West Virginia Republicans are betraying their voters for AI special interests

There is a reason why most red-state Republican leaders fail to reflect the political values of their constituents. They represent the special interests they work for rather than the whole of the people.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the ravaging of West Virginia by generative AI data centers, promoted by people like House of Delegates Speaker Roger Hanshaw, who legally represents special interest groups fighting poor, local communities in court.

The same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court.

Remember the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 that originally attempted to strip all state and local governments of any ability to block data centers from being built? Well, last year, West Virginia enacted just such a ban at the state level. Hanshaw shepherded HB 2014 to Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk.

Among many special tax and regulatory favors offered to data centers, this bill removed local jurisdiction over the siting, zoning, and operating of certified high-impact data centers and microgrids.

Thus, companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI could work with state politicians bought into their pay-for-play and force their way into any community. And what better person to be fighting for them than the speaker of the House?

While serving as speaker, Hanshaw filed a notice of appearance in the appeal to the Department of Evironmental Protection’s Air Quality Board on behalf of his client MGS CNP1 LLC, which is an affiliate of Houston-based Fidelis New Energy working on a data center project in Mason County.

This was in the middle of the session and just one week after the state House of Delegates passed legislation making it easier for these projects to obtain certification with the Department of Commerce.

Then, just two days after the session ended, Hanshaw took on a case through his work at Bowles Rice for Fundamental Data, the company working on powering the data center bonanza in Tucker County.

So the same man who was instrumental in stripping localities of their ability to block data centers is now representing the people behind those data centers in court against local community groups appealing the DEP’s permit issuance.

It was the Tucker County fight that led me to speak out nationally against this mindless business model of raping red-state land, power, and water for a form of generative AI that serves nothing but chatslop and the surveillance state.

Last August, I vacationed in Tucker County, home to the gorgeous Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley. A county that voted for Trump by a 50-vote margin, these people are the forgotten men that MAGA was supposed to represent.

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I spoke with several locals who were irate beyond words about the injustice occurring in a state with barely any Democrat elected officials.

What’s worse is that West Virginia is also being violated with endless transmission lines to power the blue-state “data center alley” in northern Virginia. According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysts, West Virginia energy consumers will be expected to pay $572 million in higher rates to fund the rope to hang themselves.

What is so offensive is that these projects are not even creating jobs. According to the February JOLT report from BLS, construction remains in the greatest recession since the Great Recession, despite these so-called data center projects. Oracle, which is at the center of the cloud computing in the data centers, is laying off 18% of its workforce.

Shockingly, Henshaw and his minions attempted to pass even greater handouts for data centers offered to no other industry, in addition to what was in HB 2014.

This session, they introduced SB 623, which offered a complete property tax exemption and sales tax exemption on all data center equipment. They also introduced HB 4013, which would have created a new tax credit available to data centers to offset all state income, sales/use, franchise, and payroll withholding taxes based on capital investments, construction costs, and wages.

How many jobs did they have to create to qualify? Just 10! Which, of course, is a tacit admission that these behemoths don’t create many jobs, despite their enormous footprint, cost, and consumption of power.

In other words, Agenda 2030 is being fulfilled right under our noses in a state where Republicans control both houses of the legislature with 32-2 and 91-9 majorities.

What West Virginia, with its mind-numbing GOP majorities, shows is that the lack of conservative outcomes under GOP control is not due to a lack of power or votes but too much access to money and special interests.