The whole data center imbroglio is one of those weird situations where you have valid arguments on all sides, there’s an obvious solution, and many Republicans aren’t being complete idiots about it. How often does that happen? Not very often. Especially the part about Republicans not being complete idiots.
No one wants a data center in their neighborhood. For one thing, they’re ugly. Who wants a grim industrial complex down the street? They tend to suck up a lot of power and require support infrastructure that is likewise ugly. Also, badly designed ones can use a lot of water, and the facilities are often noisy. No one in their right mind wants to live next to one. No one wants to live next to a quarry, a steel works, or a water treatment plant either. But we need all of those too.
The fact that you’re reading this online means that you’re using a data center. Data centers are key to maintaining the technology infrastructure that allows us to live the way we do today. With the Age of AI coming, we’re going to need a lot more data centers, and we’re going to need a lot more infrastructure to power them. That’s a given. But the Chinese don’t want us to build them. They don’t like America having the ability to compete in terms of artificial intelligence and technology. They want to strangle our technology in the crib. That’s why, according to X, they have been running bot farms to gin up opposition to these facilities. President Trump likewise points out that the Chi-coms are behind a lot of the organized data center hate, and he’s got the access to the intelligence to know these things. American communists are complicit with America’s enemies, as usual. They want to talk us into going full Luddite.
Never go full Luddite.
This is all of a piece with the attack on American fracking and other energy infrastructure that America’s enemies did everything they could to stop. It’s no coincidence that all the remedies for the climate hoax happen to be all the things that make America weaker, poorer, and less self-sufficient, as well as less free. What are the chances? Well, about 100 percent, which is why the enemies of the West are so insistent on demanding endless sacrifices to appease the angry weather goddess, sacrifices that also happen to impoverish us. The only way we can be weakened is if we choose to weaken ourselves. They have to talk us into losing this race. The information operation about data centers is akin to all the other leftist information operations dedicated to making us morally and materially poor.
But while the agitation of foreign actors and internal communists who hate everything about our society is indisputable, not everybody who is reacting to data centers is reacting to propaganda. Data centers present real challenges to real people. As we have seen, data centers are ugly and annoying, and they can be a bane to a community. It’s not just agitation that is creating the opposition, and the opposition isn’t only a bunch of geriatric No Kings geeks, blue-haired communists, and sexually dysfunctional wine women. Normal Republicans are concerned about the impact on the quality of life in their communities, and they have every right to be.
Now, it didn’t have to be this way, but to the shock of no one, the neurodivergent tech bros who emerged from Silicon Valley – with notable exceptions like Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey – apparently thought that all of America was going to be as impressed with, and deferential to, them as Santa Clara County has been for the last few decades. The only thing they have in excess of money is arrogance, and they often came out to American suburban and rural communities and announced, “We’re building this ugly, brutalist behemoth here on your beautiful pastures, and you can essentially bite me.”
To the shock of no one, that was not well received. In the past, robber barons like Carnegie and Morgan and the rest were at least savvy enough to spread their money around to win a little support from regular people. You can still find the remnants of their largesse all around the country. Of course, it wasn’t entirely benevolent. A lot of it was a cynical attempt to court public opinion in an atmosphere where they were under a lot of suspicion. But it worked. And it might work for the tech bros too if they would pull their collective heads out of their USB ports.
But no. A lot of economic good stems from these autistic technological entrepreneurs, but we’re past the time of purely economic determinism. Maybe 25 years ago, the kind of Chamber of Commerce Republicans who quote Milton Friedman to tell you why you must have the entire Third World sneak into, and totally change, your country to spur that .2 percent increase in GDP would have worked. But we’ve seen the consequences of that kind of thinking, from crowded ERs to murdered Americans, and the mainstream GOP base doesn’t think that way anymore. Even for us Republicans, life is more than just economic stats and spreadsheet calculations. I would rather be slightly poorer but not flooded with a bunch of peasants from foreign hellholes bringing their garbage cultures, feuds, and ideologies to my shores. Everything’s not about the money. Some of it’s about the lifestyle, and we would like to stop having criminals take our lives and alien freeloaders living off us in style.
And we’re making the same calculation with data centers. Data centers can be a huge economic boon. The tax benefits they provide can be enormous. And they can be constructed and run in a manner that doesn’t disrupt our communities. They don’t have to be built on a historical landmark or a long-term family farm. They’re never going to be beautiful, but they don’t have to be actively ugly. You can control the water problems with closed systems, and you can generate the power on site or arrange for them to pay for the increased infrastructure they’ll require. Many communities are very happy with their data centers. If the tech companies come to these communities, which are largely in Republican areas for reasons we will get to, with a positive attitude and a willingness to address the concerns of the people genuinely, you can find solutions. We need the data centers, and we also need to not live in a dystopian hellscape.
But here’s the thing – the data centers are largely going to be located in Republican areas. You might think that maybe we should stick them in ruined blue cities and give those people a chance to work instead of live on the dole. Well, the Democrat administrations in places like that are totally corrupt, and they’re going to make it a giant pain to build in blue cities between onerous regulations and outright graft. Once they do get built, the infrastructure that the Democrats have allowed to waste away isn’t going to be able to support the data centers. You’ve got to be stupid to build in a blue city. That’s why the tech bros go out to the red areas. But if you go out and declare, “We’ve got a ton of money, and if you don’t do what we say, we’re going to buy your city council, and we’re going to bankrupt your town with litigation,” you’re going to make enemies of us Republicans.
And Republican pols, in many cases, have been smart enough not to roll over for Big Tech. In Texas, Greg Abbott has paused data center construction to audit them to make sure they’re doing it the right way. There are Republican candidates out there running on a “No data centers” platform. Why? Because the tech bros have alienated their voters.
And that’s smart for Republicans. Simply because a corporation does something doesn’t mean we have to reflexively defend it. The idea that somehow corporations and Republicans are united died decades ago. Most corporations hate us. Almost all tech corporations hate us. They give a ton of money to Democrats, and much of their content is woke. A few years ago, tech companies were censoring people like me and keeping people like you from reading the truth. We don’t owe them anything. They’re not our friends, and we have no obligation to jump on a hand grenade whose pin the tech autists pulled.
The data centers are going to get built because they must be built. But it’s not on Republicans to make it happen without conditions just because some company wants it. That’s a different kind of Republican, an obsolete one. That Chamber of Commerce crap is dead. The tech bros need to get smart, and they need to get out their checkbooks. They need to start making data centers a good deal because they’re not going to be able to jam them down our throats. Yeah, they can buy a city council, and the city council can greenlight a center, but then what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen is what’s happening now. At the higher levels of government, the state and federal level, angry Republican voters are going to incentivize their politicians to stop the abuse. For their part, the blue states will go overboard and ban data centers entirely. That’s fine. We will be happy to take the data centers and the huge benefits that go with them once the techies meet our needs and address our concerns out in red America. Oh, and the tech bros need to stop backing our enemies if they want to be friends with us. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.
It’s nice to see the Republicans getting on the right side of an issue involving big business. For too long, we went out of our way to help people who hate us at the expense of our own base. That’s why we had – and still have some – amnesty Republicans. No thanks. The data center issue is a business transaction. If the tech bros want to get something from us Republicans, they’re going to have to give.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/08/31/republicans-are-being-shockingly-smart-on-data-centers-n2682108?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-24E9FhNtaS&utm_term=&_nlid=24E9FhNtaS&_nhids=ncqWjHRQTxj1ls
