Taylor Frazier McCollum collected 25,000 signatures to block a $5 billion artificial intelligence data center from being built on a shopping mall site that has sat abandoned for 24 years in Landover, Maryland. The land has produced exactly zero dollars in economic output for more than two decades.
Her alternative vision for the site: an indoor trampoline park.
Fox News reported that McCollum argued the $5 billion investment would "only benefit the employees of the data center." Which is an interesting way to describe thousands of construction jobs, permanent technical positions, and the tax revenue a multi-billion-dollar facility generates for a community that currently has a derelict mall contributing nothing.
The activist specifically pitched something along the lines of an Urban Air Trampoline and Adventure Park — a franchise where kids bounce on inflatable surfaces for $25 an hour. That's the counter-offer to five billion dollars in private investment. A bounce house.
The math here is not complicated. One option brings billions in capital expenditure, creates a permanent employment base in one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy, and transforms a 24-year eyesore into a functioning piece of infrastructure. The other option has foam pits.
McCollum was reportedly approached by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist-Leninist organization, during her campaign against the data center. The group apparently saw a natural ally in someone whose economic development philosophy begins and ends with recreational trampolines. That part, at least, tracks.
The petition campaign worked. The project is dead. Five billion dollars in private investment walked away from a community that has been staring at an abandoned mall since the early 2000s, because an activist with 25,000 signatures and a Marxist-Leninist cheering section decided the neighborhood didn't need the jobs.
As Twitchy noted, this is what progressive economic planning looks like in practice. Not high-speed rail that never gets built. Not green energy subsidies that enrich donors. Something even purer than that — actively destroying private investment that requires zero taxpayer dollars, then proposing a trampoline franchise as the replacement.
There's a version of this story where a community gets a world-class AI facility, thousands of jobs, and a tax base that funds schools and roads for a generation. Instead, Landover gets to keep its empty parking lot.
The trampoline park doesn't exist either, by the way. That was just the suggestion.
