Trump supporters in rural Georgia say they need help in their fight against a new data center in their town from an unlikely ally – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“If there’s a chance that anything can be done, I feel like she is going to be the one to do it,” says Beverly Morris, in a new short documentary put out by More Perfect Union.
In the new film, the New York Congresswoman travels to Morgan County, Georgia, sixty miles east of Atlanta, to meet with residents who live in the shadow of a new data center being built by tech giant Meta.
Trump won over 70 percent of the vote in Morgan County in the 2024 presidential election.
Ocasio-Cortez, often seen as a poster child for the liberal left and a staunch critic of the president, visits the Morris’s, who live just 400 feet from the 2.5 million square-foot center.
“We need her,” Morris says, noting that families in the area have not been able to access clean water since construction of the center began in 2018.
The Independent has contacted Meta for comment about the claims.
In the documentary, Morris shows Ocasio-Cortez a bottle of water from their tap, which is brown and contains a lot of sediment, telling her, “It’s gotten worse.”
“That’s night and day,” the congresswoman replies. “We’ve seen this playbook before from big companies… The only thing that’s changed was that spot opening up across the street.”
On Wednesday, the congresswoman questioned Environmental Protection Agency’s Assistant Administrator for Water Jessica Kramer on the administration’s failure to maintain clean drinking water across the U.S. during a hearing in the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. She took two jars of water from Morgan County.
“These families now have to ship, in a rural area, have to ship water to their house in order to cook and bathe themselves,” she noted.
Later in the film, Ocasio-Cortez notes that the intrusive nature of the data center would warrant a national congressional inquiry, noting that the effect they can have on the water supplies of entire states where they are located.
“One of the reasons why I certainly wanted to come out here is because when you’re stuck in Washington, and these issues come up, you get a bunch of lobbyists that come down, and they tell you that it’s all fake,” she said.
“They tell you that the water issues are actually not that serious, and they say…this stuff is kind of like an urban legend.”
Speaking to More Perfect Union, Morris’ husband, Jeff Morris, said the Democratic Socialist wasn’t what he expected her to be. “It was a good surprise… I feel like she cares about our situation,” he said.
Ocasio-Cortez has been an unlikely bridge between the political far left and the right before, having earned almost 70 percent of the vote in her congressional district of NY-14, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx.
The district also saw a significant increase in voters who chose Trump – 33 percent.
