Who Needs To Breathe When You Can Get Rid of Woke AI, Instead?
A coast-to-coast AI buildout with no environmental review, no public say, and an executive order that erases women, people of color, and queer communities from federal tech.
On July 23, 2025 the Trump Administration dropped a massive AI bomb on us. Sadly, amongst the chaos of the Epstein files it was easily missed. But I’m here to tell you about it.
They called it the AI Action Plan. Alongside it came an executive order titled, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.”
One sweeping plan clears the way for a coast-to-coast AI buildout. They want to shove massive data centers, power lines, and energy plants onto public land with no environmental review and no public say.
The AI Action Plan goes further, giving the Department of Defense “priority access” to AI computing power in any national emergency.
So, it’s no coincidence that just days after, a leaked memo revealed an off-the-record deal between Homeland Security and the Pentagon to jointly target immigrants and so-called “resistance” movements like those we saw in Los Angeles earlier this year.
The paired executive order forces every federally used AI model to strip out diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is a move that guarantees the systems will ignore or distort the lives of women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. It’s a manual for consolidating power, warping the truth, and prepping the tools of war for use at home.
It’s not enough for them to go after people of color, women, and everyone DEI stands for. They’ve also got it out for the entire damn planet.
‘Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government’
Trump’s new executive order says the federal government will only buy or use AI systems that follow two rules:
they have to be “truth-seeking”
“ideologically neutral.”
It sounds harmless, right? That is until you read the rest of it and see the truth. In reality, he defines “ideological neutrality” as stripping out anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as interpreted by the Trump regime.
It also lumps DEI in with “critical race theory,” “transgenderism,” and even acknowledging systemic racism. Yep, that’s right. Even acknowledging that systematic racism exists will land you in hot water with the federal government. The blatant racism and misogynic beliefs are beyond obvious as they frame DEI not as a civil rights commitment, but as a political agenda that “distorts” truth.
We know that this isn’t about accuracy or neutrality at all. It’s about controlling what the federal government’s AI is allowed to say, and erasing the perspectives and identities of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities from the systems that will increasingly shape public services, hiring, and even military tools used on Americans.
Under this order, if an AI system acknowledges racism, sexism, or discrimination as real forces in society, it could be considered biased and banned from federal use. If it refuses to misgender someone, that’s considered “ideological.”
I’m running out of creative ways to point out that we’re living in a Ministry of Truth reboot from the book 1984.
It’s also part of a bigger pattern we’ve seen this year.
From the very first day of Trumps return to office, his team has dismantled DEI programs across agencies, cut protections for marginalized groups, purged DEI staff from the military and foreign service, and targeted school policies that acknowledge race or gender identity.
This order just takes that same “fight” into the tech systems that will define how information is presented and whose voices are recognized by our government. Period point blank, this is technological attack on women, people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone he considers “DEI.” This will get worse in conjunction with the new AI plan. There is no sugarcoating it.
Trump et al., please.. just say you hate women, queer people, disabled people, and people of color and move on already. Just leave us hell alone.
You can read the executive order in full by clicking here.
Environmental Dystopia Unlocked
It’s the familiar arc from every dystopian movie. Billionaires and corporations burn the world down for their greed, and then build their utopia on the ashes while the rest of us struggle to survive.
So, one of the biggest changes in the AI Action Plan is something I’d never heard of before, “categorical exclusions” but here’s what I found:
Normally, if the government wants to build something big on federal land, like an AI data center or power plant, it has to go through a long environmental review. That process studies how a project could affect air, water, wildlife, and communities, and it includes public hearings so residents can voice concerns.
A categorical exclusion is a type of exemption under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that allows the government to skip an environmental assessment on how their project will affect the air and water in the area.
Under the AI Action Plan, these exclusions could be used for massive AI-related projects while also fast-tracking them under other laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
The Clean Air Act is the main U.S. law that limits air pollution to protect public health and the environment, and the Clean Water Act is the main law that controls water pollution to keep rivers, lakes, and drinking water clean. This plan says they do not have to do either whilst building.
And how do they get this exemption? Simple. If the government decides a project will not significantly affect the environment, it grants the exemption to itself.
The “AI Action Plan” wants use these exclusions to skip environmental reviews for AI-related projects. This includes things massive data centers, high-voltage power lines, cooling plants, and even new energy facilities.
So, if the Trump Administration decides a project is important for AI or ‘national security’, it can get the green light much faster, with little public input. They don’t care about your clean water, air, the wildlife, or the long-term irreversible damage they’ll cause to the environment.
If you want to know what to expect, just look at what Elon Musk’s Data Center for xAI did to Memphis.
I’d actually written on this a few months ago because Elon Musk’s xAI built a massive data center there in a historically Black neighborhood already choking on industrial pollution. It ran methane gas turbines without the required air permits, pumping out formaldehyde and nitrogen oxides into a community with some of the highest asthma and cancer rates in the country.
Residents of Memphis actually say it was done in secret, with local officials and business leaders making backroom deals before the public knew it existed. The facility swallows huge amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water every day, threatening the power grid and the city’s drinking supply.
You can read the Memphis article in full by clicking here.
Who cares about your drinking water and ability to breathe? People like Elon Musk & Peter Thiel have money to make, damn it.
The entire thing is like a student grading their own final exam.
Wait, a minute. This is becoming a trend… didn’t we just see this with Jack Cobb allowing voting machine vendors to write their own tests for our federally paid for voting machines? Weird.
The Federal Lands Most Vulnerable
The new AI plan openly admits that the administration wants to use federal land for the massive build-out of AI systems for the federal government and the U.S. military. It sounds dystopian because it is.
Public land will be converted into industrial complexes for supercomputers and data farms with no oversight from the EPA or public. The next AI supercomputer could be right next to the trails you hike, the campsites you love, and the forests you hunt in.
Millions of acres of public land are up for grabs, from wide-open desert in the West to forests stretching through the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, and land right next to national monuments and wildlife refuges.
I know many of us immediately worried about the national parks.
Same, honestly. What I found is that while building inside a national park is harder without Congress, the land just outside their borders is fair game. Now, I can’t say he won’t try, but there’s more of a fight there if he does.
One day you could stand on a famous trail or overlook and see not open wilderness, but a skyline of cooling towers, power lines, and massive server warehouses, all built without the public ever getting a real say.
The BLM land is often open desert, grassland, or scrub. These are places that are often used for grazing, mining, energy projects, and even recreation. However, they do not have the same strict protections as national parks or even wilderness areas.
Areas like central and northern Nevada, western Utah, northern and western Arizona, the Mojave Desert in California, parts of Wyoming, northwest New Mexico, and eastern Oregon are likely targets because they have huge, flat tracts of BLM land, existing power lines, and few nearby residents.
That makes it easier for the government to approve big projects there without anyone noticing or fighting back.
This Didn’t Happen Overnight
In the first months of 2025, the administration pushed through a wave of executive orders that tore up major environmental protections. They weakened the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires the government to study and publicly disclose how projects will affect the environment before approving them.
They cut back protections for endangered species, making it easier to build in sensitive habitats and they rolled back other environmental rules that gave communities and conservation groups the ability to challenge projects in court.
The result is that public lands (including places right next to national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges) are now far easier to exploit.
In the past, a big industrial project on these lands would have faced years of environmental studies, public hearings, and possible lawsuits. Now, with those safeguards gone or weakened, the path is much shorter and much quieter.
The Department of Energy is already showing where this is headed. It has put out a formal request for feedback from tech companies and contractors on building AI facilities on land it controls, with operations potentially starting as soon as 2027. That land includes large stretches of the American West, much of it near or within reach of protected areas.
When you combine these loosened rules with the AI plan’s promise to fast-track projects on federal land for “national security” or “AI innovation,” it creates a straight shot from corporate proposal to bulldozers on the ground to smog in your lungs.
By the time you find out where the next AI supercomputer is going, it won’t be a proposal on paper. It will be steel rising against the skyline, cooling towers humming, and chain-link fences where open land used to be.
The creeks will run warmer, the air will taste different, and the night sky will glow with the light of a facility you never voted for, never got to weigh in on, and can’t get rid of.
Once the land is taken, it doesn’t come back and if this plan goes through, that future isn’t some distant dystopia it’s already on the calendar. It’s on us to fight back.
Note From The Author
You might be wondering who is behind this newsletter. I am just a mom and a nurse, and I do this in my "free" time because this is my way of fighting back a way to cut through the noise and tell you the truth about what’s really happening.
My mission is simple: to provide you with honest, in-depth reporting that isn't afraid to challenge the powerful, even when it's hard.
If you want to support independent media that tells the truth, you can subscribe for free by clicking the "Subscribe" button and hitting "none" when the payment choices pop up.
However, if you can support this work with a paid subscription (monthly or yearly) this helps me by giving me more time to focus on research and writing, and less time worrying about paying for the software and research tools I need to do this work.
Either way, thank you for reading, and thank you for being here. We’re in this together. ♥
The opposite of "woke" is "unconscious".
Money truly is at the root of all evil.