Missouri data center fight at the heart of Sen. Hawley’s speech warning of AI threat

A battle over a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence data center near St. Louis has moved to the national stage.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, used the ongoing political upheaval in Festus to illustrate what he calls a fight for the nation’s “moral covenant” against big tech.

Although petitioners gained enough signatures to recall the city’s mayor and two councilmen, the Festus City Council voted Monday not to move forward with the recall elections.

Hawley’s keynote address at the 2026 American Compass New World Gala last week focused on the great risks AI poses to American workers, arguing it is a direct threat to the country’s moral fabric. He warned the rapid deployment of AI is creating a “K-shaped economy” in which a small group of tech elites rises to incredible wealth while ordinary workers are pulled down. 

“The upper arm grows fabulously rich,” Hawley said at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. “The lower arm gets quietly replaced, and what is harder to bear than the loss of a wage? Quietly less needed.” 

The senator rejected the idea that government should step out of the way and let capitalism dictate the future. Instead, he argued the economy must be shaped by a moral vision of putting people ahead of money, drawing parallels to historic efforts such as the Homestead Act and the creation of the eight-hour workday.

When the council approved the project based on a developer’s promises, voters responded at the ballot box by ousting every incumbent up for reelection just one week later.

“The people of Festus did not ask to be at the center of our national argument about artificial intelligence,” Hawley said, “but they did prove something our forefathers would have recognized at once: that the choice this country must make is still made by us, not for us.”

Hawley called the backlash “the covenant asserting itself,” saying the residents of Festus are a clear sign working-class Americans won’t tolerate a future designed entirely by Silicon Valley.

“This is the administrative state, this time with venture capital behind it, and I have the same objection, and it is a covenant objection,” Hawley said. “A country governed by experts is not self-governing. A country governed by oligarchs is not a republic. And men who answer to nothing higher than their own appetites are living by the very liberty.

“(John) Winthrop warned us against the liberty that is really license, the law of the jungle, wearing the mask of innovation. I’ll tell you instead what I’m for. I’m for the republic, I’m for the citizen, I’m for labor, the community and the family. I’m for the worker, I’m for the small town, I’m for the constitutional inheritance that says this country belongs not to a board and not to a bureau, but to the people of the United States.”