600,000 views on TikTok. 49,000 likes on Reddit. Covered by Yahoo, Futurism, TechRadar, and Cleveland Magazine.

All from a four-minute speech. At a city council meeting. In Ravenna, Ohio. Population: 11,000.

The man who gave it is not a politician. Not a celebrity. Not a billionaire with a rival agenda.

He is, Will Hollingsworth — a former programmer, content creator, and digital artist who, in his own words, spent years working with AI and trained “the very machine that would eventually replace me.”

And what he said at that microphone — in four minutes — has become the defining statement of the entire data center debate in America.

Read every word. Then share it with everyone you know.

THE SPEECH THAT STOPPED A CITY COUNCIL COLD

On April 10, 2026, nearly 100 people packed the chambers of Ravenna City Council in Ohio — overflowing into the hallways — for a debate over a proposed 12-month moratorium on data center construction in the area.

Will Hollingsworth walked up to the microphone. He had four minutes.

What he said in those four minutes has been shared millions of times. And it deserves to be shared millions more.

He began by establishing something critical — his credibility:

“I am not against technology. I am not against AI. I have worked in tech. Furthermore, I have worked with AI models. I helped build the systems that are now driving this boom. Likewise, I understand what these facilities do — and I understand what they cost.”

Then he said the sentence that went around the world:

“We are being asked to drain our reservoirs, so a chatbot can write a poem or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot.” 

The room erupted in laughter. And then it went very quiet. Because everyone in that room understood exactly what he meant.

“THEY ARE NOT AN EMPLOYER. THEY ARE AN EXTRACTION.”

Hollingsworth then delivered the most devastating economic argument against data centers that anyone has put into plain English — in a single sentence.

“A big employer who uses the water of 50,000 people — which only hires about ten people — is not an employer. They are an extraction.” 

An extraction. Not a job creator. Not an economic engine. An extraction.

That word — extraction — captures in one syllable what researchers, economists, and community advocates have been trying to explain in lengthy reports and complicated charts for years.

A data center comes to your town. It takes your water. It takes your electricity. Likewise, it takes your land. It takes your quiet. It takes your road capacity. Furthermore, it takes your grid stability.

And it gives back: ten permanent jobs. Maybe fifteen.

That is not economic development. That is extraction. And Will Hollingsworth — a man who spent his career in tech — was the one who finally said it out loud, in public, at a microphone, in four minutes.

THE LINE THAT MADE 49,000 PEOPLE ON REDDIT STOP SCROLLING

Hollingsworth described what a data center does to a community’s water supply in terms that every single American can understand — no technical degree required.

“These facilities can use millions of gallons of water per day,” he said. “We are being asked to drain our reservoirs, so a chatbot can write a poem.” 

Millions of gallons. Per day. From Ravenna, Ohio. Population 11,000.

One Reddit user responded: “God damn that was good. Seriously this should be used as a script in every county these corporations are hustling.” 

Another wrote: “Lies, lies and more lies from megacorps invested up to their eyeballs in having just a few people in government believe them.” 

49,000 likes. For a speech at a city council meeting in a town of 11,000 people.

Because what Hollingsworth said is what millions of Americans across this country have been feeling — and nobody in power had put it so clearly before.

THE DETAIL THAT MAKES THIS STORY EVEN MORE POWERFUL

Here is what makes Will Hollingsworth different from every other data center opponent — and why his speech landed with such extraordinary force.

Will Hollingsworth is a former programmer, content creator, and digital artist who used Midjourney in his role and — in his own words — trained “the very machine that would eventually replace me.” 

He did not just lose his job to AI. He helped build the AI that took it. He contributed his expertise, his skills, and his years of work to the exact technology that is now driving the data center boom that threatens his community’s water and electricity.

He is not a technophobe. He is not anti-progress. He is a man who gave the AI industry everything he had — and watched it take his job, and then come for his town’s reservoir.

“I have moral obligations. I have environmental obligations. And as a tech person, I have ethical obligations to where I feel like I need to speak out on this.” 

Moral obligations. Environmental obligations. Ethical obligations.

From a man who helped build AI. Standing at a city council microphone. In a town of 11,000 people. Fighting for the water his neighbors drink.

AND THEN CAME THE LINE THAT BROKE EVERYONE IN THE ROOM

Hollingsworth closed his four-minute speech with a sentence so simple and so powerful that it silenced the entire chamber.

“I am not a cynic when it comes to technology,” he concluded. “I am a believer in community. I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI generated images. Let us choose the child.” 

Let us choose the child.

Not the server. Not the chatbot. Not the billion-dollar corporation that wants to drain the reservoir.

The child.

That sentence — six words — became the rallying cry of an entire movement. It was shared on TikTok 600,000 times. It was quoted on Reddit 49,000 times. It was covered by Yahoo, Futurism, TechRadar, and every major tech publication in America.

Because it is not a political statement. It is not a partisan argument. It is not a complicated policy position.

It is just the truth. Simple, clear, and undeniable.

A child’s clean water is worth more than a billion AI-generated images.

AND THEN SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED

By clearly, calmly, and articulately laying out the problems, the committee voted for a one-year moratorium on all new data center projects in the Ravenna-Shalersville area. Reasons cited were exactly the speaker’s points: the water footprint of AI and the environmental risks of forever chemicals. 

One man. Four minutes. A moratorium.

In Ravenna, Ohio. Population 11,000. Against some of the most powerful and well-funded corporations on earth.

Hollingsworth later said: “It has proven that this might be one of the very first, in a long time — at least in the last 10 years — actually bipartisan issues where it’s more important than party lines. This is more important than supporting a red or a blue candidate. This is about the environment. This is about our health.” 

More important than party lines. More important than red or blue. More important than who you voted for in the last election.

A drop of clean water for a child. That is what this is about.

And a former programmer who helped build AI — standing at a microphone in a town of 11,000 — just proved that one person, with four minutes and the truth, can change everything.

SHARE this post and make sure every American hears Will Hollingsworth’s four-minute speech. Share it for every community that has felt ignored. Share it for every child whose water is being drained. Share it for every family that was never asked. FOLLOW this page — and never miss the stories that matter. 

Comment below: Does Will Hollingsworth’s line — “a drop of clean water for a child is worth more than a billion AI-generated images” — speak for you? YES or NO — and what state are you from? Let’s make this the most shared post on this page. 

Sources: Futurism — April 17, 2026 | Tech Radar — April 13, 2026 | Yahoo News — April 17, 2026 | Cleveland Magazine — May 2026 | Reddit r/pcmasterrace — 49,000 likes | TikTok — Will Hollingsworth, 600,000+ views | Ravenna City Council Official Vote Record — April 10, 2026

 

BREAKING: TRUMP CELEBRATES 80TH BIRTHDAY WITH BILLIONAIRE DAVID ELLISON AFTER DOJ CLEARS PATH FOR ONE-MAN MEDIA EMPIRE 

For more than a year, this page has been tracking the relationship between Donald Trump and David Ellison, the 43-year-old technology heir and Paramount Sky dance CEO whose ambitions to control American media are now closer to reality than ever.

Tonight, at a White House spectacle costing more than $60 million, UFC chief Dana White escorted an 80-year-old Trump to the ring on the South Lawn. Ellison was right there with him, along with another familiar face: Mark Zuckerberg, seated ringside. The oligarchs were all together for the party.

Ellison had plenty to celebrate. On Friday, the Trump Justice Department approved Paramount's staggering $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery without requiring a single divestiture or concession. Not one.

Think about what Ellison will soon control: two Hollywood film studios, HBO Max, CBS News, and CNN. He already fired Stephen Colbert and installed Bari Weiss to reshape CBS News in a direction critics call MAGA-friendly. Now CNN is next.

This didn't happen by accident. Ellison threw Trump a private dinner in April with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio all in attendance. The same Justice Department reviewing his merger. The same DOJ that just waved it through.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said it plainly: "This is terrible news for every American who doesn't want Trump-aligned billionaires to control what they watch and how much they pay."

This is what media capture looks like in real time. This page has been telling you it was coming. The gladiators performed tonight for an 80-year-old man who would rather be Caesar than a president.

Share if this reporting matters

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Nearly all Holocaust scholars, who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust, have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature, the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of the crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.

Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum LA deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN” CAN’T ONLY MEAN NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash. In the hands of Zionists, “never again” means precisely that, never again only for Jews.

Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and wrote “Survival in Auschwitz.” He was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

He deplored “Manichaeanism,” those who “shun nuance and complexity” and who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duals, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside.”

Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.

“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in “The Drowned and the Saved.” “[H]is fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility,” Levi adds. “[W]illingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.”

These bitter lessons of the Holocaust, which warn that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin, that we can all become willing executioners, that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust, are what Zionists seek to deny. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.

Holocaust studies, which exploded in the 1970s and were epitomized by the deification of the Holocaust survivor and fervent Zionist Elie Wiesel — literary critic Alfred Kazin called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust” — have now surrendered any claim to championing universal truths. These Holocaust scholars use a benchmark evil, as Norman Finkelstein points out, “not as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club.” The mantra “Do not compare,” Finkelstein writes, “is the mantra of moral blackmailers.”

Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, as Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews.”

Holocaust studies are based on the fallacy that unique suffering confers unique entitlement. This was always the purpose of what Finkelstein calls “The Holocaust Industry.”

“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles Maier in “The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity.” “It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? … Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?”

Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival — its “right to exist” — is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an anti-Semite facilitating another genocide of Jews.

This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they seek to obscure. What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians in the Bengal famine by the British or the Soviet-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Manifest Destiny any different from the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of Lebensraum? These too were holocausts, fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlusts.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, preventing U.N. resolutions and sanctions from being adopted to condemn its crimes, and demonizing Palestinians and their supporters, is proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it.

Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now Namibia.

“[S]uch magic,” Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal writes, “legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.”

Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article on Gaza on Oct. 13, 2023 — six days after the incursion by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters into Israel — titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance.

Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza, and the blood-curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials — the defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” — the stench of genocide.

“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that — as we teach our students — there are red flags that once we notice them, we're supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Segal said when I interviewed him, “even if it's not genocidal yet.”

You can watch my interview with Segal here.

“Holocaust studies as a field might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing,” he continued. “If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, maybe it's good that we won't have Holocaust studies anymore. And maybe it will open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history.”

Segal paid for his courage and his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — which has issued no condemnation of the genocide — was revoked.

Nearly two years into the genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars finally issued a statement saying that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide.

But the vast majority of Holocaust scholars remain mute, endlessly condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas while ignoring those committed by Israel. They were mute when South Africa argued before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. They were mute when Amnesty International published a report in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide.

“How many Palestinian students apply to graduate programmes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies around the world? Usually none. How many Palestinian scholars identify themselves as scholars in this field? They, too, can be counted on one hand,” Segal writes in a co-authored article in the Journal of Genocide Research.

Genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes in “The World After Gaza.”

The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended. The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth — barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable.

----

By Chris Hedges, see comments for sources and more.

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 Your dog knows something you probably don't. That soft gray plant in the border—the one with leaves like rabbit ears—is scanning the air for chemical signals. Animals recognize lamb's ear instinctively, the way they know which grasses settle an upset stomach.

There's a reason for that recognition. Long before cotton swabs and sterile gauze, battlefield surgeons reached for these leaves when the carnage overwhelmed their supplies. A single leaf could drink up an astonishing amount of blood, three times its own weight, transforming from velvet to crimson sponge in seconds. But the absorption was only half the magic.

The plant secretes its own pharmacy. Those fuzzy hairs aren't just soft—they're tiny factories producing compounds that wage quiet war against bacteria. While the leaf soaks up blood, those same fibers release substances that keep wounds clean. Medieval medics didn't understand the chemistry, but they understood results. Men wrapped in lamb's ear healed when others didn't.

Modern researchers finally caught up about fifteen years ago. Labs started analyzing what traditional healers had known through observation: the leaves contain natural antimicrobial agents similar to what we now synthesize in expensive wound dressings. Hospitals have been running trials. Some surgical units keep dried leaves in their experimental protocols, testing whether this ancient remedy might solve modern problems like antibiotic-resistant infections.

The plant doesn't advertise its abilities. It sits quietly in cottage gardens, softening the edges of stone paths, glowing silver in moonlight. Most gardeners grow it for texture, for the way it makes other plants look brighter by contrast. Children love to stroke it. Cats occasionally chew it when their stomachs bother them, another knowing buried in instinct.

It spreads gently if you let it, never aggressively, sending out new plantlets that root where they touch ground. The whole colony becomes a living medicine cabinet, renewing itself each spring, asking almost nothing in return. Poor soil suits it fine. Forget to water and it shrugs, those thick leaves holding moisture the way they once held soldiers' blood.

Every spring when the flower stalks rise—tall purple spikes that bees adore—I think about all the gardens that hold this plant without knowing its story. How many thousands of neighborhoods have this healer growing by the mailbox, pressed into service only as a placeholder, something silver to fill space.

Your garden is full of these quiet powers. Plants remember what we forgot when we started buying everything in bottles. The knowledge isn't lost—it's growing three feet from your back door, waiting for attention, for wonder, for someone to see past the decorative and recognize the profound.

That fuzzy leaf your hand passes over on the way to pull weeds? It's been saving lives longer than your family has had a surname. [XE8YG]

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