Democrats’ Spunky Spooks Show There’s No Blue Light at the End of the Trump Tunnel 

Last November two CIA Democrats won governorships in eastern states —Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey— joining the growing ranks of spooks in high places for Team Blue (there are plenty in the GOP ranks, as well, as it’s a bipartisan trend).

Both Spanberger and Sherrill, along with the equally spooky and bloodthirsty Democrat Senator from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, are mentioned as 2028 presidential contenders where they’d certainly have the backing of their friends on Wall Street and in the digital-military-industrial complex who have helped them outspend their opponents by wide margins in previous races. Despite the recent success of Democratic Socialists in Democrat congressional primaries in New York City, the national party is still dominated by the big money war machine.

Following Spanberger and Sherill’s victories, Democrats touted their focus on the cost-of-living crisis during their campaigns. They might not have had meaningful solutions, but hey, the messaging was top notch.as they pitched “common sense solutions”, “reaching across the aisle”, and “access” to healthcare.

Yet, as we pointed out at the time, there was nothing in the history of Spanberger and Sherrill—who reportedly used to dine together in DC off of gold-rimmed wedding china— that showed any concern at all with improving the economic lot of the American peasantry. During their time in DC (Sherrill was elected to the House in 2018 representing New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District while Spanberger was a three-time House Democratic Representative from Virginia’s 7th Congressional District) they never showed anything but disdain for the working class, not so much as co-sponsoring a token bill to slow the speed of exploitation.

With that in mind, the best voters in Virginia and New Jersey could hope for was that they might throw a few worthless means-tested pieces of policy to the peasants as part of some resume building for 2028.  At worst, well, we’re getting a look at it as Sherrill sics the state police on ICE protestors, Spanberger spits in the face of the labor movement, and both champion AI data centers.

At the end of May, Sherill said she deployed State Police to “keep the peace” as people gathered to protest the disappearance of people into the black hole of Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark.  What she meant was that protestors would be herded into “peaceful protest zones.” Predictably, it ended with troopers getting violent with those who weren’t a fan of protesting detentions from a cage of their own.

Rather than rein in, they coordinated with ICE, which had just recently used pepper spray against U.S. Sen. Andy Kim who had himself tried to play peacemaker.

Down south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Spanberger on May 14 vetoed legislation to give more labor rights to Virginia public workers. 

The proposal, backed by all Virginia labor groups, would have expanded a 2020 law that allows local government employees to opt-in to collective bargaining — if their localities permit it. Since then, public school teachers, public janitorial staff, and firefighters in some counties and cities have done just that, and the proposed legislation would have made it possible statewide.

Spanberger, after originally voicing support for the measure and attending a SEIU rally in Richmond in February, tried to water down the legislation and then killed it altogether. Too much, too fast, she said. Her concern over the pace of change only seems to extend to workers.

While she throws them under the bus, how about this headline from the Augusta Free Press: Gov. Spanberger taking brave stand on behalf of data center developers. From the article:

“Voters,” Spanberger said, taking the softball on data centers from MS NOW’s Jonathan Capehart at Tuesday’s Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference, and fouling it off her kneecap, “may not necessarily want a data center, but they certainly want the iPhone with the data on it in their pocket, which I say not to be kind of sassy and disrespectful, but because it’s actually true.

“And so, sometimes, the conversation has to be, if you like ordering things online or watching movies or storing your photos in the cloud, like, that’s, data centers are behind that and are essential to it. Data centers are a driver, in many ways, of Virginia’s economy,”

How you like that “abundance”?

Virginia nearly faced a government shutdown as passage of the budget was delayed due to a fight over billions in tax breaks for data centers.

In the state with the densest concentration of such facilities, Spanberger opposed efforts to end the data center retail sales and use tax exemption, which gifted the industry $1.9 billion last year. Her office told Politico earlier this year that Virginia “should not be going back on agreements it has signed with companies that have brought business investment and substantial economic development to the Commonwealth.”

Something tells me Spanberger has other motivations for her opposition. According to MultiState, Virginia has the world’s largest concentration of data centers, with more than 200 facilities alone in Northern Virginia, which also happens to be home to the CIA and the Pentagon.

Sherrill, on the other hand, is proposing Democrats much beloved “guardrails” for data centers. What are those in this case? From the New Jersey Globe:

The four-pillar plan proposes that data center developers must “pay their own way” and bring energy to the grid with them; be transparent and report energy and water use; engage with communities on concerns involving noise and light pollution; and build facilities with union labor and strong wages.

Gee, what could go wrong? Let’s see:

Be transparent and report energy and water use. Transparency isn’t really the issue; it’s the actual use.

Engage. Code for “we hear your concerns, now get lost.”

Union labor and strong wages. That’s fine, but data centers don’t provide lasting jobs. It’s a short-term project with long term consequences.

Pay their own way. This one sounds important but is actually what data center companies are already doing or trying to do. From Distilled:

48 GW of proposed data centers—roughly 33% of all planned capacity—now plan to skip the grid by building “behind-the-meter” projects. This is a very new trend.

A little more than a year ago, virtually all data center developers planned to use the electric grid to power 100% of their projects. In December 2024, there was less than 2 GW of planned behind-the-meter data center capacity, according to our data center tracker at Cleanview. Then in 2025, developers announced roughly 40 projects that planned to skip the grid partially or entirely.

Some of these projects will soon be home to America’s largest fossil fuel power plants, like Homer City Energy Campus in PA—a proposed 4 GW+ natural gas plant that will send all of its power to an onsite data center. Other projects will use a combination of technologies—everything from solar, wind, batteries, and even nuclear. Natural gas is by far the most common, though. 72% of projects plan to use it.

What could be some other benefits for tech companies going this route? GOP Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s DATA Act of 2026 hints at where this is going. From Data Center Dynamics:

If passed the bill would create a new utility category called “consumer-regulated electric utilities” (CREUs), with companies who build their own independent power infrastructure falling under this new designation. In order to qualify for CREU, the utilities would have to be completed disconnected from the main grid and built solely to serve new electric loads…

The exemption would allow data center developers to avoid the provisions of the Federal Power Act, including Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) rate regulation, reliability standards, interconnection rules, transmission planning, and merger approval.

So Sherrill’s guardrails are really just decorations along the broligarchy highway.

Trump’s Gift

The gift of Trump (or what they think it is): they don’t even need to pretend to “fight” for working class interests because Donald has been such a disaster, they’ll win without lifting a finger.

Are they wrong? Consider labor’s impotence in the face of Spanberger’s Virginia veto. Retired United Electrical Workers Union Political Action Director Chris Townsend comments:

Once Spanberger made it clear that she was going to veto the legislation, the labor movement responded with nothing more than an insiders’ political campaign. There were never any mobilizations of the union membership, let alone the broad working class, or of supporting Democratic lawmakers. A few letters were released, some outrage was offered, several press conferences were held, and that was it. 

As Trump would say, “sad.”

Perhaps  “centrist” spooks like Spanberger and Sherrill are just doing us a favor by once again reminding labor that any effort to move Democrats leftwards is a giant waste of valuable time and resources. Spanberger has even in the past gone so far as to criticize Democrats who do suggest the party should do more for the working class and cut down on all the killing abroad. Following her narrow victory in 2020, she blamed Democrats like Rashida Tlaib from Michigan for the party’s losses and argued a more pro-capitalist platform was the path forward.

Translated: you’ll have to pry the ratchet from their cold hands.

Spanberger and Sherill are doing their part to reposition the center during Trump’s second go round, which has already delivered more (bipartisan) genocide, (bipartisan) illegal wars of agression, (bipartisan) wrecking ball to the federal government and safety net, (bipartisan) the embrace of global warming, (bipartisan) an expansion of ICE paramilitary, (bipartisan) the police state architecture to go after “anti-capitalists” as terrorists.