Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.
Republicans are privately warning that voters hate AI data centers so much, it could cost them an Ohio Senate seat. Trump’s Justice Department has sided with Elon Musk to fight Minnesota’s ban on AI-generated nude images. Five journalists were detained at gunpoint at a Space Force base they had been invited to visit. And the Bureau of Land Management is quietly selling wild horses to slaughter for $25 a head.
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Ohio Republicans have identified the single biggest threat to their Senate majority, and it is the thing they spent the last three years recruiting to the state.
The NRSC has written to AI companies in Ohio advising them their data centers are costing the GOP the state’s US Senate seat. It warns that candidates Jon Husted and Sherrod Brown are locked in a “dead heat,” and that data centers are “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”
Husted was appointed to the seat after JD Vance became vice president, and is running to keep it. Brown is a former senator trying to get back to Washington after losing Ohio’s other seat in 2024, who has made opposition to data centers the centerpiece of his campaign.
Brown has spent more than $1.9 million on three TV ad campaigns attacking companies for “gobbling up” energy, and called Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.” One ad said Husted “cut sweetheart tax deals” and fast-tracked approvals “while ordinary residents watched their electricity bills explode.”
At a crypto event at the White House on Wednesday, Trump told local leaders they should embrace data centers because “the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous.” The NRSC might want to add the president to the next memo.
The Trump administration has finally found a civil liberty worth defending, and it is the right to nonconsensually digitally undress people.
In May, Minnesota became the first state in the country to ban software that creates sexual images of real people without their consent, which seems like the kind of thing that shouldn’t require a law. The ban took effect August 1 with fines up to $500,000.
Musk’s xAI sued the state on July 27, five days before the law took effect, arguing that the law violated the First Amendment, as it would be unfairly held liable for what users do with its Grok chatbot. A judge denied its request to block the law.
This week, the Trump Justice Department filed a statement of interest in favor of xAI, calling the ban too broad. It claimed that the Minnesota law “sweeps up constitutional and productive conduct,” though it did not specify what conduct that involves digitally undressing a stranger is covered by the Constitution.
Musk admitted in January 2025 that the chatbot had been generating nude images of children at the request of users, which he blamed on “lapses in safeguards.” Attorneys representing five children have since filed a class action alleging their photos were used to generate child sexual abuse material on the platform.
If you want to know how the military feels about journalists in 2026, check the curb outside Vandenberg.
Five reporters were detained at gunpoint Monday at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California after base security mistook them for gate-crashers. The reporters were traveling in a government minivan driven by uniformed public-affairs staff on their way to an invitation-only groundbreaking ceremony for a new missile operator training facility near Santa Barbara.
Security officers drew firearms on the vehicle, sounded sirens, and erected barricades at the gate entrance. They ordered everyone out of the minivan with their hands raised. The two military personnel escorting the group were handcuffed and placed in base vehicles.
By the time everyone was released 30 minutes later, the ceremony they had been invited to attend was over. None of the reporters were charged with anything, because there was nothing to charge them with.
A spokesperson for Space Launch Delta 30 said the installation commander has ordered “a full review of the media coordination processes.” That is the military’s way of saying something went catastrophically wrong while using none of those words.
The Bureau of Land Management cannot legally kill a wild horse, but it can sell one for $25 to someone who will.
The Bureau of Land Management has been quietly exploiting a legal loophole that prohibits killing wild horses directly but allows the agency to sell them cheaply to third-party buyers. Those buyers then ship the horses to slaughter plants abroad, where they can fetch up to $750 a head.
The government spends about $3,000 per horse on helicopter roundups and transport, then sells the animal for as little as $25. After Trump took office, the bureau more than doubled its sales to more than 3,700 horses.
About 73,000 wild horses roam protected public lands in the West. The bureau rounds up roughly 9,500 a year, puts half up for adoption, and warehouses the rest in a holding system that now contains 58,000 animals at an annual cost of $100 million. The agency has pitched using a gas chamber to cut those costs, which Congress blocked.
Trump’s Project 2025 called on Congress to grant the Bureau of Land Management authority to “humanely dispose” of federally protected wild horses and burros, but Congress rejected it. He tried again in his proposed budgets for 2026 and 2027, both of which cut the program’s funding by 25%. Congress restored the protections both times.
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** “Go Woke, Go Broke” Turns Out to Be Neither Woke Nor True.** A new study from UC Berkeley’s Democracy Policy Lab found S&P 500 companies that maintained diversity programs performed just as well or better than in the stock market as companies that eliminated them under pressure from the Trump administration. Of the 395 major companies that had some form of DEI programming before Trump’s executive order, only 54 kept their initiatives. Those 54 saw no decline in returns, while Costco defied the order and continued to turn a profit. It turns out the market cares less about your politics than your products.
** Court Recommends Teacher Suspended Over Charlie Kirk Comments Be Reinstated.** A judge has recommended a Lee County school teacher be rehired and paid back wages following her suspension over a Facebook post regarding the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Mariah Roller, who teaches at Three Oaks Middle School in Fort Myers, posted a comment criticizing Kirk’s past defense of the Second Amendment. Administrative law judge Andrew Manko determined the post did not cause much disruption to the school, and that the post was spread by someone other than Roller after it was shared from her personal page.
MacKenzie Scott’s Donations Have Helped Erase $40 Billion in Medical Debt. Bezos’s former wife has already sold nearly half of her Amazon shares, and since divorcing him in 2019 she’s given over $19 billion to more than 2,000 nonprofits. This includes approximately $100 million to Undue Medical Debt, which purchases unpayable medical debt in bulk at a deep discount and then cancels it immediately. The nonprofit has so far canceled more than $40 billion of medical bills in every state in the country.
A Hawaii High Schooler Discovered That Coconut Fungi Can Eat Plastic. Vera Wang, a senior at Kaiser High School in Honolulu, took home several awards from the 2026 Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair for her work in a University of Hawaii lab investigating the fungi that grow on coconut husks. Wang found that the fungi are capable of breaking down both plastic and sunscreen, and that a tannin compound in coconut fiber stimulates the growth of the plastic-eating species that performs the best. In fact, several of the species that Wang discovered do not have an entry in the world’s largest genetic database of DNA sequences, meaning it’s possible these are species never seen before.
