Death threats are now a siting input, and 500-plus towns are the output

Nothing in this pattern rewards a particular vote. Marshall's council gave opponents the one-year pause they had asked for ^[1], and on August 12, ten days later, its police department told members they were the subject of a credible death threat tied to the project, with the investigation still open according to Mayor Scott Wolfersberger ^[2][3]. Box Elder County's commissioners voted the other way, passing two resolutions for the Stratos project area, and Commissioner Lee Perry told KSL he has police stationed outside his house ^[10]. NBC News reported on August 21 that leaders nationwide are getting death threats regardless of which way they vote ^[14]. In Marshall no suspect has been identified and it is not clear whether the sender was for or against the build ^[4]. In April, an Indianapolis councilman, Ron Gibson, had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning ^[11].

What this does to the hearing record matters more than any single case. Salix's mayor called officers into the chamber while the public and councilman Gene Monk objected to the vote proceeding ^[7]. Monk's argument was that five people should not be making the call: "It's too big of a decision for us five people" ^[8]. Public comment is the load-bearing part of a defensible approval, and a project whose record was thinned for safety reasons has a weaker answer when someone litigates it later.

The Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, built from a year of scraping X and Reddit, puts most of the violent language against infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority, many of them using memes, emojis and misspellings to dodge moderation ^[15][16]. It also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than incidents earlier in the year ^[17]. One caution on the numbers: the reported window runs from July 2025 to July 2026, which cannot describe a year already scraped ^[15], so read the volume surge as directional rather than measured.

For anyone sequencing sites, the transmissible case is Saline Township, Michigan. Threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus preceded treasurer Jennifer Zink's resignation in May and moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities ^[12]. On the reported figures, one campus accounts for close to four percent of the 500-plus local restrictions now in force ^[21][20]. Margins are thin either way: Salix rejected its moratorium 3-2, one vote short of a year-long stop ^[7][19], and Woodbury County is challenging in court the 900 acres the town annexed in April for a site Google is evaluating ^[6][9]. What a developer used to model as permitting time is now sitting on individual officials, and it does not clear when the vote goes their way.