“(The AI ‘Revolution’) Is happening whether we like it or not.” – Dave McCormick, MAGA Republican Pennsylvania Senator from Connecticut.
I grew up in a Walter Cronkite/Charles Kuralt household, so I’ve been watching “CBS News Sunday Morning” since it premiered in 1979. The show is a Sunday staple, like bacon and eggs, The Sunday Times and Steelers football in the fall.
I was especially interested in the latest installment, which featured a piece on the data center invasion threatening to erase Archbald and other small towns across the country.
In March, a crew from the show attended the second “conditional use” hearing for the Wildcat Ridge Data Center “Campus,” the most objectionable of six individual disasters proposed in the borough of about 7,500 citizens. Anticipation for Robert Costa’s report was high, but the delivered product was a regrettable letdown.
Kayleigh Cornell and Sarah Gabriel, of the Archbald Neighborhood Association, carried themselves well, but the bottom fell out when Costa sat down with McCormick. In the piece that aired and in an extended interview available at the show’s website, Costa platformed “Data Center Dave” to prattle on about the endless “benefits” of paving over Pennsylvania without noting that the senator’s wife, Dina Powell McCormick, is president and vice chairman of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and one of the most powerful players in the data center invasion.
“Data Center Dina’s” compensation includes a base salary of $1 million, with incentives that could earn her an additional 200% of her salary. She received a $2 million signing bonus and stock grants valued at $60 million, according to a Meta filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The median household income in Archbald is about $72,000, according to U.S. Census data.
Costa has earned a reputation as a thorough reporter, so it was a huge disappointment that he failed to raise this scandalous conflict of interest with McCormick. If the “Sunday Morning” crew had been present at Monday night’s third “conditional use” hearing on the Wildcat Ridge project, they would have received a thunderous earful about Costa’s conspicuous oversight.
More than 500 riled-up citizens packed the Valley View High School auditorium to send a strong, unified message to Brooklyn-based Cornell Realty Management: “We don’t like your project and don’t accept it as inevitable! Take your ’revolution’ somewhere else! P.S. ‘Data Center Dave’ represents your interests, not ours!”
In yet another cartoonishly tone-deaf incitement of the already agitated crowd, Wildcat Ridge attorney Edmund J. Campbell Jr. clutched his pearls over a “Wildcat Ridge Propaganda Mailer Return” box placed on the stage.
The box was provided by the grassroots resistance group Stop Archbald Data Centers for citizens to deposit pro-project, anti-Archbald junk mail designed and distributed by Ryan Leckey Media. By the end of the hearing, the box was stuffed with hundreds of junked mailers.
“I find it inappropriate for the decorum of the meeting,” Campbell said to a chorus of boos. “There’s lots of social media out there discussing this application and others, and any time anyone suggests or posts something on those forums that is in any way supportive of data centers or this application, those things are immediately stricken.”
Incredibly, Campbell’s complaint not only minimized the thermonuclear blowback from the mailer, but also pitched the absurd fantasy that a “silent majority” of citizens privately support invasive data center development but are too intimidated to say so publicly. When any of Campbell’s imaginary army of corporate bootlickers dares stand up in support of the concrete entombment of their own neighborhoods, their comments are scrubbed from antisocial media and they’re bullied into the shadows.
When the box was moved to the auditorium floor, streams of citizens surged toward the stage to deposit their mailers. For Campbell and his crew, it was all downhill from there.
The hearing was ostensibly focused on a “traffic report” that its presenter explained was not a “traffic study,” which apparently would be more scientific and contain accurate, verifiable data citizens could trust as reliable.
This report was not that, and few in the crowd cared. The mailer and its companion website were the driving forces behind the turnout. Both blunders insulted the intelligence of citizens. The website baselessly smeared the opposition, insinuating that it isn’t organic, but led and funded by “interests from outside the area.” (George Soros, maybe?)
The hearing produced too many “mic-drop” moments to share here, including fiery speeches by former Lackawanna County Judge and lifelong Archbald advocate Tom Munley and Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan.
I’m giving the spotlight to Archbald resident Madonna Munley, known to unabashed fans like me as “The Madonnanator.” She expertly schooled Campbell and the Wildcat Ridge crew on a lesson I learned long ago: Don’t get into a war of words with an English teacher — especially if she’s retired and has time to craft a killer response.
Arguing that wild animals have the most motivation to oppose invasive data center development, Madonna outlined a natural “conspiracy” funded through sinister LLCs organized by “Bambi, Thumper, Flower, Rocky Raccoon, Rizzo the Rat, Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear and Boo Boo.”
It was a charming, cutting nugget of satire that concluded with a stiff slap back to reality.
“Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one,” Madonna said. “The people of Archbald and our area have been contributing their time and expertise and donating their hard-earned money to self-fund the effort to safeguard our town for this and future generations.
“No one is, as you suggest on the website, trying to drown out the real feelings of the residents who really want what is best for the entire community. Those residents are here in front of you, telling you what they believe is best for the entire community. That is not one of your ‘myths.’ It is the truth. Even if you can’t handle the truth.”
And whether they like it or not.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, sorely misses Cronkite and Kuralt. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.