DL Open Thread Friday, April 17, 2026

Data centers: To know them is to hate them:

[T]he share of Virginians saying they’d be “comfortable” if a new data center were built in their community has plummeted to half the level it was at just three years ago. In 2023, 69 percent of state residents said a new data center was fine with them; today, that figure stands at just 35 percent. Democratic support for such data centers has collapsed from 72 percent three years ago to a bare 28 percent today; Republican support has sunk by a smaller but still impressive 20 percentage points, from 67 percent in ’23 to 47 percent in ’26.

And that’s in a state where the tax structure has actually made it a boon to public finances. In most places, including Delaware, that won’t be the case.

Remember when SCOTUS chief justice John Roberts said their job was calling balls and strikes? Yeah, right. Tell that to Big Clarence:

Thomas delivered a televised broadside against progressivism, a political philosophy he described as an existential threat to America and the principles that founded it 250 years ago.

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said. … “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

He said that the values enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence have “fallen out of favor” among Americans — a trend perpetrated, he argued, by “intellectuals” and the nation’s colleges and universities. Thomas also said he believes many people no longer believe “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by a limited government.

You want to slag Joe Biden? Slag him for botching the Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt justice in the history of the Supreme Court.

Trump, meanwhile, is slavering at the prospect of replacing Thomas with someone younger. Alito, too.

You know why conservatives love guns? Because they’re fucking scared of everything, even (checks notes) computer programmers from the Indian subcontinent:

FRISCO, TEXAS – Far-right activists are seizing on a new example of the America they fear. It’s a booming, Texas city home to the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility and a PGA golf resort.

The activists’ problem? The city’s population of Indian immigrants and people of Indian descent has grown dramatically in recent years as the town has massively expanded. Per the 2020 census, it was America’s fastest-growing city. The 2000 census put Frisco’s population at 33,000. By 2020, it was 200,000; the city’s mayor told TPM he estimates the current population to be around 250,000. With that growth, the demographics have also shifted. The 2020 census estimated that around a quarter of Frisco residents were Asian; city planners now estimate that Asians account for one-third of the population.

City officials boast about what they regard as the fruits of years of planning: multinational tech corporations with new offices in the city, endless soccer fields, a new library with a massive T. rex skeleton inside, a gleaming megamall, and, of course, the HQs of the Dallas Cowboys and PGA America. Vast, freshly built housing tracts coat the landscape. The few trees are thin and new.

But for a coterie of area activists and influencers, the influx of Indians — some on H-1B work visas, others citizens of Indian descent — is a real-life example of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Under that idea, elites are replacing white Americans — sometimes referred to by right-wing activists as “Heritage Americans” — with nonwhite foreigners in a bid to gain political power. That narrative about Frisco has been magnified in recent days by national political figures. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who represents a district near Frisco, cited the city’s demographic changes during a recent podcast appearance to demand an end to the H-1B worker visa program.

“We’ve got communities like Frisco that have been totally transformed, whether it’s Islamic immigration or immigration from anywhere else in Asia,” Gill said. “I don’t want to hear Muslim calls to prayer in my community. I do not want the caste system socially in the schools that my kids are going to because we’ve had so many people come to the United States who are not assimilating into American culture.”

You’ll note the Sharia Law bugaboo raised again. If these people are afraid of religious law, maybe they ought to stop pushing their own version of it.

The floor’s yours.