If you’re thinking of attending any sort of public meeting about, say, zoning changes in and around your community that enable the building of data centers, here’s something to keep in mind: a school teacher has now been carried out of one such meeting and booked in jail for clapping after someone else’s speech. “I think we’re all in a state of fear because of what this government’s doing to us,” an anonymous attendee of that meeting told the Wichita TV news outlet KWCH in a report from July 22. The meeting in Emporia, Kansas concerned zoning to enable the construction of the Flint Hills Digital Campus data center, a proposed “gigawatt-scale” facility. Let’s get this out of the way: the teacher in question, 37-year-old Lux Claridge, was warned. The whole room was warned before this happened—warned not to clap, which is an expression of approval.
A man clapped once during public comment at a data-center zoning meeting in Emporia, Kansas. They arrested him. Remember… no dissent allowed! Just be silent like an obedient domesticated taxpayer while they fast‑track a data center in your backyard. pic.twitter.com/2iEE41Akwq — Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) July 26, 2026 Across the three videos released so far of the incident—in the Jason Bassler X post above, along with the two videos at the KWCH website, one of which is a news report while the other is just footage of the meeting, you can see an ostensible final warning, and then what I suppose you would call a rule violation in the form of clapping.
