Far-Left NGOs Invaded The Texas GOP Convention To Spread False Claims About AI And Data Centers

Every premiere has a dress rehearsal. The actors run the full script in a smaller room, before a friendlier crowd, so that the timing is right when the curtain goes up for real. On June 13, in Grand Ballroom B at the Republican Party of Texas convention, I watched a dress rehearsal. The premiere is scheduled for July 18, when the same network stages a “conservative grassroots” “Nationwide Day of Protest” against AI data centers in at least 13 locations. The panel and the protest are sold to conservatives as two independent expressions of a genuine conservative grassroots awakening. They are nothing of the kind. They are one production, with one script, one director, and one source of money, and the convention was the dress rehearsal you were allowed to watch.

Start with the question that should stop any thinking conservative cold. Why would money tied to the AI industry, and to the tech fortunes built beside it, pay to organize opposition to AI infrastructure? The premise seems self-refuting. People do not fund their own enemies. The puzzle dissolves the instant you grasp what the fight is actually about. It is not a fight over whether AI gets built. It is a fight over who is allowed to build it, and over who writes the rules that decide. The economist Gabriel Kolko explained this pattern a half century ago. The great incumbents of the railroad and meatpacking eras did not fear regulation. They wrote it, because rules drafted to their specifications crushed the smaller rivals who could not absorb the cost of compliance. Safety becomes the moat. The incumbent does not drain the swamp around his castle, he deepens it, and he names the project public protection.

Read with that lens, the funding trail stops being mysterious and becomes legible. The group behind the July 18 protest is called Humans First. The Washington Post reported that Humans First was incubated by the Center for AI Safety, which supplied seed money as a loan and whose co-founder appears on the California incorporation papers as the new group’s chief executive. The Center for AI Safety is not a conservative institution, and its money is not conservative money. A detailed public accounting puts its funding near $23.3 million, of which more than $21 million came from a small circle of effective-altruism donors. Open Philanthropy, financed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, supplied roughly $12.49 million. Jaan Tallinn, an early Skype engineer who also sits on the Center’s board, routed about $7.5 million through his Survival and Flourishing Fund. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund put in $6.5 million before the fraud collapsed, after which the bankruptcy estate clawed back some $5.2 million of it. Even OpenAI is in the documents, with a $333,333 grant on its 2023 tax filing, and its chief executive among the signatories of the Center’s headline extinction statement.

The staffing confirms what the money implies. The movement strategist for Humans First, Jeremy Ornstein, helped build the Sunrise Movement, and in 2018 he was among the activists who occupied Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside a newly elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His coalition counterpart, Alexander McCoy, is a self-described member of the Democratic Socialists of America who co-founded a veterans group built to impeach President Trump and who, as The Washington Post separately confirmed, campaigned for Vice President Harris in 2024. These are not incidental hires. They are the people who write the script that conservatives are then recruited to perform.

Now watch the same company take the convention stage. The host was the Alliance for Secure AI, run by Brendan Steinhauser, whose conservative resume is authentic and whose usefulness depends on exactly that. The tell sits in one line of his own biography, where he serves on the board of the AI Policy Institute, one of the policy shops the trade press places squarely inside the effective-altruism orbit. The panel’s moderator, Robert Arnakis, is the Alliance’s own Director of External Affairs, which means the supposedly neutral host and the supposedly neutral moderator are a single organization. Dr. Vael Gates, introduced from the stage as arriving from Berkeley, is no Texas grassroots activist at all. She is a career effective-altruism AI-safety researcher whose own talk materials list Open Philanthropy among her funders, and she delivered the verbatim catechism of that movement, warning that frontier labs are building a “second intelligent species” that humanity may not survive. The faith segment came from a Future of Life Institute speaker, an organization founded by Max Tegmark and the same Jaan Tallinn whose money already sits in the Center’s ledgers. The youth-jobs testimony came from the Young People’s Alliance, a group whose founders, by the cataloguing of InfluenceWatch, began by searching for ways to oppose Republican initiatives in the North Carolina legislature, now rebranded as a bipartisan generational voice.

Then there is Amy Kremer, the recurring face bolted onto the front of the apparatus. She told the room she had never advocated for more regulation in her life and found herself doing so now, a confession that should have made the audience sit up rather than nod. Kremer co-founded Tea Party Patriots in 2009 and was ousted within roughly a year, after which her own co-founders sued her, and a judge found her in contempt, remarking that she was straddling a very fine line and had fallen over it. The woman now warning conservatives that elites are capturing their movement was once accused, by the movement’s own founders, of capturing theirs. She does not stand still, as the moderator said admiringly, and she has not stood still here. She has simply found far-left benefactors with deeper pockets than the Tea Party ever had.

Senator Angela Paxton presents the harder and more important case, precisely because she is a genuine elected Republican rather than a rented face. That is what makes her performance so valuable to the network and so costly to the rest of us. Her central message was opposition to federal preemption of state AI law, delivered in the unimpeachable language of the 10th Amendment. The argument collapses the moment you ask what it produces. If every state writes its own AI code, the country does not get 50 laboratories of liberty, it gets 50 incompatible compliance regimes, which is the single most effective way to strangle an emerging industry. A patchwork is a moat. Only the largest incumbents can afford 50 sets of lawyers, and the open-source challengers and Texas startups cannot, which is exactly why the safety lobby wants the patchwork and dresses it as states’ rights. Worse, this is a national-security question wearing a federalism costume. The U.S. is in a race with China to set the terms of the most consequential technology of the century, and a thicket of conflicting state rules is the surest way to lose it. Senator Paxton, whatever her sincerity, stood on a Republican stage and delivered the precise policy outcome that a Berkeley-funded lobby has spent millions to engineer. That is not a smear. It is a description of what happened.

The factual claims fared no better than the constitutional ones. Heather Fazio warned of forever chemicals and heavy metals in data-center wastewater, then conceded under questioning that closed-loop cooling recirculates its water, which is the design most large facilities now use. Kremer volunteered a “second water footprint” for power generation as if she had uncovered a conspiracy, when steam-cycle cooling is ordinary engineering that applies to every thermal plant on the grid. The water numbers offered from the floor ranged from 50 billion to 160 billion gallons, a spread so wide it is not a measurement but a mood, and a tripling of one’s own estimate is the signature of fear, uncertainty, and doubt rather than fact. The cost-shifting alarm ignores that Texas already passed Senate Bill 6 to reallocate large-load infrastructure costs, and that hyperscale developers routinely fund their own interconnection. Every grievance, examined, turned out to be either already addressed, easily mitigated by existing technology, or simply asserted.

I want to be precise, because precision is what makes the charge stick. Not everyone on that stage is a witting operative, and saying so would be both false and lazy. The point is structural. The convening machinery and the issue framing belong to the effective-altruism AI-safety network, and sincere conservatives with real anxieties about water, jobs, and their children are being incorporated as validators, their credibility lent to a script written in California and funded through a Facebook fortune, a Skype fortune, and the residue of a crypto fraud. The tell is the uniformity. The same preemption line, the same chatbot tragedies, the same word-for-word hedge that the speaker uses AI daily and wants only common-sense guardrails, recurs across groups that claim no connection to one another. Independent movements do not generate matching messaging architecture. Coordinated campaigns do. The moderator even named the model aloud at the close, calling it the Bernie-to-Bannon coalition, which is an honest description of an operation that runs on Bernie’s money and Bannon’s audience.

The dress rehearsal is over. The premiere is July 18. You have now seen the cast, read the playbill, and traced the financing, and you are entitled to decide whether the anger you feel about your water bill and your children’s future should be spent advancing the regulatory agenda of the very tech billionaires you were told to fear. The grievances are real. That is what makes the operation work. But the hands on the marquee have not changed, and they are not your hands.

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