RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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If you're thinking of attending any sort of public meeting about, say, zoning changes in and around your community that enable the building of data centers, here's something to keep in mind: a school teacher has now been carried out of one such meeting and booked in jail for clapping after someone else's speech.
“I think we’re all in a state of fear because of what this government’s doing to us,” an anonymous attendee of that meeting told the Wichita TV news outlet KWCH in a report from July 22. The meeting in Emporia, Kansas concerned zoning to enable the construction of the Flint Hills Digital Campus data center, a proposed " gigawatt-scale " facility.
Let's get this out of the way: the teacher in question, 37-year-old Lux Claridge, was warned. The whole room was warned before this happened—warned not to clap, which is an expression of approval.
A man clapped once during public comment at a data-center zoning meeting in Emporia, Kansas.
Just be silent like an obedient domesticated taxpayer while they fast‑track a data center in your backyard. pic.twitter.com/2iEE41Akwq
— Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) July 26, 2026
Across the three videos released so far of the incident—in the Jason Bassler X post above, along with the two videos at the KWCH website, one of which is a news report while the other is just footage of the meeting, you can see an ostensible final warning, and then what I suppose you would call a rule violation in the form of clapping.
For what it's worth, a blog post on the First Amendment Coalition website questions whether a public meeting can even deem clapping to be a disruptive act and set an enforceable rule against it. Such meetings are meant to be fora for free expression. Clapping, undesirable as it may be for a presiding officer, may not rise to the level of "‘actual disturbance," the Free Speech Coalition suggests. The Coalition quotes a ninth circuit ruling saying that in the context of similar meetings, a city "cannot define disruption so as to include non-disruption."
At any rate, in the footage, the apparent presiding officer says, “Snapping, clapping, any other rude comments or anything, we will ask you to leave.” A speaker finishes on an impassioned note, saying, “we are the people, and the table belongs to us,” and sure enough, Claridge claps.
Then the presiding officer gives a somewhat ambiguous statement saying "Chief, will you take the next person out that claps or anything. Thank you." Evidently whoever the chief is, they interpret this as a call to make Claridge leave. We then see four people with badges swarm Claridge. Claridge refuses to get up, and says "drag me out," and then, as if to facilitate dragging, lies down on the floor. The four badged people lift and carry Claridge to a police Dodge Charger as multiple people might carry a cooler at a beach—no dragging occurs.
Claridge was arrested and charged. “I’m glad to be out — but this is an inconvenience, really. It’s not really deterring me from speaking out or I guess, clapping,” Claridge told KWCH. They plan to plead not guilty to the relevant charges.
The Emporia Police Department told KWCH it “remains committed to ensuring public meetings are conducted safely and in an orderly manner, while also respecting the rights of all citizens to participate in the civic process.”
According to KWCH, the city passed the zoning change needed for the data center project.
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