King George County

Swam in the wide river currents.

He fished for perch and rockfish, hunted wild ducks in the marshes and meadows of King George County.

He was a fearless, natural horseman who could judge horses and horse flesh with an expert eye.

He spent many hours in the saddle exploring the woods around Alexandria.

It released more than 3,000 past emails between town officials and the company, and in July 2025, voted unanimously to strike data centers from the town's zoning code entirely.

The same turnover played out an hour south in King George County, where a newly elected board canceled a $6 billion Amazon deal its predecessor had approved.

Two years later, the county and Amazon are still at an impasse.

What the people of Northern Virginia learned was that the data center industry had been operating in the dark for two decades, and that once the public understood what was being built and where, the opposition was fierce and bipartisan.

Surviving them, however, is not.

Congressman Eugene Vindman, a first-term Virginia Democrat, went to a King George County Democratic Committee meeting last week to rally his own people and got shouted down instead.

The offense? A vote in May when he was one of eight Democrats backing a bill that requires schools to get a parent's permission before changing a child's name or pronouns.

A committee member told him to shut up and listen, then dropped an F-bomb in the hallway.

All right, well, this looks like your typical, you know, town hall meeting.

Um, constituents in King George County confronted Rep Eugene Vindman over his vote for Republican-backed legislation affecting trans students, triggering a heated exchange.

Rep Eugene Vindman came from a predominantly Republican Virginia county Tuesday night expecting to tell local Democrats why they needed to help him win re-election.

And of course it went poorly.