Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects).

And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.

And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.

> However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally…

I wish I lived in your world.

> government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally

The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.

> However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”

Bring it on. Data center developers are getting government officials to sign NDAs as an end-run around the democratic process (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...).

And that sounds like pro-datacenter corruption to me, and it's way better documented that the aspersions you're casting.

> there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects

That's bullshit. About the only thing Americans agree on is that they hate datacenters: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/data-center-ai-de...:

> Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans....

> According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.