The Tea-Party Organizer Leading The Data Center Revolt | The Dispatch

Now, Kremer is kicking off a new bus tour, with a new focus: data centers. The 27-state road trip that began on Saturday at the Texas State Capitol in Austin is being organized by Humans First, the conservative AI-focused advocacy shop where Kremer serves as CEO.

A Tea Party organizer-turned-J6er leading a so-called Data Center Revolt underscores just how politically salient the ongoing data center buildout, largely being undertaken at the behest of AI companies, has become. But it also forces Kremer and a growing portion of the MAGA right into the uncomfortable position of opposing President Trump, who has remained unflinching in his support for AI infrastructure development.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month, adding that Americans should “let Data Reign.”

“I still love the president. I mean, he has been a great president, and I just think that he’s on the wrong side of this,” Kremer told The Dispatch. “With the ‘let data reign,’ I would say, Mr. President, let Americans reign. Let Americans decide what they want in their communities.” Kremer added that Trump has changed his mind before in response to changing political winds, and she hopes the president will come around this time, too.

The president’s continued backing for data center development puts him at odds with a growing number of Americans across the political spectrum. While some communities have welcomed data centers and the construction jobs and tax dollars they bring, others have begun to turn against the computer-filled complexes. A September poll by NBC News found that nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the development of a data center in their local area.

The broad appeal of this particular breed of NIMBYism has given right-wing populists like Kremer a cudgel with which to attack Big Tech, even as Trump has brought some industry leaders into his fold. And the message seems to be resonating. The bus tour is currently on track to make 34 stops, hitting cities across the South en route to Washington, D.C., before traversing the country and ending in San Francisco.

“I would love to get the president to come on the bus tour with me,” Kremer said, “and to take him to some of these small towns and listen to these people, and I think he would change his mind on a lot of this stuff.”

For nearly 20 years, Kremer has been something of a right-wing clairvoyant. She was among the first handful of organizers of the Tea Party, which pushed the GOP further right during the Obama years and foreshadowed the Republican Party’s embrace of populism. In May of 2015, weeks before Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to kick off a long-shot bid at the presidency, Kremer was tweeting about his political prospects: “Do not underestimate him. He doesn’t like to fail!” She went on to cofound one of the early Trump super PACs.

But Kremer wasn’t always a political organizer. After sending her daughter off to college, the stay-at-home mom and former flight attendant decided to pass the time by chronicling her life in two online blogs: one about gardening, the other about politics. She later turned to social media as an outlet for her activism, which led her to #tcot, or Top Conservatives on Twitter, a late-2000s online subculture that spawned the Tea Party movement. “I have become addicted to Facebook and Twitter,” she wrote in one of her old blog posts. “I really got into Twitter when Obama and the Pelosi/Reid thug gang started pushing the crap pork sandwich down our throats.”

After an acrimonious falling out with one Tea Party organizing group, Kremer joined the Tea Party Express, which made nine bus tours for the Tea Party cause. Kremer, who sat in the back of the classroom growing up to avoid being called on by her teachers, was suddenly speaking at the rallies held at the various bus tour stops.

As a former flight attendant and stay-at-home mom without a long history in politics, Kremer brought a “compelling story” to the Tea Party, Sal Russo, co-founder of the Tea Party Express, told The Dispatch. Kremer was effective because she “saw the need to get off of the sofa, get out the door, organize, and get people involved in politics.”

Kremer soon traded the Tea Party for MAGA, founding multiple pro-Trump organizations between 2015 and 2020. After the 2020 election, Amy Kremer’s daughter Kylie started a Stop the Steal Facebook group that became one of the fastest-growing groups in the platform’s history. Then came two more bus tours as the Kremers hit dozens of stops on a red coach bus emblazoned with the logos of sponsors like Mike Lindell’s MyPillow and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. The second trip culminated with the “March to Save America” rally on January 6, 2021, for which Kylie Kremer procured the permit, and the Capitol riots aimed at preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. During the permitting process, the Kremers falsely told the National Park Service that there were no plans for a march to the Capitol, according to a 2023 report from the Interior Department’s inspector general.

Kremer faced multiple subpoenas after the attempted insurrection, a situation that created an “enormous amount of stress,” she said. Nevertheless, she parlayed the experience into a successful campaign for one of Georgia’s seats on the Republican National Committee.

As Kremer throws her hat in the ring with the AI skeptics of the right, time will tell whether her sixth sense for populist movements will be vindicated yet again. Speaking in a southern twang, Kremer rattled off a list of reasons conservatives should be concerned about AI: It’s being used to aid terrorism. Big Tech is foisting data centers on communities that don’t want them. AI models are escaping their sandboxes. But Kremer is at her best politically when she forgoes the sci-fi lingo of the AI world. At one point, Kremer shows me her dog, a 9-year-old chihuahua-beagle mix named Lovie who is coming along on the bus tour.

“If AI is so great, why can’t my dog live as long as me?” Kremer asks with a laugh.

Kremer’s folksiness is part of her appeal in AI policy organizing. “Some people are good at lobbying. Some people are good at media. Some people are good at, I don’t know, operations. But it’s a rare person that really understands grassroots and how to do the work and has already done the work,” Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the conservative AI-skeptical group Alliance for Secure AI, said of Kremer, whom he floated to lead Humans First.

The political advocacy group was initially conceptualized as a nonpartisan organization focused on democratic control of AI, according to NBC News. Within months, though, Humans First’s liberal wing was being spun out, and Kremer and co. set about MAGA-fying its ranks and message.

Despite claiming that the group doesn’t oppose data center construction outright, Kremer’s movement has alienated some pro-growth pragmatists who see the data center backlash as a kind of moral panic being worsened by foreign influence campaigns. Data centers are a tool for economic growth and tax revenue that can be reinvested into government services like schools and housing, the thinking goes. Some downsides of building giant bricks all over the place can be mitigated by governments eschewing data center project subsidies and requiring developers to pay for their own power, Scott Lincicome wrote in Dispatch Markets.

In an interview with The Dispatch, Jordan Schachtel, a senior policy adviser to the pro-AI conservative group Innovation Council, labeled Humans First a “degrowth fake right-wing organization” that is “jacking real conversations and just advancing specific propaganda to roll back American innovation.”

But populist-minded opponents of AI insist their movement is only growing. After publishing an open letter to the White House calling for mandatory predeployment testing of frontier AI models that was signed by a variety of conservative AI skeptics, including Bannon, Humans First latched onto data centers.

Steinhauser argued the backlash against data centers is “real” and likened some of the skepticism against it to what opponents said of the Tea Party. “In 2009, Nancy Pelosi famously called us astroturf, and we showed up with 10 million people on the west side of the Capitol, and I said, ‘We replaced the grass on the west lawn with astroturf.’”

Amy Kremer’s story seems to run parallel to America’s trajectory over the past 15 years. She joined social media to connect with friends and ended up being awakened politically. She went deep enough down the rabbit hole that she ended up leading a movement to enable the right’s worst impulses in 2020. Now she finds herself ready to embark on a barnstorming tour for the right-wing backlash against data centers, for which she seems an unlikely messenger. Perhaps her concern with this particular issue, as with many things in Trumpworld, lies somewhere on the spectrum between belief and opportunism. Kremer says her pivot to AI policy comes down to instinct.

“It’s all gut instinct,” Kremer said. “I could have never scripted it, never put myself here. I am here because God put me where I am for whatever reason, and so I go with my gut.”