Locals Resist Data Centers; Democrats Are Too Timid

Words from populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower.

By Jim Hightower, The Progressive

A Rising Progressive Populist Revolt Stuns AI Profiteers

There’s a clique of plutocratic, high-tech billionaires who think they’re entitled to turn America’s farmlands and rural communities into their personal domain of predatory artificial intelligence data centers. But a little bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently hit those puffed-up elites where they’re most vulnerable: the funny bone.

Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates. It read:

SUPPORT THESE

DATA CENTERS

Schools

Libraries

Bookstores

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta are front-loading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water, and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, “Uh, hell no!” Indeed, at least forty-eight data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition, and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt Republican Governor Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them—and the state’s far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.