The Data Center Debate in Three Contrasting Views
Peloni
Data center infrastructure in the United States. By DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Public Domain, Wikipedia
In addition to the two articles below by Daniel Greenfield and Jefferey Tucker, take to heart the arguments presented by Janet Levy in her recent article. Greenfield’s concluding comment, particularly the second half, bears highlighting because it really captures the key point in this debate: “AI is not a threat, except in the wrong hands, people looking to control us are the real threat.”
While the basis of Greenfield’s argument remains impossibly accurate, namely that there is a clear effort to manipulate Americans into surrendering the AI R&D race to the Chinese, it remains an important point to clarify that the Chinese angle of manipulation does not appear to be the only one at work in trying to influence the American people regarding expanding AI Data Centers across the country. To be certain, there is an effort to castigate contrary views as illegitimate, as is the obvious purpose of labeling them as luddites, without any appreciation of the the reality that there are real concerns behind them as discussed by Levy and by Tucker below, and are also articulated by Greenfield in his opening sentence. As Tucker explains below, “Too often, large technological shocks have been inorganic. They have been imposed by aspirational cartels in league with state power who are looking for unfair advantage and power and portfolio aggrandizement.” Additionally, as Levy also explains “The globalist project of ubiquitous AI data surveillance systems is a direct threat to our constitutional republic and the freedoms it sustains” and “The prospect of immediate profit will incentivize the power industry to see the projects through, heedless of opposition.”
Indeed it would appear that the fear of opening this conversation up to an open debate is what is fueling the attempts to delegitimize the voices of concern described by Levy, Tucker and Greenfield. Hence, returning to Greenfield’s pivotal summary sentence, it is important to grasp that there is not just one set of globalist influences at hand in manipulating the outcome of this debate. Notably, those who would seek to ignore the will of the people in a nation which was founded upon the principle of governance by the will of the people are as much of a threat to Constitutional govt as is the CCP, because they are looking to radically change the US complete with all the trappings of a nation wide surveillance state regardless of the popular opposition they are facing. It remains vital for the future and for those who value the principles of liberty which underpin the Western world to consider if the only point of relevance in the AI rat race is to beat the Chinese, or, if the more important point might be that the principles which define the Western world should be maintained as this process is debated and considered in the context that the Chinese are not alone in wanting to push the world towards a globalist styled future. Stated otherwise, AI is a threat in the hands of those who would peal back the liberties which define and defend the Western world, even if doing so might advantage the Western world in its contest with China. In the end, the real contest is not fundamentally with China, but with the preservation of the principles which distinguish the West from China as this contest with China continues to develop. We simply can’t afford to lose what defines the West from that Communist nation, and those definitions are grounded upon the competing concepts of democratic governance versus totalitarianism.
Daniel Greenfield’s and Jefferey Tucker’s essays are below and Janet Levy’s article can be found HERE.
The Anti-AI Movement is Pushing World Government
Fake experts, media hysteria and the same old agenda.
by
There are plenty of good reasons to be concerned about AI: destroying jobs, dumbing down students and the spectacle of people copying and pasting chatbot answers instead of doing their own research. We are looking at the very real possibility that the next generation will primarily relate to the internet, interact socially. and gain information, through AI.
And then there’s the anti-AI op being run by shady groups with prior involvement in ‘disinformation’ speech censorship and climate hysteria, using alarmism to push a deal with Communist China that would impose a global government and eliminate our freedoms.
The op kicked off in D.C. when Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old socialist politician whose previous position on technology was that he had no apps on his phone, didn’t seem to recognize the names of major platforms, and had a woman named ‘Melissa’ tell him what he was doing, suddenly announced that he was teaming up with Chinese AI professors for an AI ‘safety’ event at the U.S. Capitol. The professors had been involved in China’s AI governance.
This was followed by a recent ‘Pro-Human Assembly’ featuring such luminaries as Sanders, teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten, actress Ashley Judd, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Stephen Bannon under the apparent auspices of the Future of Life Institute: which had been involved in the China-Sanders event. Last year, the Institute issued a PhD fellowship proposal for US-China AI governance, urging “global governance” to reduce “the risks associated with a US-China AI competition” and the deployment of advanced AI systems.
Anyone who remembers past deals with China or arms deals with the USSR knows, such a deal would be completely worthless, would be violated by China, and would be used to cripple us.
Future of Life’s ‘Human Statement’ was endorsed by Susan Rice, Bannon, Ralph Nader, Annie Lennox, Stephen Fry and Xiaohu Zhu, the founder of China’s ‘Center for Safe AGI’: a senior researcher at China’s Nanjing University and a member of the ‘Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI’ that is pressing for a global governance deal with China to limit AI development.
The ‘Coalition’ bills this as a ‘Deal of the Century’, a “fast-tracked, temporary bilateral China-US AI treaty to enact controls” over AI in an ‘open call’ endorsed by a number of figures and organizations including Zhu. The Coalition, which is headquartered in Rome, also claims to be “forming a steering board of US AI treaty-advocacy organizations” and to have engaged “ media figures (e.g. Bannon, Carlson, Rogan)” to push its agenda of a China AI treaty.
What is the ‘Coalition’ really calling for? A “powerful and democratic global federal organization with exclusive control over all potentially dangerous AI research, facilities, and source materials.” China isn’t ‘democratic’, so democracy is out, but this organization would be global and would be powerful, and would have control over America, but obviously not over China.
A world government for dangerous AI applications sounds like the worst possible idea ever.
The Coalition proposes an “intergovernmental constituent assembly” that would then be “extensible to other inherently global challenges and public goods, like climate, nuclear, bioweapons, and our digital public sphere.” The latter means a renewed push for internet censorship through a vastly “powerful” global organization with governmental powers.
If this sounds familiar, that’s the exact same ‘fix’ that had been previously advanced for nuclear weapons, global warming and disinformation. Define an urgent threat, propose global governance as the solution, and panic the public so they don’t know they’re losing their rights.
The rash of ‘pop-up’ organizations no one had ever heard of before demanding AI regulation through a deal with China follows the familiar pattern of ‘disinformation’ groups that popped up after President Trump’s win in 2016 claiming to offer expertise on the dangers of online speech and demanding urgent government intervention. In a matter of months, the media, politicians and activists were citing a network of ‘experts’ warning that democracy would soon fall apart.
And some of the organizations advancing anti-AI hysteria were involved with environmentalism and disinformation. We’re told to listen because otherwise the world will end. Sound familiar?
“It may be tempting to succumb to powerlessness, by sticking our heads in the sand or watching doom unfold from the sidelines. But how can we find true peace or look our children in the eyes if we do not at least try to do something to save their future?” The Coalition’s open call clamors.
What are we saving them from? Who’s about to doom our children? The same canned rhetoric they used during the Cold War and for environmentalism is being dusted off all over again.
Who are the ‘experts’ behind the anti-AI campaign warning us of doom?
The ‘Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI’ was spun off from Rufo Guerreschi’s Trustless Computing Association. Trustless was a platform for promoting ‘Seevik’ (civic) , a device that promised to fight ‘disinformation’ by having everyone carry a $200 Seevik encryption around with them to “create and regulate a new global democratic digital public sphere and defend democratic institutions from the rise of authoritarianism.”
Seevik never went anywhere, so Guerreschi, who lists a degree in architecture through Arizona State and one from the University of Miami, and an MS in Urban Planning switched to AI hysteria. It’s not at all clear how his expertise in urban planning qualifies him for regulating AI.
PauseAI US, another member of the Coalition, which is calling for “a global, indefinite pause on frontier AI research until we know that it’s safe”, was founded and is headed by Holly Elmore, a Harvard PhD in Evolutionary Biology, who went to work as an expert on animal welfare, fighting against rat poison, for Rethink Priorities, a left-wing environmentalist group from the Effective Altruism movement, and then formed PauseAI and suddenly became an AI expert.
How did the switch from rat birth control to banning AI happen?
In Holly’s own words, “I was working on wild animal welfare, which is thinking about the welfare of wild animals. But it’s an interesting field. I was pretty qualified to do it, even though it’s such a new field – who really has qualifications – because I have a PhD in evolutionary biology.” But then “around that time, ChatGPT came out and eventually I got so taken by the possibility of pushing for a pause, once I saw that there was such support among the American public for it that I thought, ‘This is a huge opportunity. I have to take it.’”
And she took it.
The former grad student is now all over the media and social media while tweeting that “I want to write an op-ed about how the AI company execs and employees deserve jail” and “It’s not okay to be friends with people who are risking the entire world and the future of humanity. It’s just not. Stop protecting them and making them comfortable. You are taking part in their crime when you tolerate their recklessness.” This is the shrill and unserious state of the movement.
There are legitimate concerns about AI, but the anti-AI hysterics are rarely grounded in any kind of specific concerns and facts. Instead, much as with global warming, it’s heavy on freak-outs and short on science, and unlike global warming, can’t even seem to articulate the threat.
That’s because there are no specifics worth destroying our freedom and national independence.
Actual dangers from AI can be regulated the way we regulate all other products. The anti-AI movement is hyping SciFi intangibles about a superintelligence while using as its example chatbots that have trouble understanding simple commands. They’re seizing a narrow window in which they can frighten us, wield power over us and impose their system on us. And their agenda is about a whole lot more than AI. It’s “extensible” to our entire lives.
AI is not a threat, except in the wrong hands, people looking to control us are the real threat.
The Reason for the Tech Backlash
Jeffrey A. Tucker | Epoch Times | August 26, 2026
The backlash against data centers has shocked political and financial elites. It’s because it seems to stretch across the left-right divide. Indeed, it seems like the one thing that most Americans can agree on: These centers need to be curbed and controlled. Part of this backlash is also targeting the Flock cameras taking over urban areas with new forms of police surveillance.
Looking at this without much on-the-ground knowledge, one might be quick to judge these movements as a revival of Luddism that came with industrialization two centuries ago. Is it always the case that people resist the new thing because they don’t understand it and don’t like the inevitable creative destruction always and everywhere wrought by free-market forces?
I don’t believe this story. There is no reason why any real innovation adopted voluntarily on the market should engender a mass movement of revanchists who want to go back to the old ways. The key word in that sentence is voluntary. When we look back at history, we can see that there are large dollops of public forces that have come with many industrial transformations, including data centers now.
Too often, large technological shocks have been inorganic. They have been imposed by aspirational cartels in league with state power who are looking for unfair advantage and power and portfolio aggrandizement.
Let’s travel back in time 500 years to the Enclosure Acts of Britain that are often said (rightly or wrongly) to have kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Before widespread enclosure, much of rural England operated under the common-law, open-field system. Villages had large open fields divided into scattered strips cultivated by individual households, plus common pastures, meadows, and wasteland where villagers could graze animals, gather fuel, or forage under customary rights (such as pasture, pannage for pigs, or estovers for wood). These rights were tied to specific holdings or, in some cases, held more broadly by tenants. Land was managed with shared crop rotations and grazing.
Tradition was settled and it all worked. But starting in the 17th century and extending through the 19th century, Parliament pushed to privatize these lands based in part on access to power and royal privilege. The peasants were pushed out, and grazing rights and farming rights long established by tradition came to an end. Make no mistake: This was an act of power, one that discredited the very idea of private property rights, which came to be seen in British culture as nothing but royal privilege.
This is what gave rise to popular resentment. It was no industrialization as such, but rather the means chosen to force it upon an agricultural society and its settled ways. Had this been done by contact and agreement, popular opinion would have been very different.
Something very similar happened to the American South following the Civil War. The Reconstruction governments in league with Northern industrial interests forcibly industrialized large parts of the South, turning traditional agricultural lands into factories. This gave rise to a perception that industry was invasive and coercive, an imposition rather than a choice. An entire movement rose up in opposition, not because people hated progress but because they didn’t want it to be rammed down their throats.
Another example came after World War II in the United States. America had the most sophisticated and well-developed system of passenger and cargo trains of any country in the world. But in Washington, lobbying pressure plus perceptions about an improved future essentially abandoned it all in favor of the automobile and interstate highways. Thousands of small towns were wrecked in the name of progress while historic train stations and the towns they supported were left to rot.
Even the digital revolution has been compromised by similar tactics. Benefiting mightily from COVID-19 pandemic-era lockdowns were the sellers of software, hardware, and online teaching platforms, paid for in substantial part by stimulus checks that later led to high inflation. Stay-at-home orders were not voluntary but yet another example of forced reset on behalf of industry.
Soon after, artificial intelligence engines came online, but they have been greeted with great incredulity rather than excitement. A major reason for this was timing. The same industries that benefit from the lockdowns were now riding high with yet another toy, this one designed to replace human intelligence with machines. It’s no wonder people have doubts.
This also figures into why there is such public opposition to the data centers springing up all over the country. The constant buzzing sounds they impose on a community are insufferable. They amount to what economists call a negative externality. Also, much of the land on which they are being built is being seized by eminent domain, which amounts to stealing even when it is compensated.
This is not choice, it is not organic, and it is not voluntary. These centers feel like they are part of a central plan imposed upon settled communities nationwide. That they have engendered bipartisan resentment is hardly surprising.
It’s the same with Flock surveillance cameras going up everywhere. We are told that they are for crime control, but people know better. They are methods to keep tabs on the population generally speaking for purposes of control. That’s the key: the building of the control grid. Something prevents people from embracing this, and it comes down to one intuition: the desire to be free from impositions by a corporatized ruling class.
None of this feels like organic developments that are part of a normal market process. We see how technological revolution in history is often accompanied by grave acts of coercions. It’s these acts that discredit what they are calling progress and give rise to populist movements that are too easily dismissed as reactionary. They are more likely rooted in a normal desire on the part of regular people to be left alone.
We can tick through other examples: rural electrification in the United States, collectivized agriculture in the Soviet Union, demographic scrambling in Mao’s China, even the Green New Deal in the United States, with its wind turbines and solar mandates. We could even put vaccine mandates on this list: They infuriate people even when the product works. No one likes to be forced into another man’s definition of progress.
The free market is a wonderful thing, but these examples are not rooted in normal market forces, much less the ideal of competition. We are a long way from Adam Smith’s utopia of butchers, bakers, and brewers. This is the building of a control grid that seems to treat regular people with disdain, as rats in a laboratory experiment. It’s hardly a surprise that it has again been greeted with public incredulity and even fierce opposition.
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