corporate abuse, against the influences of money.

And the result was a worker, community-owned cooperative, a multi-stakeholder. So no, I had no idea I’d be in its position to be like a co-owner with so many other people in the community and my coworkers of a publication. So no, I did not expect to be here, but it feels good.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. During the strike, our goal was always to get back to work, but also to build a Post-Gazette that ourselves, but also journalists that came after us could build a life with. And the Post-Gazette still remains. The Venetulas Institute for Journalism did buy the Post-Gazette from the blocks. And Steve and I were among the journalists who were not retained, who were not hired by Venetulas. But we do still have former strikers who are at the Post-Gazette doing the good work to get a new contract with new owners. And we’re hoping that the victories that we got during the strike are carried forward in that bargaining. There’s a bargaining session that is happening today.

And I think that the Venetulas at least knows that the journalists of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh aren’t afraid of a fight. But I think that the strike really taught us that if you want something, you got to get it yourself. And when we were looking at the possibility there was no Post-Gazette, a huge vacuum in Pittsburgh, they’re like, “Well, something should replace it.” And some of the other publications in the city were circling vultures, and some of them have expanded into areas that they weren’t in before. But even with the Post Gazette continuing, the new owners did cut the newsroom by about 40%, 80% of which were strikers. We all have an intimate understanding of the gaps in the coverage and communities that told us during the strike and after the announcement of the closure that they felt underrepresented, misrepresented. Those of us before we were not rehired, we were willing to bring that knowledge and that trust in the community to Venetulus to maybe start to repair the damage and reputation the post-Gazette suffered underneath the blocks.

But they weren’t interested in that, at least from us. So yeah, it is wild to think that we’re building our own news outlet. That’s not something that any of us though was going to happen. We wanted to get back to the post-Gazette, but now we’re in control of our own destiny in a way that we weren’t during the strike. Yes, we were out there fighting for ourselves, but also we’re at the mercy of the slow cogs of the justice system. And this is like we’re setting the pace, we’re doing the work ourselves, and it’s fully under our control, which is really amazing, but it is also a lot. It’s like, it’s our responsibility. Yay. It’s our responsibility.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know it intimately. Yeah, it’s such a head spinner where you’re like, oh shit. Now we got to do that. Oh shit, we get to do that. It forces you to confront the sort of decision-making that affects our lives on a day-to-day level. And it is both liberating and terrifying to have more of that decision-making power yourself instead of just trusting it to be done for you by our higher ups. But so many of us, for that reason, I don’t think have even considered what it would look like in our day-to-day work lives to have that agency, to have that democratic cooperative sort of model rather than the kind of top-down authoritarian model that we’re all so comfortable and used to, which we’ve been conditioned to be used to by force for many, many generations. But I digress. I wanted to hover on that for a second and ask about your time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

What did working and striking at a paper like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette teach you about what a project like the Pittsburgh Progress needs to be and why it needs to be?

Steve Mellon:

Well, we learned several things during the strike. Quite honestly, when I was a journalist, I tried to be out on the street a lot and talking to people. But it wasn’t until I went on strike that I was put into conversations with people in various communities that were underrepresented. And I learned a lot during the strike, especially after the strike was over. After we’d won the strike and the Post-Gazette announced its closure. And at that point, Max, we had conversations with people in the community. One of the first questions we asked, I remember, was what does it mean to lose the Post-Gazette? What does it mean to you and your community to lose the Post-Gazette newspaper? Because at that point, we didn’t know that the Venezuelas Institute was going to step in and buy it. And one of the responses really stuck with me is a young woman stood up and she said, “The closure of the Post Gazette doesn’t mean anything to me because they’ve not been relevant to my community for years.” Now, as a journalist who spent his life, a good chunk of my professional life reporting on this city, that was heartbreaking to hear that these institutions that I’d given my life to were irrelevant to the communities that had supported us during the strike and had leaned into our effort, Max.

That’s like, well, what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong with this? This is an issue. And it gets not just to journalism. It’s like we’re seeing the crumbling of communities all over this country.

There are a lot of forces that profit from creating division. And newspapers, news organizations have failed in their duty to be the cohesive force. And it’s like, okay, that’s an issue. How do we solve that? We kicked around several different ideas. And one, I don’t know anything about co-ops, Max, but in our discussions, when we brought up the fact that. Because we talk about nonprofit models, these different models. When somebody said, “What about a co-op?” People got really excited about that. And when we started talking about a co-op, that’s when we started to see a lot more people to show up. I was at a journalism conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania about two months ago, and there was a lot of talk at that conference about engaging with your audience. How do you engage with your audience? Honestly, if we haven’t figured out that at this point, then we failed anyway.

But we thought, okay, well, we’re not going to engage in our audience. We’re going to ask them to become stakeholders in this process. And I think that is a game changer. I think this model going forward is one that can be replicated. There are co-ops, successful news co-ops that exist in other places, a whole list of them. So we’re not new to this. But I do think that what we can do here in Pittsburgh is build on those models and take the lessons we learned from the strikes, take ideas from the communities, the people that we met during the strike, the people that we reported on for a pup, and use those to build a publication where we are not going to have people stand up at a town hall and say, “The Pittsburgh progress is irrelevant to my community.” We’re trying to make sure that that does not happen to us.

And our way of making sure that happens is having that young woman in the room when we’re making decisions.

Natalie Duleba:

The things that I learned at the Post Gazette, besides the things like the skills that I built there that I’m bringing in, I was a copy editor and a pay designer before the strike. I came back to be full-time on the web desk. I’m bringing those skills into this. I’m glad that I can bring that extra oomph to what I can offer. But also I think that being on strike, we saw what it was like to be on the other side of business interests overriding journalistic ethics or the coverage of the strike was just insulting, honestly, because we knew where these things were being obfuscated, but it went deeper of the Post Gazette trying to hide the fact that people weren’t talking to them because they were holding our picket line and getting around not saying the mayor is not responding to comment on this issue because he’s not responding to any comment, but not putting in, he’s not talking to us at all because he’s respecting a picket line, shades the way that people may have perceived that article.

They may think the mayor is running away from accountability on this issue or leaving off said in a press release so it looks like somebody who was holding a picket line maybe gave them a quote. And an average reader might know about the strike, but not know that that came from a press release. And then they’re like, maybe they could see the way that these perceptions change potentially. Or even a local news station that has a business relationship with the post Gazette had coverage during the summer when SAG and WGA were on strike and they had a segment where they talked about all the active strikes in the country and they didn’t mention us. The strike that at that point I think had gone on for over a year at that point. We were deep into our strike. It wasn’t like it was brand new.

And to just see, okay, so the business relationship you have with the post Gazette, I mean allegedly, it’s not like I got this confirmed by anybody, but why else would they leave it out if not because of that business relationship? There’s no other reason why I could think to not put the strike that’s happening in your own city into report about strikes that are happening across the country. And there’s no way that there’s not other communities, other issues that have been covered in that way that have felt like the nuance has been left out or that there has been gaps that have not been filled with reporting. And us being so intimately on the other side of it, I think really places us in such a great position to poke at that. What is not being said in these press releases?

What is the CEO or the founder of this big company obfuscating with legal language? Where when you poke at it, you can like, oh, well, technically what they said is correct, but there’s all this stuff that they’re leaving out that we learned by talking to the working class, the people of Pittsburgh, the regular everyday citizens that are affected by these decisions, who have first person experience being the little guy who was affected by that. And it sucks to be on that side of it, but it has allowed us to build that extra lens of looking at things that way. I mean, journalists are trained to ask questions and poke at things, but I think seeing behind the veil intimately and personally is going to allow us to easily see where that is happening. And also, I mean, we had a little exercise when you’re in one of our founders’ meetings about what don’t we want our newsroom to look like?

What behaviors do we want to avoid when we’re building our newsroom and our editorial practices? And a lot of it came down to not understanding why things are being done.

Why is this decision being made? Why is this policy in place? And why aren’t these things being communicated to the people who actually have to follow these rules? And I think that the transparency that comes in being a worker-created newsroom and a worker-led newsroom will allow. When someone’s laid off, that sucks, but a lot of times an owner just says, “We got to lay you off because we are losing money, I guess.” And you just have to take the word for it. But hopefully we don’t have to ever confront that type of thing. But if we do, that’ll be a decision that is made collectively where you understand what’s gone into it, why. And it’s not a callous just cutting of the cord there so that the owner, I guess, doesn’t get to buy a second summer home. It’s like you’ve been involved in the whole process and there’s trust that is just baked into a democratically run newsroom or any business, I suppose, but we’re talking about a newsroom here.

But we want to try to build a newsroom that people are on the same page, that is collaborative, and that people understand the mechanics that are going on and that the work and the journalism that is being done is ethical and not bowing to business interests. And I think that we’re well on our way to doing that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, let’s bring this down to paper level and talk about what this looks like in the now officially launched publication. I know as we said in the intro, and as y’all say on your website, this is a work in progress. Y’all are growing, but you have officially launched. So tell folks more about what the Pittsburgh progress is, where it’s going, and what they’re going to find there, and what they can do to support y’all.

Steve Mellon:

Well, right now, we did launch on Monday. We’re considering that our soft launch. We’re working up to becoming a regular daily publication. We just started this process. It’s kind of crazy, Max, to think that this wasn’t even a topic of discussion until January 7th. And it took a couple of weeks before we had consensus about to even move forward with the idea of a new publication. And so a lot has happened very quickly. We’ve had to come up with a business. We’re journalists, Max, we’re not business people, but we’ve had to become business people. And it’s like, okay, the learning curve for this is very, very steep. We’ve had to come up with a business plan. We’ve had to come up with bylaws. It’s over and over and over again. It’s your social media strategy. We’ve had to hire people to do some of the things that we just don’t know how to do, and we don’t want to mess them up.

We have to become incorporated. How do you do that in a timely manner? And all these things. So a lot has happened very quickly. It wasn’t until quite honestly a couple of weeks ago that we were able to sit down and think about, “Oh, wait a minute. If we’re going to publish, we got to have some stories in this damn thing.” So we put together a slate of stories that we felt matched what we want to be and what we want to do that align with our mission to give people a glimpse of what we hope to be in the very near future. If you look at pittsburghprogress.com right now, you’ll see, I think, five or six stories. Our lead story right now is about organized nurses here who are fighting for our contract. That’s a big, big story in this town where these big medical companies have such a big footprint.

Nurses on the front lines of that. So that’s one of our lead stories. Natalie has a story on third places for the members of the LGBTQ community. We have a review of a new book on WPA workers. Kim Kelly wrote the foreword for that. You guys all know and love Kim Kelly. So we have our origin story is another part of that. We have a couple sports stories. We are really going to lean into high school sports because we’re interested in not covering the millionaire. God love them, our millionaire sports heroes. We are interested in covering the sports played by the sons and daughters of the working people of this region. So that’s what you’ll find when you go there now. We’re going to continue to build on that. We’re still working. We’re a small team right now. We’re building and adding, but we’re a small team and we’re having to walk and chew gum and tie our shoes and bake dinner and comb our hair all at the same time.

So it’s going to take a minute to get this thing up to where we want it to be. And we’ve learned, Max, that this group of people, when we get together, we set our mind to something, we can accomplish that thing. And this is a goal we have set for ourselves. And I know we’ll do it. I know we have a community of support. People who want to support this, learn more about it, go to pittsburghprogress.com. You’ll find a button that says join us. It’s like a maroon button, a red maroon button. Click join us. You can learn about progress. You can learn how to support this effort. If you have questions, you can reach out to me or Natalie, I’m sure you’re willing to answer questions too. We’re hoping that there are. I’ve been in journalism a long time, Max. Most people that I was in journalism with, most of the people that I knew in journalism all over the country, none of them are in the business now.

They’ve had to get out. Their newspapers have closed. They did not make enough money to support their families. For one reason or another, they’re out of the business. That’s got to stop. What’s the model for that? Well, we think this is a model that can be replicated in other cities. One of the things, we have a couple of goals here. At least that’s the way I see this. One goal is to do just what Natalie said, provide news coverage that is ethical and that focuses on the needs and concerns of the working class people in our region. But another goal is to say, “This can be done and this is possible. There are other cooperative news organizations that have done this. This is our model. We want to build on those models and say, okay, we’re going to take the baton and run with it.

We are going to run like hell with that baton, and we want somebody else to pick that up too. So we’re all running here and building news organizations that are engaged in covering the news, informing, being a source of communication, but are also building community. And I think that’s one of the things I learned about working in newspapers as a young man. This is back in the ’80s. I worked at weekly newspapers. These weekly small daily newspapers in small towns were part of the fabric of that community and held the community together by being a voice where people could look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize their community. That’s gone. What we see in a lot of newspapers that post, because that is an example of this, we have an institution talking to other institutions. And what happens when that worker voices, regular people voices are lost?

One of our goals is to do that here in Pittsburgh is create a publication that does not do that, where people can look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize the community that they care about and that they’re willing to invest in. So that’s where I see where we’re at right now and where we want to go.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. The pittsburghprogress.com is our website, but we’re also on Instagram, BluSky and Facebook. You can find us on all three of those by searching for the Pittsburgh Progress and all the same, the link to how to join us is available in all those places. And giving us a follow there is really helpful. And also you can stay up to date on the next steps in our rollout. But I think that having edited all of the stories that went up for the soft launch, that I would encourage people who want to support us to really. Obviously, I’d like you to read all of them, but if you do, you’ll see the way that they actually plug into each other, that they build on each other, the same concepts of building community. We have a high school football coach who has led an incredible team, but he’s also committed to staying at this high school to build up these young men into not only good football players, but also good young men and having that commitment there.

And there’s a football club, a soccer football that’s for a community football club. And the runner of that is similarly aligned and also has similar goals of making the players better people as well as improving their skills. The review that Erin put together of American-made stories of work, it’s a look at the working class voices of many generations ago and how they echo into today’s concerns, even if the technology has changed, but it’s still working class people trying to carve out a space for themselves and finding connections through the lens of history. Also, it’s just like you feel smarter after reading it. And my own story, these are business owners who you think that the kicker is more than money. Obviously they’re running a business, but they want to build community with their customers and fill gaps that they see in their own communities. These are all sober spaces, trying to have that safe third space for people to come to and build community and find like-minded people they can be themselves around.

And then the McGee story of nurses trying to fight for the best for their patients because they’re passionate about what they do and they’re going against big UPMC interests. And I think that seeing the way that came together and how when you let journalists pick where they can find these stories and how they do blend together, if we can continue that, I’ll be so happy and so pleased. And as Steve said, I think that as people feel more alienated from each other and from the bigger interests that control the country, that they will turn to one another and be like, “Let’s do it with each other, with our neighbors who are the people that we know and trust, and we can count on to follow through on what they’re saying they’re going to do.” I mean, our strike was sustained by donations from regular people and the other worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoke to, they’ve been so open with us about how they did it, how we can follow their example and learn from their mistakes.

There’s been no gatekeeping amongst the worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoken to. And it’s the same story of journalists who were let go by a new owner or had their publication shut down, and they just turned to one another and said, “What if we did it?” We have the skills, we can learn the new skills that we need to get it off the ground and get it going. And I think that the contraction and consolidation of, as Steve said, of these local newspapers that serve communities as that continues to happen and be gutted by private equity, I think that’ll be the workers who build those things back up, that we’ll see more worker-led newsrooms under various models pop up and fill the gap that business interests left in the pursuit of more profit, more money. And I’m excited to be part of the fabric of that, that there’s other rust belt cities or cities maybe who don’t have the same kind of working class history as Pittsburgh to be like, “We know how to cover our city.

We know these communities. We don’t need permission from a rich person to do this work. Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s get off the ground and they can rely on our lessons and the resources that collectively these worker-led newsrooms are putting together to offer.” And I would really love to see that. And I’m hopeful that we can find our place there, get our legs under us, and that we continue to see the support that we saw during the strike and during the past six months, which it is wild to think it’s only been six months since January 7th. I mean, a little bit more than six months, but what’s that? Is it that Margaret Mead quote of, “Never undermestimate the work that a small dedicated group of people can do.” I’m butchering that, but that’s the sentiment is that people who are passionate and committed to a thing can achieve it because that’s how everything has ever gotten done is people roam up their sleeves and putting in the sweat equity.

This way, all of our work is going to directly benefit us, not rich owners who don’t actually need the money and have never had to worry about being able to pay for the food on their table or keeping the lights on. And Steve said that in his origin story on our website, and it was echoed in the conversation that Aaron had with the editor of American Made. If you resonate with any of that, you’re going to resonate with what we’re doing. So if you want to be part of our story of our effort, check us out on pittsburghprogress.com, on Instagram, BluSky, Facebook. You can hear everything that we’re doing in the next couple months as we head toward our hard launch. We really love it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Natalie Duleba and Steve Mellon, both former strikers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and both now founding worker members of the newly launched Pittsburgh Progress, a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members. Go check them out using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’re talking about an urgent crisis and a scourge that is affecting working class communities around the country. Today, we’re talking about data centers. And we’re talking about what it means for you and your community when one of these loud, polluting, energy and water guzzling behemoths comes to your town. And we’re going to be talking with people who are experiencing this firsthand right now, but we’re also going to be talking about how we talk about data centers and the communities that they’re affecting.

Because recently I was scrolling on Instagram and Facebook and I saw this viral clip from a news report that was going around with a recognizable face at the center of it. Now the clip was from an MS Now report and just take a listen to it for yourself.

Speaker 1:

A quarter mile away, Cheryl Shadden says the noise is as loud as ever.

Cheryl Shadden:

It’s like living on the edge of Niagara Falls or you’re on a runway next to a jet that’s taking off, but this jet doesn’t take off.

Speaker 1:

Morning, noon, night, she even hears it in her bedroom and it’s changed everything about how she lives her life, including her politics.

Cheryl Shadden:

Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you.

Speaker 1:

A lifelong conservative, she’s so angry, she refuses to vote for Trump backed Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP nomination for Senate Tuesday. Instead, she’s all in for James Talarico, a Democrat seeking to flip a seat controlled by Republicans since 1993. You’re willing at this point to forego basically every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill data centers.

Cheryl Shadden:

Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank. Everybody. All of us. We’ve had enough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, as you guys heard from that clip, the original report named the woman being interviewed there, but in the viral post with that clip in it, the woman was simply named as a “Republican voter.” And that just pissed me off. And the kind of comments that people were leaving on these posts by the hundreds and thousands were just so absurd and gross and so stupidly and unhelpfully partisan. So many folks seem to think that the explosion of data centers is only happening in one type of community and that those communities somehow deserve it if they voted one way or another. But listen, how people respond to this crisis in the next election cycle will be very important, but we also need to get it through our skulls that this is bigger than what happens in the next election. And data centers are not just red state or blue state problems.

This is a working class problem and we all need to take it seriously. And when I was seeing that clip going around, all of the discourse around this has been especially gross and infuriating for me because we actually know the so – called Republican voter in that news segment. Her name is Cheryl Shadden. She’s a human being, not a quote unquote, Republican voter. She’s a registered nurse anesthetist and a resident of Granbury, Texas who lives right next to the site of a massive Bitcoin mine. And we’ve had Cheryl on this show before, and we’ve spoken with her and other members of her community about the hell that they are living through after this giant, loud, environmentally destructive Bitcoin mine moved into their neighborhood and more data centers are now invading their area. And I’m really grateful to be joined today again on the show by Cheryl and more of her neighbors from Hood County, Texas.

But we are also joined today by folks who are living here and fighting against data centers here in our home state of Maryland. So let’s meet our incredible panel of guests and I want to shut up and ask y’all if you can start by introducing yourself to the audience here.

Cheryl Shadden:

Hi, Max. I’m Cheryl Shadden. I live in Granbury, Texas. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. I live in a rural area. I am also born in Maryland. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland. I lived there until I was in my 20s. And so I remember Maryland quite well and I remember Texas quite well before this happened to all of us as well.

Karen Pearson:

I am Karen Pearson. Thanks Max for having us again on the show. I appreciate you and your passion. I am a licensed professional counselor. I live in Granbury, Texas too. Actually, Cheryl is my neighbor. I live about 800 feet as the crow flies to Marathon Bitcoin. And then just a little bit further right next door to it is Wolf Hollow Gas Power Plant. I live out here on 12 acres with my parents. They have been here 30 plus years and I’ve been here 21 years. Most definitely this has come in and really just unraveled our peace out here, shaken us as far as what it means for our rural area that we invested in retiring at. Also too, just water supplies, noise pollution, vibrations, things that it also has contribute to as far as health-wise. So it’s definitely something that in this area, I say it’s more like environmental euthanasia that we are experiencing.

Definitely a concern, especially with more in our future that is moving in right on top of us here.

Craig Jackson:

I’m Craig Jackson. I live in Granbury, Texas as well. Actually seven miles from Karen and Cheryl, but I’m also 300 feet from a proposed data center that’s going to be on 2,000 acres in the city of Granbury. I’m actually listed as a plaintiff on a lawsuit against the city for Breaking Open Texas Meetings Act as well as several other violations. But as far as this whole situation, it’s been a full-time job fighting this and along with all my other neighbors that have been battling the Bitcoin mine, we’ve actually started a homestead and lost several animals due to the infrasound and noise that’s been produced off of it. And you wouldn’t think seven miles would have that effect, but we can get more into that conversation later. But all of this is basically it disrupted our way of life and why we moved out here to be away from the city and to start a homestead in the process.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I’m Dr. Shannon Wolf and I’m also the precinct chair in the community that Karen and Cheryl live in, and that’s how I met them three years ago. And so I live in Granbury, Texas. Part of what I’ve looked at over three years is a lack of awareness by so many people at just the devastation that the Bitcoin mines can cause, often cause and then the data centers that are coming in. There are eight or nine data centers coming into a very small community or very small county rather, and there seems to be no way of stopping them. And I don’t know that Hood County is a lot different than any other county in America. I hear reports of the same kinds of issues happening in Oklahoma and in Mississippi and in places up north. And so I think it’s going to take all of us working together to stop the onslaught.

Micaiah Lloyd:

Hi everyone. Thank you Max for being here. Thank you all for inviting me. My name is Micaiah Lloyd. I’m a resident of Charles County, Maryland. A data center was proposed in my neighborhood November 17th of last year. And me and my county have been fighting tirelessly to make sure that they don’t even have the zoning rights to be in our neighborhood. So that’s where we are in the fight in Southern Maryland. I’m just a girl. I’m 24 years old. I’m trying to build my own wealth. I’m trying to build my own career. And I talk about generations a lot because I feel like my generation is in the fight for our lives right now. I feel like we’re in the fight for our future. I used to coach little kids. I played soccer my whole life and I coached four, five and sixes. And I’m also fighting for them right now.

We’re fighting for them. We’re fighting for them to be able to grow up and breathe clean air and not be surveilled and to drink clean water. I don’t know what the future will look like in about four years if data centers take over this nation.

I’ve been an activist my whole life. When Trayvon Martin was killed, it really radicalized me and I’ve been in the streets protesting since I was about 15. I’ve always been wondering what is it going to take for the working class to unite? What is it going to take for us to come together? What’s going to be that one issue? And I know that data centers are that issue, so I’m very happy to be here. I’m very happy to be networking, especially with people who could possibly be red and who could possibly be very different from me, but we’re all human beings and I think this one issue will really connect us. So I’m very excited about that.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Hi everyone. My name is Hillary Gonzalez. I am an eco poet and author. I’ve lived in Maryland for the past 10 years now, though I originally am from Southern Virginia. For the purposes of this interview, I’m going to let my accent slip. I’ve been fighting Johns Hopkins DSAI Institute, which is their Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute for the past three years now. I can step outside of my front door and literally look at where they’re constructing it. And from the very beginning they told us, “Oh, this is going to be so good for your neighborhood, so good for your community.” I have yet to see that. I’ve only seen environmental harm that their construction has caused. And now we’ve learned from the Baltimore Business Journal that they’re also planning a data center for East Baltimore. So my fight has switched from fighting just DSAI to now fighting for the entire city because I don’t want this in any part of the city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for being on this panel together. It is really incredible to have you all here together, even if it’s just for an hour. And I want to make the most that we can out of that hour. So I wanted to go back around the table and ask, starting with our neighbors in Granbury, if y’all could give our listeners and anyone out there listening now a sort of quick and dirty reminder of what the hell has happened to your communities in these recent years with these Bitcoin mines and data centers? How is it affecting people? What does it look like over there and how are you living your lives when these behemoths are coming into your communities?

Cheryl Shadden:

I’ve lived here in my home for 35 years. It was nice and quiet. I could walk outside of my home at any time of the day or night. You could hear birds chirping, you could see your animals outside, and it was just a quiet, peaceful environment. Now sitting here in my office, I can hear the crypto mind churning through my walls. I myself personally have had permanent conduction hearing loss. I will never get that hearing back. We have motion sickness, dizziness, nausea. We don’t sleep at night. Even trying to go to sleep with a TV on or a radio on and fans on high, you can’t go to sleep, you can’t stay asleep. This noise, sound and infrasound, it travels through your walls, through your windows. It shakes your home. And this is just the noise from the crypto mine that’s turning into a data center now adding two more hyperscale data centers.

This doesn’t include the gas plant that they’re powered into. This doesn’t include the explosions from their valves when they can’t carry a load. This doesn’t include a third gas power plant coming here and building and traffic twenty four seven and literally 5,000 trucks per month.That doesn’t include the dust clouds. This doesn’t include the air pollution. Here in the state of Texas, because Texas so special, we only test air pollution and they don’t really even test it. They model it. It’s modeled in isolation. So even though the gas power plant that’s directly across from my home, even though their pollutants go right to threshold like 0.4 from being above a dangerous threshold, so that power plant is looked at individually versus the power plant that’s right next to it that rolls out acid rain and all of that. That’s looked at individually as well. And so even though both of these two power plants operate right at threshold, they’re not looked at in combination.

And now a third gas power plant is coming in here that we fought hard against, and they’re going to be an eight-turbine gas power plant. They’re going to roll out some acid rain as well. And this doesn’t even begin to account for the water use. Right now, just the two power plants across the street from me use 1.5 million gallons of water per day off of our lake and our river and spit it back out. When they spit it back out, it’s minimally treated. It’s still hot water, so it’s causing problems in our lake and in our rivers. And that flows on down from here. So the pollution here in Granbury, the water is actually cleaner up above Granbury. It becomes seriously polluted right here at Granbury where we have three gas power plants that are pulling off of the water sources here and dumping back in.

We’re going to have four. And so if you calculate the water usage, even though you’ll have the crypto mine and the data centers telling you we’re not using water, we’re not using water. You are using water by proxy if it’s taking two and a half, three million, five million, 10 million gallons of water to provide you power. So they are using water even if not directly. And if you look closely at all of these hyperscaled data centers and they’ll tell you they’re closed loop water systems, well, that’s like saying your car is a closed loop water system. You do have to flush the radiator out in your car and you have to refill it. That’s not closed loop if you do that. And if you look at all of these hyperscaled data centers coming in, they all have retention ponds behind them. That’s basically a big septic tank.

A retention pond does not mean closed loop. It means we’re going to let this nasty water sit here and draw mosquitoes and every other problem known to man. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to protect the rivers and the tributaries and your health. So air pollution, light pollution, water pollution, erosion, and it doesn’t just affect Republicans, it doesn’t just affect independence, and it doesn’t affect just Democrats. It affects us all, all of us. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got to tell any of y’all listening, those types of retention ponds filled with toxic stuff, they are all over this country, baby. Whether it’s coal ash tailings ponds that have toxic heavy metals in them, whether it’s lagoons full of hog waste that has so many nitrates in it that it causes massive algae blooms. You don’t want to know how much of a toxic soup we are all living in, but it’s our job to try to educate ourselves about this. And so please, folks from Granbury, keep educating us. Let’s toss it to Karen. Tell us more about how this has affected you guys and your lives.

Karen Pearson:

Thank you. Yes, I probably want to speak more towards my parents than anything. They’re both 83. And for anyone who has been out here, everyone knows that their front porch is a gathering place. I enjoy sitting out there watching the birds, the deer, just a menaseri of wildlife. My mom’s a big bird watcher. And so many of those animal populations that were thriving out here at one time are not so much anymore. A couple of other things, and Cheryl mentioned this, balance issues, the noise pollution. So again, on our porch, sitting out there and having conversation in the evenings with my parents, it’s very hard to do. My dad’s lost about 70% of his hearing and we can’t sit out there and just have a typical conversation like what we used to without him either not hearing any of it or constantly having to repeat.

I think some of the other issue is because of the noise at night, and if the wind is blowing just right, especially if there’s a south wind, it is like at megaphones over to our place. So my parents don’t sleep and they have an upstairs, their bedroom is upstairs and it’s kind of eye level with the plants.

It’s a megaphone. I mean, it’s so loud in their bedroom at night that they don’t sleep. And so then obviously during the day, that causes a lot of fatigue. I think mentally on them, it’s extremely hard to think about what their future looks like. This is not what they planned for retirement. It’s hard on me to watch what they go through because they’ve invested everything into this property. This is where they though that they would live out the last parts of their life, which has been my commitment to them is to help them with giving them the best quality at the end of their life. And so I feel pretty helpless a lot of times. I can’t help them. I can’t make the noise go away. I can’t help them sleep better. I can’t help them. And so being in the fight with my neighbors, with Shannon and government, trying to just have people to understand what this is doing to us on a personal level.

What this do? And man, it’s like you can’t get anyone to understand that. You can’t get anyone to, I don’t want to say anyone, but as far as government and stuff, it’s like there’s no empathy. On a daily basis, no one sees the mental decline of my parents. No one sees that they can’t sleep or why. And that’s just real hard. It’s hard to watch them go through that. So that’s where, I guess again, I go back to that environmental euthanasia. And I feel bad for my neighbors who really don’t speak out for themselves because they can’t for one reason or another, maybe lower socioeconomic purposes. But this is in their backyards in their back bedroom. And so I know I’ve talked to them how the impact is on their lives. They don’t sleep. There’s other health issues. I don’t want to labor all the time for that, but there’s just so much on a personal level that it ruins lives.

It really does. And it’s not what you expected. It’s not what’s being talked about. There’s no transparency about how this impacts personal lives. It’s just not there.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think if anything, this whole battle’s not just pissed off a bunch of people, but brought a whole bunch of people together. So speaking on the Bitcoin mine, we noticed in 2024 we moved into our house at the end of 2022. So we got immediately, my wife’s dream’s been ducks and chickens. So we got ducks and chickens, set everything up. All of a sudden more eggs than we can get rid of. In 2024, marathon takes over the Bitcoin mine and we noticed production decreasing and chickens dying and ducks dying. And slowly, and then one morning we woke up and it was almost like a massacre because we had micro chickens and micro ducks. Within 24 hours, all of them had passed away. And what we discovered was that the infrasound coming off the Bitcoin mine that Cheryl and Karen and everybody else in the area is hearing is actually traveling with the wind.

But also when we have heavy cloud cover, it creates a sound barrier wall that is basically just bouncing off. And low frequency sound bounces differently than high frequency. Low frequency actually travels and I’m actually uphill. So it just really, as sound waves get tighter and tighter, if anybody can visualize it, it just literally we hit it and there’s nights I hear it and it’s like a whale that is outside just moaning and it’s in spurts. And there’s been several nights. My kids, they’re five and eight and we have a elementary school just a mile down the street from me, a high school two miles away. And so there’s kids in this entire neighborhood. I’ve talked to other parents that are like, “Man, my kid’s just not sleeping through the night or my kids are having a hard time sleeping.” Turns out that whale sound is what they’re hearing.

And so fast-forward January of this year, we discovered New Year’s Eve night that there was a data center being proposed for our city. And lo and behold, it’s 300 feet from my house. And so literally from the corner of my property to where it meets the fence line, the Dallas Cowboys could play and they might lose that game, but they could play there. And so either way, what’s been frustrating for us is my entire life now revolves around research, which I do in my job daily anyway for other people, but now I’m doing it for something that is literally threatening our way of life. And so not just we have a community well and so one small tap in the wrong direction, our wells dry and we’re going to be Meta in Georgia all over again. Turns out this is a Meta-funded data center project, Patriot, which as more information has been coming out, we have been seeing the audacity and arrogance and maybe even some ignorance from our city council or city manager, city attorney.

It’s been nothing but propaganda coming from the city side as well. So all this positive benefits about data centers and they couldn’t even get our own state representative to say something positive. They had to get the state representative from Fort Worth to say something positive. And he said, “Well, data centers are how your alarm clocks work. That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. My alarm clock lives internally on my phone if I use my phone.” And it just shows the audacity and how far they’re trying to propaganda all of this to the point where we as a community have been coming together and now I’m listed on the lawsuit against the city. One of those things I never thought I would have to say that as a county resident, I am suing a city that is affecting my everyday life. Now my home and neighborhood is a county island.

I don’t vote for these people. I don’t even get a say in what these people do, but they’re affecting my home. And so we’re fighting back and we’re even doing a recall. Hopefully we get enough signatures by that deadline, but we’ve done as far as signatures for no confidence in the city manager and city attorney. And every time we turn around, we’re just met with arrogance or just careless attitudes of…

People can go back, look at the city of Granbury, excuse me, city council meetings. And you’ll see on the January 6th meeting, it was literally everyone in that room was frustrated because we were told specifically only talk about the dirt when it came to annexing this property. And that was the shot heard around the entire county of like, okay, this fight just became personal for all of us.

Karen Pearson:

I was at that meeting and that’s where we also heard the city manager, I guess that’s what he is, saying that he did not care about us and something along those lines. So yeah, I heard all of that at that meeting and it was mouth-dropping.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think what he actually said was I’m not scared of you, is what he said. Karen, I think you and I were sitting next to each other.

Karen Pearson:

We sat next to each other. We sure did. Yeah.

Craig Jackson:

And to add to it, we have so many emails from the city manager, from the former director of development, about meetings at a data center where all the city council members were there, all of them in the same building, same time, same place. How they all got there is a different story, but we have all of this data and all of these trails and all this communication that shows all this was premeditated. And we’re seeing now other cities are fighting this. And so one of the things, our hope and prayer is not just to undo the annexation, but just undoes all of it. But if we can establish that, hey, this is how business should not be done, hopefully we can help other towns in this fight as well.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

So as I said before, I’ve been in this fight for about three years, maybe a little more than three years. And I met Cheryl when I was running for precinct chair and she asked what I was going to do about the data centers and I had no idea what she was talking about. And so I went to look at this data center that was causing so much grief. And I had this aha moment because I thought there was a train track near my house that I just hadn’t found yet. And I could hear it really well in the wee hours of the morning or sometimes really, really late at night. My husband and I would talk about, where is this train? Because it was this rumbling that we heard. And my husband and I drove past this Bitcoin mine and we had this light bulb moment.

We don’t have a train. We have a Bitcoin mine. And Craig was talking about waking up around three, somewhere between three and four o’clock in the morning on some mornings. And I will have a migraine just all of a sudden I will have this migraine headache from this Bitcoin mine. And so we’ve been fighting this thing for about three years. Cheryl and I with just some other people have even gone down and spoken at the state capitol to a subcommittee. We have written letters. We have had town halls. I can’t even begin to list all the things that we have done to raise awareness. And I would say for the past two and a half years, Cheryl, I can’t talk for you, but it feels like I’m beating my head against the wall. It seems like people say, “Yeah, that’s tough, but that’s not me and I’ve got my life to live.” And they go on and do their thing.

Well, now that it’s all of Granberry, people are waking up. Now I don’t blame them. People have lives to live. But now we have eight to nine of these hyperscale data centers coming into one of the very smallest counties in the state of Texas. We are very small and these hyperscale data centers, one of them is about the same size as a small city. We’re talking massive data centers taking over ranches. They’re taking over areas where they There is protected wildlife. There’s one area that they’re trying to industrialize where we have bald eagles nesting there and we can’t even get EPA to pay attention to them paring down the trees and displacing these bald eagles. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. So with these hyperscale data centers that are coming in, we’ve realized that our county does not have the, or we thought our county didn’t have the right to zone or to protect ourselves from them.

And I think that there have been some people that have truly dropped the ball in elected officials who have truly dropped the ball in this and they have not protected citizens.

I see things happening in my area that I think it’s going to change this beautiful, beautiful area. And I think there’s no coming back from that. And we’re talking about endangered species that live here. There’s a species of bird that lives here that’s endangered. And I have no idea why people who are supposed to be protecting don’t protect. And that Cheryl brought up the gas power plant and when your listeners are maybe facing some of these things coming in, you cannot separate these data centers from their power source. Those two things are two parts of the very same conversation. So the data centers in our area are having to bring in their own power source. And so they’re building gas power plants, but they are using the very bare minimum of standards in protecting the environment from any type of pollutants. And so one of the other things that Cheryl was mentioning was that these, I’m sorry, gas power plants, the permitting entity in Texas only looks at each individual power plant and not take into account the cumulative impact of multiple data plants.

I’m sorry, multiple power plants. So for example, in Tarrant County, which is Fort Worth, Texas, it’s pretty large. They have one gas power plant inside Tarrant County. And right now in my very small precinct, which is five, six miles square, we have three gas power plants with another one coming in. So that’s four gas power plants now. We have two battery energy storage systems, which are the best plants or facilities. We’ve got a solar farm that is coming in and all of this has been happening within just a very short period of time. And the residents are trying to stop it and we have no way of stopping it. So that’s what we’re facing. But I’m hearing people from across the nation say the same thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and speaking of which, Makaya, Hillary, that’s how I met both of you is because you two are both folks in communities here in Maryland fighting these things coming in. So could you tell us more about how you got involved in those fights and what’s actually happening in your communities with these data centers?

Hillary Gonzalez:

For DSAI, it’s been a roundabout fight to get me into the data center fight. I’ve always been against them, but for the longest time, Johns Hopkins was claiming DSAI isn’t a data center. And so we have been fighting them by saying, “Well, you can’t study AI without a data center being involved. So it’s the data center. Where are you going to build it? Where is it being planned for? ” And as far as the construction itself, you’ve seen massive stormwater events just constantly every single time it rains. And I think when people hear stormwater runoff, they think like, “Oh, who cares? It’s not that big of a deal.” Except that we are located directly next to Stony Run Park, which is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. So everything that goes into Stony Run eventually goes out to the Chesapeake Bay. And stormwater is very harmful because it has pollutants in it like diesel, oil, microplastics, a lot of sediment, which can eventually kill a riparian area like Stony Run, one of the few green spaces that we have in Baltimore.

Actually, just this evening because of the storm, we have what we call on our block the storm watch where if it starts raining, if it starts storming, everybody waits and they go outside and they take photos and they take videos of the runoff that’s coming from the construction site. And then we send in our 311 reports to Baltimore City. We send them into the Maryland Department of the Environment. We send them to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And it’s just exhausting to have to do this every single time it rains. And we’ve met with city leaders. We’ve met with city officials. We’ve had them come out to the site to see the stuff that’s still there after it rains, to see the pollutants. We have videos of it going directly into Stony Run. And one such meeting, we actually had our city council president Zeke Cohen come out to the site and we told him, “Hey, this is what we’re experiencing every single day.

And these are our very real environmental concerns. The city spent $10 million of taxpayer money repairing Stony Run so that we could have a healthy water system in Baltimore City so that we could have a healthy harbor eventually as well.” And he basically heard all the concerns and he basically said, “I don’t care. We’re going to aprove this project anyway because I think that this is going to be good for Baltimore.” So this whole project has really just opened my eyes to what the city is allowing Johns Hopkins to get away with and what they have in the past as well. Ultimately, I had to help found a nonprofit in Baltimore City so that we could sue Johns Hopkins to try to stop this project. But ultimately this isn’t just about one data center project. This is about our governor wants to ramp up data centers in Maryland, which is really scary because we unfortunately have all these rural communities who are facing terrible consequences of these data centers.

And we have them as examples for what we don’t want in Baltimore. And we have so many communities that are at risk that we know that they’re going to try to build these data centers in. And I don’t care that this is being built in my neighborhood. I do care, but what I’m saying is it’s not just that this is affecting my neighborhood. I don’t want a project like this in any neighborhood in Baltimore. It doesn’t belong in any community while you fall under regardless of what your economic station is in life. It doesn’t matter. This is truly something that can unite all of us and it’s something that we should all be fighting against.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’m absolutely distraught hearing about what you guys are going through and I’m a crybaby. I’m also a crash out. And my messaging and my militancy in my area, I get a lot of critiques on it, but it’s because of stories that I hear like this where these people just do not care. And I just don’t know what it will take and how many cuss words I have to spew out of my mouth to get these bozos to care. And I am so spiritually connected to the earth. It’s part of my mental health practices, how you guys talk about just wanting to sit outside with your family and sit outside with your parents. I’m with my baby boy right now and all we do is just sit outside while I crochet and I sit outside, I sit under my tree. I know I saw your baby too.

I was trying to say hi.

About the dead chickens and the dead ducks, it sounds so dystopian. And if this is my future, I don’t know what to do. And all I know is to fight like hell. And what we have been told, there’s this district commissioner, he’s the district commissioner of district four in Charles County and we were at a district, I think it was a town hall meeting. And members of my coalition, I don’t know if they directly addressed him, I don’t know. But basically he said that we have funding issues. He’s made a metaphor, a stupid metaphor about a barn. This is the barn we’re trying to build and if you don’t want to build the barn but this thing, we’re going to leave you behind and stuff like that. Just nonsense, ridiculous nonsensical bull crap. And then eventually he said, what has stuck with me is you’re going to have to stay in fight.

That’s what he says as it relates to data centers. He said, you’re going to have to stay in fight. This man is running unopposed in my county and our governor Westmore endorsed him. Westmore didn’t say it himself. He was supposed to be here in Charles County. I made a call to action about it. Excuse my language. He pussied out. He canceled it for unforeseen circumstances. And then just minutes before we start this call, I see that he had a private event in our county and spoke to some of our district commissioners and Ralph Patterson, the man he endorsed, and Ralph Patterson’s mother, Edith Patterson, who was a dinosaur elected official in this area. And yeah, it’s just been a fight. It’s a lot of political manipulation. People have data center money in their campaign contributions, but they want to tell us they’re not going to put a data center in our community and people believe them and people still vote for them.

And it’s just very frustrating. I’m very frustrated. I’m very emotional listening to you guys talk about what’s happening. And I would hope if people who didn’t look like me listen to you guys speak, they would take your concerns seriously. And I really hope that they do because it’s so dystopian what I’m hearing. And I have neighbors who have chickens. I’m a mile away from farmland and that’s what I love about this area. That’s what I love about Charles County. I feel like a country girl next to a city 45 away from DC. It’s really weird and I love it and I love that I can play both sides. So yeah, it’s a fight and it’s a lot of political manipulation and I just hope that people don’t listen to it. Right now, my biggest issue is being a lou, audacious Black woman speaking on behalf of the issue and people not wanting to take me seriously and my concerns seriously.

And that will be the detriment of our community.

Karen Pearson:

The chicken thing, I had totally forgotten until Craig mentioned it. My parents also had chickens and oh my gosh, we had so many eggs, more than we could give away. And then all of a sudden they just stopped laying one day. We quit getting eggs and we had several to die too. And it’s like, can you really believe this stuff? Is that really what happens to the animals and stuff like that? And then you start hearing others say the same thing and we don’t know each other. I didn’t know Craig. I didn’t even know he had this issue till this call. And I had forgot that we had the same thing. So my parents had to get rid of their chickens. So a lot of things like that out here have also happened. Domestic animals dying. Cheryl can talk about this too. Again, it’s some of those things that you don’t really realize.

And I think Craig spoke to some of this. The levels of the noise that are just not noticeable as we talk and communicate, it’s that decibel level that you don’t hear. And there’s another doctor, I believe she’s in Lesbon, and she’s done research on the vibrations and what those types of vibrations do to your inner body and the way it calcifies cells and stuff like that. And I haven’t even gotten into my mom’s health issues that have evolved over the last three years, but all of this didn’t were fine. All of this just happened in the last three years. And so you just cannot tell me that it’s a coincidence. There’s too many of us that have the same going on.

Cheryl Shadden:

So when infrasound hits your body and it doesn’t matter if it’s an animal, it doesn’t matter what living being it hits, it starts causing tissue damage to soft tissues. And so it can be noise that’s not even audible to the human ear. When one of my dogs started ripping her fur out until she was a bloody mess, I tried everything under the sun, worked with my vet, and I finally had to let go of her life. And when you see this happening with your friends and your neighbors and even people in California or Maryland or Texas, it’s heart-wrenching. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a young woman raising hell in Maryland or you’re an old lady in Texas raising hell, it’s still not okay. It’s still not okay to be harmed like this. It’s just not.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to pile the misery and horror on, but I mean I have to also mention that I hear these kinds of stories in so many other parts of the country that we keep calling sacrifice zones because it’s just areas where people are being left to live in conditions that threaten life itself. So you know who I heard working class people like yourselves talk about this kind of thing? People in East Palestine, Ohio and in the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania when they blew up the five cars of vinyl chloride in those trains. And then they told everyone after that big toxic death plume blasted them all with toxins, they said, “Okay, you’re fine. Go back home.” And it was because everyone’s chickens and cats and it started dying that they were like, “We’re not fine. The fish belly up floating down the rivers.” They said, “You’re telling us that’s fine?” They do this everywhere.

And this is why I always tell people, I feel like I’m investigating a serial murderer because I hear the same stories coming out of the mouths of working people in so many different communities who are being polluted by this crap, who are being killed by this stuff. And we’re all being set up for sacrifice whether we voted for one party or another. So it’s kind of like, what do we do about this as working people? Can this be what y’all have been mentioning on this call? Can this be one of those things that really gets us to get over our differences and forces us to work together to fight this scourge that is coming for all of us? Let’s talk about that in this final round. Because we have an incredible panel of folks who are fighting data centers and Bitcoin mines in Texas that are already there and new ones that are being proposed.

You folks here in Maryland who are seeing these data centers go up in Virginia and around the country and you’re trying to fight them in your area. So what can we learn from each other? And I guess going back to that central message in the introduction, what do we need to learn so that we don’t fight this the wrong way? So that we don’t get caught up in the, you’re on the red team, you’re on the blue team, you’re in this state, so you deserve it, you’re in that state, so you don’t deserve it. How do we get past that crap and actually fight this and win this? So let’s go back around and any sort of advice that y’all want to offer each other or anyone out there listening who may be dealing with this now or soon in the future.

Cheryl Shadden:

When I started on this battle plane, I never once went up to somebody and said, “Are you a Democrat or are you Republican? And I need you to listen to me. ” This is a humanity issue. It’s a humanity issue all the way across this nation and into Europe. And so like we had talked about before, if my next door neighbor, and I don’t care who you are, if you come to me and ask me for help, if somebody’s invading your home and you need me to come and help you, I’m coming to help you. I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care if I have a big dog and you have a little dog. I don’t care if you drive a red car and I drive a green one. I don’t care. I’m coming to help you because that’s a humanity thing you should be doing is caring about other people.

And what the governor of Maryland is doing is the same thing that our politicians are doing all around the country with very few exceptions is you’re not listening to your constituents remotely at all. Excuse me.

Hillary Gonzalez:

You’re so right. And I come from a small rural town in Virginia and really the only reason that I’m here today is because of mutual aid. Because we had to talk to our neighbors. We had to ask our neighbors for help whether we needed clean water because our well at one point was infected by Eli. Whether the food stamps run out, so we had to have one of our neighbors bring over some place for us. And I think we’re living in a time where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors, but I know every single name of my neighbors in my neighborhood, every single person. I knock on their doors all the time. I ask them how they’re doing. I’m like the unofficial mayor of Remington at this point. They come to me with every single issue and I listen to them and it doesn’t matter what side of the board they’re on.

I’m disabled, I’m queer, definitely leftist. But if you come to me and you need help and this is a humanitarian issue, I will help you. And I think that this truly is something that can unite all of us because this isn’t just a human issue, this is a land issue, this is a water issue, this is animals, this is our environment, this is trees. It’s everything. And that’s something at the end of the day that we can all be united on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s also our energy bills, right?

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s also our energy bills. That’s right. Yeah. But also on the flip side of that, I’m sure that our governor in Maryland is going to say the same thing and Makaia can probably attest to this as well. They want to start building many nuclear reactors with these data centers, which is just absolutely insane.

Cheryl Shadden:

Little baby nuclear reactor.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Yeah, that’s insane. It’s completely untested tech. So I think another thing that we all need to start working on is when I see these data centers and the politicians who are approving them, what keeps connecting itself for me is that all of them are receiving APAC money. And I think we desperately need two individuals who are not accepting any funds from APAC.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And you know what else we got to throw on here is we need to ask ourselves as working people, what is the payoff here? What are these data centers and Bitcoin mines giving to our communities? How are they helping us? Are they providing all these jobs beyond a few construction jobs for the people who are building them? And then what happens to them afterwards? I mean, we get all these data centers and the payoff is that all of our newsfeeds are filled with fake AI slop, that AI is in all of our electronics surveilling us, taking people’s jobs, that they’re using AI to bomb people in Iran and other parts of the world. Hat the hell do we want that for? And is that worth sacrificing our lives and communities and environment too?

Hillary Gonzalez:

I think overwhelmingly, the first question that people have started asking themselves when someone proposes a data center for their town, the first thing that you’ll hear these politicians and these developers say is, “This is going to be so good for you. This is so good for the future.” A future for who? Who is that future for? And the second people start asking that question, the whole thing falls apart because it is not a future for us. There is no part of this that we have a future in. This is a future for them.

Craig Jackson:

I would invite anybody to look into the Project Stargate in Abilene, Texas. It’s about half the size of two of the proposed data centers for our Hood County Grayberry area. It’s 1100 acres. The one going next to me is 2090. The one further down the street across from Dinosaur Valley State Park, which has dinosaur tracks in limestone that will erode away due to acid rain over time is going to be about 2,100 acres or so. Anyway, that one is interesting in itself. And then next door to that is going to be one for Black Mountain Energy. And so as far as Project Stargate’s concerned, there have been so many interviews with the sheriff, with locals that have proven that infrastructure, whether it’s Texas, Maryland, wherever, we can’t handle the construction infrastructure. Not only the construction infrastructure, the infrastructure for hotels, for rental, for housing. It’s just not there.

And we’ve been seeing over the past generation that home affordability is out through the roof. Rental affordabillability is out through the roof, and that is coming for our town if we don’t fight and stop it. And so something that somebody proposed to me is just run, run for office. That is one way we can fight this is if you have an open election coming up, run. Because there are so many people that have recently been elected on this issue, whether you’re red or blue that are winning. We have an ag commissioner nominee that’s a Democrat that is killing it because of this whole issue. And I am proud to say that yes, I am excited to see somebody young regardless of what party they stand for, that is standing for the beliefs that I believe in. And so that’s one huge way. But the other thing too is anybody is questioning this, look at Abilene because it is a perfect example of prime going through the roof.

These are not just temporary construction jobs. These are jobs that are going to last three to five years. And then with those jobs, you’re going to bring in all sorts of people that are looking for work, all sorts of backgrounds. The dust is going to be a huge issue. They spend about, what is it, a hundred million gallons a day just spraying water to keep the dust down. And so traffic is a nightmare. It’s abysmal. And so we’re inviting this into every single neighborhood that has a proposed data center right now. There’s so many other issues we can tap into. I know we’re restricted on time, but ideally, if there’s something that we’ve been learning is learning your state’s laws, if you have an open meetings act, anything you can use because the Bible says your sins will find you out, numbers 23. Anyway, have found so much dirt behind the scenes that we are using the courts for our advantage for.

And whether our elected officials want to listen to us or not, at some point it’s going to court. And we already have two of the data center campuses that were proposed that are now suing our county that they’re going to lose because of how they’re trying to use a warp and distort the law. And then the other thing, follow the money. Greg Abbott, our governor, has received over $500,000 in donations from one single tech entity and a tech pack. And so it’s disgusting how much money tech is putting into whatever party will follow them and allow them to do this to us.

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because after one of the last hearings that we had with the Board of Estimates in Baltimore City, they approved a big part of the project for DSAI. And then I think it was a few weeks later after that decision, we saw campaign money from Johns Hopkins officials flowing into the pockets of the Board of Estimates people.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

One thing that I would like to add to this is I have worked a little bit with a petition to recall the entire city council and the mayor except for one council member. And I have seen Republicans and Democrats working shoulder to shoulder on this issue. And I think that’s what it needs to look like. We’ve talked a bit about politics here and there are some pretty bad people that are in office and they’re pretty good people that are in office. And I want to say that just like the people that might be listening to this, they don’t always know the details about how bad these data centers really are. And I want to give them time to learn, but they better hurry up because we don’t have time to wait for them to eventually figure this thing out. I don’t want this to be a Republican Democrat thing.

I think that too much of our country talks in terms of politics. I really wish it would be more of we’re neighbors, we live in the same community, let’s work together to make this thing happen. I heard Cheryl say that before, not today, but I’ve heard her say before, as a nurse, she doesn’t ask somebody their political affiliation before she helps them in an operating room. It doesn’t matter to her. And when I look at another human being, it doesn’t matter to me. If you need help, I’m going to try to help you. I don’t care which side of the aisle that you’re on. Now, I wish that this would be one of those things for everybody, that it just doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. It’s coming for all of us. And if we don’t all wake up and work together, we’re lost.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I am radically black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black black, black, black, black. Talk about everywhere am I going? And my parents never talked to me about race for real when I was a little girl. They just let me, because I was just so whimsical. I have stars tatted on my face. They’re the Neverland stars because I just love Peter Pan. I don’t ever want to grow up. And the world just beat me up. The world just beat me up. I played travel soccer, like I said before, so I was mostly an all white environment. So I didn’t get confidence until maybe my freshman year of high school. My racial self-esteem was low, just a whole bunch of things. So when I look at the world, it’s not that I’m trying to see racism, it’s just what I see because I’m looking for myself and I never see myself.

So me entering this organizing space, I blew it up. I blew it up. And it was after I was at a planning commission meeting and they said, “Let’s put all the data centers in the heavy industrial zones.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s where all the Black people are, isn’t it? And it was. And so I went in my coalition chat and I’m just like, “Y’all, I’m about to blow these people up.” I told them everything I was about to say. I said, “I’m doing this on my own platform. I’m just letting you guys know. ” And it hasn’t been good since. There’s been a huge divide in our county, unfortunately, between people of the more Southern part and people in the Northern part of the county. So I would say if you’re entering an organizing space, sometimes it is best for your mental health, just so many tears have been shed and it’s been a waste of time trying to get people to understand me and my point of view.

So sometimes you have to protect yourself and you have to organize with people who align with you more. But in terms of regular day-to-day conversations, no one who would talk to me would know about all of this crazy stuff I got going on in my head. I am a very personable person. All of my jobs have been more so blue collar. So I’m in the service industry a lot. I love elderly people. I don’t care what color you are. I love all people. And when I talk to people, I talk to them as if they’re the only person in the world.

So you need to go out and you need to talk to your neighbors. One of my neighbors, I’m looking at their house right now, he voted for Donald Trump. I don’t care. I didn’t even know he voted for Donald Trump until a year ago, but I’ve looked at this man face-to-face for 23 years of my life and I wouldn’t even have known. He’s always very nice to me. When I walk my dog, he lets my dog poop in his grass as long as I pick it up. It’s just like you need to go out and you need to talk to people and we have to find common ground and we have to be able to listen to people. And class solidarity is so important right now. And there are poor white people in this area who have been silenced and who have been bamboozled into voting for people consistently who do not care about them.

And I really hope that this issue wakes people up that all of these politicians lie and we need to follow the money. And if they have weird people in their campaign contributions, you should probably pay attention to that and you should stop making excuses for people.

And like Mr. Jackson said, we need to start running for office. Regular everyday people have to be in office. We have to clean sweep our government, our local governments. After God willing, I really am praying that we will ban data centers by November. I’m praying we can bully us more collectively into banning data centers. And if that happens, we’re clean sleep in the government. All of our local governments just need to be investigated because how did you allow this to happen? Why are you so susceptible to corruption? Why do you have an affinity for selling out your constituents? Why do you have an affinity for looking us in our face with attitude and lying to us and not taking our concerns seriously? Everyone has to leave. Everyone has to go. Everyone needs to be fired, as Donald Trump will say. All of them, you’re fired.

Everyone has to go. So I would say in terms of advice, get your boots on the ground, get out, talk to the people you know, get out and talk to the people you don’t know. Start showing up to planning in district commissioner meetings, go to your local government meetings, look these people in their face. These politicians, I can tell they’re scared when I walk in the room because they know I’m about to insult them. Start bullying these people. They really need to know that they work for us. And a lot of people don’t like my language, but at some point you have to stop caring and you have to really start embracing your own radical Black politic and start crashing out. And that’s my advice. I feel like if we would all crash out, they would not act like this. We need to start put…

And I don’t want violence to happen to anybody, but what they’re doing is violent to us. The stories that I’m hearing, it’s violence. It’s terrorism to me. It’s domestic terrorism. That’s what I hear.

Cheryl Shadden:

That’s what it’s like living here. It’s like living in a war zone. It absolutely is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s what I’ve heard. I listened to you guys’ podcast about two times and just so I could really understand everything. And this sounds like just a horrendous… I’m sorry, I know it’s a beautiful place, but it sounds like a horrendous place to live. It sounds horrendous.

Cheryl Shadden:

It is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’ll be damned. If that happens to my beautiful… I’ll be damned. Oh my God.

Cheryl Shadden:

And people tell us all the time, just move. Well, my home and my property are paid for. I couldn’t sell my home or property if I wanted to. And so what do we do? You stand and fight.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s all you can do.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah. And to follow up with Cheryl, I have to disclose there’s a data center coming next door to me if I decide to sell my home. And we have a neighbor, their house has been sitting because it has to be disclosed. So you don’t have a choice. I mean, the worst case scenario for me is Airbnb my house to data center employees, but where am I going to go? Because I grew up in Houston and so I lived next to the highway. I know the highway noise. It’s embedded in my DNA at this point. And that’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s like you’re living next to a highway that just will not stop. And there’s nights, there’s not a car on the road. I’ve literally walked over to the highway. I say highway, Texas highway. There’s not a car on the road, but you’re hearing that droning constantly.

And the only way we are going to stop this is to not just educate politicians, but we need educated people to run for this. We need to stop just believing. So one of the things we’ve come across in our area is developers making false personas and going on Facebook groups to hype up all the positive benefits of data centers or people who are invested in data centers going on and playing the positivity side. And as neighbors, one, you know your neighbors, you know who’s true and who’s not, but the reality is we can only do so much on social media, but we need to be the louder voices in all honesty. We need to be the voices of reason. And one of the things we see all the time is, well, you’re on Facebook, you’re using a data center, you’re on TikTok, you’re using data center.

And part of that education is there’s a difference between an enterprise data center and a hyperscale data center. And what’s coming in our areas is hyperscale, which is what we don’t want. We’ve been using enterprise data centers for years. I used to work in a building that had its own data center within, and the room was constantly kept at 70 degrees, but you couldn’t hear the fans because they sound walled everything. It didn’t disrupt anything. It didn’t use any water. It was all air cooled by air conditioning. This is an entirely different beast that we’re fighting and that’s where the education outlet comes in. So if we just have smart people running, if we do more education, do what we can be the voice of reason, not just the voice of opposition at the end of the day.

Karen Pearson:

I think the level of secrecy and deception, I guess, I mean, I’m not a naive person. I deal with all sorts of people and I love people too. I like to get to know different people. And I mean, I feel like we all bleed the same color red. And our skeletal makeup, we have many things in common as far as color, race, none of that matters language. For me, one of the things that has been the most shocking is how people have just so easily lied and deceived and a lot for the sake of money. There for a long time we said out here that we were kind of the redheaded kids of Hood County because, and again, me and Cheryl, some of us have talked about this. There’s quite a few of us that are in this fight that are very highly educated.

But what they’ve done to this community is because of lower socioeconomic. I think Mikaia mentioned this about the industrial part in the city, that’s a lot of Black people there. Well, out here there’s a lot of Hispanic people in our community and they’re not going to speak up for themselves for various reasons. I don’t care if you’re here illegally or undocumented or whatever. I have some wonderful neighbors across the street that I would go help in a heartbeat. The deception to pile this onto the communities like that and to think that you can get away with it, it is, like you said, that sacrificial zone. It’s showing me that there are some of us who are worth sacrificing for a dollar. There are some of us who regardless of, “Oh, let’s look at that community. It doesn’t look like it’s very well-deserving. Let’s put it all there.” And I don’t know, I guess just the way that other human beings treat human beings is beyond me.

I don’t think that way. My heart is not like that. And so it’s just really hard to comprehend the deception and the lack of transparency and how so easily we can lie and how we can sacrifice another human being for the sake of money. I cannot wrap my head around that. And that’s part of why I want to keep fighting.

Micaiah Lloyd:

These are called the paths of least resistance, these specific neighborhoods, and it’s a microzoning and it’s redlining. So for the audience, if there’s a data center being proposed in your community, it’s probably in a community that would have the pathway of least resistance. If we’re in a state like Texas and we’re worried about ICE, probably Hispanic people aren’t going to speak up for themselves because they’re scared. So yes, let’s put it here. So we do need to pay attention to not only Black and brown people, but poor people as well because they don’t have the resources to fight for themselves.

Hillary Gonzalez:

100%.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

You are right about that. What I have found recently is that I think even middle-class people are no match for these data centers because they have really deep pockets and they can litigate for forever. And I think a normal everyday person is not going to be able to fight that because they’re going to take it to court and they will tie you up in court and they will take everything that you have and then some. Cheryl, I know that with yours, they were asking questions that they had no business asking you. So they were wanting everything and the paperwork was just nonstop. So that’s been my experience with these data centers.

Craig Jackson:

We can also say it’s expensive. We had to retain a lawyer which costs 10,000 upfront and it’s not even probably the lawyer we’re going to go with at the end of the day. There’s several other communities that have gotten lawyers that it is expensive. So if there’s any lawyers listening that want to help, we would appreciate the help. But at the end of the day, what it really is coming down to is money. And just anybody that wants to take five seconds to Google Marathon Digital Bitcoin, they sold off a lot of Bitcoin and made a lot, a lot of money at the profit of this neighborhood. And it’s frustrating because we don’t receive any of that, but our property taxes go up, our electricity goes up, our water bill, everything else goes up. We’re fighting just for daily life, but yet they’re profiting off the backs of our health.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas, Cheryl Shadden, Karen Pearson, Craig Jackson, and Dr. Shannon Wolfe. And I want to thank our guests from Maryland, Hillary Gonzalez and Mikaya Lloyd. This was such an important discussion and this is such an important issue and I’m so grateful to all of our guests for being part of this panel and for everything that they are doing to fight back for their communities. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.