Wrong Seat, Wrong Moment – Part V
By Judy Tipple
Yesterday in Marysville, Eric Jones stood in front of 250 farmers at the Yuba-Sutter Farm Bureau forum and said this:
“Let me make a simple statement: no more data centers in California.”
He called for a national moratorium. He said members of Congress who don’t understand the technology shouldn’t be in the room for these decisions (Patch, Sept. 2, 2026).
Strong stuff. The kind of line that gets applause in a room full of people watching data centers drink their water and eat their farmland, and farmland all over the country.
Here’s the problem. It’s not what his campaign has been telling voters for months.
Go to ericjones.us right now. His official AI platform page said something very different, until 2 days ago:
“America’s AI strategy should be pro-innovation, however unwelcome the near-term threat to American AI leadership is not regulation, it’s the absence of it.”
The page goes on to call for:
- Federal investment in “the data centers” as part of “winning” the AI race
- A “strong federal framework that preempts conflicting state laws” — meaning stripping California’s own authority to set its own rules
- Naming California by name, alongside Texas, Colorado, and Illinois, as an example of the “patchwork” of state regulation that’s supposedly holding companies back
UPDATE: That page is gone now.
Within roughly 48 hours of these two contradictory positions being put side by side, ericjones.us/artificialintelligence disappeared. It no longer loads..
What survives: the full screenshot of the page as it existed, titled “A Plan for Artificial Intelligence,” carrying the ericjones.us branding, showing the exact language quoted above. That page also called for mandatory on-site renewable power and stricter water-usage standards for data centers, language independently pulled and indexed by search engines before the page came down — a second, separate capture of the same content from a different source.
Two independent records of the same page, both predating its disappearance. He can take the page down. He can’t take down what it said.
Read that again. His own platform said the real risk isn’t regulation, it’s a state like California having any. His own platform wanted Sacramento’s authority over this handed to Washington. And in Marysville, twenty-four hours before I’m writing this, he told farmers he wants zero new data centers, period.
You cannot hold both positions. A federal preemption framework built to smooth the way for more data center buildout is not compatible with “no more data centers in California.” One of these is the real Eric Jones.
Which one matches where his money comes from?
Jones spent 12 years and 7 months at Dragoneer, and 8 years as a partner at Dragoneer Investment Group — a venture capital firm, not an employee’s desk job, an owner’s chair — after joining the firm in 2013 and rising to partner…a firm he “resigned” from in the summer of 2025, 2 months before he announced his candidacy for CA04. That’s an owner’s stake in the firm’s returns, not a paycheck. Dragoneer’s money, and the a16z-adjacent network around it, doesn’t profit from fewer data centers. It profits from more of them, built faster, with fewer state rules standing in the way. The platform page — the one nobody reads out loud at a farm forum — is the one that lines up with that money.
One more thing about that money trail: as of this writing, Dragoneer’s own website is dark too. No portfolio page. Move along, Nothing to see here. These aren’t the AI/Data Center dependent customers of Dragoneer. The firm whose entire business model depends on more data centers getting built has gone quiet at the exact moment its own former partner is being asked to explain why he suddenly wants a moratorium on them. What survives is Wikipedia’s page on Dragoneer, which still lists the portfolio by name — Airbnb, Anthropic, Atlassian, Discord, DoorDash, Databricks, and dozens more — a public, sourced, independently maintained record that doesn’t depend on Dragoneer publishing anything about itself.
And it’s the 12-month, still-attributed-to-him-until-two-days-ago platform that lines up with Trump, not the moratorium.
The White House’s own National Policy Framework for AI calls for exactly what Jones’s platform called for (until 2 days ago): preempt the states, stop the patchwork, clear the way for buildout. There’s a DOJ “AI Litigation Task Force” whose entire job is challenging state AI laws like California’s. Attorney General Rob Bonta has been fighting that effort in writing, telling Congress that stripping states of this authority “would seriously undermine” their ability to protect their own residents.
So when Eric Jones’s website called for federal preemption of California’s rules, that’s not some neutral technocratic position. That’s the same side of the fight Trump’s DOJ is on. It is the opposite of what he told the room in Marysville 2 days ago.
Funny thing, actually
On Monday, in a virtual town hall, someone asked the 14-term “establishment Blue Dog”, Mike Thompson, Jones keeps running against the same question, live and unscripted. He gave one answer. He’s for a moratorium, so California can actually assess the safety and regulatory questions before more of these things get built. One answer. Not two. No federal preemption clause buried on a website undercutting it forty-eight hours later.
Finger-in-the-wind politics
Jones has already been called out for this pattern before — casting himself as a progressive in Davis while embracing hard-right positions elsewhere, depending on the room. Data centers is just the clearest version yet, because this time you can put the receipts side by side: a permanent, written, paid-for-by-his-own-campaign policy page against a live quote from yesterday.
Voters in the new, more rural stretch of CA-04 — the Yuba City and Colusa communities added by Prop 50 — deserve to know which Eric Jones shows up in Washington. The one who wrote the platform, or the one who worked the room.
Previous Posts, “Wrong Seat, Wrong Moment”
Part I
Davisite 
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