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President Trump’s rant to the nation about election fraud Thursday night was full of inaccuracies, previously known information, and claims unsupported by evidence. On the biggest conservative TV network, Fox News, which Trump watches regularly, no one is giving it much attention Friday morning.Matthew Gertz of Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors right-wing media, wrote that Fox News’s Friday morning programming prioritized several other stories over Trump’s speech. Among the stories covered were Caitlin Clark’s WNBA game Thursday night, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s policies toward landlords, Fox’s World Cup coverage for Sunday’s final, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s antifa summit Thursday. Fox & Friends didn’t even mention the speech.It’s a continuation of how the network treated the speech last night. Laura Ingraham didn’t even discuss the speech, even though Trump was scheduled to speak just two hours later. Jesse Watters gave it a passing mention at the end of his show, prioritizing one of his correspondents interviewing people in bathing suits at Central Park. Sean Hannity gave the speech a small amount of discussion and said his show would look into it in the coming days.The most attention Fox gave to the speech was on Special Report, with Hugh Hewitt saying in advance of the speech that he hoped Trump would focus on renewed hostilities in the Iran war, as it was “vital that the president keep that in mind that American servicemen and women are in harm’s way when he is on the air.”The network’s reluctance to give Trump’s speech heavy coverage may have something to do with the hefty settlement Fox News was forced to pay in 2023 to get rid of a lawsuit over how it covered election denial conspiracies from the 2020 presidential election pushed by Trump and his allies. Or it also could be due to the fact that Trump was just repeating old, tired claims of election fraud, and making up new claims of foreign interference without evidence. Maybe Fox sees that Trump is desperately trying in vain to forestall a big defeat this November.

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.”