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The US recently approved a $2 billion Saudi order for weapons guidance systems, launchers, warheads, and other equipment.

The US this week said it had carried out its first offensive combat mission using unmanned surface vessels.

The mass mobilization against data centers is coming to a boil this week, and the tech aristocracy is turning paranoid. No wonder: The AI zealots of Silicon Valley have staked their souls on President Trump’s commitment to blitz-scaling these rural facilities.On Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing a yearlong statewide moratorium on data-center construction. This panics the AI overlords. If a commie-style ban can make it in pro-business New York, it can make it anywhere. “The real worry in the industry isn’t New York specifically, it is the precedent,” said Joseph Hoefer, a key AI lobbyist, about the response of Silicon Valley to Hochul’s move. “The concern is real, and it moved fast.”And then there’s the mounting popular disgust with facilities that guzzle water and power from rural communities, giving nothing back. “Data centers—why would you want that?” Tucker Carlson said recently on a podcast. “Why are you telling me all of the bad things that are going to happen, not telling me really any of the good things, and then telling me that it’s inevitable and I can’t have electricity or water because the machines need it?” Indeed. We know that data centers drain water reserves and strain electrical grids. But their round-the-clock “brute force” lighting also eliminates dark nights, wreaking havoc on the circadian rhythms of humans and animals. As for air pollution, according to a recent study, just one data center in Northern Virginia pumps out enough aerosolized waste to cause respiratory diseases and premature deaths to the tune of $53 million to $99 million in health damages annually. And then there’s the headache- and insomnia-inducing noise pollution. No wonder seven in 10 Americans now oppose data centers, including a majority of Republicans. Caleb Max, another AI lobbyist, describes this polling on data centers as  “devastating” and warns, “If the industry doesn’t wake up quick and start solving this, it’s going to get a lot worse.”All of which brings us to tomorrow, July 18, when Humans First, an activist group fronted by staunch America First conservatives and supported by Marjorie Taylor Greene, is planning a national day of protest to fight the facilities across the country, from Alabama to New Mexico, Missouri to Idaho, West Virginia to Wyoming. With conservatives in the fight, AI’s foes can no longer be dismissed as tree-huggers, degrowthers, and union thugs. This leaves almost nothing in Silicon Valley’s rhetorical arsenal. The idea that the data centers are noble citadels in the AI war with China doesn’t exactly fire up the popular imagination. The 2010s concept that our Silicon Valley overlords are entitled, as geniuses, to turn American towns into sacrifice zones—that also rings hollow. So this week, the oligarchs resorted to the last refuge of a scoundrel: They described the protests as a psyop. Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen amplified a thread alleging that Humans First is really an anti-ICE socialist outfit. The thread pointed to a March article about Humans First called “Built to Deceive: How the Effective Altruist Machine Infiltrated the Conservative Right on AI,” by Jordan Schachtel, an AI zealot with Blaze and Breitbart bylines and a Substack called The Dossier. (On Friday, Schachtel argued in the newsletter AG—yes, American Greatness—that data centers power “the new American Industrial Revolution.” )Aspiring trillionaire Elon Musk, along with mere billionaire David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, showered X love on Schachtel’s gotcha when it came out. But the exposé is not as revelatory as they think it is. Schachtel chronicles how a small group of Effective Altruism activists committed to AI safety—not socialism—fostered Humans First to engage conservatives in the fight against data centers. Then they handed it off to them. That sounds like coalition-building, not deceit. (The “pro-human” mobilization against data centers has been ideologically diverse from the start.)In May, Humans First published an open letter urging Trump to pump the brakes on data-center construction: “We write as committed America First leaders to thank you for considering an Executive Order to vet potentially dangerous frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models before they are released.” This remarkable appeal, both populist and pro-regulation, is signed by marquee rabble-rouser Steve Bannon, as well as other leading lights of America First, the MAGA splinter group. Amy Kremer, another signatory and the chair of Humans First, is an inveterate Tea Partier who founded Women for Trump and organized the rally that spun into the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington. Cathy Latham, who also signed the letter, is a former Georgia elector who was indicted in 2023 for signing “alternate ballots” certifying Trump as president (Trump pardoned her). Outside of data centers, Latham’s interests include “advocacy for transparent, non-ideological education that prioritizes critical thinking, American history, and conservative values over ‘woke’ or Marxist influences.”Kremer, for her part, considers the data-center protests “the most important fight of our lifetime” because “this technology could wipe us off the face of the planet.” This week, she wrote in RealClearEnergy, “The same disconnect that gave rise to the Tea Party in 2009 is happening again in 2026. Instead of a battle over bailouts and Obamacare, this time the battle is over runaway big tech, dangerous AI, and AI hyperscale data centers.”The right comes by its skittishness about data centers honestly. Even Schachtel concedes: “Their AI skepticism might be fairly perceived as genuine, rooted in years of commentary on transhumanism and civilizational risk involving Silicon Valley elites having power over the average American.”So have right- and left-wing populists really made common cause at last—or is someone playing someone? If the left is pulling the levers, America Firsters may end up supporting green policies or government regulation. If the right’s in charge, DSA types might have to recognize that conservatives, in Schachtel’s words, “arrived at doomer-adjacent conclusions through a distinctly conservative and Biblical lens.”Not bad. The only losers are the oligarchs. And religious tolerance, along with a government that works for the people, seem like a pretty American place to converge.

Drop Site Daily: July 17, 2026

Donald Trump promised federal cuts under the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency would “drive out the massive waste.” Indeed, waste is now being expelled on an incredible scale, across the country: A diarrhea-causing parasite, cyclosporiasis, has sickened thousands of people in more than two-thirds of U.S. states. And the outbreak’s severity—evidence increasingly shows—can be attributed at least partly to DOGE.According to a Friday report by WIRED, DOGE cuts significantly reduced the size of the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. The lab was “downsized from 11 people to just three” last year, parasitologist Joel Barratt, who formerly led that operation, told the publication.“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” Barratt told WIRED. “Cyclospora is just one piece. It’s making the news right now, but there are other, more dangerous pathogens than cyclospora.”That’s not the only way Trump’s cuts have hamstrung the response. In an analysis at The American Prospect, for example, Ryan Cooper details how the administration devastated American food safety and public health infrastructure in ways relevant to the outbreak. Additionally, in July 2025, the CDC under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quietly changed the monitoring of cyclospora from mandatory to optional in Foodnet, its pathogen-tracking partnership with 10 state health departments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration.With WIRED’s report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim Thursday that the administration’s funding cuts did not impact the response to the outbreak “at all” sounds more dubious than it already did.Describing the wreckage left in DOGE’s wake, one GOP senator recently coined the phrase “DOGE shit.” The department’s increasingly apparent role in exacerbating this outbreak suggests there’s more mileage in that pun—a couple social media wordsmiths have already seized on it, nicknaming cyclospora “the DOGE shits.”

The report surfaced one week after the US President claimed that Al-Sharaa reassured him about Syria possibly having a role in dealing with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Zoe. , July 17, 2026

Despite recent evidence to the contrary, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear isn’t so sure that Senator Mitch McConnell is actually alive.Speaking with journalist Katie Couric in an interview published on YouTube July 15, Beshear explained why he had requested a formal update from McConnell’s office earlier this month. In his explanation, Beshear revealed that he had received information from multiple officials indicating that the 84-year-old Republican had passed away.“It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” Beshear recalled. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies—not state agencies—suggesting he’s passed.”The Kentucky senator went missing for nearly a month after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, McConnell’s office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. But the media blackout finally ended on Sunday, when the senator’s office shared a photo of McConnell sitting upright in a chair beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.Far-right influencers immediately jumped on McConnell’s statement, baselessly claiming that the picture had been AI-generated while demanding that McConnell release a video statement to address public concern. (Forensic analysis teams concluded that McConnell’s “proof of life” image was very much real and not AI-generated.)McConnell’s team has not provided any further explanation or evidence supporting McConnell’s improving health condition since Sunday.Earlier this week, Beshear held a press conference in which he acknowledged that while the July 12 update was a “step in the right direction,” McConnell ultimately needed to provide a more comprehensive update in order to cut through the resulting conspiratorial noise.“We hope that there is a speedy recovery,” Beshear said on Tuesday. “But with all the speculation—and there’s been a ton—the fastest way to end all of it is calling into a news station if you’re otherwise taking calls, putting out a video or two, which all of us do in office.”