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More Than 500 Towns Restrict Builds As Councils Shutter Public Comment
Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.
Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."
Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.
Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.
Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.
The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.
(Score: 2) by jb on Sunday August 30, @09:41AM (2 children)
How can a death threat possibly be legitimate?
I would have thought that threatening to kill someone is one of the most illegitimate things anyone could do...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bentonite on Sunday August 30, @10:25AM (1 child)
Legitimate also means real - clearly it wasn't about conformance to laws or rules (would it be legitimate to go out of your way to follow unjust laws?).
Most death threats are bluffs, to try to get someone to stop doing x.
If someone actually wanted to kill someone, clearly they would kill them first and then talk to their dead body.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @05:12PM
Unless, of course, they open their mouth first and kill later. I'll note that a number of mass shooters talk about their plans before they actually murder someone. For example, the US Secret Service sponsored a study of recent school violence ("To aid in these efforts, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) studied 41 incidents of targeted school violence that occurred at K-12 schools in the United States from 2008 to 2017."). One conclusion they reached (pg. 45):
School violence tends to be by young adults, who often lack in planning and self-restraint, so it's probably a biased sample. That's still a number of cases where talk preceded action.